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Sampling sexuality: Gender, technology and the body in dance music
Abstract
Bayton (1992) is right to be preoccupied by the mutual blindness between feminism and popular music. For if pop music has been the twentieth-century cultural genre most centrally concerned with questions of sexuality, one would expect more feminist critique and engagement with it. It is undoubtedly true that feminists have often been suspicious of pop music as typifying everything that needs changing for girls in society (McRobbie 1978), and of rock music as a masculine culture that excludes women (Frith and McRobbie 1979). Conversely, those who wished to celebrate the political oppositionality of rock music have often had to draw an embarrassed veil around its sexual politics, and have had good reason to be wary of feminism's destructive potential. Nevertheless, Bayton's own bibliography shows the considerable work that has been done by feminists on popular music, and the problem is perhaps better seen as one of marginalisation of this work within both feminist theory and popular music studies. In addition, I would argue that the work of Radway (1987), Light (1984), Modleski (1984) and others, in ‘reclaiming’ the popular genres of romance reading and soap opera for women, does have parallels in popular music in the work of Greig (1989) and Bradby (1990) on girl-groups, or McRobbie on girls and dancing (1984). Cohen (1992) shows some of the mechanisms through which men exclude women from participation in rock bands, while Bayton's own study of women musicians parallels other sociological work on how women reshape work roles (1990). And the renewed interest in audience research in cultural studies has allowed a re-valorisation of girls' and women's experience as fans of popular music (Garratt 1984; Lewis 1992), and as creators of meaning in the music they listen to (Fiske 1989; Bradby 1990).
... Unfortunately, jamtronica music festival events and communities have yet to embrace similar efforts, as scene members often characterize these events as utopian interludes to their mainstream lives, refusing to acknowledge or address circumstances or standpoints that challenge this view. Jamtronica scene members' omission or minimization of in-event (and intracommunity) violence perpetration heightens the historical marginalization women have experienced within subcultures, particularly ones that organize around music consumption (Bradby 1993;McRobbie and Garber [1977] 2012; Thornton 1996). ...
... Popular and participant assumptions purport that subcultures foster egalitarianism among scene members through ideological and behavioral solidarity (Malbon 1999). However, these presuppositions frequently obscure how gender and sexual inequalities manifest within subcultural contexts, privileging men's subcultural experiences as central, natural, and axiomatic (Bradby 1993). Jamtronica festival subcultural norms elevate impulsivity, voyeurism, gratification, and hedonism -subjectivities that festival-going men may enjoy freely, yet often exclude (Campbell 2006;Kimmel 2008;Valenti 2014), imperil (Armstrong, Watling, Davey, and Darvell 2014), objectify (Bartky 1990;Dworkin 2000;MacKinnon 1987;Wolf [1991Wolf [ ] 2002, and invoke the policing and reprimand of women (Vance 1984). ...
... Jade disclosed the inequities of experience and risk that women may face within festival arenas, articulating the ways that mainstream norms of gender and sexuality permeate an arena that allegedly eliminates them, posing significant -and unequalconsequence. Jade's comment suggests that gender disparities within jamtronica subcultural scenes entrench men's positions within festival arenas (Bradby 1993) -as competent, self-evident, privileged subjects, even if they are intoxicated or incapacitated. ...
The purpose of this study was to explore emerging issues surrounding gendered
fear, threat, and violence perpetration at music festivals – particularly events that feature
a synthesis of jam band and electronic dance music acts – a genre termed jamtronica by
its fans. Though gendered violence perpetration and prevention have been widely studied
within other party-oriented settings (i.e., sexual violence perpetration on college
campuses), very little research exists to address how wider disparities of gender and
sexuality permeate a community whose members frequently claim the scene’s immunity
from external inequalities.
In this three-year multi-sited ethnography, I incorporate participant observations,
group and individual interviews, and textual analyses to progressively layer
investigations into: 1) festival-goers’ gender-bifurcated perceptions of the problems they
face within the event arena; 2) how institutional and interactional inequalities fuel
gender-sexual expectations that exacerbate the risks with which festival-going women contend; and, 3) how jamtronica’s “libertarian and libertine” codes complicate women’s
negotiations of (sub)cultural agency, expression, and safety. Findings derived across
fourteen sites, interviews with 179 festival participants, and countless material texts
suggest that men and women do perceive festival “problems” in very different ways –
subsequently leading women to calculatedly navigate festival terrains, interactions, and
self-presentations in ways that festival-going men seldom must. Protected by scene
norms that paradoxically elevate personal autonomy and group integration, festival-going
men’s homosocial displays of masculinity (through pranks, drinking and drug use, and
even sexual predation) often goes unchallenged – or, is seemingly even encouraged.
In an environment that both scholars and study participants claim to eclipse
mainstream inequalities of gender and sexuality, a closer look reveals the multiplex ways
that festival-going women risk their physical, social, and sexual well-beings in order to
pursue the emancipatory promises that jamtronica music festival community discourses
purport. For this understudied, yet rapidly growing, subcultural scene, this study offers
conceptual and analytical foundations to event-specific violence prevention
programming, as well as gender and sexuality-centric initiatives paramount to ever-
diversifying jamtronica music festival communities.
KEYWORDS: Music Festivals, Jam Bands, Electronic Dance Music (EDM),
Gender, Sexuality, Risk
... This tension between accessibility and novelty, or strangeness, can serve as both a site of resistance for female artists to wage "sex as a weapon" in the fight against gender stereotyping (James, 2015;Roberts, 1990) as well as a space where stale ideas about gender roles and what is appropriate female sexual behavior are reified (Andsanger & Roe, 2003;Bradby 1993;Railton & Watson, 2005). Female artists are more frequently sexualized than their male counterparts (Andsanger & Roe, 2003), with male artists often being framed as the authors of their music and female artists as an object through which a per- formance flows (Bradby, 1993). ...
... This tension between accessibility and novelty, or strangeness, can serve as both a site of resistance for female artists to wage "sex as a weapon" in the fight against gender stereotyping (James, 2015;Roberts, 1990) as well as a space where stale ideas about gender roles and what is appropriate female sexual behavior are reified (Andsanger & Roe, 2003;Bradby 1993;Railton & Watson, 2005). Female artists are more frequently sexualized than their male counterparts (Andsanger & Roe, 2003), with male artists often being framed as the authors of their music and female artists as an object through which a per- formance flows (Bradby, 1993). The representation of female artists in music videos is further complicated by its intersection with race and ethnicity. ...
