Dancing About Architecture : Postmodernism and Irish Popular Music

Abstract

Introduction Listening to Bono of U2 in a recent radio interview, I was struck by a comment he made. He was talking about contemporary and past musics, and how the past and the present are tied up with hopes and fears about the future. It was, he argued, a case of the difference between yesterdays tomorrow and todays tomorrow. Yesterday's tomorrow was about a confidence for the future, a belief that progress was more or less inevitable and, for music, that artistic creativity would continue to blossom and produce great works. By contrast, today's tomorrow is characterised by a chronic lack of confidence in the future, a deep-seated questioning of the possibility of further progress, and a resigned belief that absolute musical creativity is no longer possible (if it had ever existed in the first place) simply because all the good music has been written already. This, for me, is crucial to the very idea of postmodern music. However, as Elvis Costello's quote above suggests, any attempt to rationalise, analyse or intellectualise music is bound to fail. By its very nature, music is not readily suited to a written discourse. Added to this is the problem of how different sectors of the music community react to attempts of any academic approach to popular music is bound to come up against some resistance. This resistance tends to take two forms: one that comes from the music industry itself and one from academia. The industry response tends to ridicule attempts to analyse or intellectualise music as being hopelessly inappropriate to the energy, vitality and essence of the musical experience. Academic objections, on the other hand, emphasise the lack of worth inherent in the subject matter for any kind of self respecting serious inquiry. Jackson (1996: 12) argues that only more recently has sociology, cultural studies, and communications/media studies begun to take the whole area more seriously. This interest has taken a number of forms, with postmodernism being one of the more prominent. Ironically however, much postmodernist writing on music has concentrated on high culture forms, thereby taking a remarkably modernist approach to their study of a conservative choice of material. This article will look at definitions of postmodernism in this context and will examine how it might be relevant to contemporary Irish popular music. Specific mention will be made to eclectic mixing of styles, appropriation of older musical texts and the questions of irony and parody.