The Power of Pop
Christopher Partridge, The Lyre of Orpheus: Popular Music, The Sacred and The Profane
Oxford University Press, 368pp, £16.99, ISBN 9780199751402
reviewed by Eugene Brennan
Despite – or perhaps because of – the ubiquity of online cultural studies commentary, popular music’s place in contemporary culture seems to be particularly susceptible to being fetishised as a space of purity, not to be contaminated by intellectual inquiry. The popular success of Slavoj Zizek’s documentaries comprising Lacanian demystifications of Hollywood films, for example, didn’t seem to meet with defensive reactions along the lines of ‘It’s just about the movies, man.’ While there are many factors in play in the frequently anti-intellectual sanctifying of pop, the immediacy, visceral impact and even potential for collective delirium certainly seem to give it a more privileged, and hence sacred, place in modern culture. The Lyre of Orpheus offers an engaging and enjoyable account of the various manifestations of 'the sacred' in popular music. However, Christopher Partridge’s sometimes overly sentimental, idealised treatment of the sacredness of pop music – of its inherent purity – is highly problematic.
In a reminder of the religious right’s failed attempts to distance the sacred and profane in popular culture, the book also offers us a useful warning against secular culture’s parallel fetishising of the purity of such experiences of pop, a warning against attempting to insulate pop from the everyday, to make music a protective cocoon against the profane. A renegade Durheimian conception of the sacred, regularly drawn on throughout this book, serves as a useful reminder that there’s no inside that’s not already contaminated by the outside, and that pop, however joyous it may be, does not have magical powers of resistance to, and insulation from, politics, history and everyday life. Thinking of popular music as sacred also requires a consciousness of the fact that any construction of the sacred is unstable and closer to the profane than we might sometimes think.
Partridge’s definition of the sacred comprises experiences which are ‘set apart’ from everyday life in some absolute sense. However sacred forms are ‘historically contingent expressions of particular cultures, the products of particular histories and contexts, rather than being ontologically fixed.’ While exploring pop as sacred, Partridge is careful then to remind us that its ‘apartness’ from the everyday is always tenuous, that ‘Music’s meanings are inseparable from the social and cultural situations and circumstances in which they arise.’
Popular music’s capacity to engender ‘communitas’ and create affective spaces where new meanings can be constructed is one of the guiding concerns of this book. It is strongly influenced by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in its approach and often exhibits both the strengths and occasional weaknesses of that tradition. There is sensitivity to popular music’s subversive potentials throughout, alongside strong rejoinders to the elitism or fatalism which can seep into academic perspectives on popular music: the history of the music industry, as Partridge rightly argues ‘has not been one of unalloyed monopoly’ from EMI’s travails with The Sex Pistols to Bill Drummond and The KLF’s efforts to subvert the industry.
However, a dogmatically poptimist perspective can come close to endowing the latest consumer trends or cultural changes with an unwarranted ‘subversive’ status. At one point, for example, Partridge argues that we are ‘witnessing, through the development of mobile technologies, a mobilization of the social and with it the subversive potential of the carnival.’ There is no pause to consider the various repressions of the social, or the endless circulation of drives at the expense of sustained political desire, fuelling contemporary digital capitalism.
Similarly, in an otherwise excellent discussion of transgression, he asserts that ‘to cross a boundary is to weaken it.’ This emphasis on the power of transgression is unusually optimistic, especially given that he references both Bataille and Foucault throughout, both of whom insisted on transgression’s strengthening of, and completion of the law. Crossing a boundary can often be an affirmation of and implicit submission to it as well. And again the same problem guides one of the main arguments of the book: it is unusual that the accurate insistence on the relational, anti-essentialist reading of constructions of the sacred (and hence transgression) is followed by an insistence on popular music as fundamentally transgressive. Generally a poptimist myself, it nevertheless feels as if unrealistic and sometimes critically unquestioning claims are being made on popular music’s power.
Popular music is alternately referred to throughout as sacred, profane and transgressive. This is not due to an inconsistency on the writer’s part but highlights the precariousness and malleability of the concepts. Chapter three, on transgression, provides some of the strongest analysis in this respect. A clarification of the definition of the sacred and an excellent reading of industrial music is theoretically supported by the work of The College of Sociology, a neo-Durkheimian research group distantly related to the Surrealists. Based around Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois and others in 1930s Paris, the group’s main concern was the study of the sacred in contemporary life.
Bataille took up sociologist Robert Hertz’s distinction between two poles of the sacred, the left hand and right hand, the former being associated with impurity and repulsion, the latter with purity and attraction. The predominance of the ‘pure pole’ of the sacred in modern life represses the necessity of the ‘impure’ according to Bataille. Even the basis of Christianity is the passage from left to right, the submission of Jesus’s body to torture and defilement in crucifixion before being seated at the ‘right-hand’ of the Father.
