Music, Metamorphosis and Capitalism

The essays in this volume look at various kinds of music from a number of perspectives, including the socio-political, the aesthetic and the psychological. The music under discussion here is diverse but fits loosely into the categories rock-pop, new music, rap, metal and music video, with the caveat that much of the music discussed here is historically layered and engages self-consciously in the deconstruction of music genres. If there is an interpretative theme that links these essays, it is that of the cultural embeddedness of music. At the same time, and this is perhaps the single most important challenge taken up in these essays, this variable cultural studies approach embraces fully the aesthetic dimension of music, construing it as that which resists and articulates the signifying function of symbolic systems of meaning. Music is seen here as the kind of social critique that traces out its own phenomenological and structural pathways in such a way that, in the end, it is critical hermeneutic theory itself that comes under scrutiny. By way of reference (and perhaps indebtedness), the non-signifying property of music discussed variably in this volume is the same as that which was brought into relief in the terminologically contradictory title of Theodor Adorno’s masterwork, Aesthetic Theory.