{"id":7478,"date":"2020-11-11T16:08:45","date_gmt":"2020-11-11T16:08:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/?post_type=product&#038;p=7478"},"modified":"2026-01-07T12:17:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T12:17:13","slug":"dialectic-of-pop-e-book","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/product\/dialectic-of-pop-e-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Agn\u00e9s Gayraud \u2013 Dialectic of Pop E-Book"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>E-Book version of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/book\/dialectic-of-pop\/\">Dialectic of Pop<\/a> by Agn\u00e8s Gayraud<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"small-quote\"><p>The most interesting book I\u2019ve read about music and\u2014not politics, but the political dimension of life \u2026 It\u2019s brave, questioning, and alive on every page.<br \/>\n\u2014 Greil Marcus, author of <em>Lipstick Traces<\/em>, <em>Mystery Train<\/em>, <em>The Dustbin of History<\/em>, and <em>Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"small-quote\"><p>Adorno reborno for the era of Daft Punk and Drake: the outlook pop-positive from the outset, the analysis penetrating, rigorous, elegant. Gayraud asks lots of interesting and pertinent questions\u2014and answers them<br \/>\n\u2014 Simon Reynolds, author of <em>Retromania<\/em>, <em>Rip It Up and Start Again<\/em>, and <em>Energy Flash<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n[embed]https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=OgrDYxFz8Qg&#038;feature=youtu.be[\/embed]\n<p>In the first major philosophical treatise on the subject, Agn\u00e8s Gayraud explores all the paradoxes of pop\u2014its inauthentic authenticity, its mass production of emotion and personal resonance, its repetitive novelty, its precision engineering of seduction\u2014and calls for pop (in its broadest sense, encompassing all genres of popular recorded music) to be recognised as a modern technologically-mediated art form to rank alongside cinema and photography.<\/p>\n<p>A thoroughgoing engagement with Adorno\u2019s fierce critique of \u2018standardised light popular music\u2019, <em>Dialectic of Pop<\/em> tracks the transformations of the pop form and its audience over the course of the twentieth century, from Hillbilly to R&amp;B, from Lead Belly to Drake.<\/p>\n<p>Inseparable from the materiality of its technical media, indifferent and intractable to the perspectives of high culture, pop subverts notions of authenticity and inauthenticity, original and copy, aura and commodity, medium and message. Gayraud demonstrates that, far from being the artless and trivial mass-produced pabulum denigrated by Adorno, pop is a rich, self-reflexive artform that recognises its own contradictions, incorporates its own productive negativity, and often flourishes by thinking \u2018against itself\u2019.<\/p>\n<p><em>Dialectic of Pop<\/em> sings the praises of pop as a constitutively impure form resulting from the encounter between industrial production and the human predilection for song, and diagnoses the prospects for twenty-first century pop as it continues to adapt to ever-changing technological mediations.<\/p>\n<p>We have created a set of YouTube playlists to accompany the book: See <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/urbanomic\/playlists\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/urbanomic\/playlists<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":7682,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[1603],"product_tag":[],"class_list":["post-7478","product","type-product","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","product_cat-ebooks","first","instock","downloadable","virtual","purchasable","product-type-simple"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/7478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_brand","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_brand?post=7478"},{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=7478"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=7478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}