While many in the French school of sociology equated the left-hand sacred with the profane, for Bataille and others at the College it was an essential experience of sacred horror repressed in the modern world. The deconstruction of the binary between the sacred and the profane then clarifies the conflation of certain moments in pop music history between these terms. Transgression can then be understood as not necessarily a blanket profanation, a denial or utter rejection of the sacred, but as a contestation of what is sacred. For Bataille, transgression was not a profanation but a route to the sacred. One of Industrial music’s most important figures, Genesis P.Orridge is exemplary here. From the famously outrageous performance art of COUM Transmissions to Throbbing Gristle’s live shows entailing ‘lots of blood, guts and sex’, Orridge succinctly describes his life’s work as ‘exposing the pus-filled underbelly of the established social status quo.’ Rather than a profanation however Partridge stresses Orridge’s endeavours as ‘a consciously explicit attempt to rediscover the sacred.’ Furthermore Simon Ford has usefully contrasted TG with Kraftwerk’s embrace of the correlation between electronic music, technology and dehumanisation. TG, in contrast, wanted to make electronic music that retained a human element. Their view of modernity was much more ambivalent, acknowledging the threat of technology as well as the excitement. Partridge is right then to emphasise the pertinence of the sacred in their work, especially given that Bataille and Foucault’s investigations into transgression were broadly concerned with the loss of the sacred in modern industrial societies.
Problems emerged in industrial music when excess became the only guiding factor. When all boundaries are removed the moment of transgression is made impotent. A state of transgression is a contradiction in terms. Orridge, as well as Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire, thus expressed concerns at the likes of Whitehouse and SPK who seemed to wallow in degradation, raising important questions about the nature of transgression, as Partridge explains:
Beyond the problems of transgression dealt with here in the strongest chapter, there is a wide range of music explored from Black Metal to chart pop in chapters focused on romanticism, religion and emotion. The breadth of music competently explored is perhaps one reason for the sometimes limited depth of analysis. The discussion of dub, for example, comes to a climax in a discussion about the power of its use of bass which, Partridge says, ‘communicates the hope of redemption from a dread situation. Bass will shake the walls of Babylon, shake the profane structures of an unrighteous society … Bass is subversive.’
He writes about the ‘redemption’ from dread, but what about the libidinisation of dread found so often in dub? Partridge seems to present dub in quite humanist terms but does not explore its place within an anti-humanist continuum of afrofuturism exemplified by the title of Mark Sinker’s landmark 1992 essay on the subject, ‘Loving the Alien’. From this perspective, alienation, oppression and dread are there to be weaponised, the starting point for a cultural aesthetic that rejects narratives based on redemption or reintegration into the human. Cultural critic Kodwo Eshun has written extensively about this and indeed Partridge quotes Eshun’s description of Lee Scratch Perry’s Return of the Super Ape as ‘dub that disturbs the atmosphere until it yields poltergeists … Perry crosses into its ghost dimension, walks through the temporal maze of aural architecture.’ But this perspective isn’t expanded upon or critically engaged with. While Eshun’s writing has raised its own set of problems (the irony of excess humanist jouissance experienced precisely at the rejection of the human, for example), the implications of such anti-humanist conceptions of dub and afrofuturism seem essential for this examination of popular music and the sacred. At moments like this the otherwise clear and competent narration has the feel of an introductory overview rather than a more satisfying critical engagement.
One of Patridge’s main arguments throughout the book is that popular music is fundamentally transgressive. At various moments throughout postwar cultural history popular music has occupied an undoubtedly transgressive space, but the claim that it is fundamentally so is problematic. Partridge writes: ‘Often composed at the liminal edges of hegemonic culture, on the rejected periphery, its very existence, from folk to jazz to dubstep, has always constituted a threat to the sacred center.‘ Part of this perspective is informed by society’s fethishisation of youth as a space of purity and popular music’s traditional role as the corruptor. But that is not an established hegemonic position anymore and hasn’t necessarily been for a long time. Popular music can still be transgressive of course but it can’t be ‘fundamentally’ so in an era when the erosion of distinct youth sub-cultures goes hand-in-hand with the blanket normalisation of retro. It is unusual to insist on popular music’s necessarily counter-hegemonic position without addressing, for example, the disturbing trend of parents and children liking the same music: who cares if it’s the White Stripes or Led Zeppelin on the radio – it all sounds the same.
The debates about retro have been going on for a long time and there is a strong counter-critique to retro-saturated pessimism which suggests that such a perspective is blinkered by its very specific idea of the future. Often wedded to a canon of post-war British modernism, perhaps (retro-)futurists are sometimes less discerning of the emergence of new unanticipated futures within music and culture.
