Andy Bennett's Popular Music Analysis

Andy Bennett’s book presents a refreshing perspective to the sociology field as the topic had been previously lacking and outdated. By proposing significant amounts of original research Bennett’s two-part analytical text has turned into a book from a doctoral thesis; seeking to ascertain how popular music is taken as a cultural resource. The wisely connected information slips within the more broad international literature on youth styles, local spaces and popular music. Bennett successfully illustrates graphically how styles of music and their attendant stylistic innovations are assumed. As a lecturer on Sociology, Bennett’s work is unsurprisingly directed at undergraduate and postgraduate students in the sociology field. His references are

beyond nine pages and include a detailed index, which leads to the assumption of a thorough and well-organised text. Bennett sets out to bring a new perspective to some of the more recent works on youth culture and popular music by examining the way in which young people live through the music and how it can differ depending on the environment.

Popular Music and Youth Culture has distinctive conceptions of the ways in which the social world is experienced and understood.

Bennett attempts to challenge the idea that popular music establishes a cultural text that has a connotation autonomous of its audience. Continually asserting that people are more than a cultural impeccant who unreceptively devour the product of the music industry; arguing that they are in fact instinctive instruments that construe and apply popular music in a means that are precarious and imaginative. Bennett proceeds to illuminate this argument by conducting several ethnographic studies in Newcastle upon Tyne. By citing a diverse number of musical forms such as bhangra, hip hop and rock, Bennett attempts to place an etic reading on their existing dance culture. By exposing those engaged in Newcastle’s dance scene he has managed to uncover the conformist hierarchies of taste by drawing on the assorted musical forms. This led to Bennett’s first limitation, by placing an age limitation on his subjects and ‘assuming’ that the local dance culture is only appealing to the younger generation and suggesting that the “underground ethos of the local dance culture us read as a form of resistance to those who exercise conventional political and commercial power in the

city.”

As the global music business is becoming more oligopolistic in nature day by day, it has brought with it many detrimental consequences. Homogeneity has become the unconscious trend, carefully guided by the media corporations that control the music business. Bennett creates an exceedingly difficult situation by choosing to turn a blind eye on the poverty of conventional music in Newcastle. Instead deciding to use it as a framework to emphasize the innovation and dynamism of particular musical genres that subsist. To determine why specific cultures engage in contemporary popular music a truly persuasive explanation of what pop means to people is in need of adequate examination. In Popular Music and Youth Culture, however, it becomes blatant that Bennett has tried to privilege one source (innovative) over the other (orthodox). Through the lack of equality between the sources, Bennett’s gripping book might at best be studied only as a competent achievement.

The exemplification Bennett places on how people relate, critically undermine and understand popular music is at best profoundly dubious and a significant limitation on his work.

Bennett accurately states that people do not embrace music that the global culture industries throw around in the hopes of creating a connection. People have and continue to think judiciously about popular music and the importance it evokes. It needs to be known that many opinions and moods that social beings have about popular music take place within controlled or persuasive environments. The influence that these environments hold allows people to restrict their cultural predilections and practices, or to create their own relationship to the musical texts. Bennett’s ignorance toward the structural context within which a person’s relationship with music evolves is essential to form a sufficient judgment of musical practice. The restriction on Bennett’s scope of study is directly related to his inability to study more than a minority in the European Culture. By diversifying his study like he has claimed to, would allow copious more readers to be engaged with his

work.

Popular Music and Youth Culture represents a fine achievement for Bennett, and undoubtedly could serve as a valuable reference to a wide audience; however, there are several critical imperfections with his text. The title itself does not lead itself to a reading on music consumption. His choice of urban European countries makes this book incomprehensible to many audiences, from different countries. Bennett’s approach begins to disperse as the attention and scrutiny faces the model of cultural practice and consumption he endeavors to develop. The term social actor’s is regularly utilised by Bennett, this term portrays people as reflexive agents who participate knowledgeably and artistically with the flow of cultural meaning objectified in a series of musical texts. It is assumed that in contemporary society people have forgotten the former restraints that hierarchies of societal status and cultural taste placed. Bennett naively believed this helped in order to construct more fluid modes of collectivity and embrace a wider range of musical styles. The sociological thinking behind this assumption places Bennett in an almost post-modernist state of mind. There is no doubt that Bennett has strived to defend his thesis, whether he has managed this truthfully with a whole respect to the sociologically field is undetermined. Music consumption managed to steal Bennett’s attention away from the more construing topics of music’s cultural significance.