As you might expect from an industry fighting against its impending demise, the music press wastes no time when presented with a rare opportunity to shape popular discourse. And so, with the announcement of Oasis’s reunion came an anxious rush of well-worn opinions about the band’s work and its meaning within British culture. It began with the usual handwringing about the pernicious influence of their apparent musical boorishness on wider society. This was then met with familiar earnest rejoinders about the political possibilities contained not only in the camaraderie that their mass appeal engenders, but implicit within the music itself.
I see no sense in re-litigating the specifics of these tired arguments, because ultimately they are irrelevant to the workings of contemporary pop culture. Instead, they serve to illustrate a way of thinking about art that is untethered from the reality of its production and consumption today.
This is most explicitly expressed in the prevailing belief, common among old-media critics, that aesthetic properties have a bearing on a music’s capacity for asserting a moral framework and codifying its audience’s politics. The ugly inference here, as you might expect from the political arrogance that always seems to emanate from the centrist cultural critic, is that a ‘refined’ aesthetic taste and a progressive personal sensibility are mutually reinforcing. In this formulation, musical taste becomes a means of expressing, identifying and delineating political beliefs.
But this myopic focus on the merits of individual musics neglects to consider the cultural ecosystem they inhabit. It doesn’t account for the music industry: its increasing homogeneity, how little stylistic distinction matters to the political economy of pop music, and how this tempers the influence of individual musical works within wider society today.
So when Simon Price, for instance, claims that ‘Oasis are the most damaging pop-cultural force in recent British history’, it’s largely meaningless because it’s predicated upon their music providing the aesthetic framework for their audience’s taste, which then helps to concretise their political beliefs. But no such process exists. When consumption is hyper-segmented and individualised, yet takes place largely via all-encompassing distribution platforms, no single aesthetic – regardless of the scale of its popularity – can assert a broad influence beyond its own consumer base.
If we think of politics as the competition to assert an influence of one kind over another, music cannot hope to be a site of this struggle if there is no capacity for cross-cultural, pan-public dissemination of ideas and ‘vibes’ within musical works themselves. As a result, industrial musical culture is reduced to a matter of production capacities and consumer choices. The only politics in music is the dominance of the industry over the aesthetic.
Agnès Gayraud sums up everything I could hope to express on this subject in her Dialectic of Pop:
‘If pop was once a kingdom, it is now crumbling. In the early twenty-first century there is no universal King of Pop, only a myriad of little kings and queens ruling over the patchwork countries of a segmented mainstream. The ‘underground’ exists on the same monopolistic platforms as the most prominent artists, the only real meaning of the word being relative weakness in the marketplace.’1
When aesthetic judgements are little more than purchasing decisions, taste becomes a phenomenon of consumption rather than expression. So those critics loudly proclaiming their aesthetic (and so in their eyes also political) superiority are in fact confirming themselves to be part of the very cultural-economic phenomena they wish to be seen as distinct from. In expressing their musical sensibilities, they are merely announcing themselves as having made a consumer choice, just like the lumpen mass of low-brow listenership from whom they desire to be differentiated.
However special and interesting your listening habits are purported to be, you’re likely to be paying the same ~£9.99 to Spotify Ltd as everyone else. It doesn’t matter whether people are listening to a cherished record, ‘Alternative 80s’, ‘RapCaviar’ or ‘Daily Mix 4’, the money all goes into the same pot.
And so, as capital renders all commodities equal, all artworks have an equivalence, and the ethical dimension is erased. Liking or hating Oasis is utterly meaningless in and of itself, in terms of its moral or political consequence.
In an economy in which people are atomised and alienated, communities decimated, and subcultures fractured into such a pointillist blur that they’ve recongealed into a new monopoly-facilitated monoculture, it matters little which particular brand you’ve hitched your aesthetic wagon to.
In a society in which gig venues are disappearing and public space is receding, music loses any capacity to be a collectivising force, and instead leaves little cultural footprint beyond a monetary transaction directly between listener and musical property-owner.
On the streaming platform, from which the UK industry collects the overwhelming majority of its revenue, everything is flattened. Aesthetics, politics, history, mulched into a sublime mass of data fine-tuning your habits and preferences, algorithmically spitting ‘your’ tastes back out to you. Everyone is different, everyone is the same. There is no collectivising capacity in such an ecosystem: instead, we find a proliferation of infinite niches that have little to do with one another except their cohabitation of the same digital serving-plate.
