Page 38 - summer 22

MODERN TIMES

SESSION FOUR
• Popular culture and the early history of recorded music

Popular culture has existed from time immemorial. In earlier times, it implied
entertainment or sport for the people made by the people themselves. But in the
th
20 century it changed its meaning. The invention of mass media implied mass
popular culture produced for but not by the people. It included popular newspapers

and magazines illustrated with photographs, sound recordings, radio broadcasts,
films and later television programmes; more recently videos, computer games,
websites and social media platforms.

The new technologies of the mass media were largely controlled by what Adorno
called “the culture industries”. What sort of culture did they produce? Was it to be

taken seriously? Was it art for the masses, with serious cultural pretensions? Should
it be evaluated by the same criteria as art? If not, how should it be evaluated? Or was
it, as Adorno judged, mere consumer entertainment with no intrinsic cultural merit?
And what was its purpose? To improve and enrich the lives of the masses? To give
them what they wanted? Or to distract and manipulate them into accepting their lot
under the hegemony of the ruling class?

These are big questions and we’ll need to consider the evidence when we’ve looked
th
at the history of 20 century film and sport. But we start In this session with the
history of recorded music, which after newspapers could claim to be the earliest form
of both modern popular culture and mass media. The phonograph was invented in
1877, while the superior gramophone became common in the 1890’s. The first snap-
shot camera, the Kodak-Eastman Brownie box camera, came out in 1900. The first
projected movie show was at the Grand Café in Paris 1895 but there were no
purpose-built projected cinemas until after 1910, when safety laws insisted on a fire-

proof projection booth (nitrate film was highly inflammable). Wireless sets were
mass produced from the 1920’s, televisions from the 1940’s.

In Dave Timpson, we’re lucky to have an expert on recorded music and an avid
collector of some very early examples of recorded music which he has offered to
present to us.
The Age of the Gramophone: The Early History of Popular Recorded Music
Presentation by David Timpson

MODERN TIMES