Writing for Your Supper – Creative Work and the Contexts of

Popular Songwriting.

In 1988 I wrote a song called Model Son. This song appeared eventually on an album for RCA
Records - Swimming Against the Stream by Latin Quarter released in the spring of 1989. By
that point it was my one hundred and forty seventh song and would make my fortieth
recording. Oddly, no one save myself heard my version of Model Son. Instead I did with it
what I did with all the songs I wrote in the years I spent as a full-time songwriter - I
completed it on paper as a lyric where the melody and arrangement existed only in my
imagination and in snatches of singing on a cassette recorder. I then posted the lyric (set out,
conventionally, as verses, chorus and ‘bridge’) together with several others, to my then
songwriting partner, Steve Skaith (he lived in London, I in Liverpool). His contribution to the
songwriting process was to set my words to music.

In recounting this brief outline of songwriting practice, one that identifies me as a lyricist
rather than songwriter as such, I am aware of how unusual and far removed from the
conventional portrayal of pop songwriting my experience might seem – at least since the rise
of ‘rock’ music and the emergence of the writer-performer. Rather than argue for the
contemporary re-emergence of the non-performing songwriter in the now narrower sub-
genres of ‘pop’ and ‘R&B’, for the purposes of this discussion what I intend to emphasise are
the similarities rather than differences between my experience and the writer-performer rock
‘norm’. My reason for so choosing is because the contribution I wish to make to a symposium
which reflects on the relationships between words and music is one that emphasises, and
explores the implications of, the work involved in bringing them together.

I use the term ‘work’ advisedly because I mean it in the prosaic sense of paid employment, of
effort for reward under prevailing economic conditions. My writing Model Son is evidence of
my being a worker in the popular music industry. As such a worker, for all the time I lasted as
a professional songwriter, my experience was that there were scant explanatory resources
available to me from which to make sense of that role and, consequently, to help me live with
my (implicitly unstable and demanding) conditions of work. Instead, the general reaction of
friends and family to my occupation (drawing as they will have done on embedded and
media- appropriated populist discourses) was that I had ‘made it’ and that I now existed in
some exotic, non-work place. This is not how I experienced popular songwriting: it is a job, if
not like any other then it is still more like ‘other’ jobs than is ever grasped in and by those
colloquial discourses and their continuous deployment and replenishment in ‘bio-pics’, and in
the pulp biographies and ghosted autobiographies of popstars and pop songwriters. Of course,
because I entered the role with my head full of the same ideas of ‘making it’ and the promise
of exciting times it was a little while before I experienced this realisation; but my outline of it
here is not simply an account made in hindsight, once on the ‘inside’, the music industry can
rapidly reveal itself as a work-place and demand to be treated as such.

“Fame, I’m Going to Live Forever…”

As I recall from my own, early desire to be a ‘song-writer’, and as I have had confirmed to me
constantly in over a decade of organising and delivering songwriting and ‘music industry’
courses, large numbers of young people continue to aspire to the status of songwriter, but they
aspire (as I aspired) in ignorance of how songwriting (and with it, record making) takes place
under ‘industrial’ conditions. Consider the ‘reality’ television programmes ‘Popstars’, ‘Pop
Idol’ and ‘Fame Academy’ (in all their now globe-spanning incarnations) in these terms. The
entire premise of these shows devolves onto three of the primary clichés of ‘show business’ –
that record and publishing companies are comprised of ‘talent spotters’; that, consequently,
they ‘know talent when they see it’; and that their expertise ensures that ‘talent will always
out’. This phenomenon deserves far more attention than I can give it here but my point is that
the distance between how popular music is organised industrially and how it is represented to
us, decade after decade, in talent shows and in films about talent, is described by the distance
between Judy Garland in ‘A Star is Born’ and Judy Garland in real life – put simply, making
music for profit and celebrity is not how it appears to be!

Clearly, my ‘revelation’ here is no revelation at all – we all ‘know’ that films are just ‘stories’
and most people recognise (or at least suspect) that television programmes are constructed to
established conventions. Further, every other person we meet seems to have a similar story
about how someone in school, or in a local band, or in the pub, sings, plays, looks and
performs better than the latest winner of the most recent talent show. In this way another slew
of clichés is invoked – the music industry ‘doesn’t care about talent’, ‘record companies just
rip you off’, ‘you have to be in the right place at the right time’, and so on. Yet, for all this
‘common knowledge’, we are no closer to understanding how matching words to musical
notes can appear to be in two places at once – in the world of deserving talent and the world
of mendacious companies; in the world of the ‘truth’ of emotional expression and in the
‘false’ world of emotional manipulation, and so on. And to dismiss these binaries simply
because they are binaries does not seem to be quite enough. Rather we need to recognise that,
because large numbers of young people are motivated continuously to seek out recording and
publishing contracts, or ‘deals’ as they are more commonly referred to, the industrial

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organisation of popular music is enabled and goes on being sustained. In turn, if we consider
that this is not serendipity, that business cannot be managed in the hope that supply just keeps
on appearing magically, then we are forced to consider that supply (and with it industry) must
in some way be present in, and practised through, this process of aspiration. My exploration
of how words are matched to musical notes in popular composition is, then, predicated on this
recognition and pursued towards this end.

Model Son – the finished lyric:

Verse One:
I grew up with a scorpion behind me
Sting in my rib-cage, the moment I drew air
Within his means there was nothing he denied me
But nothing was all we'd ever share

Chorus (one)
I couldn't be a model son
Models have no self-motivation
They ride little trains on endless tracks
I had my own route, my own destination

Verse Two:
In Kidd or Blood he claimed a distant cousin
Shipping lumber, tramp steam, out of Jacksonville
And he showed me reefs and hitches by the dozen
But the knots that he tied in me, they're tighter still

Chorus (One):

Chorus (two):
I couldn't be a model son
Models learn no self-preservation
They live by grace on feet of clay
Needed my own rock, to tangle with temptation

Bridge:
But tempted, stung to action
Leaving home and stung some more
So we have danced it down the decades
Mother, father, son and squaw

Verse Three:
I grew up with a scorpion behind me
Sting in my rib-cage, the moment I drew air

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And tipped in ink indelibly he signed me
The blue-print of another son somewhere

Chorus (one):

Chorus (two):

________

Creators, Creativity and the ‘Creative Process’

Paul Zollo’s Songwriters on Songwriting is perhaps the definitive collection of its kind.
Taking the form of interviews (sometimes composited from several sessions, several years
apart) with over 50 of the leading North American songwriters from, mainly but not
exclusively, the ‘Rock’ era, Zollo seeks, in his own words to,

allow these songwriters to talk seriously and in-depth about their great songs and
about the creative process.

Most reviews of the work consider that he achieves this aim; as Michael Tearson of Sing Out!
Magazine puts it:
Two pieces juxtaposed early in the book form a kind of core around which this
collection revolves. These are lengthy interviews with first Bob Dylan and then Paul
Simon. In each of these, Zollo shows how well he listens and responds in his
questioning. The Dylan piece … rapidly leads into a fascinating discussion about the
instinctive, intuitive way Dylan creates his writing. With Simon, there is an in-depth
retrospective of the whole arc of his career … This segues into an intense discussion
about his creative process … Both interviews are tremendously revealing and
rewarding.

This sense of ineffability, in part constructed by Zollo in the types of questions he asks his
respondents is, then, summed up by Leonard Cohen when he observes that, ‘if I knew where
good songs come from I’d go there more often’.

