Though arguably never a singular, self-determining apparatus, the global music industry has taken a striking turn for the more-capitalist-and-less-autonomous over the last half-century. In an increasingly profit-driven market, compounded by the gradual economic neglect of the arts in favor of “hard sciences,” creative freedom has come to stand at odds with financial security. More and more, artists are bound to the rigid rules of genre—rules born into, and permanently tied to, distinct social and historical contexts. This connection is perhaps more apparent in genres which have endured greater public scrutiny: Rap music, for example, is widely connoted as a “Black genre”; a space in which racially systemic poverty, violence and adjacent hardships are expressed artistically, to be consumed by an audience that extends vastly beyond any personal connection to the subject matter. Hence, the artistic qualities of rap music are often challenged by the practical financial salvation that it can bring via this audience. Artists are incentivized to create the most commercially appealing music possible in order to make the most money possible—music which must adhere to the proven and established parameters of genre.

Still, these parameters are constantly being bent, broken and reshaped. Such reconfiguring work is done slowly, by artists who either begin in sufficient financial security to create for a much smaller pool or who submit themselves to the resultant risk of financial insecurity. A prominent example of this submission, and that on which I center my coming argument, is the 21st-century witch house band SALEM. I choose to focus on SALEM both because the band emerged from relative nothingness and financial destitution, and because their pioneering role in the “witch house” genre is uniquely indisputable. Whereas the emergence of equally transgressive genres like punk, metal and hyperpop is attributed to a range of artists over decade-long periods, SALEM is, by all accounts, the singular creator of their own genre. 

Witch house is characterized by long, droning chord progressions of high-pitched synths; 2010s-era trap drums laden with deep, drenching bass notes; distorted samples and downpitched vocals.  Each element of the genre, I argue, can be considered directly counteractive to popular culture’s preferences and tastes: Complex rhythm is replaced by monotonous patterns; clean and professional mixes lose out to grating, red-lined distortion and once-subversive, though now accepted into the mainstream, trap drums are repurposed as merely supplementary to basslines equal parts loud and, again, monotonous. Perhaps the most openly countercultural aspect, though, is witch house’s vocal inflictions. Artists like SALEM make little to no effort to “sing” in the traditional sense of the term, instead preferring a dull hum that tracks the basslines with an occasional rap verse. 

It is on account of these directly countercultural characteristics that the witch house genre became a complete departure from popular culture’s proven and conventional conceptions of “good music,” and thereby a suggestion that its antithetical “bad music”—as popular culture expectedly labeled it—is viable as both a genre and a cultural movement. In his book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, professor and theorist Dick Hebdige accounts for public response to this suggestion, writing that “the mispronunciation of words and the misuse of language,” which I extend from his dialogical context into that of music, “are classified along with incest as horrendous aberrations” because they “express forbidden contents… in forbidden forms” (2310). This classification is done onto subcultures and their artistic expressions by mainstream cultural curators—that is, the elite and socioeconomically influential—as an act of self-preservation, aiming to stagnate public ideas of artistry in order to socially and financially suffocate any art which could challenge the boundaries that they have set for it. In doing so, these curators retain their dominative role over society. Should they fail to deter enrollment in subcultures, the public will become less and less influenceable by their rhetoric as its interests, as thereby its finances, gravitate towards various countercultural causes. 

In the case of SALEM, the band’s role as a figurehead of sorts for this countercultural movement made their music especially “forbidden contents” because it mimicked—and therefore threatened to replace—the relationship between these elite curators and the public. To be a fan of the band involved a particular ingrouping that subverted the expectations, set by the elite, of what it meant to be an average member of society—the same of which could not be said for those who were fans of any band existing within the confines of mainstream curation. Thus, fans of the emerging witch house genre became, in this avenue, one degree less “cultural” and instead one degree more “subcultural.” In more established genres, rules and aesthetics are collectively determined, meaning that no singular person/group holds complete control over them; within the sphere of witch house, however, SALEM arose as the absolute authority, as is the elite class over the middle and lower. This role replacement is precisely what threatened cultural curators so much. 

