How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Mainstream?: Charting the Musical Middle

Mainstream is a word we use without much questioning, and notions of mainstream music can be particularly fraught. Mainstream music is too safe, too apolitical, too pop sounding, too middle class or too working class, too white. The problem, as the field-defining scholar Simon Frith points out (echoing Marcel Proust), is that the songs we are most ready to dismiss intellectually connect us emotionally—they are the ones we sing together.¹

American music has long been rich in mainstreams. The show business variant, evolved from vaudeville and Broadway, gave us pop, a quickening of popular. But there were black and southern white mainstreams too by the 1920s, as first noted by Philip Ennis. Ennis, hired young onto an early 1950s BMI Music Publishing study of radio DJs meant to refute charges of commercial manipulation, was already an emeritus sociology professor when he published his one solo work of music scholarship, The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music (1992). The book placed the three streams of commercial pop against three smaller streams connected to authenticity and musical genre: gospel, jazz, and folk. Its opening half remains the best attempt to capture the multiple formulations of sound, identity, and capitalism that rock and roll drew on. This may be because Ennis, who disparaged rock and roll in its heyday, felt no investment in his streams or in debates between pop and less overtly commercial styles. Flows were flows.

Perhaps this era’s distance from the late 1960s to early 1970s peak of countercultural insurgence gives us a renewed fondness for the work started by Ennis, for seeing the worth of those who are included in pop mainstreams as much as those who lampoon them. Climbing charts and social mobility are kissing cousins. When Bruno Mars—of complicated ethnicity, interwoven genre affiliations, and a background as a child Elvis impersonator—performs his “Billionaire,” one should draw conclusions carefully, especially as the...