I'm Not Like Everybody Else: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music

by Jeffrey T. Nealon

Despite the presence of the Flaming Lips in a commercial for a copier and Iggy Pop’s music in luxury cruise advertisements, Jeffrey T. Nealon argues that popular music has not exactly been co-opted in the American capitalist present. Contemporary neoliberal capitalism has, in fact, found a central organizing use for the values of twentieth-century popular being authentic, being your own person, and being free. In short, not being like everybody else.

Through a consideration of the shift in dominant modes of power in the American twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from what Michel Foucault calls a dominant “disciplinary” mode of power to a “biopolitical” mode, Nealon argues that the modes of musical “resistance” need to be completely rethought and that a commitment to musical authenticity or meaning—saying “no” to the mainstream—is no longer primarily where we might look for music to function against the grain.

Rather, it is in the technological revolutions that allow biopolitical subjects to deploy music within an everyday set of practices (MP3 listening on smartphones and iPods, streaming and downloading on the internet, the background music that plays nearly everywhere) that one might find a kind of ambient or ubiquitous answer to the “attention capitalism” that has come to organize neoliberalism in the American present. In short, Nealon stages the final confrontation between “keepin’ it real” and “sellin’ out.”


 

Genres: Music, Theory, Cultural Studies

144 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2018

About the author

Jeffrey T. Nealon is Professor of English at Penn State University. He is the author of "Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction" (1993), "Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity" (1998), and "The Theory Toolbox" (2003).

Reviews

[Blaze-Pascal · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book extremely compelling. I am currently writing about music and identity and this book seems to have nailed it right on the head, in terms of how popular music has shifted technologically and has become identity sources for our the neoliberal biopolitical reality we all inhabit. I am however, a little skeptical on the author's approach to where he sees the escape from this mode. I think he does fall into the trap of Foucauldian analysis, and teases where a Lacanian reading may be helpful, but basically ignores it. It makes me think that I need to bring Coapjec's "Read my Desire" into discussion with this book in order that I gain more clarity on how music shapes us... but this is just my view on the conclusion and limits of the book. The author has definitely nailed the sociological aspect about music, but he has failed on the psychoanalytic, although that was never his intention. It's funny how, even though the author never mentions this, Spotify has even claimed in its end of year analysis of each user's listening, to see their "musical aura"; it's this kind of narrative that the author does such a good job to explain why we talk about music in this way.... I couldn't put it down, great book, interested in more work from this author.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

In listening parlance, authenticity-obsessed "rockist" listeneres are resolutely paranoid, as they must always guard against being hoodwinked in to investing in the wrong kind of "inauthentic" music, thereby putting precious cultural cand social capital at stake

The paranoiac discourse of authenticity dominates any music sub-culture, often without respite for alternative ways of asserting a work's quality. That music is something that works closely to the biopolitical self's identity-formation is not a shocking argument -- identity-formation is always experienced as especially valuable if it can incorporate the real thing among copies and fakes. Music is an arena of cultural mutlitude, which nicely generates objects of desire forever hidden among the bodies of multitude.

PSPS: Nealon never comments on the social phenomenon of Spotify Wrapped, and it is missed. SW does the herculean task of transforming the whole year into a temporal, biopolitical unit of labor, where a year of identity investment in niche might reward you with a self-formation of negation: that there is a place exclusively for you in the topography of taste.

[Felipe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eminently readable, extremely thought provoking, and very convincing.

This was one of those books I found myself highlighting vast portions of because I wanted them easily accessible later when I inevitably referenced them over and over again in my own work.

Anyone working with music, pop culture, authenticity, or really anything in modern cultural studies should give this a read.

(Also, somewhat tangentially, Chapter 10 has an extremely digestible explanation of Bourdieu's cultural capital, which I always appreciate since it seems Bourdieu will forever be my academic nemesis of sorts.)

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intriguing read. This absolutely made me rethink how I interact with music and art more broadly.