One starting point is to recognise a paradox. Amidst all the futuristic claims of a new digital era, there is a veritable explosion of history on our screens – including musical history. Film biopics gain Oscar nominations and drooling reviews (Ray, Walk the Line, Control). In a different budgetary world, cable channels fill their gaping schedules with cheap documentaries tracing the careers of musical ‘legends’ such as Paul Anka or Marc Bolan. In between, there are more serious but nevertheless predictable attempts to tell the story of musical genres (Soul Deep, Ken Burns’ Jazz). Martin Scorsese lends his auteur credentials to series on Dylan and the blues, which are then repackaged as glossy DVD box sets.

YouTube adds fascinating new levels to this retro culture, providing a virtual archive of musical history, from the sublime (Stevie Wonder at his peak performing Superstition on Sesame Street) to the predictable (a thousand indie boys walking through urban decay; ten thousand rappers stooping to peer into a ground-level camera). Inevitably, though, this fabulous resource is being read through the lenses provided by older discourses about rock and soul’s golden ages.

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What does this musical history boom mean for our understanding of screen culture – and for that matter, musical culture? There’s a strong sense even amongst those most drawn to retro rock culture that the relentless looking back to the 1960s and 1970s is unsatisfactory. But classic rock fans tend to blame the victim, claiming that pop just hasn’t been the same since Elvis, Hendrix and Bowie shocked baby-boomers’ Mums and Dads with their wiggles, thrusts and pouts. The music nostalgia boom encourages a sense that the sixties and seventies formed not only a golden age of popular music, but a golden age of popular music’s visual power too.

I’m very sceptical about the idea that pop has declined since the golden age of rock and soul. And I’m convinced that the visualisation of this nostalgia is deeply mythological.

Let’s take TV first. Rock musicians were on the whole quite suspicious of TV. If the rock and soul revolutions involved some musicians attempting to gain greater autonomy, they were only rarely going to find that autonomy on television. On the other hand, there were plenty of musicians and managers willing to make all the compromises necessary to work with television, given the rewards involved. We may remember glorious moments of rebellion, but these were few and far between. In the UK, the television norm for popular music was a mimed public appearance on a live half-hour show such as Top of the Pops, or a guest appearance on a ‘variety show’. Some of the most important of these were fronted by bland popular music figures such as Cliff Richard and Val Doonican, performing agonising comedy sketches alongside light covers of recent pop hits. (The US equivalent would, I think, be shows hosted by Johnny Cash and Andy Williams).

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of the most mythologised moments in rock history is Jimi Hendrix’s appearance on one such show, hosted by the Scots singer Lulu in 1969. What is striking is how many accounts portray Jimi Hendrix as sullen, angry and anarchistic, when in fact he is smiling, polite, charming.1 His reference to not playing ‘rubbish’ is self-deprecating rather than aggressive.

Those rock musicians with the necessary resources turned to the cinema, which had greater prestige as higher entertainment, in spite of Elvis’s disastrous forays. These cinematic ventures could take the form of surreal quasi-experimentalism (the Beatles), allowing one’s iconic status to be confirmed through allowing in the direct cinema cameras (Pennebaker on Dylan, The Maysles brothers doing the Stones) or basing a feature film around concert footage (Led Zeppelin, The Who).

In cinema too, though, the evidence for a golden age is sparse. Sections of the feted A Hard Day’s Night are painful to watch. For all the recent hero-worship and star-struck fascination (I’m Not There), Dylan comes across as a self-absorbed prick in Don’t Look Back. Perhaps the nadir of classic rock’s encounter with the movies though is Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same. Actually, this may even have been the nadir of rock culture, period. The group hired their own filmmakers to film them in concert, and to produce fantasy sequences that they and their infamous manager Peter Grant had devised. Journeys are undertaken often on horseback or in vintage cars. Women are rescued or are seen preparing food for their swains. The film opens with Grant and a crony, dressed as Chicago gangsters, shooting up a group of ghouls who are seemingly supposed to represent the corporate rock industry. Here the truth is revealed: prog-rock, presented as a coming of age of youth culture, was very often about adolescent boy fantasy, more Tolkien than Tobias Wolff.

Of course ‘70s self-indulgence is now a staple of rock’s retro culture. Filmmakers are quite conscious of the gentle parody of This is Spinal Tap. But what do we say about a culture that actually thinks this stuff is worth celebrating to this degree, even with the wisdom of hindsight? After all, Led Zeppelin have been one of the key players in the current rock nostalgia boom. Their reunion gig in 2007 was one of the most hyped musical events of that year – and The Song Remains the Same was released on DVD in 2007 to considerable excitement in the music press.

