Pop Research Links . . .

MARS 2012 conference, 1-4 February 2012, Seinjoki, Finland

2012-02-05T16:26:00.000-08:00

Following a kind invitation from organizers the Sibelius Academy, last week I attended the MARS 2012 conference as a keynote speaker.

MARS is an annual Finnish popular music event held at the Rytmikorjaamo (a large garage-turned-music venue) in Seinäjoki. It specializes in blending music industry concerns with academic speakers: past keynotes have included Mark Percival, Lee Marshall and Simon Frith. This year the Sibelius Academy invited alternative media expert Professor Chris Atton to talk about the history of music journalism. Chris is seen here with the award-winning Finnish braodcaster and dedicated music enthusiast Pekka Laine (on the right and left respectively):

Maintaining the focus on issue of music audiences, the organizers also asked me to discuss popular music fandom in terms of its definition, mechanics and future...

Beyond the two keynotes, a series of panels - presented in Finnish - explored various ‘popular musiikkikulttuuria’ topics, including how to attract younger audiences to festivals.

Finland has a very interesting popular music scene. A range of national bands like Lordi and Nightwish show that the country has had an especially strong heavy rock and metal tradition. Several local bands took to the stage on the first night of our conference including the fascinating Mr Peter Hayden - a Hawkwind-style instrumental outfit who fused prog rock, grunge and straight metal with a dash of new wave style bass.

Despite the predictable freezing weather it was a great trip. Apparently, Finland can have snow on the ground from as early as late October all the way through until May. When we were there, temperatures in Seinäjoki plummeted down to as low as -32 degrees centigrade: not good weather for hanging around outside. Even the locals were finding it extremely cold.

Meanwhile our hosts, Finnish music scholars Saijaleena Rantanen of the Sibelius Academy and Dr Heikki Uimonen from the University of Tampere (below left and right) were both extremely helpful and hospitable.

... All I can say to you is thank you again for a wonderful trip, and in my best Finnish:

"Toivon, että tämä ihana tapahtuma jatkuu menestyä isompi ja suuremmassa mittakaavassa."

NORTHWEST POPULAR MUSIC STUDIES NETWORK

2012-01-10T04:20:00.000-08:00

Call for Papers:

POPULAR MUSIC AND AUTOMOBILE CULTURE: A ONE DAY SYMPOSIUM

Binks Building, University of Chester, England

Friday 22nd June 2012

Event organisers:

Dr Chris Hart, Dr Mark Duffett and Dr Beate Peter

From Cadillacs to tour buses, motor vehicles and popular music have developed in parallel as symbiotic commodities. Their intimate and intertwined relationship evokes issues and feelings that characterize life in modern society. The conference aims to outline and discuss this relationship between these two culturally charged commodities. Motor transport is a dominant feature of the modern world. Cars, buses, trucks and everything in between have their followers and dissenters. Vehicles offer the functions of mobility, freedom, speed and comfort, but they are not just physical machines. Contemporary and historic brands offer consumers opportunities to display status, belonging, style and choice. Social and utilitarian elements combine within a motor aesthetic that provides individuals with entry into particular imagined communities. A multiplicity of brands and logos symbolizes the various styles, designs and attitudes that are now a global currency. Advertising and marketing have elevated the social place of particular vehicles to objects of fantasy, desire, status and play. Just as motor vehicles are referenced in popular music, so music is a part of automobile culture and design. From the 1950s onwards drivers and passengers have been able to enjoy a choice of music styles, genres and artists as in-car audio technology has became a feature of most vehicles. Linking the two commodities has allowed auto-manufacturers to stylize mass-produced lines as emblems of social and personal identity. Whether one discusses Motown, the Oldsmobile 88 or Route 66, motor vehicles and roads have been at the centre of popular music cultures that have defined the attitudes of whole sections of modern society. We therefore suggest the following themes for consideration:

* The role of vehicles in the music or images of key artists.
* Music stars as celebrity endorsers for motoring.
* Glittering prizes: vehicles as commodities (eg. Elvis, Beach Boys).
* Vehicles, gender, youth and courtship (eg. Grease, surf sounds, Beatles).
* Vehicles and particular music genres, places or scenes (eg. hip-hop, surf music, Detroit).
* Dimensions of identity: place, class, vehicles, music.
* Alienation / twisted celebrations (e. Gary Numan, Kraftwerk).
* Metaphorical critiques: crashes and traffic jams (Jan & Dean, Hendrix, The Normal).
* Popular music and racing cars.
* “Driving” and “the road” as themes and metaphors in music.
* Vehicles as vehicles for listening (eg. in-car audio culture).
* Drive time: music formats, radio and the experience of driving.
* Retro culture: vehicle collecting, music and nostalgia.
* Low-riding: race and music, vehicles and the urban landscape.
* Futurism, vehicles, speed and music (eg. Kylie, Electronic music).
* Motor companies use of music for branding (eg. David Guetta / Transformers).
* Use of vehicles in music videos.

The event will not charge a registration fee, but we will expect those attending to register and fill in a photography clearance form.

At this stage we invite submission of abstracts for proposed papers of 300 words or less with the addition of a 50 word biography by 31st January 2012.

Please send abstracts or enquiries to C.Hart@chester.ac.uk

About the organisers:

Dr Chris Hart is Senior Lecturer in Advertising at Chester. He recently co-managed the largest study done to date into the economics and social impact of historic vehicles in Europe.

Dr Mark Duffett is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Chester. He is known as a popular music scholar whose central interests include fandom and Elvis Presley.

Dr Beate Peter is a member of the Institute for Performance Research at Manchester Metropolitan University with research interests in music psychology and popular culture. Her comparative study of techno in Detroit and Berlin is to be published in Spring 2012.

Older NW Pop Studies Events

2012-01-10T04:12:00.000-08:00

In memory of David Sanjek

2011-12-01T16:35:00.001-08:00

Last night when I heard the news about Dave, I couldn’t quite believe it. We had a friendly get-together planned for this coming weekend. How inconsiderate: he never said goodbye. But Dave could be sentimental, so I think that if he had to go, his doing it by slipping away was for the best. He died as he lived - a high flyer - and he died in his own native country.

The last time I saw him in the flesh was a couple of weeks ago, when he popped his head into the jazz studies reading group that I attended at Salford. He was organizing another event that day and in retrospect I was sorry that I didn’t go. We stayed in email contact right up until he flew to the USA. He was going to argue the case for George Clinton to be added to the National Recordings Registry.

I first met Dave when he came over to present a paper at a conference in Sheffield in about 1999 - we just said a quick hello. When he got the job at Salford I saw him at another event and suggested that we should meet up: we worked in the same field and lived in the same city. We became very dear friends, partly I think because without any comeback we could hear about what was going on (and sometimes going down) in each other’s institutions, and also because we use each other as sounding boards and strategize together. I always felt we were extremely lucky to have a scholar like Dave in this region. But we became more that professional allies. When I got to know Dave as a person, I felt that I was very lucky to have him in my life. We’d be in contact by email all the time, sometimes go out for meals at the Red Chilli on Portland Street, and he’d visit my place every couple of weeks with a ragbag full of DVDs.

Dave knew as much about film as he knew about music. When you watched a film with Dave he’d always turn to you afterwards and want to know your opinion. He had such catholic tastes. I think he liked quirky, ensemble pieces the best as they fitted his inclusive ethics, but we watched everything - from old film noirs to westerns, films by Orson Welles to Dario Argento, Claude Chabrol and all else in between. I still have a pile of DVDs sitting on my shelf that he loaned me. Beyond cinema and popular music Dave was a cultural omnivore whose interests also extended across theatre, literature and American politics (a little sign of home sickness). Between talking about music research and giving me a priceless education in cinema, Dave would reminisce about his past in the USA: his family life, college days, the summer camps (some of his happiest days) and his time working for BMI… By the end of the night, we’d watched a couple of films, had a few hours of conversation, and it would be getting late. Dave would clap my hand and say, “Alright, man” then be off into the night to get his taxi across town. I never counted how many times we repeated the ritual, but I was always grateful that he’d taken the time. For such a busy person, one of the wonderful things about Dave was how often he found the time to be there with you. He was creative, considerate, compassionate and thoughtful. And I’m going to really miss him.

There are more posts from those who met Dave here.

CFP - POPULAR MUSIC FANDOM, special issue of Popular Music and Society

2011-06-11T06:30:00.000-07:00

Guest editor, Mark Duffett

Popular Music and Society invites article proposals for a new special issue. Fandom is both a personal expression of emotional conviction and a complex, changing, multi-faceted social phenomenon that now encompasses both online and offline activity.

The study of fandom is a scholarly niche that exists at the intersection of a wide range of interests and connections. It can be contextualized by wider media research (theory by scholars such as Henry Jenkins and Matt Hills; reception analysis; celebrity studies; ethnography; subcultural theory) and by direct research into popular music culture (ethnomusicology; research on listening; live music audiences; studies of music in everyday life).

