Page 39 - summer 22

SESSIONS FIVE AND SIX

• Popular culture: music, film, sport and domination

Introduction
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
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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?

RECORDED MUSIC
These are big questions and we’ll need to consider the evidence when we’ve looked
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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
share with us in the following presentation.

The Age of the Gramophone: The Early History of Popular Recorded Music

Presentation by David Timpson