... Artists can at times leverage sexual objectification to produce what James (2015) calls a "look, I Overcame" discourse-in that the artists seemingly break free of sexual expect- ations-or, in the case of Orientalist discourses, to create a kind of exotic multi- culturalism in which race and ethnicity are deployed strategically to create a sense of sexual empowerment as women are portrayed as liberal subjects, free to be whomever they long to be (McGee, 2012). All of this shaped by a female artist's need to sell not only her music to her audience but herself as well (Andsanger & Roe, 2003;Bradby, 1993;James, 2015;McGee, 2012;Railton & Watson, 2005). ...
Pop star Katy Perry courts controversy with the performance choices she makes. She has been accused of peddling sex to young girls and of perpetuating racist stereotypes in her music videos and live shows. In early 2014, Perry stirred up controversy when she destroyed a necklace with the word Allah—Arabic for god—on it in her Dark Horse video. What received less attention was her destruction of Orientalized men of color in Dark Horse. Informed by postcolonial scholarship and research on music videos, this qualitative textual analysis examines how Orientalism manifests in Katy Perry’s video. It uncovers a framing of Egypt as a mute object designed for consumption as well as a narrative that portrays men of color as a threat to Perry’s liberated, Western, female pharaoh.
... As mentioned, since the second half of the 2000s (though these ideas were already highlighted by a few scholars of cultural studies and popular music studies in the 1990s, for example Bradby, 1993;McRobbie, 1994;Thornton, 1996) academia and journalism have begun to discuss the reasons for underrepresentation of female artists within EDM scenes . It was highlighted that not only are there fewer female producers and DJs than male, but also women are almost completely ignored in the histories of EDM, although there were quite a few female musicians playing important roles in the development of the scene . ...
... There were some early research results on related topics, such as Bradby's (1993) article Sampling Sexuality: Gender, Technology and the Body in Dance Music. Also Thornton (1996) wrote in her famous book Club Cultures about the differences between female and male subcultural capital . ...
In this article, the gendered aspects of music streaming are discussed as both discursive and material processes. Its findings are based on focus group discussions about music streaming, analysis of the functions of a music streaming service (Spotify), and examples of when this service promotes gender equality. Using a science and technology perspective and previous literature in the field, this article concludes that music streaming on Spotify displays several gendered cultural patterns and that gender stereotypes are challenged by Spotify. The main results are that the digitalization of music on Spotify has led listeners to masculinize expertise, and that algorithms promote successful white male rock artists. Spotify’s attempts to challenge this are located within isolated interventions, outside of the main code, with little chance of impacting upon listeners who are not already interested in gender equality. In the context of music streaming, discourse on gender often interacts with code to limit gender diversity while reproducing gender stereotypes.
... As mentioned, since the second half of the 2000s (though these ideas were already highlighted by a few scholars of cultural studies and popular music studies in the 1990s, for example Bradby, 1993;McRobbie, 1994;Thornton, 1996) academia and journalism have begun to discuss the reasons for underrepresentation of female artists within EDM scenes. It was highlighted that not only are there fewer female producers and DJs than male, but also women are almost completely ignored in the histories of EDM, although there were quite a few female musicians playing important roles in the development of the scene. ...
... There were some early research results on related topics, such as Bradby's (1993) article Sampling Sexuality: Gender, Technology and the Body in Dance Music. Also Thornton (1996) wrote in her famous book Club Cultures about the differences between female and male subcultural capital. ...
Berlin has always had a great history and reputation in supporting gender diversity within the electronic dance music scene. Many non-profit organisations, cultural associations and individual initiatives work on changing the male-dominated local scene. They organise, for example, events and workshops for these (emerging) artists where they can also participate. This paper gives an overview on the actual situation of these organisations and tries to compare and analyse their activities in order to describe the so-called Berlin way. To do so, interviews were conducted with some of the protagonists from such institutions. Furthermore, by outlining the actual situation of these institutions, it can be questioned again if female artists and protagonists really “rule” the Berlin scene (in the sense of gender diversity) or if there are still some things left to do.
... But from a twenty-first century viewpoint, the co-optation of youthful, female aura by (often older) men takes on an unwholesome perspective (see also Warwick 2004). The absurdity of this type of ventriloquism was later criticized by Judith Butler (1993), who described Aretha Franklin's 1967 recording of "You Make me Feel Like (A Natural Woman)" (whose music was written by Carole King, lyrics written by Gerry Goffin, and title suggested by producer Jerry Wexler) as that of a "drag queen" because the natural woman of the title was a male-constructed fantasy. ...
... It could be used to reproduce patriarchal values, making the sound of the voice a commodity belonging to the sonic palette of the producer, rather than belonging to the vocalist who originally created it. As an example of this, Bradby (1993) analyzed the significance of the band Black Box's sampling of Loleatta Holloway's voice for their 1989 hit "Ride On Time". The track was mimed in the accompanying video by the much younger, slimmer model Katherine Quinol. ...
A process of ventriloquism, with male producers speaking through the mouthpieces of the women they produce, can reinforce gender delineations in pop. After discussing ventriloquism in pop and demonstrating different ways in which this has happened using historical examples, the author’s original interviews with women who record male artists are examined to discover whether a similar process takes place when roles are reversed. The author concludes that aspects of ventriloquism are inherent in production, although some women producers have questioned gender roles during this process. She also notes that as more female mediators enter the profession, we may hear more authentic expressions of women’s identities in popular music.
... This method assigned over half of our corpus as "pop," but introduced some ambiguity when choosing between the frequent co-occurrences of the rap, hip-hop, and trap genres. (This difficulty reflects the complications and slippage in contemporary genre designations outlined by Bradby 1993;McLeod 2001;Drott 2013;Butler 2006;Komaniecki 2021.) To somewhat sidestep this issue, we added -and subsequently used -a broader genre registration for each song: the binary pop versus not pop. ...
This paper compares two corpora of melodies drawn from premillennial and postmillennial American popular music, and identifies several notable differences in their use of rhythm. The premillennial corpus contains melodies written between 1957 and 1997 [deClercq and Temperley (2011. “A Corpus Analysis of Rock Harmony.” Popular Music 30 (1): 47–70)], while the postmillennial corpus (compiled for this study) consists of songs popular between 2015 and 2019. For both corpora, we analysed (1) the distribution of note onsets within measures; (2) the distribution of four-note rhythmic cells, (3) the speed of melodic delivery, and (4) the tempo of the tactus. Our analyses indicated that the postmillennial melodies are delivered more quickly, are distributed more evenly throughout their measures, repeat rhythmic cells more frequently, and are annotated at slower tempos. Even when the tactus tempos were standardized into an allowable window of 70–140 BPM, this effect, though smaller, remained. We then use our techniques to observe the properties of three representative postmillennial tracks, finding that salient information can be located in both standardized and non-standardized tactus data, and that tempo-variant differences between corpora are closely connected to musical genre, with music designated as “pop” being more similar over both genres, and postmillennial rap and hip-hop introducing the most uniqueness.
