In the years between 1910 and 1930 there occurred a number of changes in the forms of popular music enjoyed in Britain, in the ways this music was produced and disseminated, and in its use for pleasure and profit. In this article I am concerned with mapping together themes which have hitherto been investigated in isolation; I focus on the relation of musical forms to their users, bandleaders, musicians, dancers, ‘jazz fans’, record companies, etc., rather than on any single aspect of popular music. I investigate the way in which the importation of new forms of music and dance from the USA, the social disruptions of the First World War and the more general trends in British society and its economy coalesce to re-orientate musical pleasures during the 1920s. I begin by examining changes in music and dance immediately before and during the First World War.

The relationship between the black and white elements in the popular music of this century has been intimate and persistent. However, the nature of this relationship has varied from period to period and been mediated by the economic and institutional context in which it has occurred. The ‘free flow’ of musical ideas between black and white has been directed and regulated by numerous distinctly unmusical factors — principally the racist ideologies and practies within which musicians, despite their individual proclivities, have lived and worked.

Common sense tells us that sound recording — that is, records and cassettes - is a mass medium just newspapers, films or television. In industrialised countries, listening to records is just as much part of everyday life as reading the newspaper or listening to the radio. A Swedish survey made in 1976 (Anon. 1979, pp. 85–8) indicates that, on average, Swedish adults spent thirty-five minutes daily reading newspapers, thirty-three minutes listening to records or cassettes and one minute watching films. Watching films on television was not included, but neither was listening to records on the radio.

One would expect to find a variety of views about a phenomenon which a minority of the 2.3 million inhabitants of Wales (around 500,000 people) value highly, but which a majority literally cannot understand. The role that the Welsh language should play is a controversial subject both within and outside those circles where it is spoken. Wales is one of the countries where the Celtic language has survived as a living language (the other Celtic areas are: Ireland and Scotland, where some Gaelic is spoken; Cornwall in southern England, where the language is dead; Britanny, in northern France, where Celtic just about lingers on). In the immediate post-World War II period, Welsh, it was predicted by many, would die out, with the language only surviving for a few decades in remote areas of North Wales. However, provisions in the 1944 Education Act were responsible for the beginnings of a movement in the reverse direction, and by the sixties, there was a revival of the language, mainly thanks to the activities of an ethnically orientated nationalist movement organised partly through a political party, Plaid Cymru, and partly through the Welsh Language Society, Cymdeithas Yr Iaith Gymraeg (see Williams 1977; Williams 1982, pp. 145–202; the chapter on Wales in Stephens 1976).

The record and tape sales figures of the Japanese record industry have exceeded those of the industries of all other capitalist nations, except the USA, since the mid-seventies. In 1980, Japan's share amounted to 13.9 per cent of all sales in the capitalist sphere according to surveys by Billboard. The USA had 35.8 per cent, West Germany 11.6 per cent, the UK 11.6 per cent and France 7.3 per cent (Kawabata 1977, p. 22; 1982, pp. 91, 199). The output of foreign records, recorded and pressed by Japanese companies, to foreign records, pressed by Japanese companies from masters recorded by foreign companies primarily for their own consumers, has been about three to two. A good many of these foreign records are of American and European popular music, and in this field one can perceive a new and interesting tendency to promote and succeed with artists who are or were less successful in their own country. The tendency, whose background I am going to discuss here, started in the mid-seventies; one of the early examples is provided by Kiss, a New York group, which was shrewdly promoted and achieved wide popularity in Japan before succeeding nationwide in America.

‘I think that no one really wants pop music to become art because it is enough as entertainment, and if it were just a bit better, one could not look at it with an indulgent smile…’ In this bitter way János Bródy, a member of the once legendary beat group, Illés, formulated his opinion about the institutions responsible for the production, function, reception and, last but not least, the quality of pop (rock, beat) music, that is to say, the music of the young in Hungary. Whether rock or pop can be regarded as art at all or whether it is by nature an inferior genre is a question beyond the scope of this article. I am concerned here with some of the basic functional principles of the institutions of pop life and their impact on the music itself in this country in the past fifteen to twenty years. I would like to discuss these problems in terms of autonomy and self-expression rather than in terms of claimed aesthetic values, since I find the former a basic condition of producing values in this type of music.t This belief is supported by a close look at the history of Hungarian pop: it seems that under favourable social and political conditions, that is, in a period of social and cultural dynamism, characterised by an open, tolerant or relatively supportive media policy, pop music can produce (as it obviously did in the second half of the sixties) artistic values too, and give authentic expression to the aspirations, attitudes and ethos of a very large segment of the young population.

