Week Two: What are the strengths and weaknesses to Peterson’s production of culture approach to the birth of rock and roll?

There are different theories to the birth of rock and roll. There is dispute which track or artist was the first to spark the trend. Richard A Peterson defines the birth of rock and roll through his theory of production of culture.

“Individuals, organizations and industries that produce cultural products and the techniques used to do so thus define culture.”

He thus provides four roles:

The craftsman (create work but stays out of limelight, e.g. songwriters),

the showman (promotes themselves and pleases crowd, e.g. recording artist),

the entrepreneur (creates solution to unexploited demand, e.g. manager/producer)

and the functionary (follows rules and fulfils roles to distribute, e.g. radio station).

This provides insight into the context of how rock and roll was produced and distributed, but it fails to explain an exact reason why the genre of music was popular and caused upheaval in its time.

What was new and revolutionary about rock and roll music?

Week One: What is popular music?

Popular comes from the latin ‘popularis’, which means ‘belonging to the people’.

In the commercial sense this may be true, as music is accessible to anyone to download, but then again corporations cling to copyright and some artists argue their ownership once it goes into public domain.

Through the years the specific term of popular music changes in people’s perceptions. Some people take it on surface value: Popular music is music that is popular. In this case it can go across the genres of rock, folk, indie and excreta. Others narrow popular music to a single genre of ‘pop’ music, which many people identify as a negative with less artistic value.

Shuker sums the concept up as ‘all popular music consists of a hyprid of musical traditions, styles and influence and is also an economic product which is invested with ideological significance by many of its consumers.’

Well to me music is music, people like what they like. What is deemed is popular is hard to pin down, as no one has the exact same music tastes and in my opinion this makes music more interesting :-D