The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture by Timothy D. Taylor (review)

Although music has been indispensable to modern advertising since the early broadcast era, exactly how music was incorporated into Madison Avenue's bag of tricks has, curiously, escaped the attention of historians. Musicologist Timothy Taylor's The Sounds of Capitalism thus provides a major contribution to the study of American marketing, media, music, and consumer culture. Taylor's account chronicles music's place in advertising between the 1920s and 2000s, with an emphasis on the development of the jingle and the increasingly blurred line separating ad music from pop music. The book is supplemented by a website where readers can access more than eighty audio and video clips. Although Taylor discusses a number of developments in recording technology, his overwhelming interest is in the shifting genres and uses of music in advertising. Blending a culture-industry approach with Pierre Bourdieu's work on cultural hierarchy, The Sounds of Capitalism is particularly strong in its analysis of advertising music as an industrialized form of expression that nevertheless became an important vehicle for cultural capital. Taylor ultimately contends that advertising's appropriation of the "cool" via music exemplifies the near totemic role that creativity, as a "calling," has come to play in the work cultures of postindustrial capitalism.

Taylor's account begins with the development of sponsored radio programs in the 1920s, when prevailing wisdom called for music to aurally index a product's qualities; thus the plink of Harry Reser's banjo conveyed the crisp taste of Clicquot Club ginger ale. By the 1930s, ad agencies recognized that musical genres could provide a cornerstone around which to build programs that might draw different types of audiences. The Sounds of Capitalism hits its stride when Taylor moves into the jingle era. A product of Great Depression advertising's turn toward the carnivalesque, the jingle first attracted widespread attention in 1939 with "Pepsi Cola Hits the Spot." Following on its heels were equally popular ditties that gave rise to a whole industry that, like the song factories described in David Suisman's Selling Sounds, operated according to highly standardized formulas and production routines. The jingle era reached its heights between the 1950s and '70s, when the chirpy and churned-out sounds of the "Madison Avenue Choir" filled the airwaves. Yet, by then, the choir's stylings, modeled as they were on the Broadway musical of the 1950s, sounded increasingly dated; more important, however, was that for a baby-boomer generation that equated music with authenticity, jingles sounded canned and phony.

As jingles faded away, what came to replace them were sounds that more closely mimicked young people's music. Here, Taylor builds on Thomas Frank's "conquest of cool" thesis to reveal another facet of Madison Avenue's growing infatuation with the hip and youthful as selling ideals. Expressed through soft-rock sounds like Coca-Cola's "Hilltop" song, music was key to appropriating countercultural sentiments in the wake of advertising's Creative Revolution. Throughout the era, advertisers regularly enlisted the talents of popular rock, soul, and country acts. By the 1980s, this hybrid of the popular and commercial, orchestrated by the baby boomers who were now running ad agencies, resulted in driving rock anthems and nostalgic oldies thought to pack an emotional wallop. For Taylor, the 1980s were a pivotal decade because MTV introduced advertisers to a new, music-driven visual grammar of quick cuts and moody imagery. Meanwhile, a nascent neoliberalism ushered in the mega-endorsement deals struck between pop stars and corporate sponsors.

Perhaps most important, however, advertisers became interested in music that sounded not only youthful, but rebellious. The first foray into this territory was Nike's licensing of the Beatles'"Revolution." Taken as sacrilege in 1987, such licensing of anti-establishment and alternative music was common by century's end. Indeed, by that point, some observers were calling advertising the new tastemakers in music, as yet another generation shift...