Lucy March’s research while affiliated with Temple University and other places

This chapter traces forms of music culture that evolved over the 2000s, as the music industry and socio-cultural identity landscapes shifted. It introduces the media used to share and promote popular music such as TV, radio, and the Internet (including the rise of social networking sites and per-to-peer [P2P] sites); musical artifacts/products (CDs, mp3s, vinyl, digital streams); devices/technology used to listen (such as CD players, computers, mp3 players, iPods, cell phones); the continuation of the festival concerts of the prior decade while setting the stage for the elite festival culture of Coachella and Bonnaroo; and lastly the popular genres of the 2000s (including the garage rock revival, pop-rock, emo, metalcore, popular indie rock, and indie rap). Additionally, this chapter examines the industry panic stemming from the extreme drop in physical sales brought on by the proliferation of P2P sharing sites and widely accessible digital music. Further, this chapter examines the decade’s progressing culture consciousness regarding gender, sexuality, and identity in popular music. Lastly, this chapter relates the overarching themes of the aughts to the consecutive album essays in order to better understand the ways in which contributors’ formative musical experiences illuminate the socio-cultural complexities of the 2000s.

This chapter is an autoethnographic exploration of musical (self-)discovery through developments in 2000s digital culture, and how my fandom for the Japanese metal band Dir en grey helped me come to terms with my own identity. In 2005, I struggled to define my sexuality. I found solace in music, and updating my LiveJournal daily with veiled references to whoever my object of infatuation was at that moment. I shared a love of Dir en grey with new friends who didn’t think I was weird for listening to a Japanese man screaming, and who understood that just because I liked boys, that didn’t mean I couldn’t also like girls. Obtaining foreign media was also a complicated undertaking in the early 2000s. Before the release of their 2005 album Withering to death, none of Dir en grey’s music had been released in North America, so hearing it meant either hunting for an album at the annual anime convention or snagging a rip on Napster. These digital tools fostered my interest in media from other cultures, exposed me to new ways of thinking about gender and sexuality, and thus helped me negotiate my own evolving identity as a queer adolescent.

A characteristic frequently glossed over in scholarly examinations of the online electronic music genre vaporwave is its use of East Asian cultural imagery in its paratexts. One exception is a piece by musicologist Ken McLeod, who connects vaporwave’s use of visual references to Japanese culture to techno-Orientalism, a term that describes how paranoia around Japanese economic expansion in the late twentieth century manifested in American and European cultural products. This article extends McLeod's argument to show how the uses and reproductions of East Asian cultural elements in vaporwave serve to reinforce stereotypes consistent with histories of techno-Orientalist representations, particularly with regard to gender. This article elaborates on the anonymous nature of the vaporwave scene to complicate approaches to techno-Orientalist analyses of digital artifacts. In doing so, this essay contributes to the growing body of scholarly literature addressing the roles representation, aesthetics, and affect play in the formation of communities around music genres online.

In 2020, hyperpop artist Ashnikko released a remix of her single “Daisy” with virtual idol Hatsune Miku. While the rights to any commercial use of Miku’s voice and likeness are owned by Crypton Future Media, anyone with Vocaloid software can produce songs for her. While scholars have found that fan-produced performances are foundational to Miku’s development as a performer, less attention has been paid to how intercultural commercial ventures have shaped her identity. This paper employs a textual analysis of the “Daisy 2.0” music video and an observation of comments posted on the video’s YouTube upload to demonstrate how the video’s narrative and its surrounding audience discourse both limit and expand Miku’s cultural signifiers. While fluid approaches to identity afforded by the hyperpop and virtual idol subcultures hold potential to liberate these performers from hegemonic notions of gender and sexuality, cultural and commercial constraints still loom large in these spaces.