We invite papers with themes that may include, but are not limited to:

· Fans as musicians / musicians as fans

· The consumer marketplace, perceptions of the music industry

· Collecting, listening, and other fan practices

· Live music, local scenes, and fandom as living culture

· Stereotyping, self-awareness, media representation, lit and fiction

· Fandom and social identities (such as gender, age, disability, race)

· Methodology, research practice, cultural theory

· Histories, critiques of fandom as a response to mass culture

· Taste, cultural capital, and the canon

· Online participatory cultures

· Case studies and ethnographies; personal narratives, memories, and investments

· Stardom and celebrity; identification, reading, and textuality

· Legacies of key representations (e.g., Fred Vermorel and Judy Vermorel's book Starlust)

· Modernity, religion, pathology, and the "cult" analogy

· Differing fandoms / specific music genres

· The fan community: insiders, outsiders, and the "ordinary" audience

· Fan culture and the paradigm of performance

· The uses of fandom: political activism, heritage, and tourism

· Fandom, the family, and / or the life cycle

Send proposals of up to 500 words in the first instance.

Contributions will be peer-reviewed for potential inclusion in the main section of the journal. Polemical papers will also be considered for inclusion in the Forum section. Indicate the name under which you would wish to be published, your professional/academic affiliations, a postal address, and preferred email contact.

Deadline for submission of proposals is October 31, 2011. We would hope to commission articles by December 31, 2011, and deadline for submission of the articles will be July 31, 2012.

Please email proposals to guest editor Mark Duffett at m.duffett@chester.ac.uk.

Making Things Whole Again - Take That Reunion Events

2011-06-06T00:09:00.000-07:00

My friends Anja Lobert and Dr Tim Wise were busy last week putting on a double-header exhibition and conference on Take That, designed to coincide with the band's triumphant home run of several reunion dates at the Manchester City football stadium.

For American readers who don't know them so well, Take That were a boyband from the North of England who had phenomenal success before splitting in 1996. In their heyday they had a string of chart-topping singles in the UK, but only one hit in the USA. After the break-up, all went their separate ways. The incomparable Robbie Williams went on to have a successful solo career. Gary Barlow became a credible singer-songwriter with a career in his own right. Some of the others - who were called Mark, Jason and Howard - released albums of their own. Then about four or five years ago they reformed as a four-piece without Robbie. Last year he rejoined for a carefully controlled reunion that extended the band's reach to encompass the quality press, giving the Take That reunion mass phenomenon status.

As might be imagined, the Making Things Whole Again conference was rife with discussions of fandom and gender, generational memory, and Take That's in-group masculine dramaturgy. My own contribution explored how we constantly frame boybands and their followers with four interlocking discourses - youth, exploitation, gender and fandom - that collectively function to allay anxieties about us loving music that is undeniably created for the process of commercial marketing. Even in the liberate age of social media, boybands still come in for a kind of mass culture critique.

Anja's exhibition, called Take That Fandom before the Internet is also fascinating. I never realized the extent to which she was a 1990s Take That fan herself. Held in the Northern Quarter, Anja's installation is based on her research contact with around 500 fans. What it shows is that the girls who loved Take That formed a living social culture. They sent each other penpal letters, traded stickers and candid photos of band members, and some made "FBs". Many of the girls would receive pen pal letters on a daily basis.

The "FB" (or "friendship book" to give it the full title) is a hand-made compilation of fans' addresses, circulated between enthusiasts. FBs were often just a few sheets of paper folded or stapled together. Yet they were chocked full of mini-appeals in felt-tip squiggles for girls seeking new pen pals - the one page or less ads frequently featured text-speak teen acronyms for things like which bandmember the girl liked and whether she would accept corresponds from other countries. FBs also contained pictures, doodles, stickers and the like. As Anja shows, there were three types: Slams (get-to-know-yous that feature repeated answers to the same set of questions), Crams (that cram in lots of addresses) and Decos (ornate, heavily decorated lists - in effect, homemade portable "shrines" to the band).

Beyond the FBs and their ephemeral culture of performed self-representation, the currency of the fan community included real life amateur photos of the boys in the band, taken by girls who waited by stage doors or followed them round the country. While presenting a less glossy image that Take That's publicity stills, in effect these candids offered a vicarious back-stage pass to anyone who wanted to see what the boys were like in ordinary life. For most girls, the photos were the only evidence that the Take That boys were "real" lads who goofed around off-duty. Sometimes the photos were also evidence that the pen pal you were corresponding with had actually met a band member and could claim to have got nearer and known about them. Girls would write "no copies" on the back of the pictures to stop others copying them into oblivion as the pictures circulated through the fan community. Take That Fandom before the Internet shows that the 1990s were an eventual, social time in the lives of adolescent female fans from different countries. Before the days of Facebook there was indeed a communicative, living culture of active, producerly Take That fans invigorated through their engagement with what might have appeared to be, on the face of it, the glossy yet glossed over end of teen pop culture.

All Watched Over By Machines - Adam Curtiz, BBC2 documentary

2011-05-27T07:04:00.000-07:00

The televisual essayist and social documentarian and Adam Curtis has just slipped out another fascinating series on BBC2. If the first episode 'Love and Power' is anything to go by, it's going to be a great ride. Curtis has a knack of weaving together the big picture of history with the personal struggles of those who made it. To aid him he also infuses some subtle popular music cues, such as Kraftwerk, on the soundtrack.

In this episode Curtis explores Ayn Rand's role as the seismic catalyst to a wave of thinking that propelled the Republican notions of a society made up of independent "free" individuals. Inspired by Rand, Silicone Valley entrepreneurs led to a rush to promote new businesses on the back of a utopian vision of computer-based free market abundance. Yet their social dreams ignored the economic realities of unsound growth and over-reaching national debt. More personally, Curtiz contrasts Rand's unforgiving, Darwinian view of love with her own moribund love life and failed affair with the psychologist Nathaniel Branden. After he finished with her, apparently Rand angrily accused Branden of betrayal. At the end of her life, to her TV interviewer the supposedly loveless free marketeer repeated the cold, steely words of a ferociously self-willed Greek philosopher: "I will not die - it's the world that will end."

One of the most interesting points in the whole episode (7:30 in on the clip) is when we hear the disillusioned words of 1990s online poster Carmen Hermosillo. Her claims are even more prescient to the age of web 2.0 social media as they belie liberal notions of the active audience. We work for capital now, as Hermosillo made clear over a decade ago, even when we don't realize it:

It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge their individuality. This is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions – their guts – online, and I did so my self until I began to see that I had commodified myself.

Commodification means that you turn something into a product that has a money value. In the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories by workers, who were mostly exploited, but I created my interior thoughts as commodities for the corporations that owned the board that I was posting to, like Compuserve or AOL. That commodity was then sold on to other consumer entities as entertainment.

Cyberspace is a black hole. It absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as an emotional spectacle. It is done by businesses that commodify human interaction and emotion, and we are getting lost in the spectacle.

"I Have Admired You for Many Years": Fandom and the Performance of Identity

2011-05-24T12:25:00.000-07:00

Why fans of different celebrities behave in such similar ways? The 1999 documentary feature film A Conversation with Gregory Peck contained footage of the classic screen icon’s retirement tour of America. For much of the film, Peck recounts tales from his working life as an actor to live audiences of his now-middle aged fans. One woman that came all the way from England finally manages to meet her Hollywood icon backstage. The result is a loving exchange that can be found at about 7:13 within the above Youtube clip...

Gregory Peck: Hello there. You came all the way from London for this evening, did you now?

Peck fan: Absolutely. I’m speechless – I don’t know quite what to say.

Gregory Peck: So tell me about yourself?

Peck fan: Well, I’ve admired you for many years. I wanted to see for myself whether you really are what you appear to be on screen.

Peck: Umm.

Peck fan: Tonight has proved to me that you are what you appear to be.

Gregory Peck (chuckling): Well I hope so. I hope it isn’t a put on for all these years.

Peck fan: No. That’s what I wanted to find out for myself. I thought, “The hell with it: I’m going to blow all my savings and I’m going to going to come here and see for myself what you are like.” And I’m so glad I did; it’s been the experience of a lifetime.

Gregory Peck (shaking hands): God bless you. Thank you for coming.

... What is evident from the conversation is how the power relation between star and fan eclipses to the fan’s other senses of personal and social identity for the specific purpose of the forwarding her role in the exchange.

While their encounter was obviously selected by the camera crew and chosen by the editor for inclusion, it is evidently more than the sort of shallow critique of fandom that might have been concocted by some media hack. The female fan is not young, crazy, screaming or hysterical. Uncharitable commentators might lament her "dumb enthusiasm" as evidence of a lack in her life, psychology or worldview. However, to approach this star-fan exchange like that is both disrespectful, reductionist and myopic. Nevertheless, Peck's British admirer is not quite the kind of "active audience" rescued by the last two decades of cultural study, at least from what we can see here. Although she may well pursue the various strategies, tactics and practices outline by Henry Jenkins et al, rather than "textual poaching" Gregory Peck's fan here is placing herself as a fan - colluding with her aging idol to get the most she can out of the encounter. She does not want to treat Peck on equal terms. She does not want to discuss the details of her life with him. Instead she wants to represent herself as a fan, to perform her identity in such a way that Peck acknowledges her fandom itself as form of dedication and commitment. In this sense Peck and his fan are colluding; sharing different sides of a unequal but consented social relationship to unlock its potential power.

