Music functions as a fundamental class marker indexing Bourdieu’s social distinction

Evidence

Music, however (after Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Thomas Mann), ought to lead us into something more interesting and complicated than mere opinion. For one thing, it remains a fundamental class marker, the index of that cultural capital Pierre Bourdieu calls social “distinction”: whence the passions that highbrow and lowbrow, or elite and mass, musical tastes (and the theories that correspond to them, Adorno, on the one hand, Simon Frith, on the other) still arouse. Meanwhile, music also includes history in a more thoroughgoing and irrevocable fashion, since, as background and mood stimulus, it mediates our historical past along with our private or existential one and can scarcely be woven out of the memory any longer. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 654

Categorization

• XREF: Directly invokes Bourdieu’s concept of distinction/cultural capital, which underpins the reader’s attempt to map her own position in the world system. — connects to: Music’s forms and listener attention reflect the social status of their performers and public — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 54; All music either embeds or disrupts habituated behaviour patterns; The social linguistic notion of distinction generalizes Bourdieu’s class-based concept to all differentiation. — Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, Identity and Interaction: A…, 125
• ADDENDUM: Musical taste as class marker parallels the cross-cultural dress-and-immodesty moral panics of the second article — both read aesthetic choice as class/identity signaling.