Habitus and creativity in popular music

This paper discusses Jason Toynbee’s (2000) application of Pierre Bourdieu’s account of cultural production to popular music creation, highlighting the different agendas operating in their theories, specifically how Bourdieu’s “demystification” of culture as the production of capital, hierarchy and symbolic difference is at odds both with Toynbee’s account and arguably also with his own concept of habitus. It is argued, following Hesmondhalgh (2005), that Bourdieu’s emphasis on high cultural autonomy is too inflexible to be effectively applied to popular culture and that furthermore, following Dreyfus and Rabinow (1993), Bourdieu departs from his own emphasis on sociological reflexivity (central to habitus) by claiming to explain all creative action as a struggle for symbolic capital.