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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 37, Number 8. April 24 1972

Rock props up class lines

page 16

Rock props up class lines

According to George Steiner pop music is "an Esperanto.....a universal dialect of youth" And on the face of it that seems pretty safe to say. Among other things, pop music has given some sense of belonging together; as much as anything does, it involves a set of experiences, symbols and meanings that does give the "youth culture "some sense of solidarity as a separate social group. And 'Life' and Time' magazines have published enough photos of rock concerts from Bucharest to Buenos Aires to give the illusion that rock is indeed the international language.

However, two English writers Graeme Murdock and Robin McBron feel that this universal appeal of rock music is over-rated. They feel that the sort of music you like generally depends on the social group to which you belong. They-claim that social class is more basic than any artistic preference or age grouping. As they pointed out in a New Society article last year its one thing to say that people between 12 and 20 dominate the record business, and quite another to say that pop music brings everybody within that age group together.

For in England anyway, their surveys showed that instead of helping create a classless society of the young, pop music was reaffirming class divisions. For example, if you liked reggae, soul music and Slade you were, more than likely, a lower class high school dropout. While if you liked Genesis, Pink Floyd and the Dead you were probably a middle-class university student. Why should this be?

In order to set up their study Murdock and McBron asked some 340 Midland kids (aged 14 — 17, and from all backgrounds) to describe the main types of current pop music and to give examples of each. Almost all made the same four distinctions.

1)Top Twenty. Single artists. Everything from teeny idols (Cassidy, Bolan) to hard pop (Slade, Alice Cooper) to Motown.
2)Reggae/Soul — any black music funkier than Motown.
3)Progressive LP artists — Floyd, ELP, Focus. Also singer/song writers like Cohen, Van Morrison.
4)Family pop. Cilia Black Cliff Richard.

The kids themselves were also divided into those pupils who wanted to leave school as soon as possible and the more successful ones who wanted to stay on and go to university.

Most of the former were working class, and tended to like the black music "that you could dance to in discos". When asked for their favourite disc 41% of this group picked reggae, soul or Motown recording. Eight per cent names a "progressive" record. Among the middle class group this pattern was exactly the opposite, 42.5% picked a progressive record and only 5% mentioned black pop.

The next step was to ask the pupils to describe which people liked which type of music. The working class kids described those who liked progressive rock as "freaks", "weirdos" and "wankers", while the middle class group responded by calling the reggae fans "skinheads" and "cretins". Similarly reggae fans described each other as "guys who are in with the crowd" "people with a bit of taste" and "people who like to dance" while the progressive supporters felt themselves to be "people who listen deeply to music and think about it", and "people who are really into music not just because their friends like it". In other words a different attitude to musical experience can be seen. The working class one valued a feeling of solidarity of being part of the crowd, that music gave. On the other hand the middle class stressed the need for close attention and the uniqueness of each person's response, i.e. it reflected the middle class values for intellectualism and individuality.

Cartoon of a couple rock and roll dancing

Remember that this study was done in England, and so the reasons apply more to the English situation. Take the working class group first. As is well known schools reflect the middle class world of career-consciousness, based on intellectual ability, individual achievement and conformity to bureaucratic routines. All this genuinely operates against pupils from working class homes, so that most are officially labelled as substandard and given dull, alienating jobs. Being the losers in an unequal competition has been a familiar historical experience for working class people, and it has built up a legacy of responses which stress other values than those applied by schools. The early school leavers draw on these experiences of previous "unchosen" generations which have remained to colour the everyday life within the family and local neighbourhood. These local cultures are based on values of group solidarity, physical competence, toughness and action.

These are precisely the values used by the worker pupils in their selections of pop. They liked soul and reggae for two main reasons. The music and its performers express and extend their own values of toughness and physical ability, and the music is perfect for dancing, which lets you show your own physical ability to the crowd.

The successful kids have different problems. They must conform to bureaucratic routine and constantly prove their academic worth in order to pass exams and advance their careers. As a result, schools ignore or repress any emotions or areas of expression that cannot be objectified and examined. Yet it is precisely those types of feeling that rise most strongly during adolescence. So the problem for the middle class kid is to express the emotions denied by schools in ways that can't endanger his university life and future career.

Rock music fits the bill perfectly. It is as some people say "revolutionary" in that it gives an outlet for feelings that society denies everywhere else. But precisely because of that it serves to protect the repressive machinery. It is a revolutionary playground safe within the social walls.

Cartoon of a woman following a man playing a flute

The musicians are avidly read about in the underground press, and middle class kids follow very closely all the creative and life style experiments of their heroes. Great value is placed on rock musicians who "do their own thing", who are as publicly outrageous as their middle class followers would like, but do not dare, to be. For the function of the rock star is never to "tell it like it is" but how his audience wants it to be, and this feeling of ownership by the fans in his audience is as possessive among the Grateful Dead freaks as it is among the teeny bopper fans of the Osmonds.

To meet the market created by the middle class rock fan newspapers now give very erudite reviews to the relevant concerts and records. Universities give courses in rock music. Books of academic criticism pour from the presses. Ironically the music that has been hailed as the centre of the "counter culture" is fast becoming the minority culture of the middle class intellectual.

The reasoning behind Murdock and McBron's article can finally be extended to differences between American and English rock music. Generally, New Zealanders, like good colonials prefer English rock. I've often heard it said that America has no "experimental" rock bands to compare with Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes and so on. The reason for this however is not because the English have some innate superiority, but because of roots. A middle class American dropout who plays music has the whole tradition of black and white southern music to explore. The English have nothing like this folk tradition to fall back on; English folk music is alien to rock music. So in the early days of rock and roll the English copied black music very badly. During the Beatles period they copied it very well, but in the post Beatles period the English realised that what roots they had lay in the European classical tradition. And so we get to the music of Yes and Co. which try to combine rock with the technical kitbag of classical music. Whether you regard this music as 'exciting' and 'experimental' or pretentious and vapid depends on where your own roots lie.