Power struggles in popular music

Résumé 0

For the last fifty years, scholars have routinely analyzed popular music as a site of resistance against the dominant social, political, and economic structures. Typically, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) founded in 1964 by Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart explored, on the basis of the subcultural theory developed in the 1920s at the University of Chicago, the appropriation and transformation by working-class and middle-class youth of the commercial products thrown at them by the culture industry, claiming that “popular music is an integral node in the lifeworlds, collective identification, and resistance practices of young people” (Taylor 4). They also examined the “semiological guerilla warfare” (Eco) that resulted when, in turn, the cultural industries appropriated and commodified the sounds and practices released by subcultural youth and converted them into “an exceptionally profitable commodity” (Drake 3).