The Cultural Intermediaries Reader by Jennifer Smith Maguire Julian Matthews

Author:Jennifer Smith Maguire, Julian Matthews [Jennifer Smith Maguire, Julian Matthews]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446201336
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2014-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

Charles Fairchild

I recently came across a story that suggests how tricky it can be to gauge the impact of the cultural intermediaries in the popular music industry. According to a well-documented story in LA Weekly, a key figure in the spread of West Coast hip hop was David Faustino, perhaps better known as Bud Bundy from the American television show Married … with Children. The alliance between a teenage actor on a poorly regarded show from the late 1980s on what was, at that time, a marginal American television network and ‘an absolute who’s-who of West Coast hip hop’ (Westhoff, 2011: 17) seems unlikely. Yet Faustino and his partners appear to have had a significant impact in widening the reach of a form of hip hop which was to assert itself in no uncertain terms in succeeding years. Stories like this are common, but can be unreliable. They are often produced by the intermediaries themselves, or in this case a compliant chronicler. The work of these collaborating intermediaries is often shaped by demands more immediate than the reliable reporting of social history, in this case the righting of one intermediary’s listing career trajectory. Examples such as this show how difficult it can be to research cultural intermediaries in the popular music industry. It can often mean dealing with an almost unmanageably broad range of sources, many of which are ephemeral and potentially untrustworthy.

While there are a large number of academic disciplines in which writing about cultural intermediaries in popular music is an acceptable pursuit, writing about these intermediaries more generally is spread across a multitude of non-academic forums that dwarfs the collected academic output. Sources include newspapers, magazines, trade publications, blogs, websites and the musician and music industry biography genre which might range anywhere from picture books for adolescents to door-stop-sized biographies and topical narrative non-fiction for adults about artists, bands, tours, industry executives, managers, producers, specific albums or recordings sessions, particular eras, well-known scandals, and a good deal more. The abundance of documentaries about the inner workings of the music industry only adds to the wealth of sources (Amoaku, 2005; Kirk, 2004; Moorman, 2003; Pray, 1996; Rushkoff, 2001; Timoner, 2004). This complex range of sources often makes it tough to figure out who the consequential intermediaries are, what practices might be more important than others, how these people and their work might relate to the historical contexts in which they act, and finally, what impact they might have.

However, things get a bit more clear when one looks less at specific professions and more broadly at the common goals, these intermediaries have pursued, the practices they have used to reach these goals, and the contexts in which they have acted. This chapter is intended both as a broad overview and a mild provocation. First, I want to suggest that the presence, importance and impact of cultural intermediaries in the music industry is, more often than not, drastically underestimated. The scope of their work is underestimated primarily in terms of its

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