Is popular music a mass produced commodity or a genuine art form?

Art can be defined as the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination. A mass produced commodity is used to make money by producing the same thing. I think to simply label music either of these is an impossible task, music can be both.

Adorno suggests that the popular music industry is an all consuming production line, that churns out mass produced, inferior commodities; I agree with Adorno that a large part of the music industry is a money making machine. Take X-factor for example, the past four years have churned out cover after cover of recent songs, just because the public are familiar with them and therefore buy the single. However this music standardization cannot be applied to the whole industry. People who either write, produce or perform their song and do express imagination and creativity such as The Beatles can be defined as real musical artists.

How useful is a production of culture perspective in understanding the birth or rock and roll?

Law, technology, industry structure, organisation structure, occupational career and the market are 6 of the factors that Peterson considers in his culture perspective theory on the birth of rock and roll. There is no denying that all factors have contributed to rock n roll’s beginnings, for example without the change in in the 1914 ASCAP law and the FCC approving backlogs of radio stations in 1947 people wouldn’t have been introduced to alternative music. 

However Peterson doesn’t acknowledge what you would think would be a huge factor- the music itself. Peterson doesn’t explain why it is rock ‘n’ roll and no other genre of music that had such a huge breakthrough in 1955. He fails to acknowledge the technologies that created the rock ‘n’ roll sound, the huge amount of teenager’s searching for a something to relate to and the demand for a new exciting genre that could have only been rock ‘n’ roll.

Is it reasonable to consider that rock music is gendered male?

The Rolling Stone’s top 100 guitarists is rammed with rock legends from George Harrison to Kurt Cobain, at first glance you may think that its the top 100 male guitarists of all time, however with the contribution from Joan Jett at no. 87 and Joni Mitchell at 72 it is hard to deny that their is a serious lack of female input in rock.

I believe that from its early origins rock has been gendered male, purely down to social reasons. Men want to be the guitarist and women want to be with the guitarist. Everything about the stereotypical guitarist screams masculinity, from the way its held, to the way its played seem to suggest ‘a silent encoded phallocentric message’ (Bayton). Girls are socialized to play ‘feminine’ instruments (flute) and stick to Pop music. 

Its going to take more than a handful of Women to rebel against these gendered musical standards to really start making an impact on the Rolling Stone’s top 100 guitarists.