Democratising the popular: the case of pop music in France and Britain

Abstract

The article represents the second phase of a comparative project on French and British cultural policy. The project's guiding hypothesis is that conceptualisations of the popular have been a crucial driver of policy change in France and Britain, raising complex issues about the nature of cultural democracy. The second phase, including this article, takes pop music as a case study for that hypothesis. The article explores three major issues. It asks how and why, in their attempts to rethink cultural democracy for the twenty-first century, French and British policy agencies have recognised pop music as a ‘democratic' form worthy of state support. It critically examines some of the theoretical issues this has raised, comparing and contrasting the ways in which the two national policy sets have variously represented pop as having symbolic, economic and social meanings. And it argues that what has been less adequately addressed is its aesthetic meaning.

Keywords:

• pop music
• cultural democracy
• France and the UK

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Professor Martin Cloonan, University of Glasgow, for his bibliographical assistance and to Catherine Bunting, Thierry Danet and Felicity Harvest for their willingness to be interviewed.

Notes

1. To avoid arcane discussions of terminology here, I use the term ‘pop (music)’ to mean all forms of broadly speaking youth-oriented music that have emerged in one form or another from mid-1950s rock and roll. I use ‘popular music’ in the more comprehensive sense, including jazz, big-band, variety, and so on.

2. The significant cultural differences in the two countries’ approaches to a cultural policy for popular music are nicely illustrated in the contrasting methodologies adopted in two chapters on the subject in Dauncey and Le Guern (2011), Chapter 4 (Martin Cloonan on the UK) and Chapter 5 (Philippe Teillet on France).

3. The Arts Council of Great Britain was broken up in 1994 into four regional/national entities. My references to it after this date imply the biggest of these, (the) Arts Council (of) England.

4. The term ‘Chevalier’ here does not carry anywhere near the same social importance as ‘Knight’ in English.

5. It is true that, as Cloonan (2007, p. 52) intimates, France for a short while considered effectively legalising file sharing but this caused a considerable storm and was abandoned.

6. I take the following analysis of Born and Teillet from my book: Looseley (2003), Chapter 9 and Conclusion.

7. I am indebted for this point to Dr Isabelle Marc Martinez, Complutense University, Madrid.