As a fan, Peck's admirer's quest began in seeing something in his screen image (creativity, a fragment of an ideal identity, something that was innately for her) and has then gone on a mission to verify its reality. Of course her version of his screen image may be a unique personal construction. We do not know how differently or similar it is from that of other fans, or how her perspective on Peck's image compares to the ideas of Peck might hold about himself on screen. Indeed, while themes, perceptions and interpretations might be shared, Peck's image - like any other star image - is inherently unstable as shared social phenonemon.

Fan studies needs to start asking how we can theorize fandom as a set of power relations while recognizing the agency and humanity of all participants. While active audience theory has represented an advance in that area, there is still an undiscovered continent here, a territory marked out by the role-based collaborations between stars and their followers - collaborations that circulate the power of the stardom even as they reinforce its premise.

In the Shadow of Your Rattan Cane - On Modern Times (1936)

2011-05-24T11:19:00.000-07:00

Here is your pop quiz challenge for the day... What have the following people got in common: Nat King Cole, his daughter Natalie, Rod Stewart, Barbara Streisand, Petula Clark, the late great Michael Jackson and cast of Glee? They all recorded a song that had its melody written as film sound track material by Charlie Chaplin. The heart-rendingly mawkish, bitter sweet 'Smile' gradually became an American songbook classic after Nat King Cole added his vocal to its 1954. Chaplin's feature film Modern Times had first appeared nearly two decades earlier, but it was not until the fifties that John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons added their lyrics.

Modern Times itself is a classic of the modern era that found Chaplin in an ebullient mood, reprizing his role as the tragi-comic tramp for one last time and suffering at the hands of production line industry in the Great Depression. In some ways the film is a lacerating critique of modernity, with its breakneck pace, urban stress, poor working conditions and potential for accident and mental illness. Modernity, in Chaplin's day, evidently treated humanity with inhuman disrespect. The tramp waltzes through an industrial landscape and continually rejects its demands for responsibility and caution, only to fall victim to its soul-destroying consequences.

With his great and graceful slapstick art honed to its peak, Chaplin could remain in character as a mischievous child, a figure of anarchy in the midst of absurd automation (exemplified by the time-saving machine that finally goes beserk trying to feed him) and extreme poverty (the collapsing shack where he dines with his equally insane street urchin sweetheart). The couple are even punished for their dreams of conspicuous consumption. It's here that we can see the connection to Michael Jackson's image as a Peter Pan character whose tender heart highlights the injustices of modern, adult society.

In satirizing the worst of modern industrial capitalism from within, it is hardly surprizing that Chaplin was also a contested figure, a pop culture icon dismissed by the likes of Thedor Adorno for exemplifying how the culture industry had perverted the possibility of social critique. When Chaplin came to Paris in 1952 to promote his film Limelight, an angry Lettrist International leaflet announced:

"Because you’ve identified yourself with the weak... and the oppressed, to attack you has been to attack the weak and the oppressed - but in the shadow of your rattan cane some could already see the nightstick of a cop... but for us, the young and beautiful, the only answer to suffering is revolution... Go to sleep, you fascist insect... Go home Mister Chaplin."

Of course Chaplin's emotive spectacle did not start any mass revolution any more than the Lettrist's fulminating leaflet. Each form of critique was at the mercy of wider social currents that decided the fate of history. From a perspective that puts both in the past, I love the Lettrist's belligerent rhetoric almost as much as the tramp's graceful on-screen performance... I'm looking hard to see a night stick that history has slipped back behind the shadow of his rattan cane.

Marilyn: The Last Sessions

2011-03-22T02:19:00.000-07:00

"I belonged to the Public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else." - Marilyn Monroe

Just when you think TV is dead as a medium, killed by the twin imperatives of cutting costs and maximizing profits, a drama or documentary comes along to make you think again. This month it was 'Marilyn: The Last Sessions' screened on More 4. The sessions in question where not conducted in a photographic or recording studio; they were psychotheraputic encounters.

I knew relatively little of the Marilyn myth before the programme (apart from that mushy Elton John song) and was impressed by its approach and production values. It painted a picture of a woman who blamed herself and never knew how to grow up. In the shadow of her absent father, and shamed by her sectioned mother, she had eternally deferred maturity in favour of the thrill of flash bulb glamour. The movies were no cure for her existential predicament, however, as they simply created a new skin - a celluloid image called 'Marilyn' not Norma Jeane - that acted as both a cloak and a trap. She liked to be reminded that she was desired in order to avoid the question of whether she was loved. Yer as time went on, Baker felt exploited and brutalized by her dependence on Hollywood (personified at one point in the shape of John Huston). She also felt in danger of being exposed by the words she spoke and the emotions she portrayed. Photographic modeling - where she did not have to speak, just be - offered her a sanctuary, a space she could control; as, in the end, did psychoanalysis. Norma Jeane Baker was a bookworm and she read Freud.

In Norma's voluptuous body - Marilyn's phenomenal film star body - men saw only what they wanted to see. Her husbands, it seems, perhaps saw an angel, then a little girl, and eventually a liability. They were not her missing father figure and could not cure her of a struggle with the dark side. While the documentary did not explore all of her theraputic journal, she actually re-entered the process with perhaps up to five people - supposedly including Freud's daughter Anna - none of whom could really help. And finally, made weary by her string of broken relationships, implicated as the troublesome mistress of both Kennedy brothers, and mired in her connections to the mob, she a death of ambiguous intent - an overdose. The overdose that started the sexual revolution. The pills that, quite by accident, ended the era of celluloid repression and pressaged the permissive society.

The Last Sessions documentary might productively be renamed 'Marilyn Unspooled' as it majors on the tapes that Baker made for and with her final psychoanalyst, Hollywood celebrity therapist Ralph S. Greenson. Revealing her private confessions to the devouring public, even a long time after death, oversteps the mark in some ways. The transcript material is made odder by having a grave male narrator read some of it. Nevertheless, a fascinating picture emerges of a therapist who became aggressive and crossed professional lines himself in his efforts not to be dragged down into Baker's existential vortex. Marilyn's unassuming, phenomenal sexual allure hid something behind the looks: a woman who struggled with herself all her life.

Baker came to trust Greenson as their sessions became more intimate, and gradually she unconscioulsy invited him to play the role of a father figure. In his desperation the therapist began using aggressive questioning techniques that sometimes persecuted, pointedly positioning Norma Jeane in the victim role that she had been trying so hard to escape, and to which she was now resigned... Climaxing in a corny analogy to film noir, the documentary asks - as if to reveal its own constructedness - whether pyschoanalysis helped to kill Norma Jeane Baker. Evidently, it didn't and perhaps couldn't have saved her, at last in its early 1960s incarnation. Evidently, too, Baker had a knack of choosing the wrong people to help her, as if to reinforce her own position as the bad seed who could never please absent parents.

What I liked about the documentary was its analogy between Baker's oedipal biography and the pieces on a chess board (her mother as black queen, etc). It was as if the game of psychoanalysis had become adversarial when the patient refused to be cured. In the final flourish of a grand stalemate, Norma Jeane Baker left the board and bequeathed us with Marilyn as the twentieth century's ultimate sex symbol, leaving her tapes as the residue of a final performance in which she reprized the role of an innocent betrayed.

Phonographic moments at the movies

2011-03-04T11:55:00.000-08:00

Image: dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Is it just me, or is everyone else noticing a frequent use in contemporary cinema of the act of placing vinyl records on players to signify a passion for music listening? The latest example of this (after the likes of Tarantino's Deathproof, Lynch's Inland Empire and other films) appears in the basic but well-crafted remake action flick The Mechanic, where Jason Stratham plays an emotionally remote hit man (who else?) called Arthur Bishop with a penchant for Schubert's 'Trio Number 2 in E-flat Major.' So precious is Bishop about his vinyl collection that he boobie traps his phonograph in an attempt to murder a rookie upstart who acquires his property. When the music plays, jets of (CGI) flame roar across Bishop's living room and shatter his windows. (That's a great result for Schubert, I'd say, in the same league as Jerry Lee Lewis!)

So why does vinyl come so heavily coded at the movies? I mean, how often do we see people slip in CDs, click on MP3s or even put on headphones. It is as if the phonograph has a key role in the representation of music at the very moment in which it is becoming a wholly defunct technology. There are, I would suggest, a few reasons for this:

1) Vinyl listening signifies obsessive musical passion nowadays. Apart from unfashionable late middle-agers (who - let's face it - are rarely portrayed as music listeners) it is only audiophiles, DJs and hardcore collectors who are interested in slipping on some wax. The warmness of the sound is also matched here to the idea that vinyl is the 'real thing': music in its authentic form - how it was made to be heard.

2) Placing a record on a turntable is just more visually interesting that pressing click on a mouse. It's a more physical practice, and there is scope for a series of close-ups: the vinyl landing on its platform, the needle as it is placed in the record, the slight click as it finds the groove, the pop and crackle, and then - ahhhh - the music.