... In a widely-held dogmatic belief and especially in national ideologies, women are often perceived as the guardians of tradition, committed to the transmission and preservation of heritage (Hofman 2012: 51;Karača Beljak, Talam 2015: 7). Both traditional music and the contemporary global music business are in fact still male-dominated (see Bradby 1993;Talam 2015). The sevdalinka was no exception. ...
This article explores the role of Bosnian refugee women in the music-making and organisational activities of two refugee bands (Dertum and Vali) in Slovenia in the early 1990s. Endorsing the ideas about the transformative power of art and looking beyond the dominant identitarian doxa that views music-making in exile as simply the preservation of the ethnic/national identity in a new context, the article places particular emphasis on the active role of women as creative agents of social change. It traces their role ethnographically not only in the process of reinvention of a traditional musical genre (the sevdalinka), but also in identity negotiations and transformation of the gender and power relations within and beyond the boundaries of the heterogeneous Bosnian refugee community, which had been shaped by the strict Slovenian migration policy.
... To a large extent, alternatives are developed through simply ignoring and avoiding copyright regimes. On a musical level, this involves the often-discussed practice of sampling (Bradby 1993;Schumacher 1995;Demers 2003), which is central to the sociality and historicity of many popular music genres, but problematic from the perspective of copyright law obsessed with attributing individual ownership to particular cultural commodities. A more recent phenomenon building on this tradition of sampling is the hybrid genre of mashups (or bastard pop), which combines samples of one piece of music with that of one or more other tracks from different genres in order to create something new (McLeod 2005). ...
... Instead of exploring the ways samplers have been used as music technologies, the academic literature on digital sampling has tended to focus on issues relating to authorship (Sanjek 1994), copyright (Schumacher 1995, Hesmondhalgh 2006, morality (Porcello 1991), postmodernism (Goodwin 1988), and gender/sexuality (Bradby 1993, Loza 2001. A central argument I make in this book is that it is necessary to study digital sampling within the cultural and social contexts of music making: in professional studios, home studios, concert stages, performance spaces, and other sites of musical production. ...
... The synthesizer and the digital sampler changed the face of popular music dramatically, and the overwhelming majority of EDM is relentlessly mechanical and formulaic. Based on repetitive (and frequently quantized) percussion patterns generated by computers and incorporating entirely predictable instrumentation and heavily processed vocal arrangements, much EDM is based on particular, gendered, machine aesthetics (Bradby, 1993;Gavanas, 2009;Rietveld, 2004). Techno and house music in all their varieties, alongside synth pop, electro, drum 'n' bass, dubstep, as well as the instrumental elements of much of today's reggae, hip-hop and R&B are aesthetically constructed around continuity, rather than opposition, between the human and the machine. ...
... MUTEK's static assembly of being-scene provided a sharp contrast to the West Coast's techno-collectives of dance that embraced gender plurality and anarchist politics (see St John 2009). This is not to say that women were not involved with the festival, but rather that MUTEK was no exception to patriarchal trends visible in early '90s rave culture, where, summarising the research of Barbara Bradby (1993), Sarah Thornton writes that rave's 'utopianism ignores the subordinate position that women occupy ' (1995: 56). Writing of the 2008 edition, Sophie Le-Phat Ho observed that though some 30 per cent of the audience appeared to be women, many of whom were with the press or otherwise involved with the festival, out of 'almost a hundred' performers only three were identifiable as women (2008) Sifting through fifteen years of MUTEK's Final Reports, not one identifies the participation of women or ethnic minorities as a priority for the festival. ...
From massive raves sprouting around the London orbital at the turn of the 1990s to events operated under the control of corporate empires, EDM (Electronic Dance Music) festivals have developed into cross-genre, multi-city, transnational mega-events. From free party teknivals proliferating across Europe since the mid-1990s to colossal corporate attractions like Tomorrowland Electric Daisy Carnival and Stereosonic, and from transformational and participatory events like Burning Man and events in the UK outdoor psytrance circuit, to such digital arts and new media showcases as Barcelona’s Sónar Festival and Montreal’s MUTEK, dance festivals are platforms for a variety of arts, lifestyles, industries and policies.
Growing ubiquitous in contemporary social life, and providing participants with independent sources of belonging, these festivals and their event-cultures are diverse in organization, intent and outcome. From ethically-charged and “boutique” events with commitments to local regions to subsidiaries of entertainment conglomerates touring multiple nations, EDM festivals are expressions of “freedoms” revolutionary and recreational. Centres of “EDM pop”, critical vectors in tourism industries, fields of racial distinction, or experiments in harm reduction, gifting culture, and co-created art, as this volume demonstrates, diversity is evident across management styles, performance legacies and modes of participation.
Weekend Societies is a timely interdisciplinary volume from the emergent field of EDM festival and event-culture studies. Echoing an industry trend in world dance music culture from raves and clubs towards festivals, Weekend Societies features contributions from scholars of EDM festivals showcasing a diversity of methodological approaches, theoretical perspectives and representational styles.
Organised in four sections: Dance Empires; Underground Networks; Urban Experiments; Global Flows, Weekend Societies illustrates how a complex array of regional, economic, social, cultural and political factors combine to determine the fate of EDM festivals that transpire at the intersections of the local and global.
... The female voice has often been used in reference to the female body -think, for example, of the enticing sirens in Homer's Odyssey (Cavarero 2005: 106-7; Peraino 2006: 1-67). Barbara Bradby (1993) has addressed links between 'gender, technology, and the body' in electronic (dance) music to show how the female voice can be used to represent a distorted female perspective compromised by the auspices of 'male fantasy' -by the gaze of the (male) producer or composer (ibid.: 158). In this regard, a monumental study by Hannah Bosma (2003) expanded Bradby's findings into the electroacoustic realm, showing the prevalence in 'electrovocal' music of partnerships between male composers and female vocalists. ...
