Revelations of neoliberal capitalism’s effects on pop music, challenging its longstanding status as defying the status quo.

Traditionally, popular music has long been said to intrinsically contest, resist, and defy the powers that be. This new book challenges this long-standing orthodoxy, arguing that popular music is not so much a form of resistance to authority, but it often perpetuates the very power it is supposed to be raging against: neoliberal capitalism.

This misconception of popular music came to dominance in the mid-1980s and persists today, even when the vast majority of people have been disempowered, impoverished, and marginalized at home, at work, and in politics. This book explains why such a robust, pervasive, and persistent set of ideas about popular music has taken such a tenacious hold despite substantive evidence to the contrary.
 

Charles Fairchild is associate professor of popular music at the University of Sydney and the author of Musician in the Museum: Display and Power in Neoliberal Popular Culture, Sounds, Screens, and Speakers, Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, and Music, Radio and the Public Sphere.

Preface: The Conundrum of Neoliberal Pop

1. The Ideology of Greatness in Popular Music

2. The Conspiracy Theory Version of (Pop) History

3. Manufacturing Aesthetic Consent

4. Decades of Defiant, Authentic Musicians in Print

5. Decades of Defiant, Authentic Musicians on Screen

6. Progressive Neoliberalism and the Rentier Pop Star

7. Poptimism as an Ideal for Living

Conclusion: The Reproduction of Capitalism in the Arena of Popular Music