Popular Music

Anarchist Punks Resisting Gentrification: Countercultural Contestations of Space in the New Berlin

by David Drissel

Book Review: Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

by Christopher Doll

Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 68/4, 2012, pp.763-765

Talented Artists or Hardworking Craftsmen? Perceptions of Talent in the Semi-Professional Popular Music Scene in Cardiff

by Cinzia Afra Yates

Paper as given at the 2009 International Association for the Study of Popular Music held at Cardiff University.

MMP WITTR paper - Seifert and Murray

by Amelia-Roísín Seifert

Amália Rodrigues e Alberto Janes: Um encontro singular na musica popular portuguesa

by jorge carrega

  Alberto Janes, um farmacêutico e músico amador natural de Reguengos de Monsaraz, escreveu alguns dos maiores... more   Alberto Janes, um farmacêutico e músico amador natural de Reguengos de Monsaraz, escreveu alguns dos maiores êxitos da carreira de Amália Rodrigues. Dotado de um talento invulgar, o compositor alentejano foi responsável por letras e melodias inesquecíveis que continuam a ser gravadas e interpretadas pelas novas gerações de fadistas. Este artigo pretende analisar a obra de Alberto Janes e o seu contributo para a carreira artística de Amália Rodrigues.

Breaking expectations: Imagined affinities in mediated youth cultures

by Mary Fogarty

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

Volume 26, Issue 3, 2012
Special Issue: Mediated Youth Cultures
Editors: Andy Bennett & Brady Robards

This article examines the mediated encounters experienced by participants in hip hop and funk dance styles especially... more This article examines the mediated encounters experienced by participants in hip hop and funk dance styles especially breaking or b-boying/b-girling. It introduces the concept of imagined affinities to describe the spectrum of these encounters, which are enacted through mediated texts, or by travels through new places. Using interviews with dancers as a guide, I argue that artefacts made, distributed and circulated by dancers help to produce perceptions of commonalities between them. The nature of the process of rapid mediatisation, which has taken place during the past few decades, and its subsequent impact on breaking or b-boying/b-girling, are considered here through a concerted effort to historicize shifts in practice and experience. I examine the historical moment when homemade videotapes began to proliferate in the cultural practices of breaking, providing a source for the values and codes of hip hop culture. At that time, dancers on tour, who created the videos, celebrated the local contexts of other dancers from around the world while simultaneously showing a determination to appreciate breaking through its own practices and formats, even as these practices were becoming rapidly transformed and expanded through international networks.

Multiple voices, multiple narratives 03-03-2012

by Jez Collins

Figuration Punk

by Bodo Mrozek

published in: Netzwerk Körper (Hg.): What Can a Body Do? Figuratuionen des Körpers in den Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt a.M. / New York: Campus 2012, S. 191-196.

"Punk ereignete sich auf verschiedenen Ebenen: innerhalb der kapitalistischen Produktionslogiken der Musik- und... more "Punk ereignete sich auf verschiedenen Ebenen: innerhalb der kapitalistischen Produktionslogiken der Musik- und Modeindustrie ebenso wie als subkulturelles Zeichensystem, als Bewegung von Kulturamateur_innen und als künstlerische Avantgarde, die zunehmend in etablierte Kulturräume drängte. Ziel dieses Essays ist es, quer durch die unterschiedlichen Erscheinungsformen von Punk übergreifende körpergeschichtliche Aspekte herauszuarbeiten und historisch zu kontextualisieren: [...] die mit den Stilmitteln der Sexualisierung und Fetischisierung konstituierten normverletzenden Körperkonzepte des Punk [sind] als plakative Manifestationen einer neuen Ästhetik zu lesen, die in bis dato ungekannter Drastik mit sozial affirmativen und zukunftsbejahenden Lebensentwürfen brach. Nach dieser Lesart war Punk im wörtlichen Sinne die Verkörperung einer zeitgeschichtlichen Zäsur: des Strukturbruchs der 70er Jahre."

The Concept of Lo-fidelity. The Cultural and Aesthetic Implications of Lo-fi Music Production

by Melle Kromhout

Over the Ruined Factory There's a Funny Noise: Throbbing Gristle and the Mediatized Roots of Noise in/as Music

by Melle Kromhout

Popular Music and Society, Vol. 34, No. 1, February 2011, pp. 23–34

Britain's Throbbing Gristle used a kind of aural and conceptual violence to pursue specific ideological goals. The... more Britain's Throbbing Gristle used a kind of aural and conceptual violence to pursue specific ideological goals. The concept of noise is crucial to the understanding of this use, but is often explained in a limiting discourse. Friedrich Kittler offers an alternative approach by showing how the introduction of media technology initially formed this discourse. When one assesses the use of noise and its relation to violence from such a media historic point of view, Throbbing Gristle's layered work becomes conceptually coherent and turns out to be an exemplary case study for the status of noise in popular music more generally.

As distant and close as can be Lo-fi recording: site-specificity and (in) authenticity

by Melle Kromhout

Paper presented at The Fifth Annual Art of Record Production Conference, Cardiff, 2009

In the paper I elaborate on lo-fi recording and its relation towards its hi-fi counterpart, using literature on (the... more In the paper I elaborate on lo-fi recording and its relation towards its hi-fi counterpart, using literature on (the history of) audio recording, the concept of noise – one of lo-fi’s most distinctive features in opposition to hi-fi – and the conceptualization of spatiality and physicality in and of music. Since, as Stan Link points out (in “The Work of Reproduction in the Mechanical Aging of an Art: Listening to Noise.” Computer Music Journal, 25:1, 2001: 34–47), there now exist ‘some very high-tech means to achieve “lo-fi” ends,’ I focus on whether lo-fi is or isn’t moving away from the hi-fi aesthetics of the music studio, what meanings are actually performed through lo-fi aesthetics as a strategy for authenticity, relying on site specificity and physicality, and what this might mean for the construction of the music studio as a conceptual framework in the study of popular music.

