In lecture 5, we examined the cultural effect The Beatles had on British Society. The context related to the two themes, ‘consumption’ and the ‘culture industry’.
Popular music is ‘standardised’. Adorno in Storey (2003) points out that ‘standardisation’ extends from the most general features to the most specific ones.
Once a musical or lyrical pattern has proven successful, it is exploited to commercial exhaustion. Popular music promotes passive listening. The consumption of popular music is always passive, endless, repetitive and confirming the world ‘as it is’. Passive consumers buy DVDs, novels, CDs and videos. However, non-passive consumers create their own meanings of popular music.
Storey (2003) suggests that popular music operates as ‘social cement’. Its ‘psychological function is to achieve that the consumers of popular music adjust to the mechanisms of present-day life. Consumption is an active process of day-to-day life.
The music industry is a capitalist industry therefore; industrial societies produce pop music, creating a technological phenomenon. The popular music industry is an all-consuming production line that creates mass produced and inferior commodities. The cultural industry compels consumers to buy commodities produced by the media industry; (buying CDs and DVDs of popular music for example, The Beatles).
Youth culture is seen as ‘structured irresponsibility’. In The Beatles, the opening scene of the train is an example of ‘structured irresponsibility’. In this film, we saw an authentic subculture colliding with an inauthentic, mass-produced mainstream or dominant culture.
Youth culture is a hybrid within mass-mediated consumer capitalism. Youth culture is a global phenomenon, a post-modern culture created by productive consumers.
Overall, consumption is an active, creative and productive process, concerned with pleasure, identity and the production of meaning.
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