Here, a distinction must be drawn between SALEM’s existence in popular culture and their existence within their own subculture, as this elite-replacing model of genre definition. Hebdige makes a similar separation between the public, outgrouped interpretation of emerging punk aesthetics in the 20th century and the intended meanings of the ingroup, which I will borrow. The latter, he argues, is a deliberate “interference in the orderly sequence” meant to disrupt popular culture’s “universal taboos” by presenting “semantic disorder… [i.e.,] temporary blockage in the system of representation,” while the former is simplified into “shock and horror headlines” to be either commodified, “ridiculed or reviled” by popular culture (Hebdige, 2309-11). SALEM’s dual citizenship in either realm—shocking and horrifying to the public, while a welcome semantic disruption to their followers—is heightened again on account of their position as the subcultural elite, and thus becomes a time bomb: Their appeal is proven on a micro-scale, and they are left with two potential routes. First, they may achieve the disruption that Hebdige argues to be a foundational element of counterculture, “not only as a meta­phor for potential anarchy ‘out there’ but as an actual mechanism of semantic disorder” (Hebdige, 2309). In this route, SALEM’s name becomes well-known enough in mainstream media to affect the whole of society, not only “out there” but “in here”—that is, in popular culture—as well. The second route, should they fail to achieve this disruption, is to have the “subversive power” of their attempt defused onto the “preferred ‘map of problematic social reality’” (Hebdige, 2311). This diffusion is a deliberate commodification of SALEM’s disruption, incorporating it into the mainstream and thereby replacing the threat of its counterculturalism with a “pro­cess of production, publicity and packaging” (Hebdige, 2312). 

As Hebdige contends that the subversiveness of any subculture is lost when it becomes situated within this three-step capitalistic cycle, a Marxist examination of the subversiveness of SALEM and the witch house genre seems far from immune—especially considering the economic context of the global music industry’s turn for the ever-more-capitalist. Such an examination may also help to ground SALEM as an indisputable, if noncompliant, component of popular culture nonetheless, having spent our time thus far mainly identifying them as an independent force of counterculturalism. Hence, I turn to Marx himself for his theories of commodities, labor and economy. Marx considers a commodity something able to be examined either “from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour” (668). Both are true of our present commodities—SALEM and the witch house genre—so, while Marx mostly references physical objects, I apply his theories here as well. The “human wants” and subsequent reactions of the particular humans drawn to these commodities are severalfold. I categorize them as follows: 

1. Raw sound: the literal sonic qualities of SALEM’s music. 
2. Aesthetic: the accompanying visual qualities of SALEM’s music (i.e., music videos, social media accounts, public performances, etc.)
3. Political context: the ways in which SALEM’s music and aesthetic interacts with the rest of popular culture (i.e., sociopolitical movements, economic conditions, etc.)

In this list appears a reflection of Hebdige’s own three-step process, which can then be analyzed in terms of Marx’s proposed relations between items. SALEM’s raw sound is the production and the beginning of Hebdige’s cycle, at which point the commodity of their music is determined solely by its own qualities. This product is then publicized through media promotion, merchandise, music videos and so on, forming and maximizing its aesthetic. Finally, it is packaged inside the confines of popular culture and its neighboring items, being rebranded by the aforementioned cultural curators as an item that exists in conscious agreement with its surrounding political context. To give an apt example via SALEM’s discography, take their 2011 single “Till The World Ends”: 

1. Raw sound as production: the song has literal sonic qualities that, irrespective of the following external factors, either attract or deter a listener. 
2. Aesthetic as publicity: the song is accompanied by a music video, opening with lewd shots of women in a strip club before switching to looped night vision footage of military bombings. This visual introduces otherwise-absent countercultural themes that reframe the initial product and publicize an aesthetic for it to exist within. 
3. Political context as packaging: 2011 marked the withdrawal of all remaining U.S. troops from Iraq, after an eight-year bombing campaign. It also marked the release of Britney Spears’ single “Till The World Ends,” accompanied by CGI shots of skyscrapers being torn apart by flying projectiles as citizens ran for underground bunkers. By repurposing this imagery for their own aesthetic, SALEM’s song becomes a critical commentary on Britney Spears’ political negligence and the indiscriminate tactics of the U.S. military. 

