Annalee Neighbour: Review of Lecture 5

Is popular music a mass produced commodity or a true art form?
Our fifth lecture was all about popular music and the concept of mass consumption. We looked at the movie ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and discussed how ‘The Beatles’ changed the face of modern music. We discussed how from the 1960’s onwards, music became very repetitive and it didn’t matter what genre of music you listened to they all carried a lyrical/rhythmical pattern. John Storey describes this process as ‘commercial exhaustion’; once a certain pattern is proven successful it is used again and again until its popularity fades.
Such repetitive popular music is seen as creating passive listening, mass produced for easy consumption. One example from the lecture was that Motown was actually created from a play on the words Motor city, which was a city in Detroit famous for its mass production car line and then later for its production of some of the greats music of its time (quickly labeled however as a mass produced production line.)
We then went on to discuss the modern view of Consumption as an active process that we take part in everyday and that we are a post-modern culture created by productive consumers. We are as important as the text we are interpreting; people change the commodities to suit their lives. For me Simran’s conclusion summed up the lecture perfectly; consumption is an active, creative and productive process, concerned with pleasure, identity and the production of meaning. We are not just passive consumers but instigators of change.