This analysis explores how Barry Truax’s Song of Songs (1992) for oboe d’amore, English horn and two digital soundtracks reorients prevailing norms of sexuality by playing with musical associations and aural conventions of how gender sounds. The work sets the erotic dialogue between King Solomon and Shulamite from the biblical Song of Solomon text. On the soundtracks we hear a Christian monk’s song, environmental sounds (birds, cicadas and bells), and two speakers who recite the biblical text in its entirety preserving the gendered pronouns of the original. By attending to established gender norms, Truax confirms the identity of each speaker, such that the speakers seemingly address one another as a duet, but the woman also addresses a female lover and the man a male. These gender categories are then progressively blurred with granular time-stretching and harmonisation (which transform the timbre of the voices), techniques that, together, resituate the presumed heteronormative text within a diverse constellation of possible sexual orientations.
... In a widely-held dogmatic belief and especially in national ideologies, women are often perceived as the guardians of tradition, committed to the transmission and preservation of heritage (Hofman 2012: 51;Karača Beljak, Talam 2015: 7). Both traditional music and the contemporary global music business are in fact still male-dominated (see Bradby 1993;Talam 2015). The sevdalinka was no exception. ...
This article explores the role of Bosnian refugee women in the music-making and organisational activities of two refugee bands (Dertum and Vali) in Slovenia in the early 1990s. Endorsing the ideas about the transformative power of art and looking beyond the dominant identitarian doxa that views music-making in exile as simply the preservation of the ethnic/national identity in a new context, the article places particular emphasis on the active role of women as creative agents of social change. It traces their role ethnographically not only in the process of reinvention of a traditional musical genre (the sevdalinka), but also in identity negotiations and transformation of the gender and power relations within and beyond the boundaries of the heterogeneous Bosnian refugee community, which had been shaped by the strict Slovenian migration policy.
... Although there are technically no other performers in a conventional DJ setup, the coordination and entrainment of two rhythmic sources in phase is the essential part of DJ performance that is thought to develop SMS ability, a central hypothesis of the quantitative study reported in this article. Furthermore, DJs are continually aiming to maintain synchrony in a performance by eliminating asynchrony between the beat of the music that is already playing, and the samples they overlay and "mix" into the sonic environment, which is at the heart of what DJs do: intertextual layering of different audio samples to produce new and interesting combinations and aesthetic relationships (Bradby 1993;Kistner 2006). ...
Two studies were conducted to establish a more complete picture of the skills that might be accessed through learning to DJ and the potential value of those skills for music education. The first employed open-ended methods to explore perspectives on the value of DJing for music education. The second employed experimental methods to compare the ability of DJs to synchronise movement to auditory metronomes. Twenty-one participants (seven professionally trained musicians, seven informally trained DJs, seven non-musicians) took part in both studies. Qualitative data suggested that all participant groups felt DJs learn valuable musical skills such as rhythm perception, instrumental skills, knowledge of musical structure, performance skills, and a majority agreed that DJing had equal relevance with other musical forms e.g. classical music. Quantitative data showed that informally trained DJs produced more regular timing intervals under baseline and distracting conditions than the other experimental groups. The implications of the findings for the inclusion of DJing into formal music curricula are discussed.
... Although there are technically no other performers in a conventional DJ setup, the coordination and entrainment of two rhythmic sources in phase is the essential part of DJ performance that is thought to develop SMS ability, a central hypothesis of the quantitative study reported in this article. Furthermore, DJs are continually aiming to maintain synchrony in a performance by eliminating asynchrony between the beat of the music that is already playing, and the samples they overlay and "mix" into the sonic environment, which is at the heart of what DJs do: intertextual layering of different audio samples to produce new and interesting combinations and aesthetic relationships (Bradby 1993;Kistner 2006). ...
Two studies were conducted to establish a more complete picture of the skills that might be accessed through learning to DJ and the potential value of those skills for music education. The first employed open-ended methods to explore perspectives on the value of DJing for music education. The second employed experimental methods to compare DJs’ ability to synchronise movement to auditory metronomes. 21 participants (7 professionally trained musicians, 7 informally trained DJs, 7 non-musicians) took part in both studies. Qualitative data suggested that all participant groups felt that DJs learn valuable musical skills (such as rhythm perception, instrumental skills, knowledge of musical structure, performance skills) and a majority agreed that DJing had equal relevance with other musical forms (e.g. classical music). Quantitative data showed that informally trained DJs produced more regular timing intervals under baseline and distracting conditions than the other experimental groups. The implications of the findings for the inclusion of DJing into formal music curricula are discussed.
... They provide socio-cultural explanations for the relative absence of women as creators and producers within popular culture industries, broadly claiming that such work was out of keeping with popular notions of proper femininity and creativity, and restricted by mid 20 th century gender roles and stereotypes about women's capabilities. For the most part, these arguments draw on established existing literature (for example Bradby 1993;McRobbie 1998). However, I was a little surprised to find the U.S. TV show Mad Men (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Men) ...
... In parallel, and in many ways related to this explosion in the circulation and reception of popular music, there has developed a growing scholarly interest in popular culture in general and the discourse of popular songs in particular (e.g. Adorno, 1990;Barbara, 1993;Bennett, 2000Bennett, , 2009DeNora, 2004;Frith, 1978Frith, , 1981Frith, , 1996Griffiths, 1999;Grossberg, 1984;Lynskey, 2010;Peterson, 1990;Shepherd & Wicke, 1997;Shuker, 1994). Popular music trends such as Hip Hop are purely informal yet thought-provoking discursive practices for the discourse and/or semiotic analyst to put under scrutiny (Alim, Ibrahim, & Pennycook, 2009;Graakjaer, 2012;Leone, 2012;Machin & Richardson, 2012, McKerrell, 2012Pennycook, 2007;Power, Dillane, & Devereux, 2012;Van Leeuwen, 2012;Watson, 2006). ...
This article investigates deixis-based chronotopic framing across a corpus of 90 songs selected based on their top-ranking positions on the UK song charts over the period of 8 years (2006–2014). The present study combines some tools in linguistic approach to genre analysis and some concepts drawn from pragmatics and Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA), as an analytic framework. Quantitative and qualitative focus was laid on ideologically coded thematic leitmotifs and chronotopic interplay through spatio-temporal deictic patterns across the case-study lyrics. It was found that there are significant points of commonality between the lyrics in terms of thematic strands as well as chronotope-bounded deictic features which warrants the classification of popular songs as a verbally distinct genre with its own ideologically charged discursive practices characterised by political apathy, and which can in part explain the target audience's uptake of this type of songs.