The arguments surrounding Oasis are so stale because pop music culture is no longer a living conversation: not a system of moving parts, of action and reaction, of exchange of ideas and sensorial experiences, but a mass of dead commodities whose only capacity for movement is the flow of financial exchange2. So to see critics oblivious to this inertia – especially when clinging to the idea that aesthetic distinction signifies political persuasion – has been very cringeworthy and a little sad. Pathetic, really, in the true sense of the word.
It’s been strange to lift a discursive rock I’ve not touched in years and discover the same old writers have the same old conversations, deploying the same old tropes, rehearsing the same old anecdotes, as if any of it still matters or means anything. They’re like holdouts who don’t realise the war is over. Or, worse than that: it’s like they’ve spent their entire cultural-critical life fighting a war that has never existed.
Yet, in some odd way, Oasis are the antidote to all this, in that their appreciators – and the band themselves – see little sense in articulating the ‘meaning’ of their work beyond “it sounds good”. And so the most common retort to Price et al can be boiled down to some variation of “get fucked with your bullshit, the music’s good”. And there are a lot of appreciators, especially in the UK. A lot of people into the music, for the music’s sake. A lot of aesthetes, expressing (if not necessarily articulating) the dialectic of aesthetic appreciation enduring despite the limitations placed upon art by its industrialisation, in a manner far more sophisticated than the aloof music critic can hope to match.
We could think of Oasis as the ultimate mass culture band: they stand for nothing more than their own broad appeal. They speak the truth of art and consumption in the age of dead music in a way that manages to transcend its moribundity precisely through its being moribund. Gayraud, again:
‘pop music likes to think against itself. It has a contradictory relationship to its own quest for artistic truth. Maybe because it knows itself to be rooted in what a certain ideal of autonomous art would consider the very conditions of inauthenticity: conditions of industrial consumption and communication. This crucial fact is what makes it sensitive to criticism that denounces it as commercial, bad, or fake. It makes it sensitive to the arguments of what could be called anti-pop – a conception of music and of the experience of music that lies at the opposite extreme from what pop ideally conveys qua popular music. This natural curiosity for that which denigrates or contradicts it is not the result of some kind of masochism, it is structural: it functions as the necessary negativity upon which pop sharpens its own aesthetic norms.’3
Oasis’ appeal resides in these contradictions. Revels in them, even. They offer a populism for populism’s sake: their broad-stroke, common-appeal aesthetic is made possible only via these ‘conditions of industrial consumption and communication’. In so doing, they offer their fans the simple pleasure of enjoying something with others – a collectivity that is now hard to come by in any facet of society. As Alex Niven notes,
’it is surely not too much of a stretch to say that, as well as enjoying the power of the melodies themselves, one of the things the audience at these gigs will be feeling is a peculiar form of togetherness and collective hopefulness that is difficult to find in British culture outside rare, nation-transforming, once-in-a-generation examples like Oasis.’
The particularity of the aesthetic forms around which these people coalesce is largely irrelevant – what’s important is mutual intelligibility. So if there is a so-called crudeness, simplicity or lowest-common-denominator appeal to this music, its cultural standing as pop music is not limited by these traits, but rather is elevated by them, or at least persists in spite of them: reassembled into an aesthetic lingua franca for a large number of people. This is mass culture. This is what pop music is.
Perhaps, though, we should be thankful for the role that the snobbish music critic performs: it is their very disavowal of this essential property of pop music that in turn generates the opportunity for it to be expressed and proved, as an ‘art whose hopes of aesthetic transcendence are perpetually entangled in the reified world.’4 So thanks, I guess.
1 Agnès Gayraud, Dialectic of Pop, p12.
2 cf Gayraud, summarising Adorno: ‘[mass art] does not in fact come from the masses…but from an industry, an autonomous system for the rationalised production of cultural commodities’ (Dialectic of Pop, p. 52)
3 Dialectic of Pop, p18.
4 Dialectic of Pop, p27.
(This post [and this blog] is also available to read on Substack)
Disposable Everything 