Section 1 — Social systems and hegemonic control

In this first section as stated above we are going to look at ideas on the current state of society. Its systems, freedoms, rulings and demographics. To begin to theorize this state we can look at the words of Karl Marx who said that ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’ That is to say that society is split into categories based on social and economic backgrounds. What has become clear via Marx’s work is that, post-feudalism, in the decline of the traditional aristocracy the group with the best economic resources has taken control of the social domain for themselves. Marx calls this group the bourgeoisie and says that ‘it compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.’ What Marx is really getting at here is that this dominant group is not only at the top of our hierarchal society; it is also enforcing its own rules and ideas onto everyone beneath. Marx argues that our society becomes selfish here and that there is ‘no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment.’

This adoption by the great masses of the capitalist model is explained by the most likely successor of Marx, Antonio Gramsci. An Italian Marxist whose work in the socio-philosophical field has taught us a lot. The bourgeoisie or dominant fundamental group (as Gramsci calls it) enforces it views to the other social group, known as the subordinate or the masses. This enforcement has become known as cultural hegemony and Gramsci explains this term as ‘“the spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group.’ So to be clear ‘ruling groups impose a direction on social life; subordinates are manipulatively persuaded to board the dominant fundamental express.’ We may question why such consent is given by the masses to the hegemony of the bourgeoisie but what has become clear is that, historically, since the rise of the bourgeoisie, man has only ever been exposed to bourgeois culture and as such does not know life to be any different. Gramsci explains this by saying that man has a theoretical consciousness ‘superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed.’ This inheritance has resulted in ‘producing a condition of moral and political passivity’ for the masses or subordinate groups.

So we can understand society through Marx and Gramsci as a system of class domination where the bourgeoisie makes all the rules and the great masses follow them without question. These rules are known as cultural hegemony and we can begin to understand how they are transmitted from the ruling group to the subordinate by looking at Debord and the spectacle.

‘In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life.’ This is to say that the cultural streams, like news and entertainment, absorbed on a daily basis by the great masses are actually manipulating us into bourgeois ways of thinking. Moreover, that which we use as a tool to liberate us from the strains of everyday life can actually enslave us further. The spectacle is ‘hierarchical society’s ambassador to itself, delivering its official messages at a court where no one else is allowed to speak.’ So if the spectacle is an ambassador of bourgeois culture transmitted through things like entertainment, have we perhaps already proved that music, as a form of entertainment, can only ever serve to reinforce that dominant ideology? We will first further our description of modern society before we begin to argue the place of music.

One crucial point that must be understood in our theories of society is that through the economic domination, asserted by bourgeois culture, man’s desire and purpose in life has degraded from ‘being’ into ‘having’. It seems ‘human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed.’ The result is a fractured consumer society where the masses become caught up in manipulated images of material goods and ignore the real issues with their existence. This is perhaps part of the reason that hegemony moves through the years so smoothly. We are distracted by commodity fetishism, something that was introduced to the subordinate by of course the bourgeoisie. The transition from ‘being’ into ‘having’ makes us so much easier to manipulate.

Turner extends this concern with social distractions by saying that there is a ‘consumer culture in which humans are integrated into society, above all, as consumers.’ This consumer culture is being ingested by the great masses and it allows the dominant to guide us further and further into maintaining their capitalist model or to keep on boarding Gramsci’s ‘dominant fundamental express.’ If we are constantly being told through media and cultural streams, known as the spectacle, that our economic position is all that matters it seems quite plausible that as long as that position is maintained, we will give consent to the bourgeoisie to maintain social order in their interest.

In this bourgeois-dominated society it was the ‘hard-driving capitalists that turned into a new ruling class interested primarily in power and wealth for themselves.’ This selfish nature makes it difficult to understand how the bourgeoisie is consented by the subordinate to act in such a way but with their elevated position comes ‘an aura of moral authority through the creation of legitimating symbols’ allowing an ethnocentrism to come forward that is almost universally followed. This centrism is challenged by artists who can deconstruct social norms by pointing out seemingly obvious ironies in their works.