What concerns me here is not, or not just, that Songwriters on Songwriting is redolent of the
canonising practices of Rock journalism; it is more for the way in which Zollo presumes –
along with his reviewers and, sometimes, his respondents – that ‘songwriting’ and ‘the
creative process’ are synonymous with each other; or, more pertinently, that they exhaust each
other. My point here is that if we too quickly consign the effort involved in songwriting to the
ineffable we put that activity beyond analytical reach – into the realm of ‘art’ and,
consequently, far beyond the prosaic world of writing for one’s supper. However, rather than
venture too deeply into the more sterile reaches of the ‘art versus commerce’ debate what I

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want to explore are the series of questions implied in the introduction to this discussion: what
is the nature of the work involved in songwriting? What type of worker is a songwriter and
why is it so difficult to find out? And why is songwriting not (or not always) the glamorous
occupation it promises to be?

Yet, to begin to answer these questions, we are forced to acknowledge the ongoing
ideological role played by a perceived antipathy between ‘art’ and ‘commerce’. As comments
in the introduction to this discussion argue, ‘Songwriter’ is too often viewed as a privileged
freedom from work rather than as a form of employment – although this ‘freedom’ comes
with a price. Since the rise of rock music, and in stark contrast to the predominantly
triumphalist approach of Hollywood’s treatment of ‘Tin Pan Alley’ songwriters (think of
Mickey Rooney as Larry Hart in Words and Music), whether we are dealing with ‘Daniel
Weir’ in Iain Banks’s Espedair Street or David Essex as ‘Jim MacClaine’ in Stardust, the
story is a familiar one, an over-familiar one: the music industry has no room for artists, it
gobbles them up and spits them out once their commercial life is at an end; or else individual
artists can be over-whelmed by the sheer venality offered by commercial success. Stratton and
Negus both argue (although towards contrasting conclusions) how prevalent is this reading
even within the music industry itself as certain key operatives (notably Artists and Repertoire
– A&R – staff) attempt to organise the commodification of imaginative effort through a
process of self-justification – that they are sympathetic with the artistry of the artists they sign
but that the market place (or, in Negus’s study, the marketing department) are harsh places
that need to be contended with and conquered if the artist’s work is to reach a wider public.
And even though as Negus cautions (in a later work),

Creative activity and commercial criteria do not always confront each other in .. a
Manichean fashion… there is not only conflict between commerce and creativity.
But, conflicts about what is (sic) creative and conflicts about what is to be (sic)
commercial,

he acknowledges that the force (rather than the detail or the accuracy) of the ‘debate’
continues to inflect how individuals – whether immediate musical originators or managerial
staff in record companies (and, indeed, journalists and fans) – continue to perceive how
creativity is organised for consumption.

The problem with these ‘art versus commerce’ versions of the life of music-creators is that
they deflect us from access to the actual activity of songwriting. Further, as songwriters are
likely to buy into the associated myths of music-making (for the want of alternative
representations of, or ‘explanatory resources’ for, a life in music) then the development of a

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level of self-reflexivity that would encompass the notion of songwriting as, at base, work, is
discouraged. Consequently, the Paul Zollo’s of this world are on safe ground when they
approach an already selected group of ‘great’ songwriters, with the appropriate degree of awe
and subservience, because to represent these people as ‘artists’ is in the writer’s own interest:
firstly as fan who supports an ideological status quo in which ‘ordinary’ life is made bearable
by associating oneself with an artist (and/or star or celebrity) who lives an ‘extraordinary’ life
that might be enjoyed vicariously as long as enough effort is put into identifying with the
artist and with what they appear to suffer for their art. Secondly as a would-be ‘expert’, the
writer offers readers ‘access’ to exactly this extraordinary ‘art making’ through organising his
approach to his subject from firmly within the ideological parameters of the constructed
‘artist’. Permission for access is granted on these terms (because songwriters are flattered by
such interest and record companies like to sell ‘catalogue’) and book publishers respond
because they also recognise the hunger for this kind of tamed ‘insight’. Taken together,
everyone goes home happy – except the researcher into the work involved in combining
words and music!

The reason that an approach such as Zollo’s does not take us closer to the idea that
songwriting might be a ‘job’ like any other is because it is posited on the notion that creativity
is sui generis – creativity is ineffable because it is ‘instinctive’, it is ‘intuitive’, it is the
product of ‘inspiration’. None of these conditions is demonstrable and, therefore, they can
never be accessed - either from without or, seemingly, from within. Consequently, whether the
creative effort is directed at writing Northanger Abbey, designing the Tay Bridge or painting
Guernica we cannot know that effort, only its results. Further, and also consequently, an
entire, elaborate social and cultural apparatus has arisen to assess critically such results where
this apparatus consists of connected institutions all with the aim of participating in the
economic rewards of (implicitly commodified) creativity. In turn, these institutions and their
practices – whether directly productive ones (publishing of various kinds) or ones associated
with the business of disseminating works of creativity or commenting on them (the mass
media) - have come to stand for a ‘knowing’ of creativity and the creative process in a way
that goes on re-confirming that the process itself cannot be known by any means other than
through some (culturally and socially validated) system of discernment.

While I do not enjoy the opportunity here to explore the notion of taste and issues of value
with regard to popular cultural production in any greater detail (see Frith: 1996), what the
social construction of taste can be argued to accomplish is a kind of forced congruence of
discursive notions of ‘creativity’ with what we experience as cultural products – where the
point is that products are the outcome of industry, not creativity alone. In this recognition I am

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trying not to reify creativity or to argue a romantic conception of it, only to suggest that
accounts of, in this instance songwriting, rarely deal directly with creativity as a form of
effort, not because it is ineffable but because the tendency is to settle with, or fail to see
beyond, the terms in which creativity is socially constructed and debated.

Electing to Reflect.

As a (former) songwriter the representation of creativity as unknowable seems wholly

unsatisfactory to me. We have seen the words of Model Son and I can report faithfully that I
did indeed complete this song as a song through creative effort. I will explore this effort
below but here I can also report that the effort required to complete this song obeyed an
urgency that was the sum of a combination of imperatives – the song was not completed for
its own sake with only the integral demands of its subject and structure to concentrate and
drive that effort. It would be fair to comment that, had I been famous enough to be
interviewed by Paul Zollo, I might not have articulated my effort in this way: one of the key
characteristics of the canonising act is to individuate the ‘artist’, Zollo seeks the artist’s
collaboration in a (substantially unavoidable) partial, limited and implicitly positive
reconstruction of their own lives, and, more pertinently work, as ‘artists’. In this exercise,
‘record companies’ and ‘the music industry’ play shadowy and almost always negative ‘walk-
on’ parts - as, perhaps, the price of entry to the ‘non-work place, or to the status of
‘exceptionality’, referred to previously. But the point remains that what unites Zollo’s
songwriters (rather than differentiates them from each other), and what, in turn, unites all
songwriters whether ‘signed’ or ‘unsigned’, is that that what they have in common are, to use
Marx’s term, the social relations of production - in this case, of song production -
characteristic to the music industry.

