Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity

Catherine Strong

Monash University (Australia)

To begin with, in Chapter 1 Regev explains his use of the term “pop-rock” to describe the music that he is discussing, rather than “rock” or “pop” or “popular music”. Pop-rock is a term that encompasses everything that has developed as a result of the eruption of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, particularly as a result of the growth of new amplified and technology-based sounds. As such, “pop-rock” includes a huge array of genres from metal to reggae to commercial pop to EDM that have developed from the same sonic palette and conventions, despite the variations between them. Regev notes, however, that “popular music” covers a wider array of styles than “pop-rock”, as popular music includes folk and traditional musics also. This use of terminology may not be entirely satisfactory to all readers, but in the context of the arguments of this book is very effective and the reader is left with a clear sense of exactly what it is Regev is discussing.

Another important concept which is developed in Chapter 1 is that of “aesthetic cosmopolitanism”, “a process in which the expressive forms and cultural practices used by nations . . . and by groupings within them, to signify and perform their sense of uniqueness, growingly comes to share large portions of aesthetic common ground” (3). The argument that ultimately emerges from Regev’s work in this book is that pop-rock music plays a fundamental role in creating aesthetic cosmopolitanism, and in doing so has reconfigured everything from the sonic landscapes of the world to the very bodies of the people inhabiting it. In pursuing this argument, he demonstrates how pop-rock has shifted from being an oppositional, outsider art form to being a common referent for music globally, but also shows how this change has not happened smoothly or in the same way in every country. As this shift has occurred, pop-rock has become the music form through which actors express their sense of belonging to, or their wish to belong to, the global flows and future-directedness of late modern capitalism.

In Chapter 2, Regev develops the concept of expressive isomorphism, or the processes whereby culture in different places around the world comes to take on the same forms and adapt the same structures while still expressing local identity. Regev demonstrates how around the world not only the musical forms, but also the discourses around them including how music is assessed and how it is legitimated, including genre-specific practices, have come to resemble those developed in Anglo-American contexts. In Chapter 3, he looks to the history of pop-rock, and to Bourdieu’s work on fields of cultural practice, to explain how these now globally adopted forms came to take the shape that they have. This chapter involves some re-treading of well-worn paths in pop music academia, such as the development of popular music criticism and the use of authenticity versus commercialism as a way of ascribing value to music and artists. However, the way Regev ties these ideas back to the now global nature of pop-rock makes this an important contribution to the overall arguments presented in the book.

In Chapter 4 Regev develops the idea that “pop-rockization” can be thought of as an “event”, in the sense that the incorporation of pop-rock music as a legitimate part of national culture—even though this generally takes decades (and hence is a “long term event”)—has “long lasting effects on the subsequent history of social relations” (93). He demonstrates how such events have occurred around the world, but in somewhat different ways and on different time-lines, since the 1960s. The focus shifts to audiences in Chapter 5, using the key concept of “aesthetic cultures”, or “a cluster of practices, arrangements, and mechanisms” (129) that bind fans together and shape how they relate to music. Audiences engage with these cultures in different ways and with different levels of intensity, but increasingly these cultures also exist on a global level through the internet. In the final chapter of the book, Regev turns to a closer examination of the music itself, and the way a common understanding of the meaning of the sounds produced in pop-rock—its “sonic vocabularies”—that has developed produces changes to “listeners’ styles of consciousness and caused individuals to experience their bodies in new ways” (161). That these experiences are becoming convergent around the world intensifies aesthetic cosmopolitanism.

In Pop-Rock Music, Regev has taken a number of concepts that will be familiar to most popular music scholars, but has used them as building blocks on a foundation of innovative theory to create a cohesive account of how pop-rock music has come to hold such a dominant position globally, and explore the effects of this dominance. One of the strengths of the book is the many and varied case studies, drawn from outside the commonly analysed Anglo-American music centres. These show over and over again the parallels that exist in the way pop-rock music has been adopted and adapted in even the most ostensibly different cultures, while not minimising or ignoring the still obvious differences that continue to give national cultures their own flavour. Regev also skilfully walks the line between privileging either structure or agency; he gives convincing accounts of how pop-rock has become a part of powerful social structures while still highlighting how individuals, including musicians, critics and audiences, have played a part in this process, and still have the ability to affect change. The complexity of the arguments Regev has developed in this book, and the number of theoretical contributions he has to offer (most of which cannot be covered in a short review), means that most scholars working in this area would benefit from engaging with this rich and insightful work.