Markets, Marxists, and Popular Taste Fascism
If a punk record was played in the forest and no one heard it …
This entry is something of an aside to the last couple of entries …
There’s always been this argument that it’s impossible to truly gauge popular taste in music because there has never been an even playing field. If, in the mid-to-late-’70s, a Pere Ubu track was never played on the radio, how do we know whether anyone would have really preferred Lynyrd Skynyrd? We might assume that most people would prefer Lynyrd Skynyrd, but at the same time, there may be a group of people who would truly prefer Pere Ubu if they had a chance to hear the group.
The flip side of this is that popularity in no way guarantees that something is good or bad. Most critics seem to think that Led Zeppelin’s Presence(1976) and Pink Floyd’s Animals (1977) were solid albums, and while neither album sold as much as IV (1971) or Dark Side of the Moon (1973), they sold well enough (and much better than anything by Pere Ubu). The point is, big name bands at major labels have made good music.
The problem, it seems to me, is not that there would be a “popular,” or that people would prefer one thing to another, but that the popular-in being pushed by the labels with the most money and the radio stations dependent on advertising-becomes fascist in crowding out other forms of expression. If record bins and FM formats are crowded with Boston (1976), Double Vision (1978), and Rumors (1977), there’s no room for Meet the Residents (1974). If we are not familiar with something, we don’t usually go looking for it. And even if we know something exists, it may be difficult to track down.
