Dialectic of Pop

by Agnès Gayraud, Robin Mackay (Translator), Daniel Miller (Translator)

A philosophical exploration of pop music that reveals a rich, self-reflexive art form with unsuspected depths. In the first major philosophical treatise on the subject, Agnès Gayraud explores all the paradoxes of pop—its inauthentic authenticity, its mass production of emotion and personal resonance, its repetitive novelty, its precision engineering of seduction—and calls for pop (in its broadest sense, encompassing all genres of popular recorded music) to be recognized as a modern, technologically mediated art form to rank alongside cinema and photography. In a thoroughgoing engagement with Adorno's fierce critique of "standardized light popular music," Dialectic of Pop tracks the transformations of the pop form and its audience over the course of the twentieth century, from Hillbilly to Beyoncé, from Lead Belly to Drake. Inseparable from the materiality of its technical media, indifferent and intractable to the perspectives of high culture, pop subverts notions of authenticity and inauthenticity, original and copy, aura and commodity, medium and message. Gayraud demonstrates that, far from being the artless and trivial mass-produced pabulum denigrated by Adorno, pop is a rich, self-reflexive artform that recognises its own contradictions, incorporates its own productive negativity, and often flourishes by thinking "against itself." Dialectic of Pop sings the praises of pop as a constitutively impure form resulting from the encounter between industrial production and the human predilection for song, and diagnoses the prospects for twenty-first century pop as it continues to adapt to ever-changing technological mediations.

Genres: Music, Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Art

456 pages, Paperback

First published August 23, 2018

About the author

Agnès Gayraud is a French musician and philosopher born in 1979. She teaches theory at the Villa Arson (National Art School) in Nice. She has gained critical acclaim for her musical practice (as La Féline) and is a regular writer for the daily paper Libération.

Reviews

[Dodopan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here is the most salient point in Dialectic of Pop:

The art of pop music is separate from other musical arts by its aetiology: Where other forms of music are made to be performed live, pop music is made primarily to be recorded and distributed. Other works of musical art can be mixed and recorded, but the classical composition (transmitted by score) or the folk song (transmitted orally) are not made with this in mind.

By virtue of its purpose, the skills of mixing and recording are just as influential as performance and composition on the finished art of a pop song, and the recording/mixing of a single performance is captured and transmitted near-perfectly in itself, rather than being performed again with each listening. The popular Irish proverb of "the same tune is never the same tune twice" does not apply to pop music. This puts it in the same league as photography or cinema, which are separated from their pre-industrial counterparts (painting and theatre) by their mechanical natures which allow the photo to be reproduce and transmitted near-perfectly ad infimum, and thus place greater emphasis on perfecting the exact moment of capture.

This is the main crux of "Dialectic of Pop," and while it is a very interesting one, it is explained at the very beginning of the book. The rest of the book feels like an extravagant history of the pop music industry from the French perspective, and a series of awkwardly shoe-horned references to philosophical and cultural touchstones of Franco-German acadaemia.

Like her academic compatriots, Gayraud falls into the old trap of writing a book far too long with some interesting but scarce points here and there, which the author feels the need to justify by invoking the sacred names of esteemed academics and philosophers before her (such as Adorno and Nietzsche), as if to use her display of cultural capital to justify her own opinions. What could have been an interesting, accessible, and simply better book was weighed down by the need to defend its own existence within a thick layer of academic obscurantism, typical of continental writers in her field.

[Ned Binnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was going to be my phd thesis. Apparently it has already been written. Not disappointed

[D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un tratado brillante de estética moderna y contemporánea, a partir del estudio de la música pop(ular). Desde la forma en que la autora delimita con rigor la forma musical pop, hasta las "tres escuchas" de sus características y potencialidades, este libro es simplemente maravilloso. La tesis de que lo pop es definido por una reflexividad en la que la música se horada constantemente a sí misma abriéndose a su negatividad es sostenida, llevada hasta sus últimas consecuencias y problematizada continuamente, en un abordaje epistemológico muy cuidadoso. El libro se nutre de todas las dimensiones (histórica, sociológica, política, puramente estética) que abre Agnès a lo largo del libro, que es evidentemente una labor de amor y años de trabajo.

Absolutamente recomendado para toda persona que quiera detenerse a pensar, desde la filosofía, qué significa para la cultura contemporánea la música pop. Ni el largo del libro ni las citas a Adorno (autor con el que se discute en un plano ontológico y político sin cesar, pero de una forma matizada y abierta a las contradicciones propias del trabajo teórico) deberían preocupar a lxs lectorxs potenciales: la escritura es clara y sencilla de seguir, pero no renuncia por eso a un enfoque estético verdaderamente profundo.

Es, finalmente, un testimonio de que la reflexión teórica no necesariamente desencanta el objeto: leyendo este libro me volví a enamorar de música que ya conocía.

[Jacob Eckhardt · Rating 3 out of 5]

would've given 5 stars if more concise and less adorno

[Maddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I expected a modern look at music (from the 2000s and upwards) and a handling of it that was less concerned with aesthetic development than I actually got.
what I instead got was almost a genealogy of pop music, which doesnt make it a worse work, but slightly defying of expectations.
This does not take away from the brilliant observations and handling of Adorno that is on display here, here, especially the attempts to redefine thoughts from adorno and Benjamin shines through.
So does the exploration of deterritorialization of socalled "world" music, that displays really well how pop musics ability to liquify tradition and regional aesthetics actually plays into its ultimate strength.

Recommended to everyone with interest in musicology and aesthetics

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gayraud challenges Adorno's reading of "light popular music" as in simple binary opposition to "responsible music" by noting that "pop" - which she defines by the specific way in which it is recorded, as a "regime of production" alongside folk, score, and improvisatory - engages in its own dialectic between authenticity and inauthenticity, which first emerges with the "hillbilly paradox," the inability to authentically record the solitary figure, which is joined by the twin poles of sincerity and irony, since pop traffics in the ideology of "democratized genius." This capacity for reflexivity, Gayraud argues, is what allows pop to transcend its reduction to a product of the "culture industry," as Adorno charges. Nevertheless, the latter portions of the text get bogged down in a quite-lengthy historiography and analysis of (largely Western) "pop" that doesn't add much to the main thesis.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lot of thoughts on Adorno and Pop. As you walk down Gayraud's long and lush garden path of a thesis, you will gather many musical fruits from a number of different trees representing different eras, individuals, styles, qualities, timbres. Some of the points will become salient as you listen to a cited song; others will remain obscure and hard to comprehend due to an overloading of philosophical/technical terms and reversals. Overall, it was interesting on the level of thinking of Pop from the perspective of the recording, the radio, and the technical restraints/supports inherent to them. The image of the Pop song as an answering machine that anyone can call into (eerily similar to They Might Be Giant's Dial-a-Song project), disembodied yet human, is what I will be chewing on for some time to come.

[Alex Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little heavy on the pop and light on the dialectics. Basically ended up as one long critique of Adorno's already widely criticized views on popular music. It does a good job of breaking down what makes Adorno's elitist criticisms wrong, but it felt altogether unnecessary and was a bit dull.

There were a couple moments (and by that I mean maybe 5 pages worth in this 400+ page book) where Gayraud went into the specifics of what makes a pop song, album, or artist dialectical and I would have loved a lot more of that. But it was nice to see both Sparks' 'No. 1 Song in Heaven' discussed and the criminally underrated cover of 'Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft' by The Carpenters briefly mentioned.

[Zelda Sabel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meticulous & hyperspecific — incredible