“Sell Out With Me Tonight”: Popular Music, Commercialization and Commodification in Vineland, The Crying of Lot 49, and V.

Abstract

Particularly drawing on the theory of Jacques Attali and Horkheimer and Adorno, this article considers popular music in Pynchon’s novels as more than simply a ‘soundtrack’ to the plot.  Much attention has been paid to Pynchon’s original songs, but not to the manner of their dissemination; therefore, this article examines the role of the popular musician in the production of consumer culture, focusing on McClintic Sphere ( V. ), The Paranoids ( Lot 49 ), and Billy Barf and the Vomitones ( Vineland ).  Pynchon depicts a modern ‘culture industry’ in which recording artists, voluntarily or not, ape their forbears, but in which the idea that live performance is liberating whereas recording is constraining, is problematized.  The article explores Sphere’s struggles to become successful in the face of live audiences that constantly compare him to Charlie Parker rather than assessing his music on its own merits, and the twin inspirational and coercive ‘moulding’ forces he experiences during the recording process that represents the only chance for musicians to disseminate their music widely and find a properly appreciative public.  Similarly, the disjunction between the Paranoids’ deviant lyrics and behaviour, and their thoroughly generic sub-Beatles musical texture, which adheres to the tropes of recorded music (one song ‘fades out’ even when played live!) is discussed; they too are caught in an excluded middle between transgression and conformity, as are the Vomitones, who in one live performance suppress their rebellious ‘punk’ aesthetic when they gain employment performing Italian ballads at a Mafia wedding.  Ultimately this article argues that popular music is equally moulded by live audiences and by recording bosses and that its absorption into networks of capital is inevitable, so musicians, given the chance, may as well ‘sell out’, and hope to balance commercial success with at least a modicum of creative control.