As we know, the business of songwriting devolves onto an author’s ability to ‘assign’ their
innate right to make copies of her or his work (so long as it is original) to an organisation
better-placed and far better-equipped to bring that work to the attention of potential
purchasers. These organisations are able to manufacture copies of the original work and
distribute them to shops (in the case of record companies) or to make the original available to
other users (in the case of publishing) and both also (or are meant also) to advertise the
existence of the original or of copies of the original for sale or use. In this activity,
songwriters stand to earn considerable amounts of money because there are fixed rates for the
mechanical reproduction as well as the live and broadcast performance of the songs they write
to which non-writers are not entitled. Viewed in this way, the business of record companies is
to select from a large pool of aspirant music-makers, reproduce the original work of those

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selected and organise the circulation of copies of the original, for profit – and of music
publishers it is also to select from the pool of aspirants only with a view to buying the rights
to the works of the aspirants in order to exploit those works in a myriad of commercial forms.
Then, once the costs of the selection procedure, reproduction and circulation have been met,
the record company and the publisher returns a limited percentage of any profit to the creator
of the original work in the form of a royalty payment. So, for ‘unsigned’ writers there is no
income at all from songwriting while for ‘signed’ writers there is a much-delayed,
proportional income which is normally off-set in the form of advance payments against that
anticipated income – where the extent of the advance is a matter for negotiation during the
creation of ‘the deal’ and the ability to eke out the advance is a matter for the prudence, or
otherwise, of the individual songwriter.

My experience of songwriting was ‘unstable and demanding’ was in part (but only in part)
because Latin Quarter had been, in the years leading up to Model Son, an eight-piece band
with two managers. This, in turn, meant – quite unglamorously – that it could never earn
enough to ensure that everyone lived comfortably and securely. What compounded this
problem (which would affect morale) was that, despite a reduction in personnel on both
fronts, Swimming Against the Stream was to be Latin Quarter’s third album for a major label.
By the logic of the recording and publishing contract system (wherein acts and writers are tied
to sequential ‘option’ clauses) any act reaching a third album will normally have expected,
and have been expected, to have sold considerable quantities of previous records and made
considerable amounts of money for record company and publisher alike – the only reason for
those contracting companies to exercise their option to continue publishing songs and making
records by their signees. This was not true of Latin Quarter. We had enjoyed substantial sales
in some countries, but made little impact in others. Whilst signed to Arista Records that label
had been sold to Bertellsmans, a large German publishing company. Arista was then merged
with another acquisition, RCA Records, to form Bertelsmann’s Music Group (BMG). Our
first album had been made by an independent label but licensed to RCA in Germany. Success
there prompted Arista to sign us. They insisted on a new album which was not a success. We
then exploited the turmoil of the merger argue for an ‘internal’ transfer to British RCA.
Swimming Against the Stream was, then, more a third ‘first’ album – but it left us, and me
especially, with much to ‘prove’.

Despite selling in excess of 100,000 copies, Swimming Against the Stream was comparatively
unsuccessful – predominantly because sales were insufficient to pay off our accumulated
‘debt’ (royalties could neither meet the costs of production of all three albums nor offset
advance payments already made). The ‘failure’ of the album led to, or exemplified, the

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subsequent ‘failure’ of Latin Quarter - although a further three albums were made and there
have been several subsequent re-releases. Several writers – among them Hirsch, Cohen,
Garnham, Negus, Miege and Caves similarly observe that ‘many are called but few are
chosen’ when it comes to success in the cultural marketplace – but what these accounts have
in common is that they do not attempt to explain how, in individual cases, pop acts fail so to
be chosen. As I learned from my own experience, attempting to establish ‘what went wrong’
is an enormously difficult undertaking, and in the immediate wake of ‘losing a deal’ (after
trying so hard and for so long to win one) it is far easier to turn the blame inwards: my
response to Latin Quarter and RCA ‘parting company’ was to conclude that I was not a ‘good
enough’ songwriter; only gradually did I begin to look at my experience in fresh light. After
researching the experience in the context of an analysis of the music industry (which
amounted to hacking away the ideological over-growth) I began to identify the commonalities
sketched above – wherein songwriters and performers are not so much victims of the music
industry as victims of their own lack of preparation for doing business and of a concomitant
want of prudence in contracting with its companies.

Establishing a new account of ‘failure’ helped to restore my self-esteem in such a way that,
had I wanted to, I could have reverted to a comfortable notion of my own ‘artistry’ and
blamed everything else on my lack of commercial acumen and on the commercial
deficiencies of RCA Records as a marketing operation (which is substantially what I came to
do). But this is to rehearse the familiar ‘art/commerce’ script in a slightly more informed or
and more complex way: I ‘knew’ I was, or had been, creative, equally I ‘knew’ I did not know
enough about the commercial business that surrounded and allowed my creativity – and so
‘failure’ was the result. But however much this ‘works’ as an ‘explanation’ of the fate of Latin
Quarter, it is not truly an explanation of Model Son – yet the two are inextricably linked.
Consequently a closer reproduction of the episode of writing a song requires attention to its
context of production, to the social relations of its production, but it requires, also, a more
precise identification of the type of work engaged in by the songwriter and therefore the type
of worker produced in and through such an engagement.

It is not enough to declare that I was ‘a worker in the popular music industry’ as if this
explains itself. My ‘paid employment’ was not a direct wage, I was ‘self-employed’; the
condition of this employment was unstable because it was precarious, but this is not entirely
why it was ‘demanding’. Further, I was aware that work needed to be undertaken in order to
remain in what continued to seem like the waiting room of the ‘non-work place’. I was
constantly aware that I was in a business, an ‘industry’ even, and I was glad to be part of it –
but how, exactly, was I part of it, on what terms and conditions was my self-employment

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established? I was ‘in the industry’ because I was doing something (performing work) that
this industry required for its survival and prosperity. Ultimately, I was aware that being a
songwriter was not how I had anticipated it – I was ‘creative’ but, somehow, the creative
choices I made – the aesthetic choices in the completion of Model Son - were driven by more
considerations than the need to express myself on a particular subject, in this instance my
relationship with my father. This recognition, in turn, convinces me that I cannot sustain an
analysis of the music industry that argues for the precedence of its industrial routines without
demonstrating them in action. On this basis, what is required is a closer examination of
creative work as work.

Symbolic Creativity and the Cultural Industries.

As David Hesmondhalgh puts it in The Cultural Industries

More than other types of production, the cultural industries are involved in the
making and circulating of products – that is, texts – that have an influence on our
understanding of the world (….) the cultural industries have usually been thought of
as those institutions…which are most directly involved in the production of social
meaning (sic).

In a stimulating and comprehensive study, Hesmondhalgh attempts to locate the originators of

texts – songwriters among them – within the social relations of cultural production. In this
exercise he makes this useful definition of the songwriter as a worker:

The invention and/or performance of stories, songs, images, poems, jokes and so on,
in no matter what technological form, involves a particular type of creativity – the
manipulation of symbols for the purposes of entertainment, information and perhaps
even enlightenment… I prefer the term symbol creators (sic) for those who make up,
interpret or rework stories, songs, images, etc.

What is so compelling about Hesmondhalgh’s introduction of the descriptive term ‘symbol

creator’ into the debate on cultural production is that, through it, he retains the notion of
creativity but strips it of the halo of positive connotations that characterise the romantic
conception of the artist – ‘the man (sic) who is most likely to have experiences of value to
record’ in I.A. Richards’s telling phrase - in so doing, he accomplishes much of relevance to
this argument.

