Professor Wade Hollingshaus Shares the Significance of the Study of Popular Music in the Q&A Below
In the class entitled “Music as Performance: From ABBA to Ziggy Stardust,” offered by the Department of Theatre and Media Arts (TMA), students learn about the meaning and nuances of popular music through projects such as crocheted album covers, curating a lineup for a Kilby Block Party, performing in a Christmas concert in the Maeser building, interviewing older generations about their musical tastes and even going to concerts as a class to see musicians like Beabadoobee and Sturgill Simpson perform.
Learn more about the class and the study of popular music in the Q&A below with Theatre and Media Arts Critical Studies professor Wade Hollingshaus.
Where does the study of music as performance come from?
Hollingshaus: The class comes out of a fairly large discipline connected to theatre studies called performance studies. Everyone in a theatre-related major in our department takes an introductory performance studies class, and we look at how performance is a part of everything that we do in our daily lives. We perform our various roles as parents, siblings, friends, students, teachers, boyfriends, girlfriends. There is performance happening in church, in the way that museums are organized, in IKEA and of course at concerts and in theatre. People have stickers on their water bottles or their computers or backpacks that perform their identity.
Within the field of performance studies, there's a sub genre called music as performance. Most music studies are historically about the sound and analysis of music and lyrics. In music as performance, we look at that too, but it does not take priority — the priority is everything you miss at a concert if you close your eyes. If you're just listening to music, you're missing out on a lot of the meaning, especially in popular music because so much meaning is created through the way that people dress, the personas that they create, the way that they behave in front of cameras, music videos, the way that the venues are set up, album covers, album art . . . all of that is a performance of music.
Q: What kinds of concepts do you and students discuss in the class?
Hollingshaus: As a class, we learn about punk music and the Riot Grrrl Movement, the emergence of hip hop, B Boys and how digitalization has changed the way we interact with music. We look at lots of different areas of cultural studies such as gender, race, and class. For example, how did David Bowie in his performances raise questions about gender? What does that mean for us today? How do we see similar but different things going on in people like Chappell Roan?
We also spend a lot of time talking about authenticity. People want an alignment between who musicians really are as people and what they present on the stage as performers. That's a big part of Taylor Swift's success; people like that she is genuine about who she is, however, it's also about the performance of genuineness. Conversely, why was David Bowie, who seems to be so separate as a person from what he presents, considered so authentic in the early 1970s? He had an authentic inauthenticity, which is fascinating. So much of popular music comes out of Black musical traditions and there is a certain kind of authenticity that's attributed to that musical heritage — the idea that the more bluesy music sounds, the more authentic it is; the more soul it has, the more authentic it is.
Q: As part of the class, you and the students attend concerts of various genres throughout the semester. What have those experiences been like?
Hollingshaus: We talk a lot about the students’ own music listening practices, and how music is a part of their lives. We go to concerts together to discuss all of these principles.
Last semester we went to see four concerts. We went to the Maverik Center and saw Sturgill Simpson, who is a country music artist and a talented guitarist. His whole band are virtuosic musicians playing what I call “prog country.” At his concerts, you're not going for a show so much as you're going to really listen to them do amazing original songs inspired by blues with moments of jazz riffing. They also do covers of songs from the 80s, like Prince’s “Purple Rain” — stuff you wouldn't normally think of a country band playing.
We talked about that, and we looked at the audience. Who are the kinds of people you see in the audience? Why are they there? How is the space set up? What kind of audience interaction is happening? At Sturgill Simpson, there are a lot of young people with cowboy boots and bass fishing hats.
We also went up to the Union Events Center and saw Beabadoobee, a Filipino British pop punk musician. The audience there was mostly teenage girls, and it was more of a club atmosphere — a very different kind of audience than at Sturgis Simpson. We then went to Octubafest (BYU) which was extremely different. I try to get them to see performances of various genres so we have points of comparison and observations to talk about on the ride home.
Q: What do you think the value is in studying popular music? What are some misconceptions or critiques of popular music?
Hollingshaus: I don't understand why we don't study popular music more, because it is what most of our students engage with — it populates their world far more than classical music. We think about art as being a reflection of our world. It does reflect society, but it also constructs it. The world that we live in is being constructed in part by popular music and, perhaps more so, by the personas. So much of what's appealing about popular music is the way that people, young people especially, build their identities around it and through it.
German musicologist Theodor Adorno criticizes popular music because, he says, it is the same thing over and over again with just a little variation. Adorno is focusing only on the sounds, which is what his training is as a musicologist — he’s also a sociologist and philosopher. But if you're looking for the art of popular music in just the music, then you're missing the whole of the art because it's so much more than that. There is much that I like about Adorno’s writing about music, but with this critique in particular, I think he stopped short.
Q: What do you hope students take away from this class?
My hope is that students better understand how music constructs the world around them so they can be more thoughtfully engaged with that world. Sometimes that means being less dismissive of things that really have value for us, or maybe that means we are a little more critical of things that we would like to justify. I hope they ask questions like: “How do we think about popular music, and what are we missing? How else can we think about popular music? How can we have more critical generosity?”
“Critical generosity” is a phrase I get from some performance studies scholars that I like to apply towards those who make music — because most of them are trying to do something good in the world. Some of them are also doing some bad things in the world. Having critical generosity means that we give people the benefit of the doubt and primarily look for the good. We have to be careful to not use that as an excuse to please the “natural man”. If that's the reason that we're doing it, then we have to be careful. I believe that people who are making music often are trying to bring good into the world, so let’s start from that point and then build our critique around that.