One final consideration in our definition of society in the modern era is that despite what we know about capitalist domination, the transmission of bourgeois hegemony to the subordinate through the spectacle and the creation of a consumer culture, there are certain reactionary forces that move against this status quo and our idea of society as class struggles is not perfect. Especially in the 21st century where we have never had such social plurality, complexity, diversity and difference. This means that our social theory can be insufficient for some outlying communities but it is important to remember that, for the majority, the points made about society above are indeed accurate, at least from the analytical perspective of traditional Marxist thought. Everything could change in this modern day and we will explore these possibilities later on. What must be understood is that there is certainly a dominant social power that permeates through every part of our social fabric in a hope of keeping the great masses largely in the dark.

Section 2 — Music as a form of resistance

In the last section we found that society is inscribed in a cultural hegemony that follows the capitalist mode of production. This hegemony is enforced by the dominant fundamental group and is transmitted through the spectacle to the masses of the people. We have found that we must be transparent in our description of society in order to construct a definition that really works. In this section we will start to build an argument that music moves against this hegemony and by extension against the very foundations of social consciousness that we are all said to subscribe to.

We will begin by looking at some sociologies of music to see some critical responses to its meaning. There is perhaps no better place to start than the words of Adorno who looked at avant-garde composers like Schoenberg whose ‘compositions took an aggressive stand against routine.’ This is not to say that Adorno viewed Schoenberg as total resistance but rather that certain aspects of his music showed a ‘rebellion against the possessive character of experience.’ Adorno’s position that composers were and should be try distinguish themselves from routine shows how music can be ‘a protest against the dominance of the concept of classification.’ This would definitely start a conversation that some music, especially avant-garde music, can be deployed to resist bourgeois ethnocentrism. What Adorno could be referring to here is that music, by nature, is not limited to a specific audience and as such is a language, which everyone can translate. He continues to say that music is ‘something capable of creating the illusion of immediate community.’

There are many uses for this illusion of community but we are most interested in how it can allow music or musics to construct resistance. On the one hand this illusion could be interpreted as the way in which the bourgeoisie use music (culture) to impose a conservative direction on social consciousness. By constantly exposing people to one kind of music, we could all become abiding members of their model. However, what is also apparent is that music can unite complete strangers in a collective experience at any given time allowing them the chance to synchronize with each and there are many more positive uses of this. The way in which we can use this illusion of community both for and against resistance shows just how versatile music is.

If we look at the modern example of hip hop, said to be an extension of ‘the long history of black cultural subversion,’ we can see just how critical music is for the resistance of this subordinate community. As Rose has said, ‘oppressed people use language, dance and music to mock those in power’ and this definitely gives claim to our idea of music as resistance. Firstly, for the obvious reason that to mock those in power is to disrespect and point out ironies in the fundamental system and secondly because this resistant attitude can be easily communicated to others. This is because music is presented as a universal language that we are all said to be able to understand and this is perhaps why there are so many cases of music working both for and against the dominant order. This could also be another illusion as although we can all communicate to and through music, the underlying message can often be mis-interpreted. Adorno argues that, despite such subjectivity, what is important is that ‘all music, however individual it may be, possesses an inalienable collective substance; every sound says “we.” The point at which this collective substance supports resistance is where musics like hip hop come forward with their radical culture and communicate radicalism and resistance to groups of people who could get together and attempt to make some changes in the world they live. This is something, which appears out of character for us humans that are obsessed with images of wealth and materiality but as history has demonstrated, with movements such as punk, folk, lo-fi and avant-garde the people can actually take time out of conformity and security to form pockets of resistance to bourgeois ethnocentrism.

We might ask ourselves here why music can appear as such a transparent form, which communicates to all people, but this availability comes about because ‘music is always in some way related to human experience.’ This point would lead us on to the idea that music’s purpose in society is to mirror our habits and this is certainly one function it has. After all ‘the cardinal importance of music in announcing a vision of the world is nothing new.’ By reflecting our habits in this way music can make us realize issues that could not as easily be presented to us in our reality. As a result, ‘music gets people, thinking, talking and doing’ and this is how we can argue that it forms resistance. However, by being such an apparently free, transparent form, it is much more difficult to pin down, define or make an ultimate meaning of music. An ultimate definition may not even be productive, as many would argue that music is saying everything and nothing on both sides of the argument simultaneously.

