Performing Rites revisited

Abstract

Performing Rites. On the Value of Popular Music was first published 25 years ago. The aim of the book was to address issues relating to musical value and to show that arguments about whether music was good or bad were as vital for popular music culture as for high art. In this paper, I consider the changes in popular music practices and studies that have occurred over the last quarter of a century and reflect on the effects these changes have had on value discourse. The changes that interest me are the digital transformation of musical communication, leading to new ways of making, listening to and sharing music; the demographic forces that have reshaped both the geography and the ecology of the music market; and the emergence of electronic dance music in a new economy of ‘live’ music. What does it mean for a sociological approach to aesthetics that people no longer have to listen to music they do not like? That a once commonly overlooked and undervalued apparatus of music authority (music radio and the music press) has been undermined by algorithms? That dancing is such an important way of listening? What is a ‘musician’ in the digital age? In addressing these questions, I acknowledge too that, just as popular music makers and listeners are constructed as such by their historical and discursive possibilities, so, too, are popular music scholars. We are free to study what and how we like but only under the circumstances in which we find ourselves. How have these circumstances changed since 1996?