3) Hollywood has gone phonographic, perhaps, because unlike MP3s, vinyl records signify both the past and visually segment the flow of time itself. Music is on vinyl is considered to be wrapped up with nostalgia: reiterated, sometimes socially practiced, evocative of the circularity of life, a passage of time passing as the spinning grooves hypnotically reach their centre, and that last glitch as the needle jumps its end point, stopped but not halted - as if the individual's life met its end and yet the world carried on. And on, and on, and on... click.

In Media Res: Popular Music

2011-03-04T11:48:00.001-08:00

I like the on-the-fly nature of this particular scholarly outlet. Recently they did a week on Pop music. The themes were:

Monday February 7, 2011 – Ted Friedman (Georgia State University) presents: Tickling the Ivory Towers

Tuesday February 8, 2011 – Gavin Edwards (Rolling Stone) presents: Words, Words, Words

Wednesday February 9, 2011 – James Hannaham (Pratt Institute) presents: Hide Your Kids! Hide Your Wife! Hide Your Husband!

Thursday February 10, 2011 – Marc Weidenbaum (Disquiet.com) presents: "…Or Other Visual Media"

Friday February 11, 2011 – Ivan Kreilkamp (Indiana University) presents: Free and Freer: Wikileaks and ViCKi LEEKX

In memory of Mick Karn (1958-2011)

2011-02-08T01:10:00.000-08:00

Led by the memorable and uniquely fey David Sylvian, Japan were one of the most interesting art pop bands of the 1980s. Yesterday I learned that their bass player Mick Karn - the pink haired musician featured in the video here - had died of cancer about a month ago.

My first real encounter with Japan came shortly after their heyday, when the son of one of my mother's friends bequeathed us his record collection. I think my brothers grabbed some of it. I took a dubby UB40 12" (not great), a couple of Springsteen LPs and one by Japan. Their music was subtle, spacious, melancholic, adept; more than the inventive musical style, though, it was Japan's visual image which drew you in: they had an individualistic style and deformed the norms of gender in a kind of effortless, uber-casual fashion. They had a sheen, an attitude. Just like the weird arty people whose carefully coiffed barnets adorned the monthly cover of Face magazine (style bible of the 1980s), the members of Japan were at home looking strange. Us youngster listeners didn't fully understand that their glam leanings had a heritage stretching back to Bowie and Roxy Music. To us, Japan were Catford bohemians following a bizarre trajectory from the filthy streets of outer London to the blank spaces of some chic white art gallery, and onwards - at least in their own imagination - the other side of the artistic and geographic universe. They appeared at a time when a post-colonial fascination with oriental exoticism was starting to cut both ways in postpunk: Britain got acts like the Frank Chickens. Meanwhile Japan got... Japan... and liked them.

And in Japan - the group, not the country - despite the lead singer stealing his limelight, Mick Karn looked the weirdest of all. He never seemed quite as feminine, fey or pouty as David Sylvian; yet his androgyny was somehow as off edge as his musical and sartorial style. Karn is now recognized as one of the most creative multi-instrumentalists of his era, but I think his unique look was as much a part of his artistic stance as his music.

Perhaps because they worked with the distant legacy of prog rock, the thing with Japan was that they squarely considered themselves artists in the avant-garde tradition. Even when they did cover versions, the idea that ruled their thinking was that each piece of music had to register an unexplored emotion. The band's early sound was sometimes brash and more rocking. My own favourite there was the jarring ode to alienation, Adolescent Sex.

Later they morphed and mellowed into some kind of white geisha fantasy, but when Sylvian went solo he eschewed the androgynous blonde mop that had defined his bohemian look, ingratiously complaining that people hadn't seen past his image and heard his music for its own sound. By that time it was apparent that he had lost the spirit, because the wonderful thing about Japan previously was precisely how their image and music operated together to creatively compliment each other. It was as if (at least in terms of his cultural role) Sylvian became a less intriguing performer after he rejected the peroxide bottle and subtle gender posturings. Unlike, say, Flock of Seagulls - a band whose lead singer's gimmicky new romantic haircut was more memorable than his music - Japan had a creative sound. Nevertheless, I prefer to remember Sylvian as a tentantive blonde sporting a kind of Raffles gentleman's bow tie, sensitively hinting at a different world, one make acceptable by art, where the unusual was more normal. His artistic sophistication gave license to a play with gender that was itself a creative artistic practice.

Call me nostalgic, but however exotic or edgy today's bands try to be, I don't think that Japan's adroit wavelength is something that audiences can access from contemporary music. I think it relied on a personal, social and cultural innocence that is now gone forever, erased in the over-coded maelstrom of a global, commercial digital music scene. We seem to be in a more liberal yet less artistically meaningful space than in the 1980s, for better or worse.

Japan showed that the New Romantics were not all the same. One internet poster on Youtube recently commented on a Japan video, "I've just found these guys - were they anything like Duran Duran?" I think from my piece today, the resounding answer would be a no.

Mark's posts on authenticity

2011-01-06T11:09:00.000-08:00

Faking it (Lessons on authenticity from Orson Welle's 'F for Fake')

Phonographic moments(Why vinyl works on the big screen)

Mark's posts on age

2011-01-06T11:08:00.000-08:00

DJ Mamy Rock (Growing old disgracefully?)

DJ Mamy Rock

2011-01-06T10:17:00.000-08:00

Over the festive period, I was surprized that it was my parents who told me about the latest stirring in club culture: the sweet old lady who used to run the haberdashers store in my home town had reinvented herself as an electro-rock DJ! Of course I could hardly believe it, but check this out:

Ruth Flowers (aka DJ Mamy Rock) cleverly plays with our percepetions of age and popular music. She is not exactly a gimmick as she can actually DJ, create and release dance music, impress crowds with her live set, and tour internationally.

Instead of being a gimmick she is a professional DJ act based on a gimmick: the notion that such an old person can be a central part of a youth cultural scene.

Unlike the middle-aged hippies of European fringe culture she claims none of the cultural capital of a counter-cultural old-timer. Instead Mamy Rock is a commercial act, blindly innocent (as her Terminator shades suggest) of the culture of intoxicants that fuel her youthful audience. What we don't understand from all this is exactly how they see her. Young clubbers are giving her a serious listen, so does she indicate a refreshing lack of age-prejudice? What gives Flowers an experiential ticket into their world of youthful hedonism? Does her age not matter because she can really feel the music? ... Also, I wonder, how does her own peer group see her antics?

There are two stories of her emergence. In the one she tells, she gate-crashed a club night held for her grandson's birthday and just loved the music. In another version, she was a model who was put in DJ gear as a joke by a photographer, then made her into a business project by a clubland entrepreneur who spotted the picture. The distance between the romantic and industrial versions of her biography indicate the cultural work upon which her image rests.

While the DJ Mamy Rock phenomenon seems novel in clubland, one wonder whether elsewhere we haven't been here before. Often sporting elements of her combination of chains, shades and wild white hair, several disparate characters spring to mind: Andy Warhol, Phil Spector, Karl Largerfeld, Pete Waterman and, yes, Jimmy Saville. While it seems that style (and product) is what gives the aged their long-stay ticket as celebrities in the glamourous world of youth culture, what Mamy Rock has at the moment is a refreshing lack of a track record. She can therefore enjoy herself as an innocent abroad in the dirty world of electro: growing old, as some might say, disgracefully. This brings us on to a final stereotype that DJ Mamy Rock's image again negotiates with ease: that of the old rebel who stubbornly refuses to face those tranquil, twilight years.

It's an old person's world - expect a movie of Ruth's life story soon!

Popular Music and Television in Britain

2010-12-09T03:34:00.000-08:00

Another shameless plug here as Ian Inglis's edited volume on popular music and British television has just been released by Ashgate. I have to say, it's an impressive volume. Alongside my own chapter on the Sex Pistols infamous Bill Grundy interview (and the role of imagined memories), there is top notch scholarship from a range of academics working in the popular music field. Sheila Whiteley, for instance, has done a chapter on that most British of comedy series, Dad's Army. There also are chapters on various topics written or co-written by Andy Bennett, Tim Wall, Rupa Huq and a number of others. By exploring various themes and moments, the book will likely set new standard of debate in the area of popular music and British television.

Faking it

2010-12-08T15:35:00.000-08:00

F for Fake (1973) was Orson Welles' unique last film project. Drawing on his recurrent interests in dramatic art and psychological illusion, he used his filmmaking talent and cinematic charm to construct a tale of three charlatans: art forger Elmyr do Hory, biographer Clifford Irving, and himself as the familiar blustering, self-made director. As the film cleverly oscillates between storytelling and documentary it uses both archival and constructed footage. Along the way, F for Fake provides a masterclass on the meaning of fakery, with Welles reprizing his favourite role as the portly imposter, the ranconteur whose charisma is just real enough to string us along, even though, ultimately, we all know for sure that he is a fake.

