Pearl Jam Vs. the Culture Industry: Avant-Garde Struggles in Popular Music

New York University

Graduate School of Arts and Science

Draper Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities and Social Though

Art Worlds

"Five Against One "

Pearl Jam vs. the Culture Industry: Avant-garde Struggles in Popular Music

[Case Study]

By: Yael Korat

Due: 10/27/05

PEARL JAM VS. THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: AVANT-GARDE STRUGGLES IN POPULAR MUSIC

INTRODUCTION

"Anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in. Once his particular brand of deviation from the norm has noted by the industry, he belongs to it as does the land-reformer to capitalism. [...] In the public voice of modern society accusations are seldom audible; if they are, the perceptive can already detect signs that the dissident will soon be reconciled."

-- Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" p.9

'If you don't operate in that framework, which we don't, it's obvious that you won't sell as many records. And that's fine. We expected this to happen much sooner than it has.'

-- Pearl Jam's frontman, Eddie Vedder said to Rolling Stone's Cameron Crowe in "Five Against the World" 1993

In "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" (1944), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer describe the "culture industry" as a system of cultural production that manipulates the audience, and perpetuates capitalistic power relations by distracting the public with a bombardment of false fantasies, illusions of escape from their everyday lives to a capitalistic paradise. Art works, say these members of the Frankfurt School, have become shallow commodities which are no longer able to express ideas, and thus lose their significance. Repetition, cliché, effects, and unifying harmony and style ("the negation of style" p.7), are the main mechanism of the culture industry to "[diminish] the tension between the finished product and everyday life" (6). Only by expressing the discrepancy, never harmony and unity, between form and content, within and without, individual and society, can art enable us to "transcend reality" "express suffering" and "create truths by lending new shape to conventional social forms" (8). This is impossible in the world dominated by the culture industry. The formula, and prearranged harmony in works of art, like Hollywood films, are "a mockery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works of art" (5). The unity of style [...expresses the] structure of social power, and not the obscure experience of the oppressed in which the general is enclosed" (7).

Today, in a world satiated with the incessant barraging of cultural products as commodities, shaped by the taste and need of monopolizing corporations as well as the pornographic, fetishistic demand of the 'public' for escapist fantasies and deceiving promises of capitalistic bliss, Adorno and Horkheimer seem to be as relevant as ever. But is that all there is to it? Is there no refuge, no protest, no change, no meaning but the repetitious all-encompassing "sameness" reproduced by the "huge economic machinery" which governs our mind and souls? I beg to disagree. This macroscopic view fails to acknowledge dissidents within the system who call for its upheaval and actually promote change or at least raise resistance and awareness to the walls of our "iron cage". Even Marx's idea of revolution was that it will come from within the system, using the system's own mechanism for spreading Marxist ideas and protest, which will unite the proletariat and bring the revolution. The mere fact that before capitalism there was no capitalism, calls to the possibility of change of system, and who can predict where this change, or changes will come from? If indeed we are all slaves to the capitalistic machinery, any change, if any, will come from within this system.

This paper intends to explore one example of a cultural phenomenon of resistance to the system, within the art world of popular music, in order to present significant struggles of avant-garde artists within the culture industry. Fighting from within the system, the avant-garde of popular culture has many dragons to slay and many battles to lose. Pearl Jam, a popular rock band since the nineties, serves as a clear example for various struggles within the industry since they explicitly countered the ideology of the culture industry in most of their career moves as well as in their artistic content. Specifically, this paper argues that by resisting multiple conventions of the cultural industry and constraints of large-scale production, Pearl Jam expose the economic struggles in the production of contemporary popular music while they critique it, and encourage political activism and awareness, offering a coherent and salient avant-garde, which acts as an alternative model of subversion to the world of popular music. While winning many battles, and losing just as many, they nonetheless succeed in their promotion of awareness, of audience and critics, to major oppressing constraints of popular music and the culture industry, and to major social and political issues of our time, while at the same time embodying a model for imitation for other artists and members of the audience, insisting that there is another way, and there are those willing to fight for it.

While using criticism of the Frankfurt School as an inspirational drive, I will analyze Pearl Jam's career throughout various struggles with the culture industry, by application of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of cultural production (1993) as well as Howard Becker's theory of art worlds (1982) . Both these theoreticians offer methods which allow for wider cultural context, beyond the field of economics, and enable an investigation of the particular details and actual proceedings of the field. I will rely on newspaper articles, biographies, and my own knowledge of the field with which I have been acquainted for more then ten years. For the sake of reflexivity, the reader should note that I am personally biased since I am a fan of the band, nevertheless, I have attempted

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