Ästhetische Normativität und retroaktive Geschichtlichkeit scheinen zwei zentrale Momente für eine wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit populärer Musik zu sein, die ihrer klanglichen Spezifik sowie ihrer kulturellen Bedeutsamkeit als Musik gerecht wird. In diesem Beitrag werden diese zwei Momente ausgehend von zwei Denkern ergründet, die im Rahmen der zeitgenössischen Forschungskultur der Popular Music Studies verdächtig erscheinen: T. W. Adorno und G. W. F. Hegel. Die Auseinandersetzung mit der ästhetischen Normativität populärer Musik und ihrer retroaktiven Geschichtlichkeit wird Paradoxa aufweisen, die sich als „Normativität ohne Normen“ und „Geschichte ohne Vergangenheit“ pointieren lassen. Nachdem die Strukturen dieser Paradoxa ausbuchstabiert werden, folgt eine skizzenhafte Darlegung der musikanalytischen, musikhistorischen und musikphilosophischen Perspektiven, die aus dieser Auseinandersetzung hervorgehen.
Human beatboxing, the musical practice of vocally producing percussive sounds in a rhythmic framework, evolved with the increasing use of drum machines in popular music. Although vocal percussion does not have an intrinsic genre, I will address beatboxing in the context of hip-hop culture as it was here that beatboxers began to simulate electronic and mechanically (re)produced sounds. I hope to highlight the significance of these sounds by addressing some of the common practices used in beatboxing against a background of social and technological stratification. These practices involve the subversion of technology, the consumption and assembly of sound, and the implicit reference to the human/machine relationship.
The objectives of this paper are to deconstructively engage with the action of beatboxing in the social and cultural context of hip-hop, identify underlying conceptual oppositions and contradictions, and displace their hierarchical structure from within (Sweeney-Turner 2000, 182). To do this, I refer to Haraway's cyborg theory which reveals contradictions yet resists notions of unified completeness; whereas dialectics seek synthesis, cyborg theory collapses dualisms in favour of the assembly and reassembly of parts and fragments (1991, 149-162).
I begin by exploring the relationship between technology and hip-hop, followed by a discussion of beatbox performance as a commodity and how this impacts on its potential to form critique. The third section looks at the type of sounds produced by beatboxers with reference to Baudrillard's (1994) notion of simulation. I conclude by tying previously addressed issues 2 together with cyborg theory to further illustrate the possible subversiveness of its practices. My theoretical perspective is indebted to Fiske who argues that products of popular culture are neither conformist nor resistant, rather a combination of the two (2010, 21). It is my intention to produce an empowered reading of beatboxing by revealing these resistant elements and their potential critical function.
This article explores the use of music in service of anthropocentric discourses and practices. We analyse spearfishing music (music synchronised with amateur online videos of spearfishing) as it has emerged in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Through textual analysis of the gendered codes present in 40 locally produced videos, we interrogate how such practices exacerbate inequalities already present in music conventions, thus conjoining localised engagement with environmental issues with a broader discourse concerning gender representation and inequality. We further ground our position by providing qualitative perspectives attained through interviews and participant-observation ethnography. While we propose that the Anthropocene be understood as a predominantly masculinist and techno-normative framework, we also argue that the paradigms evident through spearfishing music interface with legacies of colonialism, capitalism, and Indigenous knowledge within the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand, which complicates the prospect of situating such texts and practices within a universalising account of the Anthropocene.
DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines electronic and electroacoustic music written after 1950 with a focus on works composers attribute with erotic connotations. It explores the ways in which music presents eroticism, how composers envision a musically erotic subject as well as what listeners find aurally stimulating or provocative about music.
Compositions by Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari, Robert Normandeau, Annea Lockwood, Alice Shields, Barry Truax, Pauline Oliveros, Juliana Hodkinson, and Niels Rønsholdt, exhibit common musical idioms, such as the drive to climax, use of the female voice, and visual or textual imagery. But beyond these commonalities, the dissertation’s framing theoretical, critical, and philosophical analyses prove each work exhibits erotic qualities particular to its social, historical, and music-compositional climate. Early works aspire toward a Husserlian essence of the erotic, paralleling the scientific objectivity of the 1950s; in the 1980s and ’90s, many erotic works deemphasize male sexual pleasure to mirror second-wave feminist critiques of pornography; and, on the heels of this corrective, composers at the turn of the twenty-first century use digital processing to reorient gender and sexual markers. Reacting to electronic music’s historical disregard for gender and sexual difference, this dissertation exposes the philosophical, psychological, socio-cultural, and historical relevance of eroticism in electronic and electroacoustic works.
Key words: new musicology, music theory, cultural musicology, female voice, music and sexuality, gender, electronic music, electroacoustic music, computer music, analysis of electroacoustic music, erotic art, representation, philosophy, pornography, digital signal processing, Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari, Robert Normandeau, Annea Lockwood, Alice Shields, Barry Truax, Pauline Oliveros, Juliana Hodkinson, Niels Rønsholdt
***
“Sexus erklingt: Erotische Strömungen in der elektronischen Musik”
von
Danielle Sofer BA MMus MA
DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
Diese Dissertation untersucht elektronische und elektroakustische Musikstücke, die nach 1950 komponiert wurden, und denen ihre Komponistinnen und Komponisten erotische Konnotationen zugeschrieben haben. Es wird erforscht, wie die Erotik in der Musik dargestellt ist, wie sich Komponistinnen und Komponisten das musikalisch-erotische Sujet vorgestellt haben, und was Zuhörer als stimulierend oder provokativ in dieser Musik empfinden.
Kompositionen von Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari, Robert Normandeau, Annea Lockwood, Alice Shields, Barry Truax, Pauline Oliveros, Juliana Hodkinson, sowie Niels Rønsholdt weisen gemeinsame musikalische Idiome auf, die in der Regel benutzt werden, um Erotik in der Musik zu evozieren, wie beispielsweise das Höhepunktsstreben, der Einsatz der Frauenstimme, und visuelle oder textuelle Bildsprache. Über diese Gemeinsamkeiten hinaus weist die theoretische, kritische und philosophische Analyse dieser Dissertation zudem nach, dass jedes Werk über spezielle erotische Qualitäten verfügt, die spezifisch für sein soziales, historisches und kompositorisches Umfeld sind. Frühe Kompositionen streben nach einem Husserlschen Wesen der Erotik, parallel zur wissenschaftlichen Objektivität der 1950er Jahre. Viele erotische Musikstücke der 1980er und 1990er Jahre schwächen die Merkmale der männlichen Lust am Sex ab, um dadurch die feministische Pornografiekritik der zweiten Welle der Frauenbewegung widerzuspiegeln. Kurz nach diesem Korrektiv, an der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert, haben Komponistinnen und Komponisten digitale Verarbeitungsmethoden benutzt, um Gender- und Sexualitätsverhältnisse neu auszurichten. Als Reaktion auf die historische Gleichgültigkeit bezüglich Gender- und Sexualitätsdifferenz im Bereich der elektronischen Musik zeigt diese Dissertation die philosophische, psychologische, sozio-kulturelle und historische Relevanz der Erotik in elektronischen und elektroakustischen Musikstücken auf.
