MUSIC AND POSTMODERNISM Crossover pop

Postmodernism celebrates the end of what the French philosopher Jean François LYOTARD calls the 'grand narratives' of history - reason, progress and socialism – and the dissolving of semiotics into a merely libidinal 'energetics'. Nothing is fixed any more, and ideology is in a war of position, a struggle for space. 'Totalization in any human endeavour is potentially totalitarian' (Ibn Hassan, 1977). In fact, as Neil POSTMAN says, we are more likley to destroy ourselves with the unlimited pleasures of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than the totalitarian state of George Orwell's 1984.

Postmodernist philosophers like Jean BAUDRILLARD emphasise how the barriers between art, literature and a wider political and social life are now non-existent. Sting and Bob Geldof (both, significantly, ageing male rock stars) become authorities on the environment and development economics). High school kids in America know more of the cultural life of their country (TV, films, and above all the `information superhighway') than college professors. The alienation and 'high tech' emphasis of modernism have given way to a flamboyant celebration of the power centres of modern life, particularly in industry and finance. It was first noticed in architecture, especially in the work of the American Philip Johnson, who put sloping roofs and columns on skyscrapers.

Features

1. A new attitude to interpretation, rejecting the idea that art contains a meaning that can be decoded by the diligent. It is no longer possible to operate notions of musical value since different musical structures articulate different forms of meaning.
2. Pick 'n' Mix culture: the past, or distant and exotic cultures, are a) detached from their environment and b) used selectively to anchor the chaotic images of modern European and American life (Elvis Presley's 'It's Now or Never/O Sole Mio'; Gregorian chants in the Top Ten).
3. The blurring of image and reality: to what extent does television 'create' personalities like the US President or events like the Gulf War?
4. Intertexts: The preference for parody, nostalgia, kitsch and pastiche over realism (Abba's reggae; sampling ).
5. The dominance of surface over depth.
6. No strong sense of history or the future. Alienation is abolished by saying, 'Utopia is now' as in raves or stadium rock concerts. Even a critic of postmodernism like Hans Magnus Enzensburger has observed, 'consumption as spectacle is – in parody form – the anticipation of a utopian situation' (1974).
7. A new status for art culture. Art does not represent or reflect reality: it is reality. Like the characters in a soap opera, pop stars can seem more 'real' than our own friends.

Patrick Brantlinger: Postmodernism can just as easily be stripped of its avantgarde appearance to reveal a position according to which the 'society of the spectacle' produced by 'late capitalism' seems right and inevitable. . . It becomes indistinguishable from behaviourism, a functional positivism that, no matter how radical it sounds, involves an implicit affirmation of the status quo.

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