Popular problems

In their (2009) book, Dark side of the tune: Popular music and violence, Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan argued that in establishing popular music as a legitimate area of research and study in the academy, the proponents of popular musics have been somewhat defensive, ‘inclining towards unreflectively celebratory accounts’ of popular music in musicology (p. 5). Similarly, whilst scholars

advocating for popular musics and pedagogies in schools have done much to attend to issues of democracy, diversity and inclusion in formal education, in defending the place of popular musics in relation to the established canons of western art musics it is possible that the celebrations of popular music practices in schools have overshadowed questions of content, and that the dichotomies of exclusion within the popular music realm itself have been overlooked (Hesmondhalgh, 2008; Kallio & Väkevä, forthcoming). In claiming a space for popular musics in schools in the first place, it has perhaps been easy to forget that ‘[p]opular music has often been cast in antipathy to education’ (Green, 2002, p. 159) and the concerns, conflicts and controversies that have long surrounded young people’s attention to sex, drugs and rock’n roll.

For decades, popular music has ‘inflame[d] the sensibilities of the guardians of public morality’ (Street, 1986, pp. 13-14). The burning of Elvis records in the 1950s; the threatening of excommunicating Beatles fans from the church in the 1960s; numerous censorship campaigns targeting musics ‘promoting’ drug use or socialist politics in America during the 1970s; the monitoring of lewdness, violence and profanity by the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) in the 1980s; threats of litigation and formal letters of complaint from the police force and F.B.I addressed to rap artists N.W.A and Ice-T in the 1990s; and more recently, the cancellation of performances by Finnish metal band Impaled Nazarene in response to school shootings, the charges of hooliganism and

blasphemy against Russian artists belonging to the group Pussy Riot, the banning of Jamaican dance hall artist Sizzla Kalonji from performing in the U.K. and Germany on account of homophobic lyrics, the imprisonment of Moroccan rapper and human rights activist El Haqed; the list goes on. The social censure of popular musics has often focused on the relationship between such music and young people, and the influence of the music on such vulnerable members of the population, at a time of intense identity construction and social development.

North and Hargreaves (2005, 2006, 2008) have referred to the popular musics that have been associated with arousing or inciting deleterious behaviours in young people as problem music. The problem music label has mostly been applied with regard to the potential social impact (Frith, 2004, p. 23) of hard

rock, hip hop/rap and punk musics, characterized as sexualized, racialized and violent genres. Numerous studies have been conducted in recent years exploring the possibilities of a causal relationship existing or testing correlations between these musics and teenage delinquency and criminality (e.g., ter Bogt, Keijsers & Meeus, 2013), drug usage (e.g., Mulder et al., 2009), permissive sexual attitudes (e.g., Beentjes & Konig, 2013), sexual and racial discrimination (e.g., Fischer and Greitemeyer, 2006; Turner, 2011), eating disorders (e.g., Prichard & Tiggemann, 2012), self-harm and suicide (e.g., Young et al., 2014). However, a number of assumptions that underlie many studies conducted on the relations between problem musics and problem behaviours raise significant concerns.

Firstly, there has been a largely unquestioned assumption that music functions as agent and is able to influence the behaviour, thoughts or emotions of the listener. This is problematic not only in terms of establishing an etiologically robust relationship between musics and certain behaviours, but also in the design of studies in the first place. As Paul Willis states in his pioneering work Profane

Culture (2014), ‘[o]bjects, artefacts and institutions do not, as it were, have a single

valency. It is the act of social engagement with a cultural item, which activates and brings out particular meanings’ (p. 252). In this sense, music is neither passive object nor agent. DeNora (2000) suggests that we may think of music as ‘a cultural vehicle… as a kind of aesthetic technology, an instrument of social ordering’ (p. 9) that acquires meaning through engagement with it, as contextualized in relation to musical, natural and social situations (p. 13). These social orderings are not necessarily as simple as inclusion into mainstream society or social exclusion. As explored by Sarah Thornton (1995) in her work on the club cultures and rave scenes in the UK, seemingly pejorative labels applied to certain music styles and their fans may indeed be worn as a badge of honour and identification, a source of subcultural capital.

Secondly, despite the fears surrounding popular musics and their effects on the growing minds of adolescents, there have been few justifications for characterizing certain musics as problematic, or the behaviours they are linked to as particularly negative (Frith, 2004). For example, a study conducted by ter Bogt, Keijsers and Meeus (2013) on adolescent music preference in relation to minor delinquency (such as shoplifting, petty theft, and vandalism) found that ‘noisy, rebellious, nonmainstream music genres [are] a strong predictor of concurrent and later minor delinquency’ (p. 7). The researchers point to ‘hip-hop, heavy metal, gothic, punk, and techno/hardhouse’ (p. 7) as problematic without acknowledging the diversity within each of these musical genres, nor specifying why they are seen as any more ‘noisy, rebellious’ or ‘nonmainstream’ than other genres they include in their analyses. Similarly, labelling certain behaviours as deviant assumes

a consensus on what is, and what is not acceptable social behaviour, irrespective of circumstance or reasoning. In an essay titled What is bad music? Simon Frith (2004) has argued that judgments of certain musics as bad or harmful are thus a muddle of aesthetic and ethical judgments (p. 26). Understandings of social values in relation to music, and deviances from these established or perceived norms, have not been sufficiently explored or explicated in research.

Thirdly, through focusing on the affects of music on the listener (rather than performer, creator, composer and so forth), much research has assumed that adolescents are relatively uncritical, passive consumers of (problem) music rather than actively engaged with its interpretation, reconstruction and performance. North and Hargreaves (2008) have also noted that there are a multitude of additional variables that come into play when drawing links between particular musics and adolescent behaviours, meaning that it is difficult to conclusively establish the direct affect of any music on any individual. This is not to argue that there is no connection between popular musics and instances of adolescent deviance, but rather that these relations are complex and far from established.

So what of popular musics in schools? As governments and various social campaigns have argued that certain popular musics are inappropriate for young people (through the application of parental advisory stickers or restriction of record sales for example), it has also been suggested that such musics may be particularly inappropriate for ‘celebrating’ in school contexts. This is been seen as particularly pertinent given the commitments of formal education institutions to the cultivation of social responsibility, certain societal values and a moral citizenry (Allsup & Westerlund, 2012; Senyshyn, 2008; Väkevä, 2006). It may thus be seen that the role of popular music in formal education contexts is far from secure, and even if, as in Finland, it has become an established tradition, there is little guidance for teachers in navigating those popular musics deemed problematic or deviant.