Toward a Sociotechnological Interpretation of Popular Music in the Electronic Age
1984; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3104671
ISSN1097-3729
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoThus ends the refrain to Play It All Night Long, Warren Zevon's tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd. The word play does not refer to performing on a musical instrument but rather to something technological-a record on a turntable, or a cassette. This meaning of the word here serves as a reminder that the history of innovations in modern popular music is largely a history of technological changes, and that one can therefore approach an analysis of that music in terms of technology rather than personalities. As Paul Levinson has put it, specifically with regard to the art of cinema, Technological determinism may have played a greater role in the development of film culture, and perhaps of all popular culture by extension, than it did in the appliance of more practical technologies.' Levinson's is a minority opinion, of course. The great performers overwhelm us with the impact of their personalities-that is one measure of their greatness-and the audiences listening to their music generally eschew intellectual analysis, which they consider stultifying. Naturally, then, they are uninterested in anything that smacks of formal inquiry; if people read books about popular music at all, they want biographies revealing the details of the stars' private lives. Moreover, virtually all critics are journalists and would have no place to publish analyses of the music in terms of technology even if they had the training and the inclination to write them. We do have two books on the history of the recording industry, Roland Gelatt's The Fabulous Phonograph 1877-1977 and Oliver Read's
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