This summer, I taught MUSC 1800: Popular Music for the 25th time since coming to Lakeland. It is not a course that I ever trained to teach, or ever envisioned myself teaching before I accepted my current job. Once I finished graduate school, I assumed that I would be teaching music theory, which I taught my first semester at Lakeland, and, for various reasons, have not taught since.
So it has been an interesting journey teaching the history of Popular Music, which has become the bread and butter of my work life. I like to think that I’ve become fairly good at it and developed some insight into the topic. Here’s an idea that occurred to me this week: The shape of popular music in the 20th century is indicative of a very different kind of middle class that developed during that period, in contract to what I will call the bourgeoisie of earlier eras.
A hallmark of middle class or bourgeois culture is that it tends to strive to emulate the culture of the wealthy: thus, first names that begin by being applied to upper class babies filter their way to the middle class, and then to the lower class; upper class estates are mimicked in suburban lawns. One need only listen to the lyrics to rappers to realize how pervasive this impulse still is: Rolex watches, Mercedes Benz cars, expensive liquor, and designer clothes all feature prominently. The middle class may shop at Target and Wal-Mart, but they (and increasingly the lower class) aspire to the trappings of wealth and the status symbols that, at least in the middle class mind, suggest it.
In music, this was also the case. As the bourgeoisie expanded in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, it tended to lay aside the folk music of the lower classes in favor of the “cultivated” music of the upper class–what we today call “classical” music, which for centuries had been the music that kings and princes listened to while they ate dinner. Public performances of instrumental music and opera became more common as a middle class began to be able to afford the price of admission. The “true” art form of opera was even adapted for the working classes as singspiel and zarzuela, often with tickets available at cut-rate prices, but the story was always the same–middle and lower class audiences striving to engage in the culture enjoyed by the wealthy. In middle-class homes, the piano and its musically-literate culture became an important status symbol, and every family aspired to own a piano, and middle-class daughters were trained in its use. Alongside social dance, home music-making using the piano and printed sheet music (again, a more mass-produced version of the manuscripts that circulated among aristocrats) became a key part of the middle-class social life.
Folk music, the music of the lower classes, was, in part, left behind. Composers like Haydn and Beethoven refer to folk music, and Beethoven even paid his bills by arranging folk music for publication (a lot of it–it seems to have been quite lucrative for the publishers), but by Beethoven’s intervention, it becomes very different from actual folk music. Beethoven considered himself an equal with the aristocrats with whom he associated, even if they didn’t, and didn’t understand why he couldn’t marry into that world. After Beethoven’s death, he became legendary, and middle-class pianists across the continent and in America began to pound through the Moonlight Sonata, which acquired its nickname around this time as it became the ultimate expression of bourgeois musical aspirations.
Yes, there was also the nascent sheet music industry during the 19th century. But Stephen Foster had studied music with a German composer, and created music that he thought of as parlor music–meant to be performed in the home as part of courting rituals or simply for the entertainment of the middle-class family. His sentimental songs are very much in the style of European song of the same era, even if some of his more famous–and infamous–songs refer to blackface minstrelsy. In Europe, Brahms and Chopin were indeed staples of the middle-class repertoire, and Brahms became quite wealthy, starting with the sales of his sheet music (which proceeds he invested shrewdly and successfully–an upper-class behavior, enabling him to live a wealthy lifestyle).
This is a very different landscape from the one which emerges in American music of the 20th century. Every major movement in American popular music, from minstrelsy, through ragtime, jazz, blues, country music, rock’n’roll, and hip-hop, has emerged from the working class, and often from the most disadvantaged and dispossessed cultures in society. Minstrelsy apes mid-19th-century plantation culture and the music of slaves. Ragtime was developed by composer-pianists playing in saloons and brothels. Blues and country music have their roots in the rural South, and rock has its roots in the blues and country that remained behind when those styles moved to the city. Hip-hop began in the ghetto among imigrants and teenaged street-gangs, expanding on a practice, toasting that was ubiquitous in Jamaican prisons. Nearly all American popular music, beloved of the middle class, has its origins in music practiced by people who are poor, dispossessed, disenfranchised, and robbed of their liberty.
