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Reading: What is Popular Culture Raymond Williams - He calls culture “one of the two or three most complicated words in the english language” - William suggests three broad definitions 1. Culture can be used to refer to a “general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development” 2. Might be to suggest “a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group” 3. Refer to “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity Williams definition of “Popular” - Well liked by many people - Inferior kinds of work - Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people - Culture actually made by the people themselves Pavarotti - His music is said to be good because it is popular - E.g it was a popular performance - The music is also said to be bad for the very same reason of being popular Popular culture - One definition is that its a commercial culture - It's a manipulative Reading: How Music Works By David Bryne The first sound recording was made in 1878 From generation to generation music didnt get more compositionally sophisticated but it did get textually more complex The first edison cylinder recorders were not reliable - You only get one copy from one recorder and mass producing these recorders was an insane process Summary: How Music Work - The key message in this book: Music is strongly reliant on its context, be it the particular venue where it’s played, the process it’s recorded, or the digital technology applied to create it. But what perpetually remains is music’s significance to us as human beings: it can bring us together and be a self-empowering device. Plus, with modern technology and music business that’s more flexible than ever, there are myriad methods to get

music out into the world. Actionable advice: Empower yourself and improve your brain through music-making. You may not be able to play a proper scale, but it can be remarkably empowering to learn to play a musical instrument. Creating music involves both your mind and body and research shows that consistent active participation in music stimulates the growth of many regions of the brain. So get someone to show you a few chords on a guitar and start jamming. Reading: A User’s Guide CH.2

Lecture: 3 A History Lesson - Emphasis for pop culture can't just be about mass media and commercial products/consumption - Pop Culture is about recreation as much as it's about that other stuff - But wat spaces did people use to relax in earlier pre-industrial times Public Spaces - Commons - A great place to hang out like the mall Fun Before Capitalism (Old times) - Dances - Festivals - Community oriented activities - Took place on common lands - Not many distinctions between urban and rural lesure - Activity was “homemaded” - Soccer and other games played in fields - Blood sport was very common - Cock fighting Community Vs Class Position - The text romanticizes(describe in an idealized or unrealistic fashion/make something seem better or more appealing than it really is) the social relations between classes - Not actually as benevolent as it was made out to be - Social solidarity > Individual pleasure \ The Birth of Capitalism - Cultural spaces were redefined and restructured - Enclosure policies changed what lands could be used, and used for A brief history of enclosure - Marx noted that the enclosure in England and Scotland was the “whole series of thefts, outrages, and popular misery that accompanied the forcible expropriation of the people” So What? - Issue is space and how much space you have

How public space and net neutrality is linked - Our daily human activity nowadays has shifted to use of public internet and space and if it were to be privatized would change our lives drastically Industrial revolution - During 1780-1820, britain and then europe went through a period of huge technological and social change Alienation - It is marx belief that workers have themselves become commoditized, to the point that workers lose their agency in a variety of ways - As marx himself says: “the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object” - What does this actually mean? How does work deprive us of our basic human rights? The assembly line - Assembly lines first comes into use in the latter half of the 19th century: biscuit making, food canning, meatpacking Working Class Life - Separation of work and home life - Birth of “nuclear family” - Expansion of police forces - Regulations for sport and street games - Keeping the unruly masses under control The Culture Industry Thesis - Short Version - Term coined by Adorno and Horkheimer in the early 1940s - Basic definition: Pop Culture is akin to a factory producing standardized goods that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity - Critiques supply-side capitalism and the supposedly inferior products that mass production models tend to create, including mass-produced culture Technology and Culture - McLuhan - the medium is the message: is this really still the case? - How has technology changed the way we relax? - Technologies of production vs technologies of delivery

Music Autobiography : David Byrne - How Music Work

Brynne ^^

Brynne^^

Lecture 4 Outline for the week -

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What is the Culture Industry? - Production - a marxist’s analysis - Means, Mode/Forces, Relations - A brief overview of the culture industry thesis The Culture Industry Thesis and The Frankfurt School Musical Jihad

What is Production? (A Grumpy Marxist Interpretation) - Pop culture is big business - So maybe we oughta to spend a few minutes on what business looks like - Society is constructed from natural and social material relations - This gives Mode - Overarching concept that is the combination of the forces and the relations of production Means - Sometimes called force Means of Production - Are the particular productive forces used by people to reproduce themselves and society - Depending on the time period, this can be basic agriculture, small-scale

craftwork, or industrial machinery For our purposes, we can think about the film and TV industry here in Toronto… it is more of an industrial style of production rather than small-scale Relations of Production - Which group does what, when things are being produced? Who controls what is done with transformed objects and who determines the distribution of any revenue from the sales of these objects - Key questions for each period of time: - Who has ownership of the means of production Mode of Production - It is the combination of both means and relations - We could say (Means + Relation) = mode SO, what does production of culture actually mean? - Economic impacts - 1990s tech boom = increased GDP (Promise of new tech to save us all) - Video games - nearly 17 billion in sales in 2011, 23.5 billion in 2015 - Essentially, popular media and culture drives GDP -

Culture of Production - Increased productivity? What does that even mean? - Processes of production and systems of organization can be seen … (as) assemblages of meaningful practices that construct certain ways to people to conceive of and conduct themselves at work - That means even a lot of the content we see and watch is focused on production workplace as the setting for the show - Mad Men, The Office, 30 Rock, Atlanta - Office Space (1999) The Culture Industry Thesis - Short Version - You have seen this slide once before… - Term coined by Adorno and Horkheimer in the early 1940s (during peak Nazi Germanyy…) - Basic definition: Pop culture is akin(similar) to a factory producing standardized goods that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity (acceptance of what's happened) - Critiques supply-side capitalism and the supposedly inferior products that mass production models tend to create, including mass produced culture The Culture Industry - Enlightenment As Mass Deception (1944) - The approach was designed to make sense of pop culture and the ideology behind the production of mass culture - Adorno’s is often misconstrued as a critique of culture - In fact it's a critique of industry (and the industrial production of cultural goods and artifacts) Adorno is saying we are blind - The critique rests on the idea that capitalism, particularly the late-capitalism that we’re in

now, is using culture to make more money Culture Hegemony and Adorno - Adorno’s concerns are: 1. What an individual is given to consumer 2. The totalizing nature of cultural hegemony, which to adorno is a direct result of “the industrialization of culture” 3. 1+2 = creation of passive subject Adorno on Movies - All films are basically the same in form and structure - Films reproduce our reality - We know what to expect, how to react, even how to predict the way they'll end Unending Sameness - They discuss the idea that everything is essentially the same, overly regulated and controlled, that creativity without risk is not creative at all - Chuck lorre sitcoms come to mind SO What? - The line between culture and industry gets blurry - The experience of culture has been reduced to shopping - Standardization becomes a troublesome theme - Adorno on music could be extended beyond its original internet when he claims “one listens to popular hits without really listening at all”

March of Progress - Progress - Growth - Efficiency - “For every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism”

Lecture 5 Roland Barthes - Mythologies - Belief that mythologies is a part that makes culture natural

Relationship between words and images - Mythologies was written to expose the myths that underpin most of our social values - Mythological meanings generated by juxtaposing images and words in particular texts...