Now returning to Marxism, we can consider how this process situates and resituates SALEM’s work as a commodity within greater capitalist culture. The process by which SALEM created the witch house genre (product), then aesthetic (publicity) and then political context (packaging) is a trade of perpetual labor for a product which is consumed by members of popular culture as a laborless commodity; its receivers do not take into account Hebdige’s process, and thus cannot separate each step of labor from the end result. Nor do they take into account the external curation which tells them, subtly, that there is an expectation of musical genre to be met, and that SALEM’s failure to do so translates into a failure to make “good music.” To this end, Marx explains that “the categories of bourgeois economy consist of… forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities” (671). SALEM has made a commodity, but one that cannot be so easily packaged as to conform to those who determined its social validity. 

The primary determinant of this validity, Marx continues, is the price tag attached to it (671). To obtain a commodity that costs more requires more labor, therefore it must be worth more labor. This analysis tracks onto SALEM’s music as well: Initially, the art of pre-mass-commodification SALEM could be obtained for effectively nothing. Everything was available for free on Youtube, Soundcloud, Spotify, etc. To an outgrouped critic, then, this meant that their art was “inexperienced musicians” making “a lot of near-nothing” (SF Weekly), and was worth just as much. Critical reception largely followed this perspective. As time passed, however, SALEM’s art and aesthetic became both understood and expected, and thus commodified. In 2026, despite a six-year musical hiatus, they released a clothing collaboration with the notoriously expensive brand Supreme, likening their own aesthetic with these high prices. Simultaneously, they released a 31-track compilation of old songs. Their reappearance, and more capitalistic image, garnered a retroactive acknowledgement of their “immortal 2010 debut” album (Fitzmaurice) from the same review groups who originally referred to it as “just not the easiest thing to bump in your headspace,” with “EQ’d-to-shit click tracks” that result in “sheer noise” (Enis). 

This shift in public perception tracks SALEM’s own shift, both into an accepted commodity and as a participant in commodity culture themselves. Marx’s argument of price-as-value-determinant thus appears to have come true: Despite little sonic shift, their role in popular culture has followed the repackaging and re-commodification of their music, and changed entirely. 

Works Cited:

Enis, Eli. “Salem: Red Dragon.” Pitchfork, Pitchfork, 21 May 2026, pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/salem-red-dragon/.

Fitzmaurice, Larry. “Salem: King Night.” Pitchfork, Pitchfork, 8 Oct. 2010, pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14718-king-night/.

Hebdige, Dick. “DICK HEBDIGE (b. 1951).” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, W. Ross MacDonald School, Brantford, Ontario, 2014, pp. 2305–2315. 

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. “KARL MARX (1818–1883) and FRIEDRICH ENGELS (1820–1895).” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, W. Ross MacDonald School, Brantford, Ontario, 2014, pp. 652–680.

SF Weekly. “The Supposed Horrors of Salem.” SFWeekly, 12 Jan. 2011, www.sfweekly.com/music/the-supposed-horrors-of-salem/article_02678b5b-b60f-5ff7-87bf-7b665dd6ca59.html.

Weingarten, Christopher. “The 20 Worst Songs of 2010, #6: Salem, ‘Trap Door.’” The Village Voice, 17 Oct. 2018, www.villagevoice.com/the-20-worst-songs-of-2010-6-salem-trap-door/.