Going further back to more musical examples that evoke a resistant aesthetic, such as soul music in the 1970s, we can sense this feeling of resistance to the status quo but also a conscious sentiment relating to class struggles. As we have found above, society (for Marx) was made up of these class struggles and this reinforces his idea of music as a mirror of reality. Before deconstructing aspects of soul music that appeal to our initial argument for the position of music, it is worth looking at how soul is an extension of black cultural representation. This kind of representation is of interest, as for Newton ‘black people are the poorest, most oppressed, most exploited people in the world.’

For a popular music to arise from such a neglected part of the subordinate is arguably a resistance in itself, considering how repressed this group was by bourgeois culture. What’s more is that the strong sentiments of black activism and subordinate powers were being listened to by millions of people around the world. Songs such as Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag ‘sang volumes about black pride, cultural creativity, and heritage’ and this was all happening at a time when racial consciousness was more inflated than ever before. More importantly, music like this played a pivotal role in the construction of struggle or resistance.

‘The changing sounds of black music during this period embodied the revitalized sense of black pride and raised racial consciousness upon which any organized struggle for racial justice built.’

The period mentioned above is of the 1960s and 70s and this comes at no surprise when we look at the radical music of this time. James Brown’s song is just one example of music that was embodying such resistant spirit. For example, when ‘Aretha Franklin brought her gospel music out into the streets with marching protestors as they demanded “Respect”, and ultimately won it’ there was definitely a feeling that music really could be a force of social change. This feeling can trace it roots back to the oppressed peoples living under the almost feudalist early 1900s Southern agriculture. It is no secret that blacks were oppressed and disenfranchised during this period but their use of the work song or field holler is where this feeling originates. Included in a summary of ‘the pre-blues genres that arose in the nineteenth century,’ the work song is presented as an extension of the ‘African cultures semantic and grammatical tone, phonetic structure leading to offbeat phrasing of melodic accents.’ This work song, as the exploited blacks presented it, would have appeared not so much as music but as noise to the white ‘owners’ who had never heard such rhythms. The significance of this is that the oppressed group used this African music to drop beneath the radar of the oppressors allowing for secret communication, reflection and organization upon which any resistance is built.

Looking at this African culture that was alien to the West in the 1900s, what is most challenging and different is that in this music ‘the meaning of a song derives from its lyrics’ rather than the European derivation from ‘melody,’ rhythm or chord sequences.’ So, to understand meaning comes from lyrics in this culture rather than from melody (as the European dictators would have it) is a form of resistance by nature. Secondly, if we look closer at the social situation of extreme oppression where this music had its inception, there are other resistant properties we can observe. Black people in the Southern agriculture industry used music to reclaim some of the humanity that had been taken from them by their white ‘owners.’ For these unfortunate people, ‘you were born into a society, which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.’ So again the will of these people to reclaim their identity and relate to one another through music is a great example how music forms immediate bonding, communication and community and can slowly start the engine of resistance.

Another interesting contribution to our idea of music as resistance is when we look at some versions of a famous song. Pete Seeger’s version of We Shall Overcome is remembered in particular for being a protest song. Despite Seeger’s credit for the radical message of the song, about overcoming segregation, his version is actually quite different to the one that occupies a space in our idea of protest music today. This is because the song was taken by black activists of the time and appropriated to really work for the civil rights movement. ‘Black high school student Mary Ethel Dozier added the verse, “We are not afraid” and the song was redefined by Bernice Reagan in 1962 with ‘call-and-response vocal patterns and improvisational possibilities derived from the black gospel-music tradition.’ This is not only ‘a classic example of how freedom songs were often created, or recreated, in the very teeth of the ongoing struggle’ but it also shows us that if the intention of the artist is to resist the music can be used or appropriated to have a more direct or provocative sentiment. As we will discover, this appropriation can also be used by the imposers of social control and this is where our idea of music as total resistance becomes somewhat floored. The use of Woody Guthrie’s This land is my land by right-wing politics illuminates the fact that music is always wide open to appropriation and as we can see in this example, sometimes the appropriation is not on the same side as the artist. What we are starting to realize is that to define the meaning of music for or against a direction is difficult because it can help form resistance and conformity almost simultaneously.

