Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-94d59 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T13:16:19.125Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Listening to ‘difficult albums’: specialist music fans and the popular avant-garde

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2012

Chris Atton*
Affiliation:
School of Arts and Creative Industries, Edinburgh Napier University, Merchiston Campus, Edinburgh EH10 5DT, UK E-mail: c.atton@napier.ac.uk

Abstract

Difficulty is most often associated, not with popular music, but with the avant-garde. How do popular music listeners listen to albums that present compositional, performance or conceptual elements from the avant-garde? This paper explores where difficulty lies for listeners when they listen to, situate and evaluate albums that sit on the intersection between the popular and the avant-garde. The paper focuses on the online collaborative discourse of readers of a British music magazine (The Word), to explore how, while ‘difficult albums’ might be considered sui generis and dislocated from the norms of popular music, the aesthetic discourse of The Word's readers shows that to engage with difficult albums is to explore how they are able to be connected with a range of musical histories and practices, as well as to multiple personal experiences of popular music.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adorno, T.W. 1938/1991. ‘On the fetish-character in music and the regression of listening’, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. Bernstein, J.M. (London, Routledge), pp. 2652Google Scholar
Bailey, D. 1980. Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (Ashbourne, Moorland)Google Scholar
Barnes, M. 2000. Captain Beefheart (London, Quartet)Google Scholar
Brassier, R. 2009. ‘Genre is obsolete’, in Noise and Capitalism, ed. Mattin and Iles, A. (Donostia-San Sebastián, Arteleku Audiolab), pp. 6171Google Scholar
Bull, M. 2007. Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience (London, Routledge)Google Scholar
Clarke, E.F. 2005. Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (Oxford, Oxford University Press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Couldry, N. 1995. Turning the Musical Table: Improvisation in Britain 1965–1990, Special Issue of Rubberneck magazine, 19 (Basingstoke, Rubberneck)Google Scholar
Demers, J. 2010. Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford, Oxford University Press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeNora, T. 2000. Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eisenberg, E. 1988. The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa (London, Pan)Google Scholar
Fabbri, F. 1981. ‘A theory of musical genres: two applications’, in Popular Music Perspectives, ed. Horn, D. and Tagg, P. (Goteborg and Exeter, International Association for the Study of Popular Music), pp. 5181Google Scholar
Foster, H. 1996. The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press)Google Scholar
Frith, S. 1996. Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music (Oxford, Oxford University Press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gendron, B. 2002. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-garde (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gracyk, T. 2007. Listening to Popular Music: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hatten, R.S. 1994. Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington, Indiana University Press)Google Scholar
Hesmondhalgh, D. 2007. ‘Audiences and everyday aesthetics: talking about good and bad music’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10, pp. 507–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jauss, H.R. 1982. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Bahti, T. (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press)Google Scholar
Lynskey, D. 2010. ‘The agony and the ecstasy’, The Word, November, pp. 72–4Google Scholar
MacDonald, I. 2008. Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties, 2nd rev. edn (London, Vintage)Google Scholar
Mann, P. 1991. The Theory-death of the Avant-garde (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press)Google Scholar
Marcus, G. 2000. Mystery Train: Images of American Rock ‘n’ Roll Music (London, Faber and Faber)Google Scholar
McClary, S. 1989. ‘Terminal prestige: the case of avant-garde music composition’, Cultural Critique, 12, pp. 5781CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Molon, D. 2007. Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967 (Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art)Google Scholar
Moore, A.F. 2001. Rock: The Primary Text – Developing a Musicology of Rock, 2nd edn (Aldershot, Ashgate)Google Scholar
Novak, D. 2008. ‘2.5 × 6 metres of space: Japanese music coffeehouses and experimental practices of listening’, Popular Music, 27, pp. 1534CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paddison, M. 1993. Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plourde, L. 2008. ‘Disciplined listening in Tokyo: onkyo and non-intentional sound’, Ethnomusicology, 52, pp. 270–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schafer, R.M. 1977. The Tuning of the World (New York, Knopf)Google Scholar
Székely, M.D. 2008. ‘Progressive listening, or listening as improvisation: the case of the Shaggs’, Canadian Aesthetics Journal, 15. http://www.uqtr.ca/AE/ (accessed 28 April 2011)Google Scholar
The Word. 2011. ‘Reader profile’. http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/advertisers/reader (accessed 9 May 2011)Google Scholar
Toynbee, J. 2000. Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions (London, Arnold)Google Scholar
Walser, R. 2003. ‘Popular music analysis: ten apothegms and four instances’, in Analyzing Popular Music, ed. Moore, A.F. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), pp. 1638CrossRefGoogle Scholar