This was made to end all parties

by Melle Kromhout

Tuned to the nation's mood: Popular music as a mnemonic cultural object

by Eyal Zandberg

'Crippled with nerves’: popular music and polio, with particular reference to Ian Dury

by George McKay

Popular Music 28:3 (October 2009), 341-365. Special issue on popular music and disability (ed. McKay).

This article looks at a remarkable cluster of popular musicians who contracted and survived poliomyelitis (‘infantile... more This article looks at a remarkable cluster of popular musicians who contracted and survived poliomyelitis (‘infantile paralysis’) epidemics through the twentieth century, and ways in which they managed and, to varying extents, explored their polio-related impairments and experiences in their music. Drawing on medical history and disability studies, it focuses largely on the pop and rock generation of polio survivors – the children and young people from the 1940s and 1950s who were among the last to contract the disease prior to the successful introduction of mass vaccination programmes (in the West). These include Neil Young, Steve Harley, Joni Mitchell, and Israel Vibration. The article then looks in detail at the work of Ian Dury, who was for a while the highest profile visibly physically disabled pop artist in Britain, and who produced a compelling body of works exploring the experiences of disability.

Includes 7 images.

Published in a special issue of Popular Music, on popular music and disability, containing eight essays by scholars from Europe, USA, Australia, guest-edited by George McKay.

"Ungdomens Segrande tro" Unison sång som social och kultiverande folkhögskolepraktik

by Erik Nylander

Master thesis, Department of Sociology. Umeå University

Popular Music and the Aesthetics of Ageing

by Jodie Taylor

Co-authored with Andy Bennett

The cultural turn in sociology and related fields of study has brought with it new understandings of the various ways... more The cultural turn in sociology and related fields of study has brought with it new understandings of the various ways social identities are formed. In a post-structural landscape, social identities must increasingly be regarded as reflexively derived ‘performative assemblages’ that incorporate elements of the local vernacular and global popular cultures. Building on the above reinterpretation of social identity, this paper takes as its central premise the notion that, in addition to its well-mapped cul- tural importance for youth, popular music retains a critical currency for the ageing audience as a key cultural resource of post-youth identification, lifestyle and associated cultural practices. In its exam- ination of the relationship between popular music, ageing and identity, this paper uses illustrative examples drawn from ethnographic data collected by the authors between 2002 and 2009 in Australia and the UK.

Turning Rebellion into Money

by Stephen Linstead

Linstead, S. A.  (2010) “Turning Rebellion into Money: The Clash, Creativity and Resistance to Commodification” in Townley, B. and Beech, N. eds. Organizing Creativity  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9781107403734 pp 125-148.

In this chapter I pursue the dilemma of commodification that creative artistes working in a commercial system... more In this chapter I pursue the dilemma of commodification that creative artistes working in a commercial system experience, explored through critical themes in the work of UK punk band The Clash (Topping 2003 ). The critical themes present in their work are music as cultural resistance/revolutionary form; work, employment and opportunity; domestic fascism; urban dispossession and multiculturalism; and global politics and postcolonialism. The pursuit is ultimately inconclusive,
as we might expect, but illuminates some of the dynamic and
often excruciating tensions involved in commercializing creative
resistance whilst producing perhaps the most musically complex, professionally influential, politically energized, commercially successful and artistically enduring body of work by any of the punk bands.

Popular culture as carnaval

by Stephen Linstead

S. Linstead (2010) “Popular Culture as Carnaval: The Clash, Play and Transgression in the Aesthetic Economy 1976-85” in Townley, B. and Beech, N. eds. Organizing Creativity Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9781107403734 pp 60-80.

In this chapter I explore the question of the appropriateness of the metaphor of carnival when applied to rock music... more In this chapter I explore the question of the appropriateness of the metaphor of carnival when applied to rock music generally, but in particular to the world of The Clash, with its strong visual identity and cartoonish sensibilities displaying eccentricity, mésalliances, ambiguity, profanation, transgression, ambivalent laughter and creative degradation – all classic features of carnival, identifi ed by Mikhail Bahktin . I highlight some of the post-Bakhtinian problems of dealing with a literary representation (carnival) of a lived social relation (which I term carnaval ), and using that representation as a metaphor for a different lived social relation, without direct close engagement with the relevant (transgressive) features of that social relation itself. Whilst the work of The Clash provides useful material for the former analysis, an examination of their social milieu and interpersonal relations provides insight into processes of transgression and what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986 ) call ‘the dialectics of social classifi cation’ . That these social relations have a dark side that is not resisted without cost – a point that is often lost in the application of the carnival metaphor – is underscored by the
conflictual and ultimately destructive dynamics of the band, their
management and organization, despite producing perhaps the most musically complex, professionally influential, politically energized, commercially successful and artistically enduring body of work by any of the punk bands.

Canadian Music and Fashion, Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion

by Martha Ladly

Of Cyborgs and Clavichords: Nature and Technology in Björk's "All is Full of Love"

by Jacob Sagrans

Written April 2012 for a seminar on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century keyboard technology at McGill University, taught by Dr. Tom Beghin