Discophilie or discomanie? The cultural politics of living-room listening

This article examines the early debate over the impact of people listening to phonograph records on musical culture and French cultural health. The new private experience of listening to mechanised music made possible by phonograph technology, and the different ways in which this recorded music was used, radically challenged the traditional conceptions of public musical cultural praxis. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, French critics were forced to come to terms with the many changes in how music was being produced, promoted and consumed. As a result, they developed new procedures for evaluating popular music and new theories about the function, importance and paradoxical nature of modern popular culture. Copyright