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Introduction
- Ohio University Press
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There is no simon-pure thing —Countee Cullen This book studies the many literary and journalistic representations of Britain’s first indigenous and fully capitalized mass culture form, the music hall.1 The London music hall reached its commercial zenith roughly between and . A miscellaneous revue of art and amusements, a night of music hall could feature song, dance, comic routine, acrobats, and animal acts. As the music hall grew from roots in local, raucous pub sing-alongs into a large-scale capitalized venture, it welcomed more styles of entertainment, as well as a large paying segment of the nation itself.2 The London music hall provides the central focus of my book, since the many descriptions of these halls by the London intelligentsia serve as the core texts for Introduction You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. this study.3 My work addresses the discourse produced by the metropolitan intelligentsia at the moment when the music hall reached its commercial peak. I argue that this discourse provides a pioneering example of a now familiar story about the inevitable loss of cultural possibilities. Late-Victorian literary intellectuals like Max Beerbohm and Elizabeth Robins Pennell framed a narrative of cultural rise and decline using their experience of the music hall. As they understood it, culture forms emerge with an appealing vigor, vitality, and charisma. Popular entertainment stands in some honest, responsive, and authentic relation to its patrons. Inevitably, the bloom leaves the rose; entertainment becomes commercialized, co-opted, appropriated, and vitiated. Popular, working-class, or otherwise marginal expressive forms gain momentum, marshal force, and become transformed utterly in the process. Sharp edges are sanded down; tart humor and song are run through the propriety mill. Energy gets channeled and the improper made acceptable by salaried tastemakers. The commercial success of the form spells its predetermined failure as genuine vernacular expression. So the argument goes, in the accounts of the music hall provided by the London intelligentsia. These critics had a point. The most successful arts remain those which circulate with the greatest ease, and which require the least elaboration or translation for the public. The details that give savor and piquancy to an art form can become lost in the effort to draw larger crowds. Expressive modes that bond small, intimate audiences lose their puissance; they get harnessed to the profit drive, the infamous bottom line. Crowds march in, and local knowledge is lost in the accompanying shuffle. Like all cultural forms in the marketplace, the music hall was enlisted by larger social forces, and its initial significance was refined and redefined. Nevertheless, I demonstrate that the inevitable mediation and abstraction that accompany the commercial success of formerly marginal cultural forms still permit opportunity for constructive social change. I provide close analysis of several kinds of music-hall accounts, including readings of public media controversies involving London music hall. I look to contemporary cultural studies, particularly the creative commentary of the Birmingham School, for a new way to tell the story of the music hall. The work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and many others counsels us to face the fact that art and culture are produced under impure conditions, and to profligate effect.4 Cultural messages get scrambled in the transmission; Introduction You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. they face resistance, appropriation, and acclaim. Performance forms meet and miss their intended targets, lose and find new constituencies, over and over. Stuart Hall reminds us that popular culture in particular exists as process, not essence, in a series of negotiations between different, classspeci fic perspectives. The popular is a manifest contingency or construct, existing in discursive and therefore shifting relation to any social group.5 Similarly, Paul Gilroy details the rhetorical pitfalls that intellectuals with honorable motives can fall prey to in the search for reassuring traces of identity and authenticity in music and its accompanying rituals. Treating the complex forms of musical production as natural, spontaneous eruptions , as an opposite to craft, amounts to intellectual bad faith.6 The search for the authentic within a performing art inevitably produces essentialist claims that...
