How Historical Materialism Shaped (and Was Exiled From) Popular Music Studies

The formal emergence of popular music studies as a discipline can be traced to the moment historical materialism was pushed aside.

In many foundational pop studies texts, authors commonly begin by rejecting Marxism—its scientific pretensions, its reductionist tendencies, its vulgar base-and-superstructure orthodoxy. Rather than attacking Marx himself, scholars almost always aim their critiques at Theodor Adorno. The late Adam Krims, who was both an avowed Marxist and a critic of Adorno, described the German philosopher’s work as the “foundational trauma” of the entire discipline. In truth, Adorno may be better understood as pop studies’ favorite sparring partner; dismissing his ideas has become a time-honored tradition.

Dave Laing’s 1969 book The Sound of Our Time contains what appears to be the earliest reference to Adorno in pop-studies literature. Among the first works to study pop music self-reflexively—comparable to early classics like The Sound of the City and Mystery Train—Laing’s concluding chapter, “Towards a Theoretical Framework,” opens by criticizing Adorno for reducing music to a strange sector of the economy. It ends by proposing David Riesman and Roland Barthes as superior alternatives.

Unwittingly, Laing set a pattern that would persist for decades. Simon Frith’s 1981 text echoes this move, condemning Adorno while praising Walter Benjamin only as the most interesting (and least conventional) Marxist. The same dynamic became central to the academic explosion of pop studies in the late 1980s and 1990s. Keith Negus’s Popular Music in Theory, a staple for undergraduates and graduate students, treats Adorno less as a trauma than as an early stage in the discipline’s consciousness. Adorno is positioned as a catalytic figure, though his thinking is something to be cancelled yet preserved by a later, more developed field. Negus introduces Riesman as Adorno’s successor—a curious choice, as they were nearly exact contemporaries—followed by Stuart Hall, then Dick Hebdige, forming a chain leading to the pop studies of 1996.

Viewed this way, Adorno resembles not a shadowboxer but a stepping-stone toward a science of popular music. This places materialism at the center of pop studies, though in a peculiar form. Materialism becomes something to be aufgehoben—a necessary but insufficient stage. To paraphrase Marx from Capital: Adorno stands materialism on its head, and popular music studies must invert it to find the rational kernel inside the mystical shell.

If we stand Marx on his head, where does that leave us? Largely back in idealism. Adorno’s own—admittedly muddled—commitments to Value (capital V) have been displaced by value with a lowercase v. The turn toward ideology, subjective interpretation, and the private valuation of musical objects has shifted attention away from the music industry. This is explicit in Frith, who insisted on a strict separation between music’s sociological character and its aesthetic dimension. He argued that music can never be just a product representing exchange value; artistic value unavoidably complicates the production of even the rawest commodity.

Beyond making musical objects opaque, anti-materialism has also surfaced in more straightforward ways. Idealist history has replaced the history of class struggle. Consider Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train, essentially a phenomenology of rock-and-roll spirit, or perhaps a chronicle of rock’s classical age giving way to a 1970s musical romanticism. Marcus’s specter still haunts pop studies today, yet culture has transcended its modest origins in rock criticism and the British New Left. It has become an almost unquestioned truism that we live in culture. We encounter “kale culture,” “kick culture” (referring to shoes), an “irony-obsessed, meme-driven culture,” and a “culture of extreme parsimony toward public spending.” These phrases remind us that lowercase-v value dominates our lives.

Interestingly, this version of culture would seem foreign to its earliest champions. Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams did not believe that kale or Nike sneakers conjured up their own independent ideological worlds, no matter how much they insisted we attend to everyday life. Hall occupies a complicated place in the uneven academic reception of historical materialism. A reference point for cultural studies overall, his critical history is fraught. As with pop studies, much of that history has been shaped by attempts to drag him out of Marx’s shadow. James Procter’s Routledge Critical Thinkers entry on Hall repeatedly addresses materialism, typically by highlighting Hall’s breaks with Marx. Procter writes about base-superstructure binaries, vulgar Marxisms, and Marx’s supposedly reductive notion of culture. Here again, Marx serves as a negative model for a thinker who ultimately stopped being a “pure Marxist.”