As Simon Reynolds has pointed out, retro rock documentaries are just one part of a huge musical retro industry, encompassing ‘band reformations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and out-take crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, live performances of classic albums in their original sequence, rock histories and biographies galore’.2 Reynolds is rightly scathing about this culture, and offers up his own ‘Law of Retro’ – whereby ‘the vitality of a music genre bears an inverse ratio to the amount of historical knowledge built up around it’. But Reynolds also registers that the recent boom in music documentary is providing some interesting material, some of which runs counter to the classic rock nostalgia boom. He cites recent films on Berlin techno and Bristol dubstep, but also more mainstream documentaries on Wilco and Metallica and even retro pieces on some slightly more unusual and marginal figures – Joe Strummer, Shane MacGowan and Scott Walker.

Reynolds also mentions DiG!, Ondie Timoner’s film about the contrasting fortunes of two US indie bands as they attempt to make it. Matt Stahl has analysed how DiG! offers a parable concerning the benefits of accommodation with capitalism.3 By setting the hedonistic but balanced Dandy Warhols against the mentally ill lead singer of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Anton Newcombe, DiG! portrays to its audiences a new model creative worker, imbued with mass society critique, but little more politically. I think Stahl is right, and that this captures beautifully the development of indie or alternative rock since the mid-1990s. Criticism of poverty, inequality, the opportunism and egoism of private interests, and the destruction of social bonds brought about by capitalism (‘social critique’ in the terms of BoltanskiThe New Spirit of Capitalism) is muted. What remains is an emphasis on disenchantment and inauthenticity, and the limits capitalism places on freedom, autonomy and creativity (‘artistic critique’ in Boltanski and Chiapello’s terms).4 Both critiques are important, but the latter has been thoroughly absorbed into capitalism, say Boltanski and Chiapello.

So DiG! ends up revealing some deeper truths about the realities of musical culture, in spite of its intentions. This is something that the modern rockumentaries share with older variants such as The Song Remains the Same. Metallica: Some Kind of Monster is particularly impressive because it seems intentionally willing reveal its stars as sensitive multi-millionaires, who must have their personal guru perpetually present to guide their creativity. Drummer Lars Ulrich is seen strolling around his remarkable collection of Basquiats and Dubuffets, as he prepares to sell them at Christie’s for a breathtaking fee.

Strangely then we seem to be experiencing a golden age for certain aspects of visual culture, in the form of the revived rockumentary, and the glorious resources of YouTube. But these are still buried buried beneath the nostalgic retro culture that still dominates popular music. It’s time to clear that debris away and live in the musical present, while looking and listening back in a more enlightened way.

Image Credits:

1. Bob Dylan and D.A. Pennebaker during the shooting of Don’t Look Back.

2. Poster for the film DiG! (2004).

3. Home page image. Design by Peter Alilunas.

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1. See the journalist John Walsh quoted in Keith Negus, ‘Musicians on television: visible, audible and ignored’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 131,2: 310-330. Negus’s article is a rich set of reflections on music and visual culture.
2. http://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2007/12/tombstone-blues-music-documentary-boom.html
3. Matt Stahl, ‘Sex and Drugs and Bait and Switch: Rockumentary and the New Model Worker’, in David Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee (eds), The Media and Social Theory, London and New York: Routledge, 2008.
4. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005).

The current Writers’ Guild of America strike has drawn much sniggering comment from the media and elsewhere. Such a response will be familiar to those who recall similar actions by writers in 1988 and by the Screen Actors’ Guild in 1999. ‘Don’t pity the poor pitiful striking screenwriters’, mocks Slate writer Jack Shafer, ‘let the major daily newspapers do it for you’.^[1] Shafer reads coverage of the WGA strike as favourable and explains this as the result of shared interests on the part of a cosy cabal of fellow scribes. Shafer and others downplay the relentless pursuit of self-interest on the part of the Hollywood studios. Even the more balanced accounts have given credence to the ‘hard facts’[2] produced by corporate lobbyists. The high failure rates in TV and film are presented as evidence of the heartbreaking fragility of media businesses, in spite of perfectly their respectable profit margins and share prices. The offsetting of misses by hits and the widespread use of creative accounting are ignored. The system of paying residuals (small percentage fees for DVD sales and so on) to writers is portrayed as a curious historical legacy of a time when the movie and TV business made serious money. Not like now – ah, the poor, pitiful ^[1] Shafer reads coverage of the WGA strike as favourable and explains this as the result of shared interests on the part of a cosy cabal of fellow scribes. Shafer and others downplay the relentless pursuit of self-interest on the part of the Hollywood studios. Even the more balanced accounts have given credence to the ‘hard facts’[2] produced by corporate lobbyists. The high failure rates in TV and film are presented as evidence of the heartbreaking fragility of media businesses, in spite of perfectly their respectable profit margins and share prices. The offsetting of misses by hits and the widespread use of creative accounting are ignored. The system of paying residuals (small percentage fees for DVD sales and so on) to writers is portrayed as a curious historical legacy of a time when the movie and TV business made serious money. Not like now – ah, the poor, pitiful Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