In Hesmondhalgh’s own argument, his primary focus is on determining whether the immense
quantitative changes in the organisation of the cultural industries (mergers, acquisitions – the
rise of BMG for instance - the increasing reach of globally organised conglomerates, the

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immense upheavals in communication technology) have encouraged corresponding changes
in their qualitative organisation; their social relations of production – because, if there has
been such a seismic shift this will be of great relevance to ‘symbol creators’, to their working
conditions and to their prospects. Ultimately, his conclusion is that, though much changes,
much remains the same where the location of power, and the ideological reproduction of
capitalist social relations, is concerned, but this in no sense makes him an economic
determinist; rather, he asserts at key points throughout his study, the belief that:

…because original and distinctive symbolic creativity is at a premium, the cultural

industries can never quite control it. Owners and executives are forced to make
concessions to symbol creators by granting them far more autonomy (self-
determination) than they would to most other workers.

And, again,

This point about creative autonomy is absolutely crucial for an understanding of

the cultural industries in the late twentieth century (sic – bold in the original)

What is interesting is that Hesmondhalgh reiterates this point and draws attention to its
centrality to his argument, but then, in his very last paragraph, makes this observation:

One of the most important aspects of my approach, borrowed from the cultural
industries approach, but also to some extent from empirical sociology of culture, has
been to focus on symbol creators (sic). I commented … on the surprising neglect of
these cultural workers in studies of the cultural industries.

One aspect of an answer to the earlier question, ‘why is it so difficult to find out… what type
of worker a songwriter is’ would be because there has been so little dedicated work on
identifying how music is made at the time of its making. This is why Hesmondhalgh cites
Becker’s study ‘Art Worlds’ – which work has been so influential in and on the literature, and
why also Finnegan and, subsequently, Cohen’s work has been equally influential – because
they all, in related ways, demonstrate that creativity is collective and that creators face
constraints of a range of kinds which derive from their reliance on, or their inability to avoid,
the input of others in the realisation of their artistic, creative work. I will return to this point,
below.

Hesmondhalgh can also answer why songwriting (as one form of symbolic creativity) is less
glamorous than it appears – because there is a very large unpaid pool of aspirant symbol
creators and a very, very small group of symbol creators who make an appreciable (and often
extravagant) living from their efforts. What his work does less usefully, for all its insight into

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the working context of the symbol creator, is to deal with the contradiction that, for all its
ostensible ‘autonomy’, the workplace of symbolic creativity is still, very definitely a
workplace. Hesmondhalgh claims autonomy – and with it self-determination – for the
songwriter but, truly, he demonstrates neither. To come closer, but not quite close enough, to
the experience and practise of autonomy and self-determination in songwriting we need to
consider the work of Jason Toynbee.

‘It Aint the Money..’

In Making Popular Music Toynbee rehearses an argument substantially similar to

Hesmondhalgh’s but one that exceeds it by its concentration on the act of creativity itself.
Towards this aim he draws on the work, predominantly but by no means solely, of Bourdieu
and Bakhtin to present a stimulating and elaborate study which argues for the autonomous,
self-determined creativity of musicians but only after the radical re-specification of such
creativity as ‘social authorship’. As Toynbee puts it,

Perhaps the biggest advantage of treating popular music authorship in such a way is
that it enables one to be sceptical about grand claims to creative inspiration
(sometimes made by musicians themselves) without discarding the notion of agency.

Toynbee’s argument pivots on the belief that, despite the compelling exigencies of capitalist
social relations, these are not determining in the last instance and particularly where the
creation of popular music is concerned: ultimately so voracious is the marketplace for popular
music that capitalists care less how popular music is created, all that counts is that a
continuous stream of new music is made available to them so that they can commodify some
of it for sale. Consequently, and exactly as with Hesmondhalgh, Toynbee argues the existence
of an ‘institutional autonomy’ for, in this instance, popular musicians:

Market organization is the most significant factor in explaining how a certain

institutional autonomy has developed in popular music. (…) The logic of the music
industry’s own structure as a capitalist cultural industry has, paradoxically, pushed it
into conceding a degree of creative control for musicians

From this point, Toynbee’s case amounts to a careful and intellectually demanding celebration
of what he refers to as a ‘cautiously optimistic thesis’: namely that

… popular musicians show in a limited way… the transforming power of human

agency, first as producers of desire for a better life, second as exemplars of
autonomous action

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If ‘autonomy’ is secured by the peculiarities of the music marketplace then ‘agency’
(Hesmondhalgh’s ‘self-determination’) is in part a consequence of the creative process (the
working practice) of songwriters, themselves. If we conceive ‘autonomy’ as both a state or
condition and as a conceptual space (‘room for manoeuvre’ is a colloquial rendition of
circumscribed personal autonomy) then Toynbee’s account of how this space ‘works’ would
be that firstly it is never static - because technology, and with it musical adaptation to
technology, never rests. He then goes on to make significant use of Bourdieu’s work, in
which use the fulcrum of a detailed argument (after Bourdieu) is that each individual exhibits
a ‘habitus’, ‘a constellation of dispositions … which inform subjectivity and therefore action’.
Action (in this instance musical composition) takes place on or within a ‘field’ – constituted,
for popular musicians, out of the collective total of recorded popular music. Against this
background, Toynbee urges us to see that the ‘strategy’ of each individual popular music
creator is a consequent effect of what he or she perceives as ‘possible’ from the point of their
unique intersection of habitus and field:

The space of possibilities .. is a crucial concept for the present argument…

possibilities are the product of the relationship between the ‘push’ of subjective
disposition and the ‘pull’ of objective positions… possibilities (or possibles) emerge
in the .. tension between habitus and field.

This allows him to conclude that individual creators enjoy the opportunity to make unique
music for the reason that no person ever accesses the whole of recorded music and no two
people ever access the same limited proportion of music in the same measure at the same
time. Further, no two people are alike and, consequently, what sensibility and receptivity each
will bring to recorded music will be uniquely their own. As proportionately few individuals
elect to become musicians, and fewer still elect to enter the public arena, who, finally, ‘makes’
music (in the sense of contributes to the pool of recordings) is determined by a process which,
of necessity, will need to begin away from the ‘organized’ market cited above. This removed
area forms what Toynbee refers to as the ‘proto-market’, described by him as ‘relatively
autonomous zones (that are) difficult for record companies to colonize’.

Taken as a whole, Toynbee’s argument is a hugely suggestive one – especially when joined
with that of Hesmondhalgh – for in it we have a clearer, more detailed and continuous,
connection of the individual’s will to create being practised comparatively freely - but always
under determinate market conditions and always through accessing the accumulated
experience of already existing recorded music. Much of this, in essence, is what I have hinted
at throughout this piece: this is how a musician can be in ‘two worlds at once’ – because their

13
work consists of consistently mediating, negotiating and reconciling the shifting dimensions
of ‘art-making’ and ‘commerce-satisfying’. Additionally, the industrially-demanded supply of
musical ‘raw materials’ is shown to be present through the aspiration of musicians who desire
to enter the market-place because those aspirant musicians create their new music (as in music
reformulated under prevailing technological conditions) in a bid to reach the places where
those who inspired them have already been. Finally, creativity is implicated with market-
forces but only in the uncompromised sense that the degree of connective relevance of new
music is tested in the relatively free spaces collected under the rubric of the proto-market.
Seemingly, all of the loose ends are tied up and, as a songwriter (but only because I practised
as one indissolubly through all of these contingencies), I deserve my place in Zollo’s book
after all for, at the point where my habitus connected with my perception of the field, there
was no-one there but me…

Except? Except that, for all the comfort I might draw from these notions of ‘self-
determination’, ‘creative autonomy’, institutional autonomy’ and ‘agency’, my experience
tells me that, in Toynbee’s reading of the creative moment, the subjectivity practised in my
working life as a songwriter was not a condition that could be distinguished from ‘the “pull”
of objective positions’. Instead, my ‘subjective disposition’ was inflected, inscribed and read
through exactly those ‘objective positions’ because, as a ‘worker in pop’ I needed constantly
to internalise, and to respond to my internalisation of, those ‘objective’ conditions. In the
demanding activity of constant re- adjustment to fresh perceptions of a dynamic constellation
of mutating, commodification-driven considerations I remained an agent, certainly, but only
in so far as I acted to produce what and how I determined required to be produced at any
particular conjuncture. This does not mean that I had to write Model Son but it does affect
how I wrote the song (and why the song appeared on the album). In this, what I remember
experiencing was not creative autonomy so much as creative isolation because, for all the
camaraderie of being a member of a successful band, I was also the key originating force in a
problematic economic entity – Latin Quarter. Of all the songs I wrote in this period, none
exemplifies better how subjectivity is over-determined by the subjective perception of
‘objective conditions’ than does Model Son.

Writing Model Son – Urge to Expression.

An ‘album’ is a collection of recorded songs but it is also an industrial product and all I am
truly asking is where does songwriting end and industrial production begin? Model Son was
one of more than forty songs that were considered for inclusion on Swimming Against the
Stream. In total I had some forty-three lyrics available for my songwriting partner to compose

14
around. Thirty-five of these eventuated in songs – predominantly in ‘demo’ versions recorded
onto a Tascam portastudio. Twenty-one were rehearsed by the band (some had already been
included in the live-set, Latin Quarter’s performance repertoire). Eventually this number was
whittled down to the twelve songs that appeared on the album. Throughout this time I became
increasingly uncomfortable that such a ‘personal’ song would be made available for public
consumption. This discomfort had been present from the moment I began the composition but
when you are your own audience it is easy to accommodate discomfort; the more public the
lyric became, the more reluctant I felt to allow it become a record –where the point is that
agency was alive in the immediate decision to write, but autonomy was never clear cut, even
from the outset.

As an approach to considering why the concepts of ‘creative’ or ‘institutional’ autonomy and

of ‘self-determination’ and ‘agency’ might be less than the truth of songwriting as an
occupational choice it is worth discussing the writing of Model Son in some detail. In this I
want to distinguish between a broad set of ‘motivations’ that drove the song (the place at
which Zollo’s work tends to stop) and the more difficult to access but critical factors that
comprise the ‘subjective disposition’ for the bearing its composition has on the decision to
elect for certain kinds of creative expression.

I was motivated to write Model Son for three main and inter-connected reasons: firstly I was,
as I have indicated, as a matter of employment and self-identity, motivated in general to write
songs. By the time of writing the song I had been self-supporting as a songwriter for four
years. At this point in my life I felt satisfied and self-confident in and with my career as a
songwriter (rather than self-satisfied and confident). I was satisfied because many of the songs
which I initiated (and lyrics which I completed) seemed to be assured of release as records.
This, in turn, encouraged a self-confident belief that I would continue as a songwriter into ‘the
future’ – with or without Latin Quarter. I was not ‘self-satisfied’ because I had, by that time,
become aware of how little control I enjoyed over my ‘art’ and neither was I ‘confident’ in my
immediate relationship with RCA Records and RCA Music (my publishers) because I was
also keenly aware of how strained and tenuous were the professional relations that structured
my existence – whether those between the band and the record label, the band and its
manager, or between individual members of the band itself.

My second, parallel, source of motivation for writing songs, again in general, was driven by
the need for Latin Quarter to fulfil its recording and publishing commitments. As the principal
songwriter it was my responsibility to continue to furnish the material from which recordings
were finished. It would misleading to exaggerate the force of the legal obligation to produce

15
songs, rather what needs to be recognised is how income for pop acts who are still seeking to
establish themselves on a firm economic footing remains tied to recording and publishing
advances – without my songs there would be no cash flow. I can report that this fact did
indeed register with me, though whether it invoked any determining urgency in aesthetic and
creative choices I made remains to be identified and discussed.

Finally, I was motivated to write the specific song/lyric Model Son because I experienced an
unquenchable need to explore and express my feelings about my relationship with my parents
and, more pertinently, with my father. There is nothing distinctively ‘songwriterly’ in this
need but that I had the means to create a public examination of a private issue, or bundle of
issues, begins to connect with the latent power of the popular musical form – a power which
seems to suggest that, in and by engaging with pop, and with popular creativity in general, we
attain a ‘voice’. In turn, winning a voice implies gaining a ‘hearing’, a public hearing for
whatever it is we have, privately, on our minds. Whether what we have on our minds is a
source of pain or pleasure to us, being able to ‘speak’ more loudly than our peers amounts, for
many in this position, to self-realisation, or the achievement of self-hood. If entirely
misconceived, this is still strong magic and we would be unwise to underestimate its spell -
consider the huge numbers of aspirant pop acts, the queues of Pop Idol contestants, in these
terms. But before I return to this ‘magic’, I need to counter the impression that I sat down one
day and set-to to engage with my demons in song-form simply because I could, rather my
songwriting was habitually a piecemeal process. My practice was to work from a single
(lyrical) line or phrase where the emphasis here must be placed simultaneously on the social
(or political, cultural or emotional) relations suggested by the semantic content of the
observation so encapsulated – in this instance ‘I grew up with a scorpion behind me’ – and the
metrical and rhythmic structure of that line or phrase. The latter was as important as the
former – if I could not sing the phrase then I could not develop the idea contained within it (or
expressed through it) as a song.

In short, and in the instance of Model Son, I did not search for a melody or for a line of prose
(or even poetry) and neither did I do the preliminary work of electing to discuss my troubled
relationship with my father in song-form – the line ‘came’ to me, it was ‘singable’, and it
acted as a conduit to a lifetime’s accumulation of the psychological end-products of the
interactions between a father and his son. What needed then to take place was the work of
locating that line in the musical (and semantic) place that its combination of musical and
semantic content seemed to suggest might exist for it if an act of songwriting was under-taken
from this starting point. On this basis, it was not guaranteed at the outset that the first line that
occurred to be would be the first line of a new song - as it happened to be in this case - in fact

16
on some (rare) occasions the originating observation might be discarded as the song suggested
by it was worked on and worked out. Whatever the final place of the originating lyrical
phrase, the writing process would be the same: the lyric would be developed through singing
and rarely in a single session; rather, I would return frequently to, what would begin to
emerge as, verses or choruses and prosecute them to a finish as energy and inventiveness
would allow. All of this activity would take place on a comparatively systematic basis
wherein the subsequent process of co-writing took place in a context in which the need to sell
records rather than attain self-expression was the over-arching goal.

Songwriting and the Romantic Artist

Before proceeding it is important to caution that I am aware of how at least two aspects of this
(abbreviated) account of my songwriting might appear to chime with the romantic conception
of the songwriter as ‘artist’. In the first instance, when I write that the initial, ‘stimulant’ line
for Model Son, ‘came to me’ I intend this phrase to be understood in a material rather than an
inspirational sense. The line derived from a conversation with my mother who, at one time,
attempted to explain my father’s personality in terms of his astrological sign, Scorpio: he was
a ‘scorpion’ and his (defensive) reaction was to be stinging. There is no sense, then, that the
image emerged from my tortured soul after solitary reflection, instead it was collected from
the discursive flux of daily life, as was everything else I wrote – whether from dialogue in
films or television programmes, conversations overheard in public places, fragments of
interior monologue provoked by responses to private or public events, advertising slogans,
even graffiti. Even so, this was not, or not alone, a hyper-sensitivity to words as such, rather it
was a sensitivity to how words are deployed to explain relationships or sets of (social)
relations. As an individual I was sensitised to the reasons people gave or invoked for
conducting their lives in particular ways and for justifying the repercussions of their actions
on others – where the latter groups, disempowered though they were likely to be, might also
textualise their attempts to make sense of their pasts, presents and futures in interesting and
productive ways. The triangulation of my songwriting is then completed by my recognition of
a felt need to establish, also through words, how and where I felt I stood in relationship to
those (implicitly inequal) relationships and relations and to the justifications made for them.
To me this now seems all to be the product of deep emotional insecurity and a practised petit-
bourgeois need to exercise control through a fear of its absence but at the time it was rock and
roll and I did it for a living.

The second aspect of an implied Romanticism in the synopsis of my songwriting concerns the
observation that my creative effort lay in ‘locating’ an originating lyrical line or phrase in

17
some, as yet undiscovered, whole that its existence suggested might exist. As it stands, this
summary of a complex procedure might be taken to imply that, somehow, I believed each
nascent song to be a ‘David in the rock’ – to exist in toto in some etheric place only an artist,
through artistic effort, could reach. This would be a misleading conclusion to draw; rather to
argue that a ‘stimulant’ lyric carried with it the implication that some wider or deeper concern
was signalled by it – and that this ‘concern’ could be expressed as a song – is simply to
observe that melodic lines can be ‘worked up’ into songs and that lyrical lines contain ideas
that might be developed in interesting ways and also that both require effort to pursue to a
conclusion. Viewed in this way I cannot conceive this ‘effort’ in any way other than ‘creative’
but what needs to be identified is the range of forces and relations that might be argued to
have borne on the choices I made in fashioning the text; in manipulating its many symbols in
ways that would make this song a ‘contender’ for a commodity (the one that came to be called
Swimming Against the Stream – which title now seems increasingly ironic!)

Songwriting and Work

It could be argued that I was motivated to write Model Son for a combination of what might
usefully be described as situational and (to echo Toynbee) dispositional reasons: firstly, I was
a songwriter by occupation who needed to write songs to maintain this role and who was
faced with an immediate objective (an album to complete). Secondly, I was a songwriter who
was habitually sensitised to discursively mobilised projects of power (in personal life, in the
social and political realms) who attempted to make sense of these projects through lyric-
writing articulated and practised through imagined musical composition. This is an entirely
autonomous – in the sense of individually distinct – expression of subjectivity (though
whether it is a distinct practice of creativity remains to be discussed). Further, how I
‘imagined musical composition’ drew on what I enjoyed of the music I knew and liked – a
particular assemblage of ‘hits’ from the mid-1950s onwards, leavened with the work of the
more conventionally-melodic rock writers and performers (predominantly but not exclusively
the ‘singer-songwriters’). Consequently my imagined compositions obeyed fairly orthodox
and obvious genre rules – clear evidence of congruence with Toynbee’s ‘social authorship’.
Finally, the election of the precise subject matter, my relationship with my father, can only be
agentic and self-determining - nobody put a gun to my head and demanded that I write on this
particular topic in this particular way (the maritime references derive from his time as a
merchant seaman, for example).

Held to the light at this angle, it is difficult to see how, at all, my songwriting took place under
industrial conditions – at least in the traditionally conceived sense of some form of supervised

18
production towards a determinate end in which the employer attempts to ensure that the
worker expends all the labour power the employer has purchased. Of course, there is more
than one way to skin a cat - not all production for profit is organised as an assembly line and
one of the key areas for debate and research in management theory is the extent to which the
classic, ‘Fordist’ model has been superseded historically, both within and beyond
manufacturing industries. On this basis it would be more accurate to discuss whether and how
my songwriting took place under the conditions of the specific industry within which it
occurred – in this instance the music industry. Currently, though, the closest the study of
popular music comes to an account of the music industry as an industry (as a workplace) is in
the published work so far cited – in Hesmondhalgh, Toynbee and in Negus (where the latter
has mounted quite different analyses in different publications). There are many other rich
engagements with popular music that, perforce, must deal with its complex condition as an
industrial, cultural and social product but there remains a dearth of studies which attempt to
account for what happens in the making of music by musicians who, apparently while
working solely to directions suggested by their respective muses, still contribute to
commodity-production as subordinates to capital.

To put this another way, ‘capital’ is not a force which, in the instance of musical activity,
operates as some kind of cultural ‘beachcombing’ operation – essentially after work has been
done. Equally, though, it offends to consider capital in (exactly) its Fordist incarnation -
wherein managers, on behalf of investors, design and enforce a rigid and ‘scientific’ work-
system in which the entire labour power of an almost infinitely substitutable workforce is
commandeered by those managers to serve the aims of capital accumulation. This is why
Adorno has made no appearance in this discussion: songs do not write themselves and even in
an Adornian universe it would still be permissible, and methodologically possible, to examine
how individual creativity and the logic of production mesh to produce a musical item which is
simultaneously a piece of music and also a commodity. The ‘truth’, then, must fall somewhere
between these two extremes, and, therefore, in some other rendition of the ‘logic of
production’. As we have seen, in recent work on the ‘cultural industries’, the logic of musical
production has been represented as one in which, to quote Hesmondhalgh, there exists:
an unusual degree of autonomy, which is carried over from eras where artists, authors
composers worked independently of businesses

Under these circumstances, capital’s response to its own inability to directly control
production is to resort to a medley of risk-reduction measures as the setting for production;
for example (after Miege), more products are commissioned than are actually released into the
marketplace, new ways are found to sell old products whose costs of production have already

19
been met, ‘workers’ are not retained on fixed salaries but must rely on royalty payments,
capital is invested most heavily in strategies and practices for accessing and constituting
markets (in physical and electronic distribution systems and in promotion and marketing).
Again as Hesmondhalgh puts it,

This combination of loose control of creative input, and tighter control of

reproduction and circulation constitutes the distinctive organisational form of
cultural production during (this) era (sic)

Writing Model Son – The Place and the Fate of Autonomy and Self-Determination

The problem with the account of songwriting as work which devolves onto the notion of a
‘loose control of creative input’ is that, in attempting to open a distance between an account of
the music industry as an industry and other, more rigid, accounts of industrial configurations
of wage labour and capital, it tends to over-plead the case for creativity. This is not to make
the counter-error (which is Adorno’s mistake) of arguing that, when it comes to popular
music, creativity does not take place, rather it is to suggest that we pay closer attention to the
contexts within which (musical) creative work exists. Throughout this account I have referred
to how ‘demanding’ I found the role of a songwriter to be. In many ways this observation flies
in the face of the ‘glamour’ we associate with the role; further it tends to disturb the more
complacent overtones of ‘creative autonomy’ and ‘self-determination’ - yet ‘demanding’ it
remained.

In my own research into the experience of music acts signed to major record labels I found a
repeated pattern of transformation from aspirant pop act outside the music industry, to
‘signed’ record making act at the heart of that industry. In brief, what this devolved onto was
the unavoidable necessity of aspirant pop acts connecting with, and accumulating,
relationships with, intermediary figures (managers, advisers of various kinds, record company
personnel, and so on), who, together with the act, formed, in each case, what I came to call a
‘supra-organisation’ – roughly an uneasy and uneven working coalition of differently-
motivated individuals (some of them representatives of large and powerful organisations
enjoying different and contrasting access to resources) all combined to realise an often-
divergent conception of the musical work initiated by the act, or, more accurately, by its
songwriters. The pressure I experienced then derived from the need to consider (poorly-
informed) perceptions of the priorities of the working coalition as a whole – as well as of each
of its parts. Under these conditions, my ‘subjective disposition’ (Toynbee) and, within and

20
through it, my ‘self-determination’ (Hesmondhalgh), was constantly driven to check my
creative decisions against a complex of considerations.

Model Son needed to respond to a complex of considerations because it was created through a
complex of relations: Latin Quarter’s ‘deal’ with RCA was predicated on their belief that we
were a potentially lucrative investment – in the fateful words of the A&R representative
charged with making a record with us, ‘you are a first division band but you haven’t made a
first division album yet’. This was good motivational psychology and great politics - we were
flattered and encouraged to aspire to ‘greatness’ but simultaneously neutralised as a ‘judging’
force – attainment of the ‘feel good’ but imprecise goal of a ‘first division album’ was to be
determined by the company, alone, embodied and actualised as it was by the A&R man.
Consequently, in writing Model Son, one consideration I needed to make was how ‘the
company’ would react to what I wrote - when I chose the subject matter and the words and
music which articulated it, I needed to anticipate whether any resultant song would emerge as
a ‘contender’ for the album that the company was prepared to pay for – whether, ultimately, I
wanted the song to be a ‘contender’ is another matter, still. Further, that the company would
be the eventual arbiter of my work was but the ‘outer-ring’ of an ‘orbiting’ constellation of
audiences for my work. This ‘constellation’ consisted, in the immediate sense, of the intricate
and intractable relationships with intermediary figures within the ‘supra-organisation’ whether
separately or in some almost infinite number of combinations. In turn, the entire raison d’être
of this collection of people was that together it could produce the commodity which would
usher into being a paying audience for the music of Latin Quarter. In writing Model Son,
some, but certainly not all, of the considerations crowding my subjectivity would be the
following:

1. Although this is comparatively exceptional, I needed to anticipate how my co-

writer would react to what he received from me – in the instance of Model Son
would he be motivated to compose, and then to perform, a song about my father?
Further, did what I had written live up to, or conform to, his expectations of my
contribution to our joint work?
2. I needed to consider how the band and the manager would react to new
compositions – by the time of writing Model Son we had all lived through
promising times that had failed somehow to live up to their promise, yet we were
still ‘in the game’. Would they be pleased or would they react negatively? Would
Model Son be perceived as a ‘bad’ song or as a (too) risky departure from the
norm?

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 3. I needed to consider the integrity of any resultant album in terms of subject
matter and tempos – although I could not control my co-writers compositional
reactions, was the subject too sombre for the needs of the album?
4. I needed to anticipate how Latin Quarter record buyers would react to the new
songs: would they be disappointed? Would they consider the new material even
better than previous work and so express enthusiasm to family and friends and
encourage them to buy the record and attend the planned promotional tours?
5. I needed to consider how non-Latin Quarter record buyers would react – would
new, large-scale, sales of Swimming Against the Stream eradicate our mounting
debt to the record company and allow us to continue to make records? My
‘career’ depended on the song!
6. I felt the need to anticipate reviews of the new album – I had already been
castigated as a ‘worthy but dull’ writer, would Model Son reverse this negativity
or confirm it? Would I need to absorb more pain and embarrassment or would I
achieve my ambition of being recognised as a ‘good’ songwriter? (I had much to
prove).
7. Finally, was the song up to my own standards? Did it pass the test of what I
considered and imagined ‘good’ writing to be? Here is a significant test of
subjectivity – or at least in its incarnations as self-image and the requirements of
the self-esteem, referred to previously – where both are fragile and can be
affected positively or negatively by the reactions of any or all of the preceding
individuals or groups; where, in turn, all of this makes ‘self-determination’
something of a hostage to fortune.

Taken together, these considerations should, at a minimum, demonstrate how cluttered and
clamorous is the songwriter’s ‘space of the possibilities’ (Toynbee). Further, all of this
agonising about unpredictable and uncontrollable reactions to creative choices takes place
under considerable pressure. When writers write, when they work, they do so ‘against the
clock’: not only do record albums take time to write and record (as well as promote, market
and sell), they exist in a tacitly agreed (and often quite paranoid) ‘cultural’ time-frame – by
the time of the album’s release it would have been three years since Latin Quarter’s hit single,
would we have been forgotten? Was the time now past for the specific ‘scene’ (replete with its
distinct generic identity) we were perceived to be part of? Additionally, writing and recording
is hemmed in by budgetary limits and limitations. This is not to argue that all records, indeed
songs, could be improved if just a little more time and lot more money had been made
available; more it is to concede that some aesthetic choices are made simply because a
decision demands to be made, there and then: songwriters and band members need to live

22
while writing, but, as we have seen, recording costs incurred need to be recouped from sales
before any income from the record or, much more pertinently, any further funds against
anticipated royalties will be advanced by the record company and by the publishers.

Songwriting is ‘Work’ – so what?

My anxiety to reach the heart of an understanding of songwriting as ‘work’ is because my

own experience of ‘writing for my supper’ seems to linger as a harsh and dispiriting memory
– dwarfing the pleasure I took in the activity (together with the reminiscences of all the ‘good
times’), but it is more than simply pique. What causes me more anxiety still is the dual
recognition that, while combining words and music for a living, or for any other reason, is
indeed a pleasure; this activity is encouraged in our culture almost entirely for the end of
profit-making: ‘many are called’ - to the thrill and love of songwriting - so that the work of a
very few can ensure that the owners of, and investors in, vast corporate conglomerates might
grow ever-richer. To put this slightly less biblically, ‘making it’ is what the corporations (and I
would collect the ‘independent’ record sector under this heading) offer to all young and
unworldly people – part of the thrill of consuming music is to identify with its performers, its
stars: but what is the ‘it’ that is ‘made’: is it a place reached or a state attained? Toynbee is
decisive here when he argues that music-making offers:

‘the promise of transformation…the possibility of possibility. It is a resource of

hope’.

We make popular music in hope, in the hope of escaping work, in the hope of over-coming a
lived and palpable alienation and achieving the agency or the self-determination that he and
Hesmondhalgh argue is achieved through popular cultural production. But, again, songwriting
is, precisely, production – not just an economic activity but an industrial one.

Literally thousands of young people, all of the time, aspire to be ‘pop stars’ and to be
identified, listened to, admired, valued and respected as individuals, for who they are and how
they express themselves; for what they have to ‘say’ and how they ‘say’ it. That ‘ordinary life’
seems to deny us these opportunities, this interest, care and empathy, is eloquent in itself – but
what really counts, for the purposes of this argument, is that this denial propels those of us
who are aspirant music makers into the path of a set of people who argue that they can see the
‘good’ in us, so long as it is expressed in forms that they recognise as musical talent. As such
we are far beyond Becker’s ‘art worlds’ at this point – to connect with intermediaries is not to
extend some beneficent ‘network’ of which the music-maker remains the centre, it is to hope

23
(and to have confirmed) that you are doing something ‘right’ from the perspective of the
market and the commodity-process.

As we have seen, Toynbee represents the area in which individuals who aspire (through
music) to leave behind the ordinary world as the ‘proto-market’ a place or conceptual space in
which the ‘promise of transformation’ is sought in and through acts of ‘agency’ – making up
and performing songs for an audience. But, in my reading of the experience of aspirant pop
acts (proto-pop acts), the alchemy of the proto-market can only occur through the addition of
the ingredient embodied by the intermediary figure – with the result that transformation can
take place (a ‘deal’ might be forthcoming) but this is not the same as the transmutation
courted and longed for by the aspirant musician. Instead, when musicians achieve deals they
go to work, ostensibly for themselves and on their own behalf (self-employment) but more
accurately for a ‘joint’ end over which they have no final control (self-employment does not
presuppose ‘creative autonomy’). The ‘deal’ they make (that they have dreamt of making) is
to make a record, a record paid for by an investor (a record company) and organised, by the
investor’s direct employees, as a commodity. More than this, the aspirant has already been
working – in the sense of internalising the ‘rules of the game’, of directing and disciplining
their labour towards the deal, towards marketability, from the moment they began to aspire to
‘making it’ - because this ‘making it’ has been represented to them not just as a chance to gain
a ‘voice’, not just as a ticket to somewhere else, but as (life-affirming) creativity, itself.

Again, what is this ‘it’ that is so determinedly sought to be ‘made’? In essence it is both place
and state – a place of individual affirmation, a place to be more than is allowed elsewhere.
One of the reasons that songwriting is a difficult occupation to access and interrogate is
because the music industry is organised to put us out of touch with – prosaic - reality (or to
put us differently in touch with the everyday); its products are escapist rather than utilitarian.
Whether we read this negatively (Adorno) or positively (most Popular Music Studies
theorists) is an entirely separate debate; the point is that music acts on subjectivity – we dream
other selves through it, imagine other lives, dance either to submerge ourselves into crowds or
to transcend the moment with those we love, or hope to love. Wherever music takes us it is
always away from here. Music’s power derives from how intimate we can choose to be with
some aspect or example of it, on how we allow, and sometimes cannot resist, its impact on our
subjectivity. Makers of musical products make fortunes from this recognition and they are at
pains to minimise the disruption of this potent and therefore lucrative intimacy – where the
result is that traces of industry tend to be erased from the product-making process; whether in
the aftermath of physical production (in promotion and marketing campaigns which

24
emphasise the ‘artistry’ of the ‘artist’) or, what is more important for these purposes, in the
construction of the product, itself. Consequently, when some music moves us to make music
ourselves it does not present us with a map for how to reach that ‘other place’ – because
‘transformation’ is not what is really on offer.

The actual practice of intermediary figures (notably but not solely, managers and A&R
personnel) is, exactly as Hesmondhalgh has it, to ‘manage’ the creative process. This project
is accomplished, can only be accomplished, discursively – and the discourses drawn on, and
into which musicians are drawn (hardly unwillingly, they themselves are already fluent in
them!) are ones that emphasise the mysteries, the ineffability of the work at hand. In record
making we deal directly with commodity fetishism as the album appears to take on a life of its
own. All of the talk which surrounded the making of Swimming Against the Stream - whether
a producer was necessary and if so who it should be, where the recording should take place,
what songs should be included, the sequencing of tracks, whether additional musicians would
be required - devolved onto ‘the needs of the album’. In this way, also, the intermediary
figures absolved themselves of their controlling and intrusive management, their impacts on
‘creativity’. In this way, popular music ‘creativity’ is concealed as the composite activity it is,
one driven by the over-arching need to achieve sales in the market-place – to which end
creative management, as any management, is directed

Similarly, where the ‘consumption’ (or active use) of music is concerned, listeners buy into
the belief that the musical ‘work’ is free-standing, self-explanatory and self-sufficient. This
follows for the reason that (as I have argued) a significant dimension of the effectivity of
music is that it appears to come from somewhere other (and better) than the ‘world’ in which
we encounter it. Choosing to engage with music on these terms entails the collaboration of
listeners with producers in the concealment of pop’s commodity-nature – where the
contradictory clichés of the ‘common sense’ of pop add value to its capacity to excite. No-one
wants to know the reality, it is too mundane (although still fascinating to be part of) and,
crucially, it would break the spell – the spell that promises the magical transformation that
drove the music’s creation.

Listen to the words

Songwriters create with the market in mind; perhaps not in the forefront of their minds but, in
seeking popularity and all that they imagine comes with it, songwriters (signed or unsigned)
seek to create music that will sell. This is not an Adornian criticism of the worthlessness of
pop, but it is a caution against the representation of the work songwriters, symbol creators, do
as ‘autonomous’. If I worked on Model Son in my imagination then this was self-determining,

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I was an ‘agent’ thus far, but, while I worked, my imagination worked on me – would this be
the song that made our fortunes? How could I make it the song that would change our
fortunes? Similarly, if my agentic, self-determining subjective disposition was to write about
my father then ‘objective conditions’ insisted that I wrote about him within certain forms of
expression – or this is, at least, how I apprehended the circumstances of my creativity. Those
circumstances drove a songwriting practice that, in some measure, consisted of a combination
of my own understanding of what was required of me to be a symbol creator; a diligent self-
organisation to serve my need to remain a symbol creator; together with responses to the
perceived imperatives of the immediate (and constantly changing) environment of record
making. I had a will and a need to express myself but my creativity was tailored to fit making
a record I hoped, we all hoped, would sell. To satisfy these turbulent demands I ensured that I
demolished my father, for public consumption, in three verses, a bridge and a chorus – in just
over four minutes. This is a little longer than the standard pop ‘single’ but well within the
boundaries of the pop singer-songwriter genre of which Latin Quarter fought, unsuccessfully,
to be recognised as a significant force within.

What type of worker is a songwriter? A songwriter is someone who works at bringing words
and music together – a text-maker who manipulates common and also very specialised
‘symbols’. But a songwriter is still a worker - someone who engages in effort for reward.
What differentiates this kind of worker from any other, though, is not that the reward is
deferred, nor even that it might not come at all, it is that the ‘reward’ is an intangible one and
an improbable one - a song-writer’s reward is not money (though this is welcome) not even
fame (or not entirely): a songwriter is someone who believes that, through writing, they will
be heard and therefore that they will be transformed in some way. In this belief, they misread
‘creativity’ as being identical with obeying (with sometimes substantial, individual inflection
and modification) a pursuit of music that allows them to do what is required to ‘get a deal’ (or
keep a deal) and ‘make it’. But there is no ‘it’ to be made: no ‘non work-place’ to arrive at,
while ‘selfhood’ is not within the gift of EMI, Sony and the rest. There is only money and
celebrity and that incredibly rarely. This conclusion is not to argue against aspiring, creating,
having fun, or any of the other associated, positive dimensions of making popular music, only
to caution that, if we believe that in writing for our supper we write to a refrain of our own,
we miss the point entirely.

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