Part of your World

The term "world music" is both tricky, and rather silly, to define. After all, isn't all music from this world? I'm not sure about everyone else but I for one don't listen to Martian jazz. Record stores would call it music that isn't an Anglo-American genre, or the rather hard to categorize kind of music. Hesmondhalgh points out that this distinction between indigenous and Western music is symptomatic of cultural imperialism. The way we define music itself is cantered on the West. When a song doesn’t fit into the Western idea of a genre due to style, artist, language, it gets shoved into this “other” category – World Music. However, globalization is shrinking the world. Shrinking the world won’t mean a reduction in styles though, as Manual’s experiment in India proved. When genres meet, they do not annihilate each other, but create a new sound. As musicians incorporate more sounds and influences perhaps the very idea of “world music” will change as well.  

Commodity, Art, or Artsy Commodity?

While it is completely possible that all popular music is simply a massed produced commodity, it is rather unlikely that every song that makes the charts lacks artistry or individualization.  Adorno’s observations of the capitalistic nature of the music industry definitely ring true, though, for that is what it has become in many ways – a production line. His respect for classical forms is logical and well founded as well, but it is rather unjust to hold popular music and classical music identical standards as they differ in purpose and form. Not all popular music is high art, The X Factor and that ilk prove that theory wrong, but even if a majority of popular music is just mass produced, thoughtless standardized muck there are those few artists that defy that model and create beautiful, artistic, well beloved music (look at Mumford and Sons – have you heard as many literary allusions in recent times from any song than those in “The Cave”?).  Generalizations are hard to pull off as there is always the exception to the rule, which is where Adorno stumbles a bit.

What about the Music?

While Peterson's production of culture perspective gives clarity to the context of the birth of rock with its analysis of the industry structure, occupational opportunities and legal issues, it also manages to overlooks several other key aspects essential to understanding the rise of rock and roll in the 1950s. Peterson discusses some technological advances that allowed for the rise of rock, looking mostly at delivery of music and not so much at recording or instruments, which was explored by Theberge. Peterson also fails to look at the music itself. 
He sets up a strong framework for how rock came to be but it could be applied to lots of other things as well. Why did rock become popular at all rather than some other genre? Why 1955? Peterson just doesn't quite answer these, although if taken along side Theberge and other analyses, it gives a much broader picture of both the how and why.

Just One of the Boys

It seems strange these days to refer to an object or activity as "gendered," especially in a post-feminist world, but rock music is exactly that - extremely male gendered. It's not from a lack of talent that female rockers find themselves missing from Top 50 lists and the top of the charts (check out Samantha Fish if you want proof of a talented guitarist). We have been conditioned to think of rock as very male, from lyrics to the masculinity of technology to the guitar itself.  While lyrics often proclaim exactly what the singer wants from a woman, the more subversive symbolism lies in the guitar. Prince's suggestive silhouette at the 2007 Superbowl was not the first or last time that the guitar has been used as a symbol of manhood. Since its advent, rock has been so much of a form of sexual expression, it's easy to see how the women who have made it become "one of the boys" as Jerry Garcia said of Janis Joplin.