Welles's discussion put me in mind of the constant debate in popular music over authenticity. Whether the discussion is about the verissimilitude of tribute artists or the bogus talent of 'manufactured' bands, enhanced vocals or X-Factor celebrities, biographers twisting the truth or "setting the record straight", studio gangsters or street credientials, white negroes or disco faking the funk, it seems that at every moment someone wants to separate "real" music from the marketplace's capacity to conjure up shoddy phantoms of the muse. Take Paul Morley, for instance, who, in a recent piece for the Guardian discussing boy bands, earnestly argued, as only he could, that, "They should not, though, be talked about as though they are anything to do with music, or music alone." Is Morley telling us that these singers are charlatans? That as an audience we need to be more discerning and accumulate more expertise, lest we be taken in by them and their fake music?

This clarion call to defend music as an object of purity seems obsolete in a culture of where the real is an unstable category and where 'faking' (of various sorts) has become not so much a criminal practice as an industrial norm. Against Morley - though not necessarily in defence of boy bands - I wish to recount some of the philosophical musings of F for Fake as I think they might help us advance the discussion on popular music authenticity. As Orson melts into the shadows from where he came, apply these questions like tools to your own particular project and see what insights they can help to deliver:

- If a faker leaves the authorship of their piece unclaimed, have the actually make a fake? If a faker admits faking, are they really a faker? Is a false promise really false if everyone knows it is false? A faker who admits what they are doing moves from criminality to honesty. If I draw attention to showing I am constructing something, am I really faking? Some fakers just want to be seen as top criminals. Can't unmasking one act of fakery simply serve to hide another?

- Can or should we admire a fake? Is a good fake better than a bad fake, or a bad original? Isn't a great faker themselves something of an original? Or have they forgotten their own identity - are they simply a parasite who is condemed to feel frustrated because they are unble to express any creativity independently? Does all their identity come from copying the work of another? Fakes could be seen to exploit originals, but don't originals also exploit fakes to cement their status? Sometimes a faker can (symbolically) destroy (the notion of) the original. Aren't original creators also in the habit of faking their own work? The original is really a function of our own needs.

- How do fakes (and fakers) manage to hide in plain sight? Faking is premised on rarity. Fakers are simply supplying (market) demand. As an audience we dismiss fakers but also collaborate with them. Good fakers are appreciated and have their own fame. Do we really care about facts when we are fascinated with mystery? Don't we also love to be shocked (by fakes)?

- If there were no experts would there actually be any fakers? In a sense fakers are jesters who unmask the stupidity of the experts who fail to discriminate the forgeries - so who are the real fakers? When fakes succeed are we dealing with great fakes or poor experts?

Judge Dread

2010-11-24T11:30:00.000-08:00

For some reason recently I have become academically interested in Judge Dread, not the 2000AD comic character ("Judge Dredd"), but Alex Minto Hughes from Snodland in Kent: a rather vulgar white cockney reggae artist who, inspired by Prince Buster, had a successful career on Trojan records in the 1970s. He had eleven UK hits, all banned from the airwaves.

In 1973 Hughes was interviewed in the NME by the jeering, bohemian, faintly Leavisite ego Nick Kent, who had him pegged as a "working class hero and the Robin Hood Of reggae." Kent's interview is full of the expected sniggering sarcasm and it frames the Judge as a joke. Hughes in turn, defends himself as a true folk phenomenon (he was rarely helped by TV or radio) who loved reggae and had his finger on the commercial pulse of popular taste.

What is interesting about the Judge is that he offered nothing redeeming: no creativity, no meaningful artistry, no utopian alternative, no deep soul, no revolutionary politics, no hip poses or super cool rock'n'roll swaggers; only obscene nursery rhymes done to a reggae beat, viral as Eminen and every bit as tasteless. And yet he had a huge record collection and was one of the few white men to run a disco sound system. He loved his chosen music genre, knew how to speak patois, and as an adept performer endeared himself to "authentic" black audiences in Jamaica. Yet it was back at home that he really mattered: he was as bawdy and English as Chaucer. In a Robin Hood stylee the Judge articulated an oppositional form of sexual vulgarity to launch a blue assault on middle class tastes.

I saw the video for his song Big Six, I think, on a documentary in the 1980s. The footage was shown just in passing, but I was still shocked at the style of it - the bad production values and topless dancers, his ebullient stance and silly gangster clothes. It was as if Hughes came swaggering out of nowhere, located perhaps only in the decadent Soho club circuit of the decade before, where cockney geezers might plausibly tell dirty jokes but never to an inter-racial beat.

Judge Dread was literally a rude boy, but given the permissive state of Britain by the early 1970s, at what exactly was he waving those two fingers? His microbial music seemed predestined to launch a moral panic without any real content. While casually revelling in the sexism of his era, he did something perhaps to challenge working class racism. He cultivated a knowledge of "uncultured" black music. Later Hughes released a charity single and died of a heart attack in 1998, and his legend died with him. We rely on meatier myths and more easily located footage to valorize our idols, but it's his slipping away from the canon that - given such commercial success - makes a million-seller like Hughes interesting. What I am saying is that the Judge seems antithetical to so much of what we are now. He was, in a sense, written out of the script for being the wrong kind of multi-culturalist.

Kraftwerk: Music Non-Stop

2010-11-24T11:09:00.001-08:00

Anyone stuck for 2010 Christmas present ideas? Continuum have just published a rather excellent edited volume on the German electronic music enigma that is Kraftwerk, edited by David Pattie and Sean Albiez. Yes, this is a shameless plug: I have a chapter on the racial politics of the group. I also genuinely think that more work needs to be done on the difference made by this outfit to dance music, post-punk and everything beyond.

With their unique blend of nostalgic futurism Kraftwerk caught the imagination of a generation. The music world might have been a different place without them. In Foucault's sense, they were therefore "transdiscursive authors", people who caused an avalanche of cultural activity in their wake. As we acquiess towards a strangely bloodless world of coke machines, sat navs and talking elevators - where computers monitor our every movement and soothing robotic voices steer us towards synthetic good behaviour - I can hear their echo: in a calm, teutonic voice it says, "Told you so."

Don Cherry: Canadian Patriot

2010-07-11T05:48:00.000-07:00

Since I am off to Canada quite soon, I have decided to do a post about the country's most prominent patriot, the legendary Don Cherry.

For anyone who doesn't know, hockey is a Canadian obsession. By coaching the NHL's Boston Bruins (with its legendary player Bobby Orr), Cherry managed to earn himself a footnote in the national myth. He expanded upon that by being sports commentator for CBC and growling the macho catchphrase "Rock em, sock em!"

Slowly but tenaciously, Grapes, as he is known, took up his place beside Pierre Trudeau and Wayne Gretzky as a national cultural icon.

... So why the cult of Cherry? The truth is that if Don had been born an American, he would probably have sunk without a trace. What matters is the way he contradicts Canadian notions of national identity: the way he flatly ignores his country's reactive, introverted, intellectual, multicultural, ironic, anti-American wilderness mythos; the way he chooses to forthrightly pursue an unusual, viking version of Canadian nationalism. Those are what matter, because Cherry speaks directly for a mythic, beer-fuelled, hockey-obsessed common Canadian male. In doing so, some might argue that he simultaneously acts as a jaw-dropping curio for the rest of the nation.

Some key elements in the Don Cherry phenomenon:

1. Staunch patriotism (fighting for the underdog):

2. Occasional absurdist old school sexism ("You women are gonna get mad at me out there"):

3. Willingness to be a sport and make techno records (a bit like a Canadian Muhamed Al Fayed):

4. He can effortlessly wear a pink suit (while retaining his mythic aura of masculine power):

In a sense, then, Cherry's mythos centres around the strained couplet of "Canadian patriotism"; a phrase that seems contradictory in the context of a country defined by its subdued multiculturalist humanism. When read in that way, his hypermasculinity arguably articulates a sense of national insecurity that can only be quelled, temporarily, by talk of past victory and present braggadacio.

As Cherry's own commentator said, “He often has awkward moments, because he invites them.”

Frank Sidebottom, RIP

2010-07-08T10:18:00.001-07:00

Tonight Manchester is staging a live tribute to Chris Sievey, the recently deceased creator of one of the city's most-loved comedy characters, Frank Sidebottom. Sievey made his career by donning a papier machee head that made him look like a kewpie doll, and then exploring a kind of happy northern amateurism. Predictably, it was not long before Frank disappeared into his own parody. From the 1980s onwards the big-hearted, big-headed figure straddled a line between underground and mainstream media. In his heyday he appeared on national TV shows like The Tube. Indeed, Frank's forays into comedy, TV presenting, cabaret and popular music were ongoing. Sievey had been in a band called The Freshies and there is now a campaign to get Frank's recent football song to the top of the charts.

Hailing from the mythic town of Timperley, Frank was already the stuff of nostalgia. He will now be able to take his place alongside Tony Wilson and others to become part of the cultural pantheon of the city. The character's larger than life head branded him as an icon, and now he can begin to find his place as a minor but very welcomed legend. Tonight's tribute show is being headlined by fellow Manchester eccentrics Badly Drawn Boy and John Cooper Clarke.

The odd thing about Sievey's death is simply seeing the man behind the mask; during Frank's heyday you never did. Credit must go to the late Mr Sievey for his struggle against the slick professionalism of the corporate media to construct what became a genuine folk legend. One wonders if, like some mythic superhero, the character might return with his huge head on fresh new shoulders, propped up by a heroic yet anonymous citizen who agrees that entertainment should remain a genuinely public service.