Whatever your position on these debates, they seem to be concerned with the specificity of the present moment within a wider historical consciousness. Although he rightly emphasises the importance of historical relationality in his account of transgression, Partridge does not always apply that historical perspective enough to sustain his argument that popular music is fundamentally transgressive. Popular music will surely always retain the potential, but in an era when counter-culture has morphed into cyber-culture and when popular music is so subsumed within the mainstream, claims to its inherently transgressive status would require a more rigorous and convincing engagement with these issues.
In a reminder of the religious right’s failed attempts to distance the sacred and profane in popular culture, the book also offers us a useful warning against secular culture’s parallel fetishising of the purity of such experiences of pop, a warning against attempting to insulate pop from the everyday, to make music a protective cocoon against the profane. A renegade Durheimian conception of the sacred, regularly drawn on throughout this book, serves as a useful reminder that there’s no inside that’s not already contaminated by the outside, and that pop, however joyous it may be, does not have magical powers of resistance to, and insulation from, politics, history and everyday life. Thinking of popular music as sacred also requires a consciousness of the fact that any construction of the sacred is unstable and closer to the profane than we might sometimes think.
Partridge’s definition of the sacred comprises experiences which are ‘set apart’ from everyday life in some absolute sense. However sacred forms are ‘historically contingent expressions of particular cultures, the products of particular histories and contexts, rather than being ontologically fixed.’ While exploring pop as sacred, Partridge is careful then to remind us that its ‘apartness’ from the everyday is always tenuous, that ‘Music’s meanings are inseparable from the social and cultural situations and circumstances in which they arise.’
Popular music’s capacity to engender ‘communitas’ and create affective spaces where new meanings can be constructed is one of the guiding concerns of this book. It is strongly influenced by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in its approach and often exhibits both the strengths and occasional weaknesses of that tradition. There is sensitivity to popular music’s subversive potentials throughout, alongside strong rejoinders to the elitism or fatalism which can seep into academic perspectives on popular music: the history of the music industry, as Partridge rightly argues ‘has not been one of unalloyed monopoly’ from EMI’s travails with The Sex Pistols to Bill Drummond and The KLF’s efforts to subvert the industry.
However, a dogmatically poptimist perspective can come close to endowing the latest consumer trends or cultural changes with an unwarranted ‘subversive’ status. At one point, for example, Partridge argues that we are ‘witnessing, through the development of mobile technologies, a mobilization of the social and with it the subversive potential of the carnival.’ There is no pause to consider the various repressions of the social, or the endless circulation of drives at the expense of sustained political desire, fuelling contemporary digital capitalism.
Similarly, in an otherwise excellent discussion of transgression, he asserts that ‘to cross a boundary is to weaken it.’ This emphasis on the power of transgression is unusually optimistic, especially given that he references both Bataille and Foucault throughout, both of whom insisted on transgression’s strengthening of, and completion of the law. Crossing a boundary can often be an affirmation of and implicit submission to it as well. And again the same problem guides one of the main arguments of the book: it is unusual that the accurate insistence on the relational, anti-essentialist reading of constructions of the sacred (and hence transgression) is followed by an insistence on popular music as fundamentally transgressive. Generally a poptimist myself, it nevertheless feels as if unrealistic and sometimes critically unquestioning claims are being made on popular music’s power.
Popular music is alternately referred to throughout as sacred, profane and transgressive. This is not due to an inconsistency on the writer’s part but highlights the precariousness and malleability of the concepts. Chapter three, on transgression, provides some of the strongest analysis in this respect. A clarification of the definition of the sacred and an excellent reading of industrial music is theoretically supported by the work of The College of Sociology, a neo-Durkheimian research group distantly related to the Surrealists. Based around Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois and others in 1930s Paris, the group’s main concern was the study of the sacred in contemporary life.
Bataille took up sociologist Robert Hertz’s distinction between two poles of the sacred, the left hand and right hand, the former being associated with impurity and repulsion, the latter with purity and attraction. The predominance of the ‘pure pole’ of the sacred in modern life represses the necessity of the ‘impure’ according to Bataille. Even the basis of Christianity is the passage from left to right, the submission of Jesus’s body to torture and defilement in crucifixion before being seated at the ‘right-hand’ of the Father.