To look at more examples of appropriation by the resistance would be useful here especially the black appropriation of musical materials that have carried forward the messages of different struggles and movements throughout history. Gil Scott Heron, for example, was at the forefront of activism against the regime of his conservative university professors and used music as a way of getting his message across. There were college campus riots across America in the 1970s for a number of reasons but for Heron in particular it was ‘colleges that take young black men and turn them into obedient members of a bourgeois society.’ This not only highlights that the universities were an extension of bourgeois culture but also that institutions like these were in part responsible for the maintenance of that culture. ‘The anger and resentment felt by Gil’ moved him to write an outspoken novel titled The Nigger Factory and a number of songs most notably, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Heron, ‘influenced by the way Langston Hughes used humor and wordplay to highlight contradictions such as the reality of life,’ took this approach to the song in an attempt to highlight the fact that on the television, ‘the contrast between the commercials and the demonstrations in the streets could not have been more glaring.’ Here we are seeing a construction of resistance on multiple levels. Heron is highlighting contradictions in the education system, the media and of the establishment through music. In a little over three minutes, Heron has dismantled three fundamental bodies that maintain bourgeois culture. This example shows a clear use of music to disseminate the message of resistance but it is not music alone that makes this happen. For as we have seen earlier, music is just one appropriated form alongside a clever use of language and irony by Heron to try and start to dismantle bourgeois authority.

Music of this kind is not limited to disgruntled black communities in America; in the UK in the 1970s, the androgynous artists of the glam rock movement fronted a new struggle for the liberation of gender and sexual identities. There is perhaps no greater example of a musician caught up in this movement, than pop icon David Bowie. This is because ‘the David Bowie of the 70s transcended all gender and sexuality based descriptions’ and in doing so brought some very poignant issues to the forefront of social consciousness. First of these is the fact that ‘the western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.’ One of the most obvious policies of androgyny is that such definitions are not adequate for certain people and it is this group, tired of being unable to open up about their true identity, that is being represented in the glam rock movement. The need to define sexuality and gender is just another bourgeois ideal or an extension of the ‘dominant culture that sought to suppress innate androgyny.’ The open approach to gender and sexuality that Bowie took is clear in many of his songs in particular Boys Keep Swinging and if this was not obvious in the lyric when you’re a boy: other boys check you out the statement Bowie gave in 2000 about the song confirms it. For ‘I do not feel there is anything remotely glorious about being either male or female; I was merely playing on the colonization of gender.’

‘We might understand David Bowie’s musical career, and the larger Glam Rock movement as a rebellion against conventional accounts of gender and sexuality. ’

The interesting thing about this statement is not simply that it shows the link between music and resistance but actually that Bowie and the glam rock movement, by their very existence, created a rebellion against the dominant culture. In all the other case studies explored in this essay, we have seen more of an appropriation of music to construct resistance but here, as stated above, the musicians themselves are the most visual body of the resistance, rather than just one aspect that’s using music as a tool to communicate with. From Suffragette City to Queen Bitch and every bit of glam in between, ‘Bowie literally embodied androgyny with big red space boots and a full face of make up.’ Furthermore, ‘Bowie who ‘wasn’t quite masculine, straight, gay or bisexual but all of them together’ and his stage personas, ‘embodied the inherent contradictions in gender and sexuality.’ So, for glam rock, we can ascribe a position of resistance perhaps more solidly than in any other example but the argument still remains that music was just one form appropriated by that group to really say something.