Drawing on writings concerning the cyborg and the posthuman, this article considers songs by Radiohead, Moby and others that use processed voices, digitally generated speech and sampled vocal loops. In these songs the technological sphere is made the locus of expression, while the human voices are mechanized and drained of subjectivity. These pieces – products of a rock band that relinquishes its voice to a computer, and of a ‘techno’ DJ striving to make mechanized dance music sing – can illustrate some ways musicians have used posthuman voices to chart and destabilize the boundaries of race, gender and the human.
Music has often served as a vehicle for sexual expression. But within a musical context saturated with many sonic phenomena, music-analytical tools can be limited in their ability to pinpoint evidence of sex acts, pleasure, or satisfaction. Centering on sonic experience and perception, this article challenges the common trope of the disembodied and disinterested music theorist by proposing that, rather than neglecting sexual discourses, like-minded music theorists have instead established a veritable field founded on the commonly-held belief that sex and music are (in some cases) interchangeable. The article proposes that the meta-theorization of these engagements constitutes a discursive “social epistemology” thereby positioning such diverse contributions as part of the core music-theoretical “standard” of what was once called “mainstream music theory.”
Musik hat oft als Mittel für sexuellen Ausdruck gedient. Doch können musikanalytische Werkzeuge innerhalb eines musikalischen Kontexts, der von einer Vielzahl an Klangphänomenen erfüllt ist, in ihrer Fähigkeit eingeschränkt sein, sexuelle Handlungen, Genuss oder Befriedigung festzumachen. Dieser Artikel untersucht, fokussiert auf das Erleben und Wahrnehmen von Klängen, sexuell inspirierte Musik und vergleicht sie mit erfahrungsorientiertem sexuell-verkörperten Schreiben über Musik. Durch eine Auseinandersetzung mit analytischen Ansätzen zu musikalisch-sexuellem Engagement, zeigt der Artikel auf, dass Musiktheoretiker*innen Diskurse über Sexualität kaum vernachlässigt haben, und hinterfragt so das Stereotyp des körper- und interesselosen Musiktheoretikers. Gleichgesinnte Theoretiker*innen haben hingegen einen Forschungsbereich entwickelt, der auf der Überzeugung basiert, dass Sex und Musik (in manchen Fällen) austauschbar sind. Der Artikel verdeutlicht, dass die Entwicklung einer Metatheorie für dieses Engagement eine diskursive „soziale Erkenntnistheorie“ konstituiert. Damit erweitert der Artikel diese vielfältigen Beiträge und positioniert sie als Teil des Kerns musiktheoretischer „Standards“ innerhalb der einst sogenannten „mainstream music theory“.
There exists a longstanding and widespread belief that touch is anti-intellectual and therefore inferior to sight. Yet the novel examined in this chapter, Egyptian-British writer Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun (1992), invests heavily in the notion that tactility is connected to knowledge, and that others’ touch facilitates a better understanding of ontology. Through an extramarital affair in Britain, Soueif’s protagonist Asya gains entry to a new realm of somatic knowledge. The affair has violent repercussions, though, and the novel’s exploration of painful touch is further developed through depictions of torture, agonizing beauty treatments, and the medicalized body. Rather than endorsing a sensory hierarchy, Soueif shows that the senses are interlinked and messily overspill any boundaries that are constructed to separate them.
This article examines how electronic-dance-music (EDM) festival participants construct narratives about dress (clothing, accessories, and other body modifications) to reinforce EDM as a demographically and ideologically white terrain. Through individual and focus-group interviews conducted over the course of 12 festival events, I explore how participants of popular campout EDM festivals in the Midwestern United States use conversations about dress to discuss and defend practices of cultural appropriation, often by drawing from interpretive frames of “color-blind” racial ideology. By doing so, these interviewees distance themselves from race and racism, frequently by claiming a “white innocence” that obscures the ways that larger racial inequalities infiltrate and replicate within the EDM scenes many participants insist are unwaveringly egalitarian.
This article explores 15 to 18-year old boys' and girls' compositional processes as mediated by music technology. Adopting Sherry Turkle's theory of 'hard' and 'soft' styles of mastery, I assert that a compositional approach that emphasizes technological control and manipulation may be more conducive to the working styles of boys than girls. In drawing this conclusion, I focus on three female composers, examining to what extent they were able to transcend or reconfigure the hard mastery expectations that had been imposed upon them.
In this chapter I use empirical data to explore the shifting systems of value within UK drum ‘n’ bass club culture through a detailed analysis of the dance. Clubbers’ comments regarding the value of dancing, alongside other club cultural practices, are key to an exploration of perceptions of similarity with, and difference from, others, which, in turn, construct club cultural identities. The drum ‘n’ bass dancing body demonstrates a valuing of qualities that can be linked to specific identity-based imagery. I reveal how clubbers simultaneously denounce and embody popular representations of gendered, lower or working-class identities, and suggest that these clubbers engage in a process of revaluation.
This article examines the ways in which dance embodies and expresses sexual discourses through an exploration of popular recreational dance in Ireland from 1920 to 1960 with particular emphasis on women. The author looks at the antipathy to ‘modern’ dancing by the State, Church and cultural groups during the 1920s and 1930s. This era was distinguished by a sexual discourse of ruin and sin and was part of the project of creating an ideal nation. It is argued that this period was followed by a more positive, though not unproblematic, discourse of romance from the 1940s onwards, which was associated with increasing consumption and urbanisation. In the concluding section differences and similarities between the two eras are suggested and brief comparison is made with sexual discourses of dance in the 1980s and 1990s.