While many in the French school of sociology equated the left-hand sacred with the profane, for Bataille and others at the College it was an essential experience of sacred horror repressed in the modern world. The deconstruction of the binary between the sacred and the profane then clarifies the conflation of certain moments in pop music history between these terms. Transgression can then be understood as not necessarily a blanket profanation, a denial or utter rejection of the sacred, but as a contestation of what is sacred. For Bataille, transgression was not a profanation but a route to the sacred. One of Industrial music’s most important figures, Genesis P.Orridge is exemplary here. From the famously outrageous performance art of COUM Transmissions to Throbbing Gristle’s live shows entailing ‘lots of blood, guts and sex’, Orridge succinctly describes his life’s work as ‘exposing the pus-filled underbelly of the established social status quo.’ Rather than a profanation however Partridge stresses Orridge’s endeavours as ‘a consciously explicit attempt to rediscover the sacred.’ Furthermore Simon Ford has usefully contrasted TG with Kraftwerk’s embrace of the correlation between electronic music, technology and dehumanisation. TG, in contrast, wanted to make electronic music that retained a human element. Their view of modernity was much more ambivalent, acknowledging the threat of technology as well as the excitement. Partridge is right then to emphasise the pertinence of the sacred in their work, especially given that Bataille and Foucault’s investigations into transgression were broadly concerned with the loss of the sacred in modern industrial societies.
Problems emerged in industrial music when excess became the only guiding factor. When all boundaries are removed the moment of transgression is made impotent. A state of transgression is a contradiction in terms. Orridge, as well as Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire, thus expressed concerns at the likes of Whitehouse and SPK who seemed to wallow in degradation, raising important questions about the nature of transgression, as Partridge explains:
Hence the problem for 1980s music is that it appeared to want to make the brutal discourses of transgression the norm. In so doing, it became mired in profane banality. Again, this, I suspect, is why P-Orridge became concerned … As with Bataille, he wanted to keep taboos in focus, in order to transgress them, rather than removing them altogether…
Beyond the problems of transgression dealt with here in the strongest chapter, there is a wide range of music explored from Black Metal to chart pop in chapters focused on romanticism, religion and emotion. The breadth of music competently explored is perhaps one reason for the sometimes limited depth of analysis. The discussion of dub, for example, comes to a climax in a discussion about the power of its use of bass which, Partridge says, ‘communicates the hope of redemption from a dread situation. Bass will shake the walls of Babylon, shake the profane structures of an unrighteous society … Bass is subversive.’
He writes about the ‘redemption’ from dread, but what about the libidinisation of dread found so often in dub? Partridge seems to present dub in quite humanist terms but does not explore its place within an anti-humanist continuum of afrofuturism exemplified by the title of Mark Sinker’s landmark 1992 essay on the subject, ‘Loving the Alien’. From this perspective, alienation, oppression and dread are there to be weaponised, the starting point for a cultural aesthetic that rejects narratives based on redemption or reintegration into the human. Cultural critic Kodwo Eshun has written extensively about this and indeed Partridge quotes Eshun’s description of Lee Scratch Perry’s Return of the Super Ape as ‘dub that disturbs the atmosphere until it yields poltergeists … Perry crosses into its ghost dimension, walks through the temporal maze of aural architecture.’ But this perspective isn’t expanded upon or critically engaged with. While Eshun’s writing has raised its own set of problems (the irony of excess humanist jouissance experienced precisely at the rejection of the human, for example), the implications of such anti-humanist conceptions of dub and afrofuturism seem essential for this examination of popular music and the sacred. At moments like this the otherwise clear and competent narration has the feel of an introductory overview rather than a more satisfying critical engagement.
One of Patridge’s main arguments throughout the book is that popular music is fundamentally transgressive. At various moments throughout postwar cultural history popular music has occupied an undoubtedly transgressive space, but the claim that it is fundamentally so is problematic. Partridge writes: ‘Often composed at the liminal edges of hegemonic culture, on the rejected periphery, its very existence, from folk to jazz to dubstep, has always constituted a threat to the sacred center.‘ Part of this perspective is informed by society’s fethishisation of youth as a space of purity and popular music’s traditional role as the corruptor. But that is not an established hegemonic position anymore and hasn’t necessarily been for a long time. Popular music can still be transgressive of course but it can’t be ‘fundamentally’ so in an era when the erosion of distinct youth sub-cultures goes hand-in-hand with the blanket normalisation of retro. It is unusual to insist on popular music’s necessarily counter-hegemonic position without addressing, for example, the disturbing trend of parents and children liking the same music: who cares if it’s the White Stripes or Led Zeppelin on the radio – it all sounds the same.
The debates about retro have been going on for a long time and there is a strong counter-critique to retro-saturated pessimism which suggests that such a perspective is blinkered by its very specific idea of the future. Often wedded to a canon of post-war British modernism, perhaps (retro-)futurists are sometimes less discerning of the emergence of new unanticipated futures within music and culture.
Whatever your position on these debates, they seem to be concerned with the specificity of the present moment within a wider historical consciousness. Although he rightly emphasises the importance of historical relationality in his account of transgression, Partridge does not always apply that historical perspective enough to sustain his argument that popular music is fundamentally transgressive. Popular music will surely always retain the potential, but in an era when counter-culture has morphed into cyber-culture and when popular music is so subsumed within the mainstream, claims to its inherently transgressive status would require a more rigorous and convincing engagement with these issues.