Capitalist Imaginaries of Popular Music

Traditionally, popular music has long been said to intrinsically contest, resist and defy the powers that be. This new book challenges this long-standing orthodoxy, arguing that popular music more often participates in the social reproduction of the biggest power there is: neoliberal capitalism. This is done mainly through the widespread mediation of a very particular and remarkably cohesive ideology of greatness and value. This ideology is drawn from principles and prescriptions that have long been constitutive of neoliberal capitalism. We have been told this story over and over again for decades. The music is real. The music is powerful. The music is defiant. It is a story that has gradually spread to encompass everything from classic rock to contemporary pop to hip hop to dance music. This suite of ideas came to dominance since the mid-1980s and persist to the present, an era in which the vast majority of people have been disempowered, impoverished and marginalised at home, at work and in politics. This book explains why such a robust, pervasive and persistent set of ideas about popular music has taken such a tenacious hold in a historical era which has repeatedly and thoroughly demonstrated the utter falseness of those same ideas nearly everywhere they have been experienced.