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in London (2013–2014) to address the reasons why men dominate the crowds in certain spheres of electronic/dance music. Focusing on a group of London-based genres, notably dub, dubstep, grime and ‘bass music’, I analyse how gender gets attached to musical formations through the qualities and connotations not only of musical sound, but of its material, technological, social and spatial mediations. I show how such connotations ‘stick’ (Ahmed, S. [20041. Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
View all references]. The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press) and get transmitted through time, leading to the persistent absence of women from certain musical lineages; and I demonstrate how this process serves to entrench and ‘naturalise’ associations between musical genres and ‘maleness’. I then take this analysis to creative practices. Through my dialogue with DJ/producer Jack Latham—aka Jam City (Night Slugs)—I illuminate how musicians caught up in gendered socio-musical formations can become reflexively engaged with the gendered implications of the sounds they produce, and can therefore experiment with making changes.
The aims of this chapter are broadly twofold. First, I want to examine certain aspects of contemporary rave culture, with particular reference to the subject positions opened up within this to women. To this end, I will be drawing upon personal accounts collected in a series of interviews conducted over the past two years with women involved in rave and post-rave clubbing in and around the London area. Second, I want to explore the resonances that these accounts have with certain poststructuralist feminist attempts at developing new narratives and configurations through which to think mind, body, technology, physicality, self, other and the relations between these classifications. The concern therefore is to consider the extent to which rave, as a lived social practice, resembles the kinds of theoretical formations being imagined by certain feminists in their strategic construction of particular Utopias and political fictions. Hence, the conclusion of this chapter considers the relationship between rave, which can be read as opening up modes of being which are not structured around traditional dualisms of mind/body, self/other, physicality/machine, and the kinds of configurations being mapped out by Donna Haraway in her chapter ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (Haraway, 1991) and subsequent commentary on this piece (Penley and Ross, 1991), and Rosi Braidotti in Nomadic Subjects (1994).
Just as one cannot approach gender without some theoretical preparation, so any study of popular culture must begin by briefly considering the scholarly background to it.
Being part of patriarchal society, popular music has been dominated by men at all levels: composing and playing music, arranging and engineering it, and making the business deals about it. But in certain areas of popular music, quite complex divisions of labour have operated between men and women. For example, although in jazz the greatest instrumentalists have been men – Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Charlie Parker and so on – the greatest jazz/blues singers have been women – Ella Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan.
This essay sets out to explore the tactilization of sound in electronic dance music (EDM), which offers an important sensory–affective bridge between touch, sonic experience, and an expansive sense of connection in dancing crowds. Electronic dance music events tend to engender spaces of heightened tactility and embodied intimacy, and so it should not be surprising that their musical aesthetics also highlight tactility. In track titles, lyrics, and other text-based media surrounding this genre, ‘feeling’ is often deployed in a polyvalent manner, highlighting the conceptual overlap between emotion, affective knowing, perception, and touch. This bleed between modes of feeling extends into the sound of recordings themselves, which use vibration to engage with tactile, haptic, and kinaesthetic senses in addition to hearing. This article focuses on ‘house’ and ‘techno’ styles of electronic music, especially the ‘minimal’ continuum of sub-styles that were in ascendancy during the first decade of the twenty-first century. These styles invoke tactility through a range of modalities, of which three will be the focus of this essay: percussive ‘beats’, fleshy timbre, and sonic grain. The notion of sonic grain will be developed through a close engagement with the work of musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer – in particular, his yet-to-be-translated treatise on sound objects, Traité des objets musicaux, published by Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1966. While building upon existing studies of aesthetics in electronic music, this article strikes out in an orthogonal direction, attempting to account for aspects of this genre that are not well described in terms of symbolic representation or musical form. The aim here is to go beyond the representation of tactility in lyrics and visual imagery, turning instead to the sound of electronic dance music itself, which foregrounds percussion, texture, grain, and other sonic elements that resonate with heightened haptic experience.
Historical films about Hitler and Nazi Germany are perennially popular both within and beyond the academy. However, even in films not set in, or in any way involving, Nazi Berlin but rather only filmed on location in the city, material memories of the city’s fascist spaces can be shown to exert their influence. In comparing the eerily similar geo-aesthetic styles of two relatively obscure, relatively recent science fiction action films—Kurt Wimmer’s Equilibrium (2002) and Karen Kusama’s Aeon Flux (2005)—this contribution seeks to understand how the historically inflected spatial dimension of its urban imaginary has translated into a discernibly dark and spectacularly gendered film style.
Music technology undergraduate degree programmes are a relatively new phenomenon in British higher education, situated at the intersection of music, digital technologies, and sound art. Such degrees have exploded in popularity over the past fifteen years. Yet the social and cultural ramifications of this development have not yet been analysed. In looking comparatively at the demographics of both traditional music and music technology degrees, we highlight a striking bifurcation: traditional music degrees draw students with higher social class profiles than the British national averages, while their gender profile matches the wider student population; music technology degrees, by contrast, are overwhelmingly male and lower in terms of social class profile. We set these findings into analytical dialogue with wider historical processes, offering divergent interpretations of our findings in relation to a series of musical, technological, educational, social, political, and cultural-institutional developments in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We ask what such developments bode for future relations between music, gender, and class in the UK.
The sociologist Simon Frith identifies rock and roll as a hybrid music, which emerged in the American South of the mid-1950s as a grafting of puritanical ‘white’ country and western lyrics on to sexually explicit ‘black’ blues rhythms. While acknowledging cross-fertilisation between black and white music ‘since at least the middle of the nineteenth century’, he states that since the Second World War,
It is as dance music that black music has developed its meanings for white users. The most obvious feature of dancing as an activity is its sexuality.… Whereas Western dance forms control sexuality with formal rhythms… black music celebrates sex with a directly physical beat and an intense, emotional sound. It makes obvious the potential anarchy of sexual feeling.
(Frith 1978, p. 180)
Frith appeals to an age-old metaphor: black nature is seen as fundamentally threatening to white culture. In modern popular music, this conflict is played out in terms of the liberation or the repression of sexuality.*
Rock music has not only provided the soundtrack of our lives, but a large part of the image repertoire as well. Neither the conjunction of popular music and other media (including television and film) nor the inseparable relation between rock and roll and visual iconographies, styles and attitudes is new. Nevertheless, it is clear that the force of these conjunctures in our cultural lives is rapidly spreading, viral-like, across media, genres, contexts, interests and generations. This is neither surprising nor necessarily bad; as rock and roll generations have grown up and asserted their plurality and influence, it is their music which is taken for granted, offered as capitalist entertainment and sometimes exploited for marketing purposes. This reconfiguration, often described as rock ‘moving into the mainstream of contemporary culture’ has been enabled and even engendered by technological, social and economic conditions. But it is the speed with which this is being accomplished, the particular ways it is inserted into broader contexts, and the effects it is having that interest me. The topography of popular culture is obviously changing; how rock and roll has come to define the dominant forms of cultural enjoyment and even legitimacy, offers us an opportunity to map out some of the cultural changes of contemporary life, and their relations to ideological and political struggles.