At work here may be the representations of creatives in recent TV fiction, most notably 30 Rock and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. On the surface, these shows seem to elevate art over commerce. On occasion, they direct brilliant satire against the most venal aspects of corporate TV culture. Ultimately though, in order to maintain the dramatic and comedic tension, and to avoid charges of self-serving hypocrisy, these shows chicken out: the bad guy upstairs has to be sexy and actually quite smart beneath the management-speak; the creatives are funny but gormless, and can’t really be trusted.

It’s understandable perhaps that when the relatively privileged go on strike to defend their interests, even those on the left may be tempted to snort in derision. But such actions have the potential to draw attention to creative and artistic labour – not just in the film and television industries, but beyond them too.This is important because it’s almost universally agreed that such jobs are likely to become more and more important in modern societies – not just in the USA, where Big Media continues to thrive, but from Shanghai to Santiago, Manchester to Melbourne. This is partly why national and regional governments all over the world have been putting together ‘creative industries’ or ‘creative economy’ policies in recent years. They all want a piece of the information society action.[3] (The US federal government doesn’t have a policy to boost its creative industries, but that’s because it’s been boosting them since at least the 1920s; and in any case, US companies tower over the global media industries.)

As for what constitutes a creative job in a creative industry – that remains suspiciously murky in the various policy documents. It’s hard sometimes not to see the policy creativity cult as a way of making mundane jobs sound more satisfying than they really are. Nevertheless, what’s striking is that such policies rely on the real desirability of creative work. This is more than just media glitz, and the chance to brush with renown. It reaches back into historical understandings of art.

The sad reality of course is that most creative labour markets are riddled with inequality and insecurity. Survey after survey shows that the vast majority of artists suffer real poverty. Half of Australian artists in 2000-1 earned less than 7,300 Australian dollars from their creative practice before tax. Just as significantly, only half earned 30,000 Aussie dollars from all their activities[4] – all that waitressing, bar work, teaching as you wait for the big break still leaves you skint. Similar work all over the world echoes these conclusions.

Now it might be said in response that artists – writers, musicians, composers, dancers and so on (you know, the people who appear on television) – are from the educated middle class and so they get subsidised by their parents. The trust fund acts as the subsidy that keeps the artistic reservoir replenished. But if the means of artistic expression are confined to the educated and wealthy upper middle class, then that has worrying implications for the range of experiences that will be represented in modern societies. Ignoring cultural labour will only make this worse not better. Cultural policy is one way of correcting such problems (welfare policy is another) – but neo-liberalism is skewing such policy towards encouraging the unfettered growth of this kind of labour market.

By contrast, as everyone knows, the rewards for the most successful actors and writers are astronomical. As Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook explained in 1995, cultural markets are often winner-take-all markets, and this means that small differences in talent or effort often give rise to enormous differences in incomes.[5] The idea that talent will out and that this kind of extreme skewing of income reflects real merit is commonly heard in film, television and music (and among politicians and social scientists). As with the vast salaries and bonuses paid to sportsmen and business executives, this emphasis on individual merit downplays luck, social capital, and the input of the many other people who contribute to the success of individuals; coaches, teachers, team-mates, co-workers, mentors. Why then do so many people seek to enter artistic labour markets when they are so likely to fail? Are they stupid? No, reply the economists, just human: they do what most of us do and overestimate their chances of succeeding. This might have the economistic smack of essentialism, but there’s some truth there. Some suggest this is why most artistic workers are young: once people learn how likely they are to fail, they drop out and take up other work.

