Music from the Western world is in the midst of a Weberian rationalization process that has been punctuated with periods of charismatic growth and change. While this process of musical production has contributed novel elements which modify the prevailing standard of the day, inevitably these novelties also become routinized as a result of reproduction by agents in the popular music industry. The encoding and decoding paradigms of cultural studies are reviewed and intersected with the Marxian ideas of use and exchange value to illustrate how and why this process takes place the way it does....
Music from the Western world is in the midst of a Weberian rationalization process that has been punctuated with periods of charismatic growth and cha...