Sarah Politz: On Timothy Taylor, “Music and Neoliberal Capitalism”

[Ed: This post reviews a talk by Timothy Taylor given as part of the Barwick Colloquium Series, presented by Harvard’s Music Department. Although not officially part of the “Hearing Modernity” series, the talk echoed many relevant issues.]

Timothy Taylor: “Music and Neoliberal Capitalism”

Barwick Colloquium Series

September 23, 2013

By Sarah Politz

Drawing on the introduction of his recent book, The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture (2012), Timothy Taylor outlined his case for the dramatic changes he sees to have taken place over the past few decades at the intersection of neoliberal capitalism and cultural industries. For Taylor, these changes have been marked by practices like outsourcing and increased technological efficiency, and a new vocabulary drawn from manufacturing that emphasizes “risk management,” “short-term profit,” and “package deals.” Taylor asks that we break out of economically rigid theories and pay more attention to culture and cultural industries – particularly as industries involved in processes of production, distribution, and consumption.

The work done in culture industries is particularly apparent in a practice like branding, which creates associations of memory and loyalty for a product, whether that product is an individual, a country, or a soft drink. In fact, brand has in some cases come to stand in for sound, genre, and style as a marker of desirability. The world music industry, Taylor notes, functions as a kind of “brand warehouse” in which producers and consumers “put their Others in small boxes.”

Taylor also notes a change in how elite status is marked by music consumption under today’s capitalism. The kind of knowledge that is valued under this system comes from omnivorous consumption practices. This elite status comes from having the world’s offerings at one’s fingertips; privilege is the power to choose. “Knowledge of trends” marks this new elite status rather than the “knowledge of works” that characterizes connoisseurship in the fine arts. Consumption has long been a part of identity formation, as any teenager knows, but now the practice has been codified to the point of defining a new global identity. Taylor describes this “global self” as highly “imperial,” “presumptuous,” infinitely comfortable with its own authorship and right to make eclectic choices, encompassing “all experiences, all definitions,” and possessing the psychological wherewithal to maintain these many coexisting identities without worrying about their contradictions. One can hear Walt Whitman’s self-song on replay: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.” This global self sounds familiar. Perhaps we know it by many names.

The question was raised at the end of Taylor’s talk as to whether capitalism has actually changed through its encounter with neoliberal practices, or whether the forces present in capitalism have merely intensified with the effects of technology. It can be difficult to define what exactly is meant by a practice becoming “institutionalized” or “codified” in the structures of culture industries. Perhaps these changes are only (or first?) observable at the level of ethnographic engagement and individual experience. Taylor draws a great deal on information from interviews with musicians and industry people, and it seems that this is the background that informs his perspective more than anything else. In this way, his portrait of cultural practices under “today’s capitalism” is as presentist as could be, and may be able to access the mechanisms and processes of production in a way that the analysis of cultural products alone can miss.