A Critical Review of Hesmondhalgh, D. (2008), ‘Towards a Critical Understanding of Music, Emotion and Self-Identity’, Consumption, Markets and Culture , 11(4), pp. 329-343.
Music is a form of art and most of the people see it as a positive resource in life. However, David Hesmondhalgh brought up an idea by stating that seeing music as a positive resource is a dominant conception of music, emotion and self-identity in sociologically-informed analysis of music (2008).
In all types of cultural products, music is often used to express feelings and people are easily attached emotionally to it. Hall and DuGay (1996) stated that music is the key to self-identity as it offers intense sense of both self and others, of the subjective in the collective.…show more content… Therefore, individual can easily attached emotionally to music and let the music to ‘speak’ for them, which leads to construction of their self-identity.
Although people are unaware of the idea brought up by Hesmondhalgh, but it is undoubtedly true. In fact, Bourdieu points out that music leads to class differentiation in this modern societies. He (1984) said that:
For a bourgeois world which conceives its relation to the populace in terms of the relationship of the soul to the body, “insensitivity to music” doubtless represents a particularly unavowable form of materialist coarseness.”
Living in this materialistic world, people are often being judged by their music tastes or sensitivity to music. In order to avoid being classified in the lower social class, modern individuals tend to fake their sensitivity to music. They tend to change their preferred music style, unconsciously or intentionally, and pretend to like and enjoy those music genres which are ‘categorised’ in the higher social class, such as classical music. This action taken by individual to prove themselves are musically sensitive does not construct the true self-identity of them. Their so called music sensitivity is just a false appearance for them to obtain a higher status in
