Sound Strategies: Music as Ideological Apparatus

Applying the tools of critical theory, the book does not treat music as a series of case studies that test out theoretical concepts, but rather asks how the particular artistic practice that is the kind of music made by bands might be seen through the lens of political and philosophical writing, and how in turn such practice might illuminate ideas of this sort. We are interested not only in how music is made, but also in how art more broadly, as a kind of liminal space that always has as its horizon an outside to labour, nevertheless mimics the organisation of work in society in general. Labour is an explicit concern for many of the bands surveyed, but the book also asks how specific work conditions delimit what is possible in artistic expression and how these limits become aesthetic parameters.

The book’s fulcrum is the 1990s as a point of rupture, a time when “a culture of margins collapsed around a centre” and the music that we considered subcultural or alternative lost its oppositional status, submerged in a new pluralism. It opens with an account of transgression as a recurrent theme in industrial music that has been embraced by the right as a bulwark against politically correct censorship. Concentrating on Throbbing Gristle, we consider the function of extreme noise and violent imagery in the band’s efforts to reassert the real in the face of mediated culture. But if transgression is foreclosed to us as a strategy today, there may yet be others to excavate within the project of industrial music. By looking at Lukács’ articulation of critical realism, we suggest that it is actually in their less obviously transgressive moments that Throbbing Gristle’s music most successfully captures the reality of the industrial decay from which they emerged, the horror of the everyday rather than the horror of the forbidden.

The second chapter surveys minimal synth cover versions of rock ‘n’ roll classics, centring on The Flying Lizards. Like the minimalist art of the period, this music represents a modular understanding of commodities as comprised of units to be modified and rearranged at will. Rejecting modernist tropes of originality and invention, they used new technical capacities not to efface the role of the musician or singer as author or performer, but to foreground the construction of these figures.

Our third chapter is devoted to Manic Street Preachers’ project of media infiltration as counter-hegemonic strategy. Exploring Gramsci’s ideas about the barriers to the emergence of a working-class organic intellectual, we consider the band’s work in terms of its educational function.

Living Marxism, a Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) publication notorious for its contrarian takes on the British left was hugely influential for both the Manics and Stereolab, who are the focus of our fourth chapter. Here, we track RCP’s evolution from Trostkyist fringe to the heart of the tory establishment as a corollary to the musical transformation of Stereolab from Marxist indie band McCarthy to retro-futurist mutant lounge combo. We by no means claim that Stereolab took the same kind of reactionary turn. But their abandonment of straightforwardly anti-tory guitar music for an increasingly ambivalent quasi-Marxist dreampop made of ambient loops and burbling analogue synthesisers sits within the same post-political moment of cold war certainties being re-evaluated. Considered from the vantage point of an accelerationist response to an unfettered capitalism, both Stereolab and the RCP push the idea of progress to its limit. Their conclusions ultimately differ significantly, and yet identifying the continuities underpinning them may be useful in reformulating an idea of what the left might look (and sound) like today, or at least locate the points of tension that currently seem to be hindering this very necessary regrouping.

Using Chicks on Speed’s “We Don’t Play Guitars” as our starting point, our fifth chapter discusses the performance of gender, framed by a consideration of why there have been no great women guitarists (to paraphrase Linda Nochlin). To answer this, we examine the circumstances under which such performances take place and their relationship to the conditions of labour that underpin the production of music in the context of electroclash.

Our juxtaposition of Laibach and Britpop in the next chapter looks at several theorisations of nationalism and ideology, from Benedict Anderson to Louis Althusser, we propose that popular music is part of a wide constellation of cultural commodities that constructs identification with the nation as a form of fiction that constantly fluctuates between the sublime and the mundane.

Our final chapter examines post-imperial Britain from without. Using a detailed analysis of Israeli band Mashina’s appropriation of the music of Madness, we explore the consequences of an internalised orientalist view of the middle east. At the same time that Britain was trying to come to terms with its multiculturalism and xenophobia, 1980s Israel was rapidly moving towards market capitalism and caught in a bloody military conflict in Lebanon. Rejecting Adorno’s dismissal of popular music as mere market ideology, we argue that duplication and circulation of ideas inherent in the medium can actually be used as critical tools.

Throughout, we argue that these bands have used specific methods from which we can learn, not just as regards music production, but also conceptually, in terms of how cultural artefacts perform politics in different ways. The arguments that we make throughout the book about particular bands and movements all concern the relationship between music and ideology and consider music as a cultural strategy for producing new subjectivities. Sound Strategies therefore proposes new ways of listening to, thinking about and perhaps even making music as an artistic and political strategy.