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Working musicians: Labor and creativity in film and television production By Timothy Taylor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 264 pp.

2024; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/amet.13368

1548-1425

Michael L. Siciliano,

Social and Cultural Dynamics

In Working Musicians, ethnomusicologist Timothy Taylor asks how neoliberal capitalism shapes the work involved in cultural production. He addresses this question by examining composers who work in US film and television. Taylor mobilizes vivid interview quotes and excerpts from trade publications to show how these professionals narrate their everyday activities; taking a Bourdieuian approach, he also shows how they endeavor to accumulate symbolic, social, and economic capital. Doing so provides readers with deep insight into how production has been sped up and how neoliberal entrepreneurialism has been fostered by digital distribution, a winner-takes-all labor market, and overlapping pressures to accumulate symbolic and social capital. In tandem with this examination of neoliberalism, Working Musicians shines most brightly in Taylor's analysis of gender inequality and the persistence of patriarchy in cultural industries. Here, he focuses on how composers understand and articulate the impact of gender on their work. Doing so provides valuable insight into how dominant discourses of neoliberalism and patriarchy contribute to the persistent devaluing of women's creative labor. Taylor begins the book by outlining his theoretical approach, drawing heavily on Bourdieu and thus focusing on various species of capital. Taylor also draws on neo-Marxist and post-Marxist perspectives from cultural studies (i.e., Raymond Williams) and anthropology (i.e., Anna Tsing). To a much lesser degree, he also draws on labor-process theory (i.e., Harry Braverman). Here, Taylor takes up Williams's concept of "group production" to help understand work in the cultural industries (or "businesses," as Taylor prefers). Group production emphasizes the autonomous contributions of individuals to the use value of a cultural product (e.g., movies, film, music, art, etc.). This point is well known in the sociology and anthropology of cultural production (Becker, 1982; see also Peterson & Anand, 2004), as is the difficulty of parsing individual contributions to any cultural product's success or failure (e.g., Rossman et al., 2010). In this light, Williams's "group production" provides a conceptual economy with a tip of the hat to the British cultural studies tradition. In introductory chapters, Taylor makes two novel, interrelated provocations. First, he argues that cultural industries are not industries at all, merely "businesses." This is so, he claims, because cultural production relies on networked organizations and craft or artisanal production. But many industries tend to be structured in this way (Powell, 1990). Any serious scholar of labor, organizations, or capitalism will find this provocation a bit odd. Industries are organized in myriad ways, from craft production to Fordist assembly lines and beyond. If cultural industries tend to be organized in craft or artisanal production, they are nonetheless industries. Put differently, mass production, such as in car or electronics manufacturing, has never been the sole metric by which a "business" might be labeled an industry. In relation to this business-not-industry claim, Taylor says musicians struggle not against capitalism so much as against their "bosses, directors, and producers" who maintain "the creative function"—meaning they engage in what I have elsewhere termed struggles over "creative control" (Siciliano, 2021, 2023). The social, cultural, and, I would add, sensual structures of these industries produce an antagonism between those who hold creative control and those who do not, between those who may legitimately wield decision-making authority within those structures and those who may not. This typically falls along lines of class, gender, race, and sexuality; of these, Taylor focuses primarily on class and gender. His gender analysis seems most valuable to scholars of cultural industries and capitalism, since it fills a serious gap in North American scholarship on "fields of cultural production." More broadly, North American takes on Bourdieu tend to sidestep stratification (Mears, 2023; see, e.g., Benzecry, 2022). Taylor's business-not-industry claim underlies many other claims about cultural production's neoliberalization. For Taylor, cultural production has never been an "industry," and so cultural production exists alongside, but not completely within, capitalism. To this end, Taylor draws on Tsing's (2009) theorization of supply-chain capitalism. Taylor claims that the labor of cultural production requires translation through supply chains to become valuable within global, neoliberal capitalism. These supply chains exert power over creative labor, pressuring laborers to adopt entrepreneurial approaches to their work in order to mitigate rising economic precarity—a well-known finding in research on culture workers as well as other precarious workers (e.g., Duffy, 2017; Gershon, 2017; Mould, 2018; Rosenblat, 2018; Siciliano, 2021). Taylor muddles