Popular Music, Feminism and the “Power of the Body” in the Performance: Some Remarks on Adorno, Shusterman and Pearl Jam

In this article I investigate the relation between popular culture and feminism through the specific example of popular music (and more precisely, within this field, pop-rock music). In the first two sections of my article I mostly focus on such aspects as the form/content relation in an artwork, the commodity status of contemporary popular culture, the role of standardization in the musical material used by pop-rock musicians, and the relation between aesthetic dimension and political potential, drawing on the stimulating insights offered by the critical theorists Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse but also trying to critically rethink some of their ideas. In the third section, shifting my attention from Adorno’s critical theory to Richard Shusterman’s pragmatist aesthetics and somaesthetics, I introduce the theme of the important role played by the dimension of performance in pop-rock music and, within the musical performance, by the somatic component of the musician’s use of his/her body, sometimes also to spread certain politically committed messages, as in the case of songs that aim to support feminist ideas and struggles. In the fourth and final section I try to exemplify some of the ideas emerged in the previous sections through a selective and specific reference to the grunge subculture of the 1990s and its relation to feminism, with a special focus on the rock band Pearl Jam and also in connection to some ideas expressed by the feminist theorist Angela Davis.