Towards posthegemonic popular music studies

Artur Szarecki

pp. 279-287

in: Ivana Medi, Marija Dumnić Vilotijević, Ivana Medić (eds), Contemporary popular music studies, Berlin, Springer, 2019

Abstrakt

In this paper, I argue that the implicit or explicit dependence on hegemony theory within popular music studies has resulted in diminishing the relevance of the aural dimension of culture and neglecting the wider consideration of the political effects of sound. Instead, I advocate a turn towards posthegemonic theory which employs vocabularies of "affect", "habit" and "multitude" to account for the physical effects of sonic intensities without trying to collapse them into meanings. Offering a brief analysis of two contrasting examples of popular music practices in corporate environment – company song and lip dub – I demonstrate how posthegemonic approach might extend the analytical capacities of popular music studies by providing ways of thinking and doing politics that are not dependent on establishing consent or exercising coercion, but rather on immanent processes that are activated and reproduced beneath consciousness.