his use of Tsing by insisting that cultural production exists "outside" capitalist industry. In his account, neoliberalism has encroached on cultural production only recently, having been brought on by digital distribution technologies (e.g., streaming services such as Netflix and user-generated content platforms such as YouTube). That cultural production somehow exists outside neoliberal capitalism and must be "brought in" or "translated" via supply chains runs counter to decades of scholarship on creativity's neoliberalization within and without cultural industries (e.g., Curtin & Sanson, 2016; Kozlowski et al., 2014; Mould, 2018; Raunig et al., 2011). Though I do agree that supply-chain capitalism is a useful way to understand cultural production in both conventional and digital forms (Siciliano, 2023), I'm puzzled by Taylor's claim that composers in Los Angeles are outside rather than deeply entangled with capitalism. If one considers the dense networks of humans and nonhumans needed to compose and record music (e.g., laptop, smartphone, licensed software, an apartment or home with a studio, high-speed internet, etc.), then Taylor's assertions appear even more puzzling. After the lengthy introductory chapters, Taylor introduces interview data. These empirical chapters provide fascinating insight into composers' production processes. Taylor claims that interviews were best suited to the project because most composers work alone at home, and thus observation would be less useful—an assertion that leaves me, primarily a participant-observation ethnographer, wondering how much insight Taylor lost by not observing the workers' day-to-day activities. Taylor tends to treat interviews as fact rather than illustrative of points of view. I find this unproblematic when he uses them to describe production processes. Yet naively interpreting data becomes alarming when Taylor uses one or two interview quotations to make assertions about whole fields—again, without ethnographic observation, political economy, or industry-level data to properly situate interlocutors' accounts. Working Musicians often suffers from unanalyzed, uncontextualized interview data—largely an unaddressed methodological problem, despite several pages in which Taylor agonizes over whether his method counts as "ethnographic." Choosing interviews rather than fieldwork need not be a major flaw. Taylor, however, does not concretely situate his interviews within broader social structures—notwithstanding his gestures toward the discourses of neoliberal capitalism and patriarchy. Instead, Taylor presents his interlocutors' accounts as demonstrating fact rather than indicating broad social forces, such as political economy or the dynamic interplay of structure and individual action. In doing so, he aims to counter what he sees as the long shadow of Horkheimer and Adorno's (1947) oft-maligned (perhaps rightly) "Culture Industry" essay, which needs little if any renewed criticism in 2024. The term culture industry and all its monolithic implications have long been supplanted by more pluralist terms, which find their origins in myriad criticisms of the Frankfurt School (e.g., "cultural industries" [Hesmondhalgh, 2007], "creative industries" [Caves, 2000], and "culture industries" [McRobbie, 2016]). Un(der)analyzed interview data persists throughout the book, most notably in Taylor's insistence on the irrelevance of alienation among composers. At the same time, Taylor insists that musicians are exploited through the dispossession of their labor—the most basic part of alienation in Marxist traditions (Marx, 1978). More importantly, subjective alienation consistently appears in Taylor's interview quotations, yet he insists on alienation's absence among his interlocutors. For example, one composer insists on the importance of denying his "ego" to be able to do the job (p. 60); another describes his work as making "music by the pound" (p. 67); another describes having a hard time learning to "accommodate" input from directors who maintain creative control over projects (p. 113); and yet another composer describes musicians as "used to being abused," owing to production speedups and budget cuts for music in film and television (p. 183). Far from the absence of alienation, Taylor's data suggests something closer to what I call "alienated judgment" (Siciliano, 2021, 2023), a key experience in creative labor processes. In Taylor's analysis, however, composers and their bosses "work it out," suggesting an ultimately liberal rather than critical view of creative labor processes. In sum, Working Musicians makes for an excellent deep dive into the world of contemporary composers working in the television and film industries. Taylor provides deep insight into the speedups in the industry and accompanying squeezes on labor, as well as neoliberal pressures to become an entrepreneurial worker. Alongside this vibrant and distinctive empirical contribution, Taylor shows just how far these industries still must improve when it comes to gender equality—a much-needed contribution to research on cultural industries. Still, Taylor's analysis may leave readers scratching their heads as to how Working Musicians provides novel insight into work and creativity under neoliberal capitalism.