Dissertation
Music Success Narratives and their Internalization Pathways among Adolescents
In my dissertation, I trace the internalization process of popular music narratives about success across individualistic countries, with a specific focus on young Western-European audiences. I use this as a specific case to talk more broadly about cultural (re)production and socio-aesthetic hierarchies through socio-psychological mechanisms of narrative persuasion.
Introduction
Music fulfills a variety of roles in adolescents’ everyday lives, such as individual self-reflection and friendship formation (Rentfrow, 2012). Within its many roles, music becomes especially important during adolescence as a central source of identity construction (Bogt et al., 2013; Miranda, 2013), as a badge of group belongingness, a marker of distinction, and a resource to learn from others and to better understand oneself (North & Hargreaves, 1999).
The role of music as a source of identity building through the turbulent times of adolescence could become even more important for today’s youths. Besides the developmental changes that have typically accompanied adolescents through the ages, various research has recently documented increasing levels of mental and physical health problems among adolescents, such as anxiety, depression, sleeping and eating disorders (Bor et al., 2014; Jardim & Sofia Marques da Silva, 2018). Among the major sources of such problems, performance pressure and perfectionism are two of the most frequently cited ones, especially in relation to academic/job, social, and personal achievements (Anniko et al., 2019; Curran & Hill, 2019; Souter et al., 2018).
Yet, while helping adolescents copying with feelings of performance pressure and perfectionism, music could be at the forefront in the production and internalization of narratives that fundamentally fuel such feelings, such as through the display of unrealistic ideals about success and meritocracy. In this regard, it is of no surprise to see an increasing body of literature showing the detrimental effects that a highly competitive and precarious career has on musicians’ well-being, such as increased levels of anxiety, depression, and burnout (Gross & Musgrave, 2020). Similarly as their fans, music artists are hit by the detrimental consequences of widely available unrealistic standards about success. Despite of these problems, previous literature has showed that popular music abounds with representations of success in terms of conspicuous consumption and wealth (Baksh-Mohammed & Callison, 2014; Primack et al., 2011). In popular music representations, being successful and having a high social status means wearing fashioned clothes, driving fast cars, and consuming expensive liquors. Music could therefore be a double-edged sword, functioning as a potential solver of those problems that it contributes to reproduce.
Adopting an interdisciplinary approach between media-psychology and cultural sociology, the current PhD analyzes the content and producers of popular music lyrics, the configuration of contemporary adolescents’ music tastes, and the internalization process through which adolescents select and interpret meritocratic messages to elaborate their beliefs about what is and how to reach success. To reach these goals, this PhD project is divided in two parts.
The contemporary music landscape between adolescents’ music tastes and music representations of success
The first part of the dissertation is interested in how contemporary systems of cultural production and distribution craft idealized narratives about success and to map the music tastes of their major consumers, namely adolescents. In particular, I focus on the music ecosystem–a system composed by various actors including artists, record labels, streaming platforms, recommendation algorithms–as a key site where idealized narratives are not only set in place but promoted. I pay particular attention to the content of popular lyrics, to the gender and racial characteristics of their producers, and to the genres in which they are present. Key questions guiding this first part are “How is social status and meritocracy, the two key components of success, represented in popular music lyrics?”, “Who are the main producers of these narratives and what is their politico-economic context of cultural production?”, “What are the music taste profiles of adolescents in the contemporary streaming era?”
Overall, the first part of the dissertation uncovers several relevant aspects of the music landscape in which contemporary adolescents consume and could be subsequently influenced by music. Adolescents tend to group into three different taste profiles, defined as refined, practical, and mainstream. A refined group is mostly composed by girls who likes genres at the two extremes of the cultural hierarchy (i.e., lowest ranked: Latin, Rap; highest ranked: Classical, Blues). They hold high cultural capital, cosmopolitan beliefs, adoption of and listening frequency on MSPs. A practical group is mostly composed by boys, who like Metal (a traditionally masculine genre) and two typically instrumental genres (i.e., Electronic and Jazz). They hold high meritocratic beliefs and lower levels of adoption of and listening frequency on MSPs than the refined group. Finally, the mainstream group represents average preferences across the genres and low levels of listening frequency on MSPs. When looking more specifically at the music that is highly attended to by worldwide audiences, adolescents included, I further find a widespread presence of messages about status and meritocracy, especially present in rap music and by Black and Brown artists. In particular, I found a vast presence of materialistic representations of status (46%), the highlighted importance of social connections (27%) and conspicuous consumption (17%), and the sexual objectification and subjectification of women’s bodies to express status (6%).
Music and its attitudinal effects. The development and testing of resonant effects in music experiences
The second part of the dissertation summarizes existing literature about the effects of music on individuals’ beliefs to further theorize the internalization processes through which neoliberal narratives diffuse among adolescents. I do so by meta-analyzing and systematically reviewing existing empirical evidence about the effects of music on beliefs and by further developing an interdisciplinary theory of resonance that accounts for the media-psychological and cultural-sociological aspects of mediated experiences. In particular, I focus on those mediated experiences that touch upon deep-seated questions of human existence, such as those “narratives of worth” (Lamont, 2023) related to success, social status, and meritocracy. I then put resonance theory under empirical scrutiny by investigating this internalization process among Belgian adolescents.
In the first longitudinal analysis about the long-term effects of music on adolescents’ beliefs, my dissertation draws from a longitudinal dataset of 405 Belgian adolescents (Mage = 15.1 (SDage = 1.5), %girls = 64%) to analyze two key aspects of resonance. These aspects relate to the identification and similarity between adolescents and their favorite music artists, and the transportation experienced by adolescents with their favorite songs and the potential similarity with represented life experiences. Adolescents report high levels of meritocratic beliefs and middle levels of meritocratic messages in the music products (i.e., lyrics, videos, IG posts) of their favorite artists. Yet, these studies do not find empirical evidence that more exposure to meritocratic messages in music leads to stronger meritocratic beliefs among adolescents.
Future directions
This dissertation opens up multiple venues of future research across cultural sociology and media psychology. First, by mapping one specific cultural repertoire of success, it opens up questions about presence and prevalence of other repertoires (e.g., ordinary cosmopolitanism, Gen-Z cohort narrative, Zilberstein et al., 2023) across music products (i.e., lyrics, videos, social media posts) and across industries (i.e., mainstream, mid-stream, underground).
Second, the analyzed sample of Belgian youths has its own specificities, in terms of socio-demographic characteristics (mostly Western-European and social-economically privileged) but also considering that the sample only included Flemish schools. Belgium is also considered as an archetypal Western-European country, if not the most representative country of Western-Europe, hosting the major political and economical institutions of the European Union on its territory. These particularities might partially explain the lack of hypothesized effects in the second part of the dissertation and further call for more comparative and intersectional research in the study of music socialization processes.
Third, my dissertation highlights the need to study the impact of success narratives on adolescents’ mental health through an intersectional perspective that accounts for the gendered, class-based, and ethno-racial experiences of success among music producers and consumers alike.