Metal on Metal: Notes on the Crash in Popular Culture

2010-07-07T03:43:00.000-07:00

Image: bigjom / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

James Dean, Jackson Pollock and Princess Diana died in them. Jim Morrison was supposedly traumatized by watching one. JG Ballard thought they were sexy. What am I writing about? Car Crashes. I can remember some years ago there was a headline in my local paper, "Double Death Smash: Wall of Silence." Since then, I have been interested in the social symbolism of these violent accidents and the way they resonate in popular culture.

I should say right from the start, this has nothing to do with the immense personal tragedy of real crashes; real horrors that nobody wants and that have touched the lives of many I know. Ironically, popular culture glamorizes what in real life can only be experiences of deep personal shock, pain, loss and bewilderment.

To focus instead, then, on the mythos...

Catastrophic, momentary and spectacular, car and motorcyle accidents have inspired stories, films and many, many songs. So how do we explore this complex subject? I want to argue here that the mythos of highway crashes romanticizes them as tragic comments on modern society.

To understand the crash, we have to start with the car. Cars are, in some senses, the ultimate symbols of modernity. They are machines for living in which represent the triumph of Enlightenment science and the will to create new technology as vehicle for social progress, but also the flip side of the era too: alienation, the belief that science can solve human problems and the submission of the individual to mass consumerism. Henry Ford's famous Model-T is still resonant here as symbol of massification and advanced form of industrial cloning.

As expensive commodities, cars have become both gendered and sexed up by the advertising industry. They have also been customized, used symbols of individualism and personal style. In America, they represent the steel horse: a vehicle for men to negotiate the new frontier. The pleasure of driving a car on the open road marks an obsession with power, control and speed. To recklessly and aggressively push the limits is a characteristically masculine response... In a sense, then, the car crash can be read as a catastrophic implosion that is actually an inbuilt in contemporary society. The mythos of the car crash therefore positions it as burn-out: an ironic fulfilment of patriarchy, the military-industrial complex, and commodity culture.

On top of this, there also is an inherent ambiguity in crashes: was the glamorized tragedy a complete accident or macho suicide? The way that celebrities die is often taken to be an indication of how they lived. James Dean's troubled mind was projected into the violent crumping of his Porsche Spyder. Diana's last moments already placed her as a victim hounded by the paparazzi. In the same way, car crashes in popular songs and biographies have become symbolic of their era or particular. Take Jan and Dean's famous surf tune 'Dead Man's Curve' from 1964: the song is about wreckless, adolescent boy racing in the face of mortal danger. In a similar way, The Shangri-La's 'Leader of the Pack', from the same year, paints the death of a motorcycle gang leader as a romantic melodrama. The ideological message in these tunes suggests that those who epitomize wayward youth will come acropper before they can enter the more mundane realm of adult responsibility. Two years after 'Dead Man's Curve', Bob Dylan's motorcycle accident near Woodstock was represented as an epiphany which alerted him to the absurd pressures of the celebrity machine: "I realized, " he said, "that I was just workin’ for all these leeches." The smash jolted him into a moment of personal authenticity that was represented by the spartan folk of his LP John Wesley Harding.

Image: Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Another high watermark in the cultural history of the traffic crash was in 1970, when JG Ballard released The Atrocity Exhibition: a bizarre, fragmentary novel that made reference to President Kennedy's televised motorcade assassination, from which the author drew emotional intensity because he indirectly associated with the death of his wife. That book, and the 'Crash' story that came from it (made famous later by David Cronenberg's screen version) featured the idea that car crashes were orgasmic experiences. Ballard's perverse metal-on-metal sensuality combined an air of futurism with a cryptic critique of modernity: the end point of all this fetishization of logic and machines, he said, would be pornographic. It would be about as human (or rather as dehumanizing) as an alienated sexuality. Ballard's tactical implosion inspired a wave of creativity in postpunk music led by both Bowie and, more famously, The Normal's missing-link electro track, 'Warm Leatherette'. The cover featured crash test dummies, which in turn vouched for crashes being a normal part of the industrial process (and of course crash test dummies then being idealized as post-human citizens).

That shock wave, I think, pretty much brings us up to the contemporary era, where the road is no longer entirely real. If we live in the era of the "information super-highway" (already a tawdry cliche), then the crash is now between the virtual and the real. As we implode across the unnatural terrain of cyberspace, we will encounter unforseen curves and new injuries to our humanity.

What are imagined memories?

2010-07-06T12:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had fun talking to Matt Grimes, a music industry lecturer at Birmingham City University who is starting a PhD on canonization and fans' memories of Crass. Matt is writing up a blog post about our day of discussion. He is particularly interested in the idea of 'imagined memories' that I developed in 2002-2003 in a pair of articles about Paul McCartney's webcast from the Cavern. At one point Matt asked me to explain how imagined memories come about. What I will do in the rest of this post is to define imagined memories and answer that question.

Seeing the Beatles early live shows at the Cavern and seeing the Sex Pistols taunt Bill Grundy on The Today Show at the end of 1976 are classic examples of imagined memories. The first thing to notice is that these incidents really happened: they can be located in time and place. For any individual audience members who experienced these, they were supposedly transformative moments. Yet there is also a mass of fans who never had these experiences but wished they did. In that sense they are investing in imagined memories.

Each imagined memory is the thing you wished you had experienced, but never did. It is not exactly a fantasy, because it really happened to someone else. However, it is not your memory either, because it happened to someone else. By a process of valorization in the narrative of history and in the media it is therefore a kind of fantasy which authenticates itself as a (false) memory. The term points to the paucity of phrases like 'cultural memory' in describing popular music's past: for a few people these memories are real enough (although, even for them, the memories have been inflected by the subsequent success story of the performers). Imagined memories are spaces of emotional investment that are necessarily contradictory since they only matter because of what came after them. In a sense, then, they are memory commodity templates: they are both valorized (made to matter by stories) and characterized by their own rarity value. Not everyone has the 'real' memory. This is precisely why they become starting points for further commodities (media documentaries, heritage tourism, anniversaries, re-enactments, etc).

So imagined memories are like fetishized moments of fan subject-positioning from the early career of iconic artists, but how do they come about? What is the socio-cultural process through which they are fabricated?? Perhaps they emerge through a four part process of collective appreciation:

1. Mass performance: A classic performance (live or on record) marks a new peak of an artist's mass adulation.

2. Historic Narration: Band biographies, etc, are created to contextualize, romanticize and therefore extend the pleasures fans have invested in the artist or piece of music. These narratives say things like "It all came about by accident" or "It almost never happened" or "There was a unique confluence of circumstances." They are designed to show that the emotions motivating the performance are 'real' (phew!) rather than fabricated by technicians or commentators in the culture industry.

3. Recognition: Cultural entrepreneurs recognize the moment in the narrative that appeals to fans because it shows the artist at their rawest and seemingly most powerful (not yet diluted by the industry). The moment becomes a touch-stone in retellings of the narrative. The template now complete, fans begin to fantasize, fetishize and discuss these historic moments. New cultural products are formed around the reminscences of those that experienced the moments. They are given a mediated chance to speak about what happened.

4. Extention: The imagined memory can now become a generative resource for other narratives and commodities.

In time, of course, even the mass performances (in step 1) can themselves become imagined memories as more people start talking about their previous viewing experience and fewer fans have access to a real memory of the event. (I note, too, that the idea of "real memory" is itself a contradiction, as all memories are invented by the ways in which the brain interprets, records and remembers events.)

I want to briefly mark out some subtle differences between imagined memory and myth. The key thing to say here is that imagined memories and myths are not quite the same. Myths are ways to tell an artist's story that satisfy the public. A star's mass performances (step 1) can still help to generate myths, but those myths need never actually have happened. In theory, imagined memories may be based on myths, but usually they are not. Also, myths don't have to be imagined memories: a myth can be almost anything, whereas an imagined memory is a specific moment of performance in some sense, a time and place when fans begin to wish they had been there.

Finally, this idea is still in a process for formation. There may be interesting work to be done on the intersection of imagined memories and various fan practices. One example is the question cultural capital. Given that imagined memories are invitational containers for affect that are retrospectively recognized, in what ways does their construction invite the collection and display of cultural capital? I don't think that fans need much capital to locate these moments, since they are usually prominent in discussions of music phenomena. Nevertheless the moments may become a focus for the collection of facts and stories that allow fans to play further games of distinction.

What I hope to have shown here is that although narratives of popular music history move forwards in time, we create them by looking backwards when we are steered by the affective attachments that come from our engagement with crucial performance. This process generates imagined memories of earlier times, the significance of which gets fully recognized only in retrospect.

My thanks to Matt for making me think a bit more about this. I hope other researchers like him can now find new examples of this phenomena and take the theory even further forward.

Without Fathers: John Lennon and Jim Morrison

2010-07-05T14:23:00.000-07:00

Tonight I got round to watching two biopics of 1960s icons, BBC4's Lennon Naked and the new Doors feature documentary When You're Strange. What unites these films is their father and son rejection narrative. In Lennon Naked, Christopher Eccleston does a fine job of playing Lennon at his most acerbic and asinine - an angry and creative man who constantly walked out on his own family. Variously that family was represented as Cynthia and Julian, the Beatles, his fans, his home in Great Britain, and, ultimately, his absentee father (played by a Christopher Fairbank).