Even while the rest of middle-class culture looked aspirationally to the wealthy for cues through much of the century, music was drawn from lower-class models. Why? And are the instances in other realms of consumer culture where working-class and poor models have come to define the status symbols of the middle-class?
A theory: the American middle class is fundamentally different from the various forms of bourgeoisie that preceded it. The middle class and its values are a 20th-century creation, the result of industrialization, war, and the quasi-socialist state (never called such by its governing class) that developed during this time. The enormous consumer culture only follows where the trail of spending leads it, at least in the early 20th-century. The government played a crucial role in the creation of the middle class and its culture, through its efforts to assist in electrification, create guaranteed old-age pensions, allow organized labor to flourish, subsidize industry and the automobile culture, encourage middle-class home ownership, and provide public education to all students. The Depression, and, especially, the two World Wars, especially, the Second, led to the creation of America’s mass middle class. It is fairly homogeneous, as so many families were relocated during the 30s and 40s. It was, for many years, well-educated by historical standards, but originally not college-educated. The rapid modernization of America meant that the first generation of the mass middle class moved directly there, in many cases, from abject poverty; “born in a barn, died in a skyscraper.” And this is the fundamental difference that accounts for the lower-class origins of American popular music.
Imagine a first-generation suburbanite, in Levittown, or elsewhere, in 1950. Born around 1915, possibly in a rural setting, possibly to immigrants in a large city. He grew up with lower-class music, and because of the availability of the phonograph, could access recorded music as long as he can remember. While he may tolerate “mainstream” popular music, what he yearns for is music that reminds him of his youth, as will all of us. So maybe he listens on the radio to the Grand Ol’ Opry, or purchases country and western records. Maybe he developed a taste for other kinds of music during his military service, listening to V-discs with his comrades, or maybe he grew up listening to ethnic music, and those same records introduced him to a wider musical world. At any rate, the music that is valued in his home, and that his kids grow up hearing, is music with its roots in the lower class, among the poor. He may have a piano–after all, next to the television set and the automobile, it’s still a hallmark of the middle-class lifestyle–but it really is only played when the kids practice for their weekly lessons, or on rare special occasions, and while he knows he should care about Beethoven and Mozart, they don’t pull on his heartstrings the way Hank Williams or Louis Jordan do.
This man’s children, the Baby Boomers, will proclaim working-class music to be an art form, to be granted the same status and respect as the music of the upper classes. It happens through the culture industry and consumer culture, which begins with attempts to prioritize classical music and high culture, but very quickly moves to giving the mass middle-class what it wants. Toscanini steps aside for Elvis Presley and Mitch Miller and Lawrence Welk. Classical music for decades lends prestige to a record label, but even that dwindles by the end of the 20th century as working-class music becomes the singular musical expression of American culture. This is the music that is exported en masse to the rest of the world, and which the rest of the world will eventually echo back–British invasion, afro-pop, “world music,” J-Pop, K-Pop, narcocorridas, and all the rest.
The second generation of suburbanites–the Baby Boomers–make working-class music (and to an extent, dress) the core of their mass middle class, and from this point forward, Americans cease to have a need for the music of the elite, and increasingly, the elite are steeped in that music as well. The irony is that, having so recently clawed its way out of poverty, the middle class often looks to the poor for a sense of authenticity, and holds a (usually false) nostalgia for “the good old days.” For the children and grandchildren of the Baby Boomers, who know only the middle-class culture, there is no reason to look to the music of elites. They may study it for a time (in its often-bastardized forms in high school marching band or show choir), yearning every second for “their” music and often secretly disappointed that their musical education isn’t helping them learn to play the music they truly love. For a few, the bug for “classical” music bites, and with parental support, they carry forward the traditions of elite music-making, but the vast majority put down their instruments after graduation and immerse themselves in the mass middle-class culture, where opera is Il Divo, and classical music is watching an orchestra accompany an old blockbuster film.
This fundamental difference in origin stories between the old bourgeoisie and the modern middle class, would seem to account for the very different origins of the music preferred by those groups. Any thoughts?
