Invitation to Guest Lecture on Wednesday, November 11, 11:45 - 13:15,
SR 34.D2, Attemsgasse 25/DG, 8010 Graz
This paper will explore a new formation of the political in the field of popular music. This formation was first articulated as a new popular music aesthetic of noise and aggression that directed its attack against the market as a definer of success.
This musical aesthetic was agentive in the construction of a “restricted field of cultural production,” which is Bourdieu’s term for a group of artists who produce for other artists and the prestige they can convey, not directly for a market of consumers and the cash they provide. But this restricted field was not the mere reproduction of an avant-garde within the popular, mimicking the efforts of “downtown” composers to transform the means of production of music. It was a specific Intervention into the field of popular music. The chief function of “Heroin” and other early works by the Velvet Underground was to challenge the relationship of popular music to the market, to instantiate an alternative process of value production and thereby to create the space for a politics of dis-identification from the popular mainstream.
Please find further information concerning other Guest Lecturers at the Department of American Studies in Winter Term 2015/16 under the following link: Programme Guest Lecturers