A slightly less obvious example of this countercultural statement comes from an artist whose career was somewhat revived in the late 70s by Bowie. Lou Reed’s Transformer sought to ‘encapsulate this commitment to an idea of sexual identity as something not rooted in nature, but flexible and open to question.’ If the album title does not speak for this issue itself we can look to the chorus of Make Up, which ‘represents a rare moment of explicit political engagement for glam rock.’ The chorus goes we’re coming out/out of our closets/out on the street and this implies that the girl in the song is not actually a girl.

Bowie produced that album and was involved in many other aspects of glam that challenged or mocked the dominant culture so we can cite him as a highly resistant figure in music. After all he describes his reason for getting into the music business as at the time as ‘it felt like one could affect change to a form.’ He furthered this attitude by saying ‘I wanted to be a musician because it seemed rebellious.’ The idea of the musician, for Bowie, was that one was subversive and categorically out of sync with the dominant model. We must ask ourselves here whether or not becoming a musician today still has this feeling of subversion? If this is true, we can say that to be in music is to drop beneath the radar as those using the work song did but perhaps the commercialization of musical materials since the early 1900s work song has turned music into another part of the spectacle, just another cog in the capitalist machine. This indecision in our idea of the musician shows us again just how difficult the position of music is to understand for it can always be considered to be visible on both sides of the spectrum.

The examples of resistance we have looked at have been mostly historical, so to get a more robust understanding of this first position, we must look at some more modern examples of radical music. There are many modern examples (which is promising for our argument) from the new Muse album Drones to Foster The People’s Supermodel but these commercialized artists create just as many arguments for conformity so what is of real interest is the prominent DIY culture that this kind of music is growing out of. The principle of this culture is of course that the artist does everything themselves, thus eliminating the need for the industry . From recording to promoting, the premise of this culture is that everything can be achieved by the artist and that this is actually a more honest and organic way to do it. By eliminating the industry, DIY culture begins to dismantle the dominant mode of production that the bourgeoisie feeds off.

McKay describes DIY as ‘a youth centred and directed cluster of interest and practices around green radicalism, direct action politics, new musical sounds and experiences.’ So, as it is described we can already be sure of the fact that DIY moves against bourgeois culture and as such is the perfect manifestation of music for resistance in the modern day. The rise of this resistance has two key contributors. First of these is ‘the more that corporations globalize and lose touch with concerns of ordinary people, the more the seeds of grass-roots revolt are sown.’ This theory summarizes that as the dominant mode of production expands or globalizes, it alienates the local people and as a result they decide to do it themselves and form small but distinctive social communities.

The second contributor is the Internet. This is because it allows for anyone to share their art with the entire world through tools like MySpace, Facebook, Soundcloud and many more. The Internet allows for quicker, more direct social mobilization, which is beneficial to a movement like DIY in which shared experience is pivotal. Furthermore, ‘the usage of Internet-enabled technologies benefits social movement organizing.’ So, it could be argued that the space of the Internet to allow anything and everything to be seen has removed the bourgeois imposed direction on social life and allowed certain independent streams like DIY to retain their independence.

The prescribed formula for music making is that it is expensive, large scale and linked with celebrity and fame. Therefore, it would be viewed as an inaccessible career path for the majority of people. Something that one could only dream of pursuing as a career path. DIY culture asserts the exact opposite of this and outlines the fact that anyone can make music. Moreover, we can assert that through the Internet, resistance is still being formed in things like DIY music.

So, this would be a good opportunity to reflect on this first position of music as resistance before we delve in the second position; the position that asserts it reinforces the dominant order. From the start of a long history of black cultural representation from the work songs in the Deep South to the likes of James Brown and Aretha Franklin whose songs became core dynamics of the civil rights movement to Gil Scott Heron who used music and literature to resist his university professor’s bourgeois authority there is no doubting that music has been a vital part of resistance. We have seen how David Bowie and the glam rock movement embodied an androgynous resistance to western conventions and also at a DIY culture that has disavowed all agency of the music industry and which the Internet has made largely possible. However, in trying to make the distinction that music is the real form of resistance, we have discovered that this would be a generalization. This is through its position in the centre of culture and its ability to be appropriated by anyone. We cannot therefore meaningfully define it for one side or the other.