A researcher reports on ethnographic research into the rave scene and ecstasy use, conducted between 1988 and 1992
This comment, made to me by a particular 15-year old girl, but echoing the general complaint of countless teenage girls down many generations, is the main theme of this article. I want to show that such a comment comes not from adolescent sulkiness or youthful paranoia, but that it reflects a real dilemma stemming from the fact that teenage girls are confronted by conflicting sets of expectations, which I shall characterise as expectations arising from the connotations we attach to femininit? and to adolescence ? I shall suggest that by understanding femininity and adolescence as discourse?, we may begin to uncover some of the traps we constantly set for teenage girls; and we may also throw some light on the difficulties and disappointments experienced by those who seek to work with teenage girls as, for instance, teachers and social workers. As well as showing some of the contradictory standards generated by these discourses, and the consequences of judging girls’ behaviour by the terms of one rather than the other, I shall explore femininity and adolescence as discourses with structured sets of relationships between speakers and actors who occupy positions in them. Also, I shall demonstrate that these discourses have both ‘professional’ and ‘public’ variants, using the expressions of teachers and social workers as examples of the professional aspect of the discourses and drawing upon teenage magazines to illustrate the discourses in their public variant. It is a central argument of this article that femininity and adolescence are subversiv? of one another, and in particular, that adolescence is subversive of femininity; young girls’ attempts to be accepted as ‘young women’ are always liable to be undermined (subverted) by perceptions of them as childish, immature, or any other of the terms by which we define the status ‘adolescent’.
One of the first books I remember reading, I mean really reading, still lies within quotable reach on a bookshelf upstairs. It would hardly qualify as unusual taste for a seven-year-old girl, then or now. For some reason I prefer not to look at Dancing Sta?, (a children’s biography of the life of Anna Pavlova written by a woman called Gladys Malvern) again. I would rather leave it lying there and rely instead on memory for what struck me about it then and how that relates to my concern in this paper..
Upon its first publication, Loving with a Vengeance was a groundbreaking study of women readers and their relationship to mass-market romance fiction. Feminist scholar and cultural critic Tania Modleski has revisited her widely read book, bringing to this new edition a review of the issues that have, in the intervening years, shaped and reshaped questions of women's reading. With her trademark acuity and understanding of the power both of the mass-produced object, film, television, or popular literature, and the complex workings of reading and reception, she offers here a framework for thinking about one of popular culture's central issues. This edition includes a new introduction, a new chapter, and changes throughout the existing text.
Discusses rock as a form of both sexual expression and control. Describes rock's representations of masculinity and femininity and considers the contradictions involved in the representations. Relates the effects of rock to its form--as music, as commodity, as culture, and as entertainment. (JMF)
It is a very odd fact that, by and large, feminist theory has not concerned itself with popular music. This stands in stark contrast to the considerable volume of work which has been built up since the late seventies on film, television and popular fiction. How can one explain this state of affairs? Firstly, within popular fiction, film and TV there are forms which are specifically aimed at female reception: the soap opera, romantic fiction, women’s magazines and women’s films. Since the 1970s, these cultural forms have been the focus of a substantial amount of feminist critical analysis. Indeed, in both the UK and the United States there has been a proliferation of courses on these ‘women’s genres’. In sharp contrast, popular music has been perceived as a ‘masculine’ form: music played by and for men. The non-masculinist alternatives are few in number and not easily accessible outside a limited subcultural space. Thus, it could be argued that popular music is not a form to which feminists would be drawn.
This paper was first published in Socialist Review, no. 80, 1985. The essay originated as a response to a call for political thinking about the 1980s from socialist-feminist points of view, in hopes of deepening our political and cultural debates in order to renew commitments to fundamental social change in the face of the Reagan years. The "Cyborg Manifesto" tried to find a feminist place for connected thinking and acting in profoundly contradictory worlds. Since its publication, this bit of cyborgian writing has had a surprising half-1ife. It has proved impossible to rewrite the cyborg. Cyborg's daughter will have to find its own matrix in another essay, starting from the proposition that the immune system is the bio-technical body's chief system of differences in late capitalism, where feminists might find provocative extra-terrestrial maps of the networks of embodied power marked by race, sex, and class. The essay below is substantially the same as the 1985 version, with minor revisions and correction of notes.
One of the things that distinguishes music from other forms of popular culture is that its consumption is accompanied by so much comment. Neither TV nor film, for instance, has accrued the volume, diversity or specialisation of the books and magazines devoted to music and read by people without a professional investment. This literature poses particular problems for historians of rock'n'roll, rock and pop. What are its main methods of ordering the popular past? Which musics and events does it privilege? How should scholars read the music press as sources? How can the pop histories contained in New Musical Express, Billboard or The Face be interpreted for histories of pop? This article is derived from work-in-progress concerning the history of discotheques and club cultures from the late 1950s until the present day. As such, it offers no tidy solutions or complete narratives, but rehearses a few dilemmas relevant to writing about popular culture.
I spent the summer of 1990 studying the work of disk jockeys involved in the ‘House’ club scene in London, Manchester and Belfast. What I was initially intrigued by was how a popular music genre could develop such a following, indeed, some notoriety, without the traditional trappings of ‘rock 'n' roll’ (‘star performers’, ‘groups’), and without a manifest ideological stance adopted in relation to mainstream lifestyles. I came to conclude that a shift of meanings had occurred in the activity of mass dancing to records during the late 1980s, a shift which has created a new and central role for disk jockeys.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Warwick, 1989. Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 560-573) and discography (v. 2, leaves 574-575). Photocopy.
Examen del contexto cultural de MTV (Music Television), canal de televisión que transmite videos musicales sin interrupciones, puesto en funcionamiento desde 1981. Analiza su producción, estrategias publicitarias y comercialización; también hace una caracterización y clasificación (románticos, socialmente concientizadores, nihilistas, clásicos y postmodernos) de los videoclips, con un enfoque centrado en las cuestiones de género y por último explora sus implicaciones masivas sobre la cultura juvenil y sus posibilidades de futuro.
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