Commodity Fetish

I was reading a book by Simon Frith and Howard Horne called Art into Pop, about the influence of art school musicians on British pop music.  It's an interesting book, often insightful, but a bit bland in its conclusions.  They seem to accept that we are living in a postmodern age where boundaries and distinctions blur, etc., but they don't seem keen on the idea.  Where they get confused, I think, is in trying to carve out a position between the Culture Industry approach to thinking about pop music, and the celebratory approach.  They characterize Jameson as a "pessimist" about postmodernism, but most of the commentators they quote as more or less Marxist critics of pomo seem right on to me, and even seem to provide Frith and Horne with their most solid arguments.  On the other hand, you have someone like John "MTV Orgasm" Fiske, who they rightly slam as having written the silliest article ever on MTV.  I think that they accept many of the Marxist positions, but the trouble is, they're intelligent, thoughtful, even (perhaps) class-conscious individuals who nevertheless like pop music even though it is fundamentally not just co-opted by capital, but part and parcel.  So they restrict themselves to a very narrow argument, that the art school influence has inculcated a desire to be the Artist in the Romantic sense, and that this explains punk (which it largely does) and many other musical movements, including the seeming acceptance of the money angle by many late 80s bands, and if it all leads back to capitalism then it just goes to show how art has always been a market anyway, and it doesn't prevent people from expressing themselves by consuming.  Whereas for me, I think that the “pessimists” are largely right, except that they seem to know very little about pop culture.  But since I agree with the overall points, I'm encouraged to rethink my engagement with pop culture even if I'm not going to abandon it.  It's a common Marxist point that when we buy something, say a cd, we aren't simply satisfying a direct use value (to listen to music) but seeking to fulfill a more abstract one, like the need to change one’s life or to appear in a different way.  That doesn't make me solely a dupe, but I allow myself to be duped for complicated reasons.  What I'm trying to say inarticulately is that one needn't stand above pop culture (Adorno) to critique it, that I'm most interested in critiquing pop culture in an attempt to understand myself.