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The Selling Sound

其他書名	Country Music, Commercialism, and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1920-1974
出版	Indiana University, 2002
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=4lUeAQAAMAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋Analyses of popular culture have tended to treat the relationship between culture industries and their audiences in one of two ways. Frankfurt School critics present an image of the audience as passive dupes of a manipulative commercial system concerned only with profits. More recent cultural studies theorists have proposed instead that consumers of commercial popular culture are powerful agents who turn ideologically hostile texts to their own ends. Neither approach adequately addresses consumers' own perceptions of their relationship to culture industries or the possible cultural meanings of commercial institutions themselves. This study examines the institutional development of one popular culture industry, the country music business, and the ways audiences responded to that development. Using letters to radio stations and magazines as well as portrayals of country music in the mainstream press, it emphasizes the meanings that listeners and cultural critics attached to the business of country music, rather than focusing on interaction with specific stars or songs. Trade papers, oral histories, and professional association records allow for a reconstruction of the concerns of country professionals as they worked to carve out institutional space within the larger music industry and establish their own respectability. Evidence yielded by these materials suggests that commercialism is a complex cultural text, the meanings and rhetorical uses of which have changed over time. The narrative begins in the 1920s, when changes in technology and the economics of popular music made it rural vernacular music a commercial product. Three chapters explore the development of the country music business from a disconnected series of radio barn dances and live performance circuits to a centralized system of national production located in Nashville and represented by the Country Music Association. Alternating with these are three chapters that outline audience and critical responses to the changing commercial structures that delivered country music. The commercialism of country music became a defining feature of the genre for social scientists, folk preservationists, politicians, and country listeners as well as for professionals in the country business.