Another reason often given for the oversupply of artists (which of course depresses wages in the absence of exceptional success) is that such jobs offer self-expression and self-realisation: the labour of love argument. But as economies have changed, the meaning of this labour of love may be changing too. One way to understand this is as an appropriation by capitalists of the artistic critique of conformity and constraint.[6] Another approach is to ask, as [6] Another approach is to ask, as Andrew Ross did in a seminal article on artistic (and academic) labour, what happens when pleasurable, selfless labour moves ‘from the social margins to the core sectors of capital accumulation?’[7]

One answer to this question may be that those involved in such labour are working harder and harder, internalising their commitments, and pursuing ever higher targets, in the belief that they are realising some true aspect of their selves – and yet feeling at the same time that something is curiously missing. The boundary between external compulsion and inner freedom gets pretty blurry. And in this respect creative workers may be typical of a pronounced tendency amongst those modern professionals to be ‘willing slaves’.[8]

Ross argued that those who share the experience of sacrificial labour need to organize themselves to resist these new forms of mental slavery. He also warned against underestimating the impact of such mental labour. The US creative guilds are not model forms of solidarity for the new capitalism to be sure. But if Ross is right, their actions shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand – any more than labour actions by those who work in universities. Television and film aren’t just battlegrounds over social meaning, they’re also fields of struggle over labour too.

[1] Jack Shafer, ‘Why Newspapers Love the Striking Screenwriters’, Slate, posted 13 November 2007, [1] Jack Shafer, ‘Why Newspapers Love the Striking Screenwriters’, Slate, posted 13 November 2007, http://www.slate.com/id/2177835/nav/fix/

[2] Brook Barnes, In Hollywood, A Sacred Cow Lands on the Contract Table, New York Times, posted 5 August 2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/business/yourmoney/05steal.html

[3] See David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries, 2nd edition, London and Los Angeles: SAGE, 2007.

[4] David Throsby and Virginia Hollister, Don’t Give up your Day Job: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia, Sydney: Australia Council, Sydney, 2003.

[5] Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society, New York: Penguin, 1996.

[6] Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, London: Verso, 2005.

[7] Andrew Ross, ‘The Mental Labour Problem’, Social Text 63, Vol. 18, number 2, 2000.

[8] Madeline Bunting, Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives. London: Harper Perennial, 2005

Image Credits:

1.The 2007 Writers’ Strike
2.The Cast of NBC’s 30 Rock
3.SAG Members Protesting Elizabeth Hurley Crossing the Picket Line
4.home page thumbnail image

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The Open University

I’ve spent much of the last three years putting together with colleagues a new undergraduate media course for The Open University. Many US readers of Flow will be familiar with this British institution. Its mission is to provide part-time higher education for anyone who wants to pursue it in the form of supported distance learning. Yes, anyone. Thought up in the heyday of European social democracy by Harold Wilson’s Labour government, it goes without saying that this mission was enormously unpopular with Britain’s famously inegalitarian press when the university started up in 1970. Yet somehow the OU has survived newspaper scandal, Thatcherism and even, so far, the galloping onset of marketisation and audit culture in British universities. And it’s a non-profit, state-funded, public institution.

Why’s all this relevant to Flow? Well, the OU has had quite a role to play in the development of media studies. Even in the USA, it quite often gets a mention alongside the usual and now-tedious invocations of Birmingham cultural studies. The OU’s Mass Communication and Society (1977-1982) and Popular Culture (1981-7) courses were hugely important in Britain. Many well-known media-studies names authored teaching materials: Tony Bennett, James Curran, Stuart Hall, John Hartley and Janet Woollacott, to name some contrasting examples. Dozens more cut their media studies teeth teaching the courses at the OU’s summer schools and local centres in the 1970s and 1980s. Literally thousands of students took the courses as part of social science, humanities and other programmes. And hundreds of thousands watched the OU’s television programmes on the BBC. Communication, film and television studies barely existed in Britain before the early 1980s so these courses filled a huge hole for many who wanted to engage with the media and popular culture.

The most recent OU contribution to undergraduate media and cultural studies was Culture, Media and Identities, launched in 1997 and chaired by Stuart Hall. By the 1990s, the Open University was producing some of its teaching materials with publishers such as Sage, Routledge and Blackwell. The ‘Walkman book’ which introduces Culture, Media and Identities, and Hall’s own edited collection on Representation, have become well-known beyond the OU, along with other books in the associated series. The course also introduced the much-cited ‘Circuit of Culture’ really a development of Hall’s earlier encoding/decoding model.

The Open University system

People often ask how the OU system works. The short answer is: painstakingly. Courses (which usually form one-sixth of an honours degree programme) are produced by teams of dozens of people, including OU and external academics, local tutors from around the UK, professional editors, TV producers, website designers, technicians and others. This course team system of production is very intensive and the fact that it’s survived decades of managerialist drives for greater efficiency in the UK public sector is a minor miracle of academic autonomy.

