Elitism vs. Populism in Music

To a professional, mohawked punk, punk music is definitely music of the people - his or her people, obviously. If all his or her older siblings and friends were punks too, is it an elitist choice to listen to punk music, or a populist one? Probably the latter.

One of the biggest problems with the "people are sheep" theory is that it assumes that there is one cohesive and easily identifiable flock.

Years later, he got sick of playing 'pretentious' music very few people around actually were into, decided he wanted to rock out playing music with an actual scene and wholeheartedly joined a rather good punk band. In this case I think punk rock is definitely populist because it is the music that 'the kids' in the city listen to and support. Although of course they get to feel elitist too because it's not mainstream. Hmmm.

whose saying people are sheep? Populism doesn't mean that, though Pop can sometimes in its cynical creation of product to sell and achieve chart success (and sometimes the cynically motivated product can even be good). this is of course with the understand in this context as Pop as Popular Music.

Is there such a thing as a "music of the people"?

I would understand 'populism' to be the position which does presume that there can be such a thing as a music of the people: an attitude, which could be adopted by a musician, a critic or a listener, that there is such a thing as 'the people' at all. There seems to me to be an intrinsic centripetal force in such an attitude -- i.e. a tendency to reduce the diversity of 'people' to a unitary 'the people'. So the musician who imagines the whole world as his potential audience; the critic who judges music by whether or not some mythical 'ordinary listener' will like it (as unelected representative of 'the people'); or the listener for whom listening to a piece of music involves him in an imaginary identification with 'the people': all of these imply some form of 'populism'.

The key alternative to 'populism' need not be 'elitism'. Making music, judging music or listening to music in a context where it is understood that the potential audience for the music is restricted is only elitist from the point of view of the populist. Clearly, thinking that music made in such a context is intrinsically better for that reason alone *would* be elitist.

Folk music must be the people's music because it only exists on people's front porches with neighbors and friends. Folk means people made it for themselves and sometimes, someone will a recording device came along, but rarely.

The question presumes that the whole world is our desired community--an idea which generates more cynicism than you can shake a stick at to my mind. Punk and folk are both "populist" in the sense that they are/were the outlet of underpriveleged or politically powerless communities. And all communities of a sustainable size must be exclusive of others. That is what keeps them healthy, that is what they are supposed to do. Worry about elitism in individuals, please.

The music of the people is ecclecticism.

Ah, see, I don't talk to my neighbors and we have no porch, so to hell with folk. No wait, I do talk to the neighbors across the street, but they're DJs.

By your definition of folk, most of what appears on The Anthology of American Folk Music isn't actually folk at all, because those musicians were making records (or performing on the radio, in the case of the Carter Family or Uncle Dave Macon) for an audience that was something of an unknown, other than it was obviously a lot larger and broader than it was in the music's intitial front-porch context.

I'm even less sure about your ideas concerning the purpose of communities.

I deliberately put some rather blatant assumptions into those, but I'm not tied to them - I just want someone to pick on them.

To take a stab at my own question, perhaps to be truly populist in music is to be concerned about reaching the widest audience possible. Perhaps to be populist means to be primarily concerned with entertaining.