[Anthropgrad] Seminar by Timothy Taylor on “Advertising and the Conquest of Culture”, 16 October

[Alan Rumsey]

As some of you may know, the husband of Sherry Ortner (who will be 
visiting ANU for the next four weeks), Tim Taylor, is an eminent 
ethnomusicologist and will here with her for the first week or so of 
that visit. He is giving a seminar on Thursday, co-hosted by the School 
of Music and the Sung Poetry Discussion Group, which would probably be 
of interest to many of you. Here are the details:

“Advertising and the Conquest of Culture”

Timothy D. Taylor

Thomas Frank’s important The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, 
Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (1997) usefully 
described the advertising industry’s “conquest of cool” in the 1960s and 
beyond, the cooptation of the hip and the cool for the purposes of 
advertising marketing. This presentation argues that since Frank’s book 
appeared, the “convergence of commerce and content” as the advertising 
calls it has meant that the production of content is even more entwined 
with advertising than ever before.

The first part of this paper describes this shift with particular 
attention paid to the production of advertising music, which 
increasingly uses rock, hip hop, and other popular musicians. The 
analytical portion of this paper updates Pierre Bourdieu’s influential 
notion of cultural capital. With the rise of the importance of the hip 
and the cool, high culture is becoming displaced. Cultural capital today 
is increasing conferred by knowledge of the hip and the cool, not the 
fine arts, aided by the rise of what Bourdieu called the new petite 
bourgeoisie, a group that encompasses workers in the advertising industry.

Timothy Taylor is a Professor in the Departments of Ethnomusicology and 
Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the 
author of Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (Routledge 1997, 
Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture (Routledge 2001), and 
Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Duke 2007), and numerous 
articles on various popular musics, classical musics, and 
social/cultural theory. His interests include globalisation, technology, 
race, ethnicity, consumption, tourism and gender. He is currently 
editing and writing two books: The Social Life of Sound Technologies: A 
History in Documents, 1878-1945, co-edited with Mark Katz and Tony 
Grajeda, and The Sounds of Capitalism: A History of Music in 
Advertising. He is an avid performer of Irish traditional music on the 
flute and can be heard regularly in sessions in southern California.

Lecture Theatre 3, Level 5, School of Music
4.00pm Thursday 16 October

ALL WELCOME