Given the existing capitalist determinants on the structure of the popular music industry, the record companies, because of their economic importance, not only represent one moment in a system where the music moves from artist to audience, but also generate both the artist, as producer for the industry, and the audience, as consumer for the industry's products — and both as living facets of an ideology best described as Romantic. Romanticism, whilst lived as being in opposition to capitalist concerns founded on rationality and standardisation, in fact supports capitalism by providing both an enabling rationale for invention and a sustaining emphasis on the individual which allows cultural products to be viewed as something other than simply more commodities. The Otherness of culture in capitalist society may be viewed as the manifestation of the necessary but repressed ‘irrational’ qualities which bring into existence and sustain the rational, ordered structure of capitalist practice. In the record business, both the rational aspects of capitalism and the Romanticism of its Other are highlighted by virtue of the highly developed capitalist nature of the culture industry.

At the heart of the frenetic activity of the record industry and of all the conflicting opinion to which this activity gives rise, lies a common goal: popular success. This also provides the key to the paradoxes one encounters when one studies the economic aspects of the record industry in France.†What does the achievement of success involve in actual fact? Economic, sociological and musicological analyses tend to evade this issue rather than explain it. Can the ability to achieve success be attributed to a more or less innate sixth sense? Does it reside in the superiority of the smaller producers over the larger ones? Is success achieved through bribery, through massive ‘plugging’, through a dulling of the senses or through conformism, as the ritual claims of the press would have it? Is it a by-product of profit, of standardisation, of alienation or of the prevailing ideology, as marxists argue? The sociology of mass media and culture explains it in an equally wide variety of ways – in terms of manipulation (see Adorno 1941), the meaninglessness of mass culture (see Ellul 1980, Hoggart 1957)/ symbolic exclusion (see Bourdieu 1979), the system of fashion (see Barthes 1967), desocialised ritual (see Baudrillard 1970), or as the cunning strategies of the dominated (see de Certeau 1974). I do not propose casually to invoke all the different theories only to dismiss them with moralistic claims that we must return to the basic facts.

Jimi Hendrix once claimed ‘I'm working on music to be completely, utterly a magic science’ (Henderson 1981, p. 337). It is a description that fits not just the best of Hendrix's own music, but the best of all that late twentieth-century music in which the ability to capture and control sounds (on tape or disc) has become a means of extending old musical forms and traditions, and establishing new possibilities for them. Throughout his career, Hendrix drew nourishment from his musical roots in black traditions, but it was not until the summer of 1967 that he plugged himself fully into the new possibilities opened up by the technology of sound recording. Hendrix had already proved himself something of a musical ‘magician’ in the ancient sense in that he attempted, through music, to mediate between order and disorder, using his guitar as an expressive extension of himself to flirt with the danger and power of musical disintegration (for the parallel with non-Western musical practice see Shepherd 1977, p. 72; Mellers 1973, pp. 24–6; Clarke 1982, pp. 227–9).

Popular music, like all manifestations of popular culture, lives on in spite of recurring criticisms that cast it as somehow inauthentic. In fact, defences against this discounting are built into popular music (for example, the Rolling Stones' classic: ‘It's only rock 'n' roll but I like it’) and built in, as well, to the identities of those who make the music a part of their lives, be they players, producers, consumers or critics. On the other hand, so-called classical music, not unlike other manifestations of Western European art culture, lives on in spite of popular music and provides the touchstone of authenticity that creates the defensive popular response. The ideas I am advancing here are intended to allow the players in this authenticity contest to be recognised as evidence of unique historical circumstances: recognised, that is, not only as stock dramatists of ethnocentrism, but as indicators of long-term changes in music cultures in all parts of the world.

Repetition, as a component of musical structure in popular songs, has long played an important part in ‘popular common-sense’ definitions, and criticisms, of the music. ‘It's monotonous’; ‘it's all the same’; ‘it's predictable’: such reactions have probably filtered down from the discussions of mass culture theorists. From this point of view, repetition (within a song) can be assimilated to the same category as what Adorno termed standardisation (as between songs). Of course, the significance of the role played by such techniques in the operations of the music industry – their efficacy in helping to define and hold markets, to channel types of consumption, to pre-form response and to make listening easy – can hardly be denied; it is, however, equally difficult to reduce the function of repetition simply to an analysis of the ‘political economy’ of popular music production and its ideological effects. Despite Adorno's critical assault (see Adorno 1941), despite later twists to the theory by, for instance, Fredric Jameson (1981), who argues that rather than being a negative quality of mass culture, repetition is simply a fundamental characteristic of all cultural production under contemporary capitalism, the question of repetition refuses to go away. Why do listeners find interest and pleasure in hearing the same thing over again? To be able to answer this question, which has troubled not only mass cultural theory but also traditional philosophical aesthetics, as well as more recent approaches such as psychoanalysis and information theory, would tell us more about the nature of popular music, and hence, mutatis mutandis, about music in general, than almost anything else. We must start by locating repetition within an overall theory of musical syntax.