The film climaxes with Lennon finding his rawest feelings of abandonment in the context of Primal Scream therapy, then recording 'Mother' as a record of his pain, and - in what may well be a fabricated dramatic moment - using the recording to directly confront his wrinkly old codger of a dad about his dereliction of fatherly duty.

As an aside, I have to add that Barbra Streisand, whose own father died when she was about a year and half old, recorded a showy version of the tune:

While Lennon's life story was ultimately about abandoning the parents who originally abandoned him, the Doors' film (which contained no actors, only footage of the band) showed how frontman Jim Morrison reported his entire family were dead. Morrison's claim was a lie of course, but in a way it was also true: his father George was ideologically dead to him. While Jim was spreading a gospel of free love, free drugs and hedonistic pacificism, George was fighting for his country. He was an Admiral in the American Navy.

There are multiple levels in these narratives. Both stars emerged in an era where a generation gap was establishing itself around the formation of a counter-culture. Both men rejected their fathers and joined that culture, becaming its icons.

In the familial rejection argument - which seems reductive but still convincing on many levels - Lennon's personal struggle is projected outwards to become his political protest. The confrontation of his childhood demons is also the culmination of his quest for musical authenticity.

Jim's loss of intimacy with his family, meanwhile, becomes a desperate quest for something that he can never quite find. He is let down by the hypocricy of the media, the falsity of stardom, the vacuuity of his fans, the cheap thrill of casual sex, and, ulimately, the false comfort of drugs and alcohol. Morrison's chronicles his lack of trust and a failure to find true intimacy. Despite having more adulation than most people can dream about, he is therefore romanticized a tragic rebel whose dreams were never fulfilled. Indeed his personal quest for freedom from the shackles of society was miscarried because it was pursued in the absence of any rewarding sense of intimacy.

Of course their struggles feed back into their own myths. After all John and Jim were just eligible and troubled young men begging to be loved. Meanwhile, fatherhood is the missing term from the lexicon of rock'n'roll. It is the present absense around which the adolescent ego pleasures of the form cohere. The 'double fantasy' of popular music is that fans sometimes dream they can create the intimacy missing when their heroes engage with the alienated process of stardom. In this context evidence of the celebrity's tragic childhood act as vouch-safe for an ego need which is taken to drive their quest for fame.

Psychologists say that we learn more in the first four years of our lives than in the rest. Jim Morrison often said that when he was four he witnessed a traumatic road accident where some Native Americans were killed. I doubt it ever took place. More likely, Jim created a glamorous poetic mystery by fusing a crucially early but mundane failure of parental availability (like his mother being ill or in grief) with one of America's most potent myths: the car crash as a masculine metaphor for the frenatic, breakneck pace of life - the obsession with speed symbolized in James Dean's death smash and chronicled by Paul Virilio and others.

So, then, what can we say of these bad boys of rock? They lost their parents at a young age, lived fast, died young, and numbed the pain with the playful outlets - sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. If you don't want to end up like them, just keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel.

Jews, Race and Popular Music by Jon Stratton (2009)

2010-07-01T15:40:00.000-07:00

I was recently asked to review Jews, Race and Popular Music by Jon Stratton for the journal Popular Music. The book is an interesting case-by-case study of the Jewish input into musical performance, from torch singing to Amy Winehouse. Stratton suggests that dominant WASP culture has positioned Jews as neither black nor fully white, but oscillating in a kind of cultural transit somewhere in between the two. The argument neatly avoids issues of essentialism and self-definition by focussing on how Jewish performers have then manipulated their role to act as racial go-betweens: privileged interpreters of black identity for a white audience. One of the pleasures of the book is simply the roll call of Jews in the music industry: some obvious, some obscure, and some whose Jewish identity was never a big part of their image (Malcolm McLaren, for example).

Covering Australia, the UK and the USA, Stratton's ambitious volume defly combines gender and racial analysis to explore the predicaments of several crucial artists, including Bob Dylan, Bette Midler and the Beastie Boys. In a sense, by positioning their play with identity as a function of white hegemony, Stratton is really contributing to whiteness studies. His book is a worthy addition to the literature.

Fiske Matters Conference, 11th - 12th June 2010

2010-07-01T15:28:00.001-07:00

I must be getting slow - I just spotted that Madison, Wisconsin recently had a conference in honour of the work of John Fiske featuring keynotes by Fiske and Henry Jenkins. As I'm sure you know, with their emphasis on the 'active' audience, these two scholars defined a turn in reception studies that aimed to restore agency to fans... Click here for the keynote audios!

Thanks for making it such a great day!

2010-07-01T04:45:00.000-07:00

'Popular Music Fandom: A One Day Symposium' took place last Friday and was a great success. Speakers from as far a field as Brazil arrived at the Binks Building and Matt Hills gave a really interesting and dynamic keynote speech on 'post-popular music' fandom.

Another speaker, Tonya Anderson, has just been on Laurie Taylor's long-running Radio 4 show Thinking Allowed to talk about nostalgic Duran Duran fans. The show also contained a discussion of metal's female fanbase and a commentary by Angela McRobbie.

Matt Grimes, who came along and is starting a PhD on anarcho-punk fandom, has just posted an interesting review of the symposium.

Some comments from our speakers:

The conference was a truly terrific event, and I'm so glad to have had the opportunity to present and to visit Chester. Wonderful experience overall... Again, an enormous congratulations on a terrific conference. I had a wonderful time, and will certainly recommend its next iteration to my colleagues.

I really enjoyed this event and hope there will be another one in the future!

My experience of the conference has been great. I really couldn't imagine a better start for my move to UK. I had pleasing chats and the atmosphere was very friendly, so I really hope there will be a second edition.

I felt really good about the amount of discussion and feedback that was going around at the conference. I have been to others where that was not so and I felt finally like this was what these things are meant to be doing.

... I enjoyed organizing the symposium and talking to those who came, both at the event and down the pub afterwards. I'd like to say a big thankyou to everyone who attended and helped to make the day a success.

As Brendan O'Sullivan, our Dean of the Arts and Media - who opened the day - said to me afterwards, there was "a strong international and UK presence... this was another feather in our cap."

Still Kissing Their Posters Goodnight: The Shift from Individual to Communal ‘Bedroom Culture’ as Pop Idol Fandom Goes Online

2010-06-15T10:03:00.000-07:00

Many young women experience a stage during adolescence when the private world of their imagination is overtaken by a celebrity teen crush, often a pop music idol or band. As early as Elvis and The Beatles, every generation has embraced its own version of the teen pop pin-up. Girls have historically exercised their fandom within the confines of their bedrooms, employing a ‘bedroom culture’, where they listen to music, browse teen magazines, and hang posters (McRobbie 1991). But now with the Internet, this practice has changed. Where pop fandom used to be mostly private, fans can now conduct these activities online and communally, ‘drooling’ in unison (Clerc 1996). This new more community-oriented fan experience has dramatically altered the nature of pop fandom. This research is an ethnographic investigation that explores how feminine identity construction and sexuality are influenced by pop music subcultures. Of particular interest is the way in which the fan experience has changed historically with the introduction of the Internet, specifically how fans now connect via a hybrid of online and offline interactions and how such an interaction mix generates complex dynamics and hierarchies. By focusing on ‘mature’ pop fans as opposed to teens, this project endeavours to trace their transformation from the relative isolation of pre-Internet teen fandom into what has now become enduring and life-long adult fandom that is deeply communal, entrenched in a worldwide network of other fans. The subcultures examined are fans of a sampling of ‘heart throb’ pop artists spanning the last three decades, including The Backstreet Boys, Take That and Duran Duran.

Tonya Anderson, University of Sunderland / Fangirlsonline.org

In Media Res - Fan / Celebrity Relationships

2010-06-15T09:57:00.000-07:00

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

My American friend Dave just sent me this link to the commons media journal In Media Res. This week they are featuring academic pieces on media fandom which talk about affect, desire, devotion and stalking. One piece is being released per day, so the next few days should be interesting.

Ronnie James Dio - laid to rest

2010-06-14T13:27:00.000-07:00

Metal's elfin thespian of metaphysical evil, Ronnie James Dio, died of stomach cancer last month, age 67. Because he started at a very early age, Dio - who appeared in numerous metal documentaries and Jack Black's 'Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny' - had racked up over 50 years flying time as a working singer and bass player. He was also the man who popularized the devil hand signal and ruled the airwaves in the mid-1980s with 'Rock and Roll Children'.

Dio's funeral at Forest Lawn was a rock'n'roll affair, with Geezer Butler as a pall bearer and so many fans that it broke all records for the cemetary. (Michael Jackson would have beaten that, but he had a secret interrment.) When Dio's widow appeared, his fans chanted, "Wendy! Wendy! Wendy!" They can now get a memorial t-shirt on his website, the proceeds going to a cancer charity.

