Conclusion: Music Matters

Abstract

This book has undertaken a comprehensive genre study, examining the complete life-cycle of the British pop music film, plus its ensuing sporadic twitches of reanimation. The approach has been both historicist and formalist, since genre is a two-faced entity, its internal elements inseparable from historical processes, and it has worked to foreground its selected films as both culturally and cinematically important. Often essentially opportunistic, exploitative ventures, the British pop music film has frequently undercut the hegemonic formal invisibility and exposed the ideological meanings embodied by such conventions. A ‘coming-of-age’ genre concerning young people and new musical forms, the British pop music film is shown to be heavily negotiated, doubly defining the relation of a ‘minor’ to ‘parental’ culture. This can be seen as both formal, working with and against the omnipresent models of the American musical, and technological, fighting the upstart medium of television until it usurped the pop music film’s primary financial function. Using the genre to explore social history, this study reveals a further, recurring duality which, especially at times of profound social change, saw its principal players, the young, both celebrated as the harbingers of an exciting and prosperous future and, from Margaret Hinxman with Beat Girl to Christopher Tookey with Ill Manors, condemned as exemplifying a new moral and cultural bankruptcy.