In order to ensure that the distance learning materials are clear, cogent and academically rigorous, members of course teams read each other’s work in a number of different drafts — at least three – and make comments on these drafts at a series of meetings. And often in writing too. I remember with particular agony email exchanges of many hundreds of words about one sentence. (In defence of those of us involved, it did happen to be a sentence about Adorno and Horkheimer). To sit listening while a number of very bright people make detailed criticisms of your work is a process that is probably best described as character-building. If I said that no-one ever fell out and that each meeting began and ended with a group hug you wouldn’t believe me, and you’d be right. The process is wonderfully stimulating but unless you have a vast and impermeable ego, at times it’s also pretty terrifying.

Changing politics, changing media pedagogy

For those of us charged with the responsibility of developing a new Open University media course, its earlier achievements in media and cultural studies were hard acts to follow. One of the most interesting aspects of working on the course (which, typically for the OU, has a less-than-thrilling title: Understanding Media) has been to observe the ways in which it has ended up reflecting shifts in the field of media analysis and shifts in the big wide world beyond it.

The mandate of the Understanding Media course team was to provide a secure foundation in media analysis for a new generation of OU students – and for others reading our published textbooks. One of the major dilemmas we faced was whether, in an introductory course, to stick with the production-texts-audiences trio which is at the heart of most ways in which the field is pedagogically carved up — including Hall et al.’s circuit of culture — or whether to try to innovate beyond it, as, say, Simon Frith does in his essay on ‘Entertainment’ in Curran and Gurevitch’s Mass Media and Society. With some trepidation – we were worried that it was becoming stale through familiarity — we played safe and opted for the trio as the basis of the structure of the course.

But in other respects, we have departed significantly from what a media studies course in the 1990s would have looked like. For many years, well-rehearsed tensions between political economy and cultural studies have divided the field; and, for better or for worse, to say that this division is ‘boring’ will not make it go away. Equally important in my view have been fissures deriving from the troubled legacy of post-structuralism. All this has led to real difficulties on some undergraduate media courses in bringing these various approaches and positions into dialogue with each other. In many universities, at least in the UK, the compromise has generally been that particular modules would be taught by critical realist/political economists; others by post-structuralists and constructionists; and others by popular culture academics. Or, worse, entire courses or programmes would in effect pursue one approach, with only tokenistic recognition of competing lines of thought.

For many amongst a new generation, whatever their own preferences, an adequate grounding in media critique needs to take serious account of cultural studies, post-structuralism and of the Marxian approaches that were sometimes portrayed as a thing of the past in the 1990s. Rather than advocating a particular approach, the Understanding Media team encouraged its authors to put different critical perspectives on particular topics into dialogue. In the fourth book in the Understanding Media book series, for example, the constructionist approaches that have tended to dominate textual analysis are rubbed up against critical realist positions. Across the course, our goal was to avoid caricature and un-necessary simplification so that students gain a real understanding of the different approaches on offer. This does not, however, mean a bland relativism: the preferences of individual authors shine through in their presentation of competing perspectives.

The course reflects changed political priorities too. For all kinds of understandable historical reasons, many cultural and media studies teachers in the 1990s, like much of the left, were overwhelmingly concerned with the politics of difference and identity. The political role of ‘culture’ itself, arguably sidelined for so many decades, became central – and indeed in some accounts the realm of culture in effect came to be equated with the social, or with politics. This was the aftermath of 1989, the period where political debate was dominated by conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and by the continuing struggle for gender and ethnic recognition.

To put it another way, though, this was the world before the WTO protests, before 9-11 and Afghanistan, before the second Gulf War. The politics of identity and difference remain key in the new course, but I suspect there is much greater attention to issues of social inequality, class and imperialism than there would have been if we had been producing the course ten years earlier. And the issue of market liberalism keeps coming back like a chorus in a pop song – especially in the book on Media Production, but not just there. For many years, consumption was where the action was felt to be in cultural and media studies, and was often understood as the privileged site of cultural creativity. Understanding Media’s book on audiences has a different inflection, and is centrally concerned with the experience of living in nations penetrated by transnational media flows. Here too, neo-liberalism, in its many guises, is a spectre haunting the teaching material.

In trying to create a media studies course for the first decade of the twenty-first century, we’ve tried to draw upon the widest possible range of critical media scholarship. Readings from over 70 authors are integrated into the textbooks, hundreds more are cited. And now that we’ve finished it seems to me that there is actually a tremendous body of critical media work to draw upon in meeting the challenge of teaching the media to new audiences. As for whether the Understanding Media course team has drawn upon this work successfully – that’s for others to judge.

Image Credits:

1. The Open University

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