Postmodernism and Music

Research based task:

The focus of your task will be postmodernism in relation to music. You will need
to have an understanding of music that includes the following:

• the postmodern sensibility that anything can be considered cool in an

ironic ‘I know it’s bad, but it’s so bad it’s good’ way
• Work that is created based (entirely or in part) on older material. This
incorporates sampling and will take you from the realms of hip hop culture
transporting you finally in today’s modern fragmented musical landscape.
You will have to listen to some of the artists to fully appreciate them and
their work.
• Audiences that are both niche and mainstream. E.g.: Radio 1, 1xtra, BBC6,
XFM
• The ways in which people engage and listen to music e.g.: iPod, DAB,
mobile phones etc
• The legal issues surrounding sampling. (Led Zeppelin ‘borrowed’ heavily
from old bluesmen and it took years for the songwriters to be credited and
paid royalties. The same group took a hard-line stance initially to be
sampled by hip hop groups.)
• The state of the music industry incorporating any recent developments
that change how we access/ interact with music e.g.: Spotify, X Factor,
iTunes, illegal downloading, free cds with newspapers etc

All of the above need to have example attached to help them make sense. The
examples need to have explanations that place them within a postmodern
context.

Possible artists to include in your research:

DJ Shadow

Cut Chemist

Coldcut

Timbaland (his work with Missy Elliott)

Beastie Boys

Afrika Bambaataa

Bjork

Dangermouse
You may look to other artists as well. This is particularly important as it will mean
you have a personal input.

The following essay may prove helpful.

MUSIC AND POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernism celebrates the end of what the French philosopher Jean François
LYOTARD calls the 'grand narratives' of history - reason, progress and socialism –
and the dissolving of semiotics into a merely libidinal 'energetics'. Nothing is
fixed any more, and ideology is in a war of position, a struggle for space.
'Totalization in any human endeavour is potentially totalitarian' (Ibn Hassan,
1977). In fact, as Neil POSTMAN says, we are more likely to destroy ourselves
with the unlimited pleasures of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than the
totalitarian state of George Orwell's 1984.
Postmodernist philosophers like Jean Baudrillard emphasise how the barriers
between art, literature and a wider political and social life are now non-existent.
Bono and Chris Martin (both, ageing male rock stars) become authorities on the
environment and development economics). School students know more of the
cultural life of their country (TV, films, and above all the internet and its
applications) than teachers. The alienation and 'high tech' emphasis of
modernism have given way to a flamboyant celebration of the power centres of
modern life, particularly in industry and finance. It was first noticed in
architecture, especially in the work of the American Philip Johnson, who put
sloping roofs and columns on skyscrapers.
Features
1. A new attitude to interpretation, rejecting the idea that art contains a
meaning that can be decoded by the diligent. It is no longer possible to
operate notions of musical value since different musical structures
articulate different forms of meaning.
2. Pick 'n' Mix culture: the past, or distant and exotic cultures, are a)
detached from their environment and b) used selectively to
anchor the chaotic images of modern European and American life
(Elvis Presley's 'It's Now or Never/O Sole Mio'; Gregorian chants in
the Top Ten). A mod.ern example would include artists such as La
Roux, Little Boots, Hurts and Active Child.
3. The blurring of image and reality: to what extent does television 'create'
personalities like the US President or events like the Gulf War?
4. Intertextuality: The preference for parody, nostalgia, kitsch and
pastiche over realism (sampling).
5. The dominance of surface over depth.
6. No strong sense of history or the future. Alienation is abolished
by saying, 'Utopia is now' as in raves or music festivals. Even a
critic of postmodernism like Hans Magnus Enzensburger has observed,
'consumption as spectacle is – in parody form – the anticipation of a
utopian situation' (1974).
 7. A new status for art culture. Art does not represent or reflect
reality: it is reality. Like the characters in a soap opera, pop stars
can seem more 'real' than our own friends.
Patrick Brantlinger: Postmodernism can just as easily be stripped of its avant-
garde appearance to reveal a position according to which the 'society of the
spectacle' produced by 'late capitalism' seems right and inevitable. . . It becomes
indistinguishable from behaviourism, a functional positivism that, no matter how
radical it sounds, involves an implicit affirmation of the status quo.