By "emancipatory" uses of popular culture is meant those that challenge
dominant institutions. "'Emancipatory' signifies emancipation from something
that is restrictive or repressive, and for something that is conducive to an increase
of freedom and well-being." ⁷⁸ Such a conception, as Kellner describes it, "sub-
verts ideological codes and sterotypes. . . . It rejects idealizations and rationali-
zations that apologize for the suffering in the present social system, and, at its
best, suggests that another way of life is possible." ⁷⁹

Through history, music has often been fundamental to such an emancipatory
process, reinforcing exercise of such human abilities to subvert and transform
existing systems. Through affectively empowering emotional changes, music
promotes establishment of sustaining relations of community and subculture that
are fundamental to creation of an alternative public realm, a kind of cultural free
space made of materials taken from thousands of composers and musicians who
contribute the essential elements of what is propagated by the culture industries. ⁸⁰
In the chapters that follow, some of the ways in which people have used and
continue to use music to "squeeze out" free space in the existing class and
power relations of society are explored.

-14-