From the Margins to the Mainstream: Two Crossover Cases

Embracing the Margins: Counter-Mainstream Perspectives in Popular Music

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Department of Music, North Carolina, March 28, 2015.

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

Abstract

Marginal musics, for all of their aesthetic qualities, 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 an aesthetic 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 mainstream music industry, developed around both of these genres, simultaneously reflecting and perpetuating their marginality.

Yet, what happens when too many people embrace the margins? 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 duo The Swell Season won the 2007 Oscar for Best Original Song with “Falling Slowly” in the movie Once. 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 and others have described as “mainstreaming,” and what Dick Hebdige 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 one becoming the other.