Fredrick Jameson famously said that culture can no longer be imagined outside the marketplace, and that seems apt in the Spinal Tap world of metal. The idea that a funeral is a show for fans and that the cemetary keeps a popularity count is indicative, not quite of the penetration of the marketplace (to my knowledge no tickets were sold), but at least of the commercial ideology of rock - that real life is part of the show, that audiences have to be measured, that popularity is the measure of success.

The great thing about Dio was simply his performance. He breathed conviction and always looked the part. One wonders what a man who spent half his life singing occultic peans to wizards, dragons and demons will do in the afterlife.

Heaven 17: Inside Outsiders Playing To Win

2010-05-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple of nights BBC2 have screened a couple of retrospectives on the originators of 1980s British electro-pop: Heaven 17. When I was aged about seventeen, I started collecting their singles on vinyl. I felt their music had a sound and a concept like nobody else. In the heyday of New Romanticism here were three twentysomething lads from Sheffield dressed like young business executives forging a strangely alienated dance sound. The cover of the 'Penthouse and Pavement' album looked like they'd just sealed a property deal in Milton Keynes. I’d not frequented a club or seen many concerts back then. Indeed the idea of seeing Heaven 17 play live was unthinkable. Yet I was drawn to the cryptic edge they bought to pop - there was just that elusive and undefinable "something" about them.

Twenty five years later the media are celebrating the early achievements of a band that spawned the likes of La Roux, yet Heaven 17 still sound unlike anybody else. Musically they mixed high BPM machine music with a punk ethos, funky slap bass, and yuppie aesthetic to create note perfect pop. As a listener, though, you got the impression that the music was articulating an impulse that was both from a different world and frustrated with our own.

Looking back there was an awful lot going on behind the façade of the British Electric Foundation (their own attempt at a Kraftwerklike institutution). For one thing, despite the ironies, Heaven 17 actually had quite traditional racial and gender relations compared to some of their counterparts; lead singer Glen Gregory’s Germanic tones and Aryan aesthetic brushed knowingly against the syrupy wails of their black female backing singers. Temptation still sounds as genuinely sultry as anything from the decade. They also subverted both pop and society from the inside, showing how you could be both in the game and challenge it. What was really interesting about their music, to me, both then and now, was its adult themes – things like labour relations, class inequalities, nuclear protest and the sex trade.

Unlike the badly behaved adolescents of rock music, Heaven 17 and their fans took the world seriously. We were looking in on adulthood and the capitalist society it enabled with a mature sense of disappointment: were we really being prepared for such a joyless workplace - whether on the factory floor or in an office selling insurance? Was getting on in a YTS scheme and doing some suffocating 9-5 job the height of what life could offer?

After their heyday their music lost its social commentary and therefore its edge. Many of us fans started listening to other things. Yet, three decades on, their lone voice still seems unique in pop. Glen Gregory has lost his hair and now looks like a sharp, good humoured night club owner. Martyn Ware has finally fulfilled his dream of impersonating Ralf Hutter. The music has not changed, though, and it still speaks directly of empty pleasures, alienation, automation and loss - an adult music for 1980s dance adolescents who were wary of the norm in both society and the generic popular culture it held dear.

Post-popular music, mnemic communities, and intermediary fandoms: Challenging general approaches to fan culture?

2010-05-17T16:24:00.000-07:00

In Fan Cultures (2002), I attempted to produce what amounted to a general theory of media fandom, tackling issues of fan identity and community. But this approach (see also Sandvoss 2005) potentially neglects the specificity of types of fan object/experience. With this self-critique in mind, I will consider three illustrative ways in which popular music fandom cannot readily be aligned with 'fan studies' more generally, given that this has typically been dominated by screen media debates.

Firstly, film and TV texts cease to be produced if they fall below thresholds of industry success and 'popularity'; popular music is less prone to this sort of cut-off point. As a result, what might be termed post-popular music fandom can be analysed, whereby life-long fandom (Stevenson 2009) is enacted in relation to once-mainstream but still active artists. Secondly, whereas film and TV fandoms have been theorised as 'interpretative communities' (Jenkins 1992), fan relationships to popular music may be significantly less interpretative in character, and this too calls for specific theorisation, e.g. via work on mnemic objects (Bollas 1992). And thirdly, pop music fandom cannot always be reduced to fan-artist relationships (despite excellent studies such as Cavicchi 1998; Echard 2005; Fast 2001; McDonald 2009). Music fans may also relate to a range of industrial co-producers and intermediaries such as labels, music producers (Warner 2003), and (re)mixers (Zak 2001), even within a “cloud” or web 2.0 model of the music industry (Wikström 2009). Screen media fandoms do not possess entirely analogous “productive consumer literacies” (Laughey 2006) despite the presence of auteur/network brands.

I will thus argue that popular music fandom calls for a series of specific theorisations which go beyond, and qualify, approaches taken elsewhere in 'fan studies' (Harrington, Gray, and Sandvoss 2007). Theorising post-popular music fans, mnemic community, and the music industry's intermediary fandoms might all offer specific routes to opening out and complicating general theories of fan culture.

Dr Matt Hills, Cardiff University

Highlighting Theory and Research Relevant to the Identity Development of GLBTQ Dusty Springfield Fans

2010-05-13T16:04:00.000-07:00

As a doctoral candidate in interdisciplinary studies my focus is the meaning of celebrities and icons in the identity development of GLBTQ fans across the lifespan. My dissertation will examine this phenomenon through collective case studies of Dusty Springfield fans. In preparation for my dissertation, I am preparing a qualifying paper to set forth the theoretical underpinnings I have identified in the areas of fan studies, projective psychologies, and identity development. For The Northwest Popular Music Studies Network symposium I will highlight aspects of these theories and how they relate to my research into the meaning-making of GLBTQ Dusty Springfield fans. For example, object relations theory helps explain the feelings of protectiveness Dusty’s music elicits in her fans, as well as how it contributes to their development as individuals. I would welcome the opportunity to receive feedback from scholars in the field, as I move forward in my work.

Nancy Young, Lesley University, USA / Dustyspringfield.info

‘Anyone who calls Muse a Twilight band will be shot on sight’: Music, Fandom, and Distinction in the Twilight Franchise

2010-05-13T16:01:00.000-07:00

This paper examines the routes that fans of popular music might take into their fandom, considering how this might be influenced by their use of other media texts. Theorists such as Matt Hills and Cornel Sandvoss have argued that fan studies needs to move away from viewing fans as people who are only fans of one text at a time. This paper seeks to consider this by exploring how fans of film and television programmes might find that their fandom leads them to discover particular types of bands and music, examining how such textual links are articulated. This will be undertaken through analysis of Twilight fans and the resultant fandom of artists who feature on the movie soundtracks such as Paramore, Thom Yorke, or Muse. In examining how online fan sites are used to discuss the soundtracks, the paper examines the distinctions and value judgements that might be made in such debates. Drawing on fan studies which have considered issues of distinction, taste and value, the paper aims to discover whether fans who have come to fandom via texts such as Twilight might be devalued by other fans of these bands. For example, are such fans devalued as inauthentic or as not being proper fans? How does this relate to common lines of division within fan cultures such as issues over age and experience, fandom longevity, and gender? Is this related to the way in which the bands themselves position themselves in relation to Twilight? The proposed paper thus aims to consider some of the fan practices and distinctions which operate when fans discover new music fan objects as a result of their interest in other media texts.

Rebecca Williams, Lecturer, University of Glamorgan

Politicizing Fandom: Music Listeners as Imagined Subjectivities in the 1970s Italian Music Press

2010-05-13T15:51:00.000-07:00

My proposal aims to explore the historical formation of a certain discourse on music fandom in Italy. In particular, I will focus my analysis on the way in which two 1970s magazines, Gong and Muzak, constructed the image of the pop music listener through a certain kind of “decisionist narrative” (Matt Hills: 2002), which framed fans according to an opposition between rational and 'affective' forms of music fruition. However, providing an overview of magazines' historical and cultural context, I will show that rather than condemning (or denying) the affectivity of fandom, they employed contradictory strategies to legitimize it through politics and 'high theory'. In this way, press' narratives reflect the wider crisis of the dichotomy between 'the personal and the political' that took place within the Italian youth movements toward the end of 1970s. This proposal is part of a more extensive project on the Italian music press history, which employs fan studies to contribute to the historicization of discourses on (and images of) music fandom in the Italian context. My aim is to address the question of the historical emergence of fan cultures taking into consideration their media representations.

Simone Varriale, University of Bologna, Italy

‘Myspace-Bands’ and ‘Tag-Wars’: The Case of Online Social Media and the Deathcore Scene

2010-05-13T15:47:00.001-07:00

In my talk I aim to interpret the transformations that took place in the relations of the extreme music scene known as ‘deathcore’ due to online community practices in recent years. All this interests me in respect to the questions concerning genre communities: how do web 2.0 applications affect communities organized around certain genres? How do certain genre-definitions and communities form each other as well as the relation to the transformation process itself, and what kind of conflicts does this engender? First, I look at — through the career of the band Job For a Cowboy on Myspace — how the online success of the band led to the devaluation of the ‘deathcore’ genre label and to the decreased reputation of Myspace as a medium among the people conceiving of themselves as the authentic members of the scene.
Second, by the discourse analysis of the deