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Understanding the relation between the realms of the popular and the arts has been an important challenge for Euro-American art theory since the early 20th _century. Two broad theoretical trends have been particularly influential in the treatment of this issue. One is the modern thought that there is clear discontinuity between the two fields; the other is the postmodern idea that there is none. The two extremes define a wide horizon in which manifold theories on the matter unfold. They range from the interdisciplinary views of Adorno and the first generation of the Frankfurt School (Adorno 1991 and elsewhere, Adorno and Horkheimer [1944] 2002), to the defenders and detractors of postmodern radical inclusiveness (Britto García 1991; Jameson 1991; Lyotard 1984; Örmény 2013b, a), to the sociological approaches based on field theory à la Bourdieu (1969, 1996, 1998). The list is by no means comprehensive.

The previous chapter makes it clear that aesthetic approaches to popular music answer to the same theoretical topology, with positions in favour of discontinuity dominating the first wave of popular music studies and positions against it prevailing in the second. In this context, arguments for inclusiveness in the sense of continuity and equivalence would bring us nowhere as regards the distinction of popular music from other repertoires. Therefore, I will start by focusing on discontinuity theories, particularly on instances where the breach between popular and art is the deepest. In such a theoretical context, the question of authenticity as the rapport with the truth plays a crucial role.

Depending on how one conceives it, authenticity as a value may lead to diverse negative definitions of the popular. Based on our preliminary approach in § 2.2.1, let us consider the case in the light of Leavisism, one of the most radical theorisations

concerned with the subject. The Leavisite critique belongs to the first wave of popular music studies and therefore deals with artefacts different from the musical items produced and consumed today. However, and despite its cultural location at the heart of the British tradition, it remains topical beyond such limits. That is so, because its binary assumptions match those of many musicians, audiences and scholars on a global scale. The following lines aim to clarify the level on which such a radical mind frame remains in force, and what its relevance is in definitional terms.

3.1.1 Popular Lyrics versus Great Poetry

Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in literature 2016 ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’ (Nobelprize.org 2017). It is interesting that the Nobel Lecture of the singer-songwriter began with the confession that his first reaction to the news was curiosity:

When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was (Dylan 2017)

Dylan’s statement is symptomatic of the relationship between ‘popular lyrics’ and ‘great poetry’: how do they relate to one another? On what grounds? Certainly, not everybody takes this connection for granted. Bearing in mind these developments in the global field of literary production, to say it with Bourdieu, let us examine this connection in light of some of the theories discussed in Chapter 2.

In the Culture and Civilisation tradition, the reference to assess popular writing is the notion of literature as art. In this connection, I have observed in § 2.2.1 that authors such as Leavis (Leavis 1933a, 1972b) and Mellers (1941, 1964) lay serious claims against pop artistry on grounds of over-emotional banality: they reproach popular literature its lack of realness in the twofold sense of facts and emotions, and hence posit high culture as the last bastion of real life. How does emotive content relate to the idea of reality? Actually, Leavisite critiques place emotional genuineness above factuality in their characterisation of aesthetic experience, whereby the notion of real life acquires the phenomenological tinge of emotional life (Leavis and Thompson 1950). Regarding music, consider Meller’s ideas on the matter:

No one could ever prove […] that Beethoven is a ‘more philosophical’ composer than Mozart; there is a very real distinction implied, but it is one that can be made only in terms of quality and kind of emotional response (1941: 96).

In the next paragraph, the musicologist expands the scope of his commentary, not only addressing music but also literature and the visual arts:

A word, of course, is something that can be held up for inspection; it has definable meanings, even though these meanings may be complex and not reducible to prose analysis. Yet even though we may know, ultimately, a little more about the relation of the experience of (say) ‘King Lear’ to the emotions of ‘real’ life than we

know about the relation to real life of the attitudes involved in a musical composition, I doubt if the matter is, in the literary case, so very much simpler; and when we consider the pictorial arts we realize only too clearly how troublesome, rather than helpful, the element of representation may be (idem).

Reading these arguments in the wake of their philosophical antecedents can be helpful to understand the connections they set into work. Mellers’ aesthetic position is compatible with Kant’s judgement of taste, which draws on the feeling of pleasure or displeasure, namely the feeling of life (Kant [1790] 2000: §1), rather than on the concepts that make sense of the object of cognition. Following Leavis (1972b), although the private mind is certainly responsible for artistic production, its optimal performance relies on its partaking in the communal mind. This recalls the Kantian definition of Genius as the innate talent of the mind through which nature prescribes the rule of art (Kant [1790] 2000: §46). The latter is subjective as regards the peculiarity of each original presentation (ibid. §49), yet bond to universality insofar as it answers to the dictum of nature itself. In this connection, we can also invoke Hegel’s conception of the mind (Geist) as the ultimate truth of nature and the general consciousness that brings humankind to universal grounds of metaphysical identity (Hegel [1830] 1959: §381ff). Although neither Leavis nor Mellers took over the philosophical task of deriving their postulates from such sources, the presence of the latter in the European episteme of the early 20th _{century is noticeable in the partial consonances these theories display. The} connections I wish to stress are the following:

2. This connection implies no normative function of the canon, for every cultural product receives the ideal support of a distinct, robust civilisation—unlike the masses.

3. The individual qua constituent part of the collective has full access to the truth of human nature through the ‘natural impulses of the heart’ (Mellers 1964: 243). 4. Aesthetic experience rises from feelings that bloom subjectively yet on universal

grounds.

In tune with the above, Mellers claims that the judgement involved in the receptive experience of art is ultimately personal. It is the qualitative singularity of the emotional response that makes for the artworks’ distinctiveness (Mellers 1941: 96). It follows that the genuineness of the emotions quickened by lyrical content ought to rely on the bridge between the individual and the collective; it rests on the abidance of the lyricist by the feelings emanating from the universal roots of her/his own particularity. Hence, emotions of real life talk to the listener, not from the anecdotic factuality of the referent, but from the fundamental actuality of the mind and its universal psychological attitudes. This spells a mode of authenticity wherein emotional life stands out as the ultimate instance of emotional truth at which poetry must aim. Anything else is fleeing from human reality, for the sake of monetary profit or plain self-indulgence.

In this regard, although Mellers addressed ‘commercial music’ with less animosity than Leavis did ‘mass culture’, the musicologist never conferred popular rhymes the status of high poetry. Following the author, popular songs are defendable because of their perceived factuality, but the original sin of being schmaltz under the appearance of actuality remains unredeemed (Mellers 1964: 243-248). In this account,