Section 3 — Hegemonic appropriation, Commodification and Conformity

All we can do is look at which way it is leaning towards in the modern day. There is no doubting the fact that music has changed society. No doubting that music has served as one of the most resistant forms to cultural hegemony and as a result many factions of our modern society that would have been kept in the dark have illuminated themselves and gained a more equal standing. What this actually means is that our neo-Marxist idea of society as a class struggle against capitalist domination may be too simplistic. In the modern era, instead of there being one set of bourgeois-generated questions and answers that are universally followed, there are actually many conversations going on now that could never have been at the time of Marx. This social liberation owes itself partially to technology but largely to music and subversive groups asserting change in the examples that we have seen above. Such movements have not only allowed the people behind them to live more fairly, they have crucially molded the conditions of life, which music was said to be a mirror of. This means that, through resistance, which music has been a part of, we have a more pluralized, complex and understanding society that is harder to resist. The mobilization of the demographic or creation of a movement through music is thus so much more difficult to ascertain and this is starting to deflate the capacity for music to form resistance in modern times.

So, in asserting the other position of music as conformity we will look to Adorno again as we did in section 2. Although Adorno recognizes the collective substance of music, which we have identified as a core dynamic of DIY culture earlier, he argues that collectivity and other characteristics of social circles are actually illusions of social consciousness and as such we can argue that Adorno believes music cannot really form resistance . In talking about music and consciousness he said for ‘music of integrity, once the essence of genuine social consciousness can degenerate into ideology and even into a socially necessary illusion.’ This means that often, whatever intention (radical or conformist) intended by the artist, the listeners will make an entirely unique meaning of a song for themselves. From this point we can see again the subjectivity of music. If Adorno is right what we must find out is whether the listener’s socially necessary illusion is clouded by bourgeois ideology and if this is the case then we can argue that, when perceived, all music becomes conformity. After all, it was said that the bourgeois created society (therefore the listener) after its own image.

To begin to uncover this controlled social judgment we can look to Chantal Mouffe who argued that music, despite its resistant capacity, was the ultimate tool for disseminating bourgeois culture. This is possible because of a bourgeois appropriation of musical materials. Moreover, that which on the one hand can be thought of as the essence of resistance can be also redefined in a way that aligns with the status quo. For ‘the aesthetic strategies of counter culture: the search for authenticity, the ideal of self-management, the anti-hierarchal exigency are now used to promote capitalist regulation.’ This is to say that capitalism has developed to such a complexity that it can regulate its rules through musical forms and what we should try and discover is whether or not capitalism is using music more than the radicals in the modern day.

On the one hand, the commodification of musical forms known as the music industry has allowed capitalism to infiltrate all kinds of music and promote even the most radical songs in a way that suppresses their innate resistance. For example the right wing appropriation of Woody Guthrie’s left wing song mentioned earlier. The general consensus today is that ‘wherever there is music there is money.’ Thinking of the music industry as an extension of the capitalist grasp, we can discover that the way in which the industry suppresses such rebellious messages is through censorship. Sometimes in the literal sense but mostly because the industry plays on the fact that ‘music is rarely listened to’ for what it is. For music, ‘as with every facet of social life for which the rules are breaking down (sexuality, the family, politics),’ the real issues are not being recognized or rather ‘people refuse to draw conclusions from it.’ It is the way in which society refuses to acknowledge the real meaning a song that further tarnishes our idea of music as resistance. The music industry is certainly the engine behind this as we see a blatant diversion from the meaning of a song to the image and status of the artist. Kanye West is perhaps the perfect example of this. His music constantly references old black protest songs from artists like Billie Holiday and Otis Redding yet the majority of his following concentrate on his image with Kim Kardashian and his status as a fashion designer. Kanye’s choice to prioritize image and fame over his art is one of many cases of total conformity in music. This present day example also shows us a conflicting position of Kanye and by extension, hip hop that talks about resistance but doesn’t really resist at all and makes it easy for us to see that more generally, music has been taken over by industry and may be too conflicted to represent genuine resistance and subversion.

So for music, once ‘the essence of genuine social consciousness,’ it seems that society is no longer so moved by its movements and meanings. This is because people are not making the same connections to music as they used to. The commodification of the art form has changed the dynamics of its subversive nature and thus its ability to play a role in activism and the organization of social movements are somewhat diminished. Of course where there are small pockets of resistance music remains a vital part but in reality the music is not being heard for what it is. The industry has absorbed the resistant properties of music and turned them into new forms of control. The artists at the forefront of public attention are contributing to this mis-guided perception of music and are more often than not conforming to bourgeois ideologies idea of the good life.

Moments of transition in society such as the abolition of inequality for various aforementioned social groups, which music was such a big part of are not really coming forward in the modern day and it is arguably because of the movements of the past having created a more fair society that resistance is more difficult to construct on a big scale. There are undoubtedly still forms of resistance in society and there are still issues that need to be pointed out but music is now so economically saturated the resistance is remaining largely subterranean. However, as we have seen within black communities in southern agriculture, being able to escape or submerge oneself through music can allow for reflection and organization around the real issues and this is arguably where the roots of real social action are sown. Moreover, if people can allow themselves this reflection, we could see more social revolution and music, as something of a free form, could play a big part again.

So, our perspective of music today can be described as an old thorn in the side of society that has somewhat lost its sting. Through commodification, appropriation and mis-interpretation, this great tool of social reflection and revolution has become fragmented leaving behind small remnants of activism that may come to the forefront again. For the moment many of the radicals in music are either being mis-interpreted, remaining subterranean or choosing to conform for their own gain. This is giving the bourgeois conformists the upper hand with music appropriation but with such a versatile form as music, this could change in the future as we have found that there is no ultimate conclusion for music’s position.

The rejuvenation of musically fronted resistance could be down to something like the Internet by elevating such radical messages across the world with one single click. What society must do is make an effort to perceive such messages in the right way. This is difficult in an age of social and digital distractions combined with the fact that we have found that music means something different each time it is played, used, appropriated, stolen and re-invented.

Conclusion

Music, under certain conditions, was undoubtedly the social reflection that played a role in allowing elements of society to resist its bourgeois dictators and we must not dim the fact that the musically fronted movements of the modern era resisted authority and cleansed society allowing for higher forms of social consciousness and activism to arise. However, it also allowed the bourgeois dictators to appropriate the various social functions of music to distract us all from the real problems. On the one hand, there are entire generations of people totally moved by the subversive and resistant messages purveyed out on society through some musics. At the same time, the way in which music creates socially necessary illusions, has been capitalized upon by the capitalists and the aesthetics of counter culture, turned into new forms of control.

This dual identity of music combined with the way it can be appropriated by pretty much and kind of group from the hippies to the corporations highlights just how problematic an assumption of music forming resistance or conformity is. In reality, music is always forming resistance and conformity at the same time. This is the real discovery of this paper. Music is so unattainable and attainable at the same time. To attempt to define it for or against anything in a totality would trivialize and generalize the fact that it is such a cryptic and elusive form.

So, in answering our question of whether or not music constructs resistance or conformity is an inadequate conclusion. What is more productive is to look at the situation right now. As we have seen, society creates entirely unique meanings of music but those meanings can become synonymous in the modern day where we are constantly connected to a stream of prescribed culture. The real issue today in any kind of resistant perspective of music is that most of the artists in the public eye are not embodying the values of resistance that people like David Bowie and James Brown once were. Instead, today we have a commodified rap music that is purveying as many if not more capitalist values than ones of honesty, community and integrity.

Moreover, music as a whole today (although we probably shouldn’t talk about it in this way) is arguably swaying more towards conformity through things like the industry having saturated the creative market place and also people’s revitalized willingness to board that dominant fundamental express. However, through platforms like the Internet and DIY, there is still a resistant character to music. These elements have to some extent further dissolved the distinctions that have existed between audience and artist. Music arguably still has that DIY sense of community, genre and inclusion.

The unwillingness in this conclusion to really conclude for one side or the other hopes to assert the fact that any paper that seeks to define music wholly should realize that it is for the most part unclassifiable.