Popular Music Margins Becoming Mainstreams: Amy Grant, Elliott Smith, and the Political Economy of Niche Markets

Brown University Music Colloquium

Brown University Department of Music, Providence, Rhode Island, March 11, 2015.

Material from this paper was published in God Rock, Inc.

Abstract

Marginalized popular musics, for all of their aesthetic qualities and musical elements, are often accompanied by an ethics of production, distribution, mediation, and/or reception that limits their broader accessibility. The Christian popular music industry, for example, has long circumscribed its market a priori by its target consumers’ faith identity despite selling music that sounds largely indistinguishable from contemporaneous mainstream pop. Independent (or “indie”) rock, while constituting little more than a stylistic category by the second decade of the twenty-first century, is rooted in the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic of punk and hardcore in the 1970s and 1980s. Shadow infrastructures, parallel to and yet distinct from the dominant corporate music industry, developed around both of these markets, simultaneously reflecting and perpetuating their marginality.

Popular music scholars have long framed the relationships between the margins and the mainstream as bifurcated and aspirational, in which the objective of marginal (peripheral, “minor league”) artists is to reach the mainstream (or center, “major league”) of mass culture. Eric Weisbard’s (2014) more nuanced proposal suggests that multiple mainstreams serve distinct needs and consumers; indeed, one listener’s margin might be another’s mainstream. I argue that the language of distinct markets—both niche and mass—provides another valuable theoretical frame for scholars and observers of popular music.

What happens when artists transcend the margins and their markets? Amy Grant became the first Christian pop singer with a number-one Billboard Hot 100 single following the 1991 release of “Baby, Baby.” Indie rock singer-songwriter Elliott Smith was nominated for the 1998 Oscar for Best Original Song (“Miss Misery,” from the movie Good Will Hunting). (Carl Wilson memorably describes Smith’s performance on the Oscar stage in his 2007 book on Celine Dion, Let’s Talk About Love.) Both artists “crossed over” from their smaller, niche markets into the much larger mainstream pop market. In a critical analysis of these two cases’ trajectories, I examine the ways in which ethics and aesthetics are implicated in crossover success—what Jason Toynbee (2002) has described as “mainstreaming,” and what Dick Hebdige (1979) has identified as the dominant culture’s integration of subcultural style via the commodity form. This paper thus moves beyond comparative or categorical definitions of margins and mainstreams to theorize the process of popular music in transition from one market to another.