Hall’s intellectual appetite was unquestionably omnivorous. He read widely, engaging Marxists alongside semioticians, poststructuralists, and critical race theorists. Where he found Marxism lacking, he challenged it readily. Yet while Hall may not have been a “pure Marxist” in some vague sense, he can certainly be described as an orthodox one—meaning he remained deeply engaged with the core problematics of historical materialism throughout his life. In a 2008 interview, he lamented that cultural studies had lost its Marxian roots: valuable insights into culture, discourse, and ideology had been gained, but cultural studies consequently lost its way.

Hall’s materialist commitments come through even more powerfully in his work from the 1970s and 1980s. His 1973 essay on Marx’s Grundrisse—originally part of a seminar series published in 1974 in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies journal—offers a pure endorsement of historical materialism, comparable to Louis Althusser’s arguments in For Marx.

This account provides the backdrop for Hall’s formulations of culture and the popular itself. Hall insists both must be understood in relation to material conditions. “Subcultures, Cultures, and Class,” the lengthy opener of the 1976 collection Resistance Through Rituals, defines culture in terms of its material and practical dimensions. Culture is described as the practice that realizes or objectivates group life in meaningful shape and form. As Marx stated, individuals express their life through what they produce and how they produce it. Cultures do not simply exist in people’s heads; they are objectivated in patterns of social organization and relationship through which the individual becomes a social being.

“Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” appearing in the 1981 anthology People’s History and Socialist Theory, is even more explicit about Hall’s materialist leanings. Here, Hall attacks what he sees as the two flawed dominant theories of popular culture: the mass-culture account (the Adornian or anti-Adornian view of the music industry as containing or generating resistance) and the anthropological account (which treats popular culture as everything “the people” do or have done—customs, folkways). Both approaches ultimately struck Hall as too narrow. One relied too heavily on the music industry, addressing the business of music rather than capitalism as such; the other resorted to a vague opposition between “the people” and whatever they supposedly opposed.

Hall offered a new definition: popular culture consists of forms and activities rooted in the social and material conditions of particular classes. In the same essay, Hall writes—perhaps his most famous line—that popular culture is “one of the sites where the struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged.” Two sentences often get dropped by later readers: “It is not a sphere where socialism, a socialist culture—already fully formed—might simply be ‘expressed.’ But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why ‘popular culture’ matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it.”

All this is not about deciding which “team” Hall played for, but about tracking a productive idea for thinking about music. Hall grants culture a certain degree of autonomy, giving it ideological flexibility. He rejects anthropological culture because it focuses on “ways of life” rather than “ways of struggling.” For Hall, culture constitutes a battlefield—one that shifts with the contours of history and society, tethered to capitalism, but a battlefield nonetheless.

This invests culture with both semi-autonomous and oppositional character. Resistance Through Rituals spells out a theory of conflict between working-class culture and dominant culture, following the traditional Marxian view of capitalist struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie. Hall’s interest in Gramsci stems largely from hegemony as a way of theorizing ideology—a theme he also explores in a lengthy essay on Althusser. The story told in the CCCS volume is about the tension between a dominant bourgeois culture and an oppositional working-class social project.

Potentially more interesting is Hall’s account of subculture. Rather than being about safety pins and dyed hair—at least for Hall—subculture amounts to a theory of frictions within social groups. The “Notes” essay emphasizes that a dialectical relationship also operates inside the working class. Culture, though classed, does not reflect two neatly bounded worldviews. Instead, culture is coalitional; popular culture refers to an alliance standing against “that other alliance of classes, and strata and social forces which constitute what is not ‘the people’… the culture of the power-bloc.”

This framework underpins Hall’s most-read essay, “Encoding/Decoding,” written in 1973 and first published in 1980. Probably popular because it addresses language and semiotics more frankly than other texts, it developed a theory of communication parallel to the trajectory of Capital. Linguistic and media communication, in Hall’s terms, follows the skeleton of commodity production—of production, distribution, and production.

Here Hall introduces articulation. He argues that representation within culture is never purely denotive. Instead, articulation advances a standpoint on or about a thing, not a neutral description. Hall cautions against reading articulation as “an individualized and private matter.” Capitalism, he asserts unequivocally, constitutes the horizon for meaning—not only because codes can be warped by hegemonic ideology, but because articulations themselves have a practical dimension. They theorize the world in ways shaped by class, hegemony, and the standpoint of the people. Citing Valentin Voloshinov, Hall concludes that debates over meaning were renderings of “class struggle in language.”

This model offers a way to take the diversity of aesthetic practice seriously, not merely because the relationship between music and society seems arbitrary, but because of the many forms social expression can take. Hall argues for thinking of aesthetic practices as articulations that present particular views of the world, and maintains that those views should be understood in relation to social practice—not as private, random, subcultural designations. Capitalist production organizes that social practice.

Turning now to punk: this genre deserves special attention within this discussion. Punk was a primary example in both early pop studies and cultural studies. Dave Laing wrote as an explicit Marxist before shifting to a less political, semiotics-driven approach. Dick Hebdige applied a de-Marxed version of cultural studies to punk’s visual style. Simon Frith developed his account of music’s autonomy specifically to refute cultural studies.

Because of this history, punk studies has mirrored academia’s uneven engagement with materialism. One of its two tendencies runs toward formalism, as seen in Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces (effectively a sequel to Mystery Train)—reading punk as a farce to Elvis’s tragedy. The second tendency emphasizes punk as ethos or attitude, which renders the music’s material opaque. Steven Blush’s book New York Rock, for instance, includes a chapter titled simply “Attitude.” Punk becomes a doubled idealism: formalist without any actual form.

This helps explain why genre has been such a troubled question for punk. It seems self-evident—three-chord rock, leather jackets, awful hair, and bad attitudes—and yet actual defining features remain elusive. Even confining ourselves to 1970s New York (the period my work focuses on), punk is an odd signifier. Its history is fuzzy enough to make it hard even to define what belongs before, during, or after. Musically, too, the term resists boundaries. The Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie, and Suicide make for a strange grouping indeed.

Hall’s materialism offers a rationale. Extracting the mode-of-production question for this period is somewhat straightforward—you essentially copy from Harvey, Mandel, or others. Even Fredric Jameson, who generally stays silent on music, cited punk as the great sonic illustration of late capitalism’s new logic. But where Hall’s framework proves most valuable is in discovering punk’s multi-faceted nature as genre. It would take punk’s diversity seriously—viewing its various forms as articulations of social life under late capitalism, while also accommodating cultural history, rock’s institutionalization, its expansions, its abdication of certain social functions, and so on.

Think of Patti Smith Group’s ambitious rock reformation as a bohemian, overtly subcultural response—one content with avant-gardism at the cost of remaining peripheral. By contrast, consider Suicide’s catastrophic, deconstructed retro rock, which holds onto none of rock’s conventional hopes.

To flesh out one specific vision further: I hear the Ramones as a version of punk kitsch. They identify positively with mass culture, but a very specific segment of it—one that emphatically renounces all high-art claims. Their songs neither romanticize the Lower East Side nor celebrate the pristine vacuum cleaners and vintage Chevrolet cars that Ernst Mandel described as signature products of post-war affluence. Their chosen slice of mass culture is kitsch—comic books, slasher movies, boredom, apathy, rock-and-roll’s debased, weird, golden-oldie underbelly. Think of a song like “Chainsaw,” which essentially summarizes the plot of the 1974 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The Ramones’ relentless affection for “Surfin’ Bird” turned it into the Beethoven 9 of musical kitsch. This sensibility is reflected in musical form: their albums and concerts churn out interchangeable, plastic rock ’n’ roll that grows into an endless mountain of throwaway commodities pouring off the assembly line. The music still inhabits a world of Chevy Bel Airs, but its ‘50s models are rusting in abandoned New York City lots during the 1970s.

When heard this way, punk designates less a fixed set of stylistic criteria or an outlook than a bundle of practices trying to articulate rock’s fate, the destiny of mass culture, and the condition of capitalist social life generally. It variously expresses a hope for an endless vanguardist rock bohemia; the dread that rock endures only as a tattered, faded photocopy of its former self; and the sheer tedium of a music completely stripped of its future.

Works Cited

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Blush, Steven. 2016. New York Rock: From the Rise of The Velvet Underground to the Fall of CBGB. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

Buhler, James. 2006. “Frankfurt School Blues: Rethinking Adorno’s Critique of Jazz.” In Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth Century Music, edited by Berthold Hoeckner, 103–30. Routledge.

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Marcus, Greil. 2009. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Second Edition. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press.

Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Vol. 1. New York: Penguin Books.

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Scherzinger, Martin. 2005. “Music, Corporate Power, and Unending War.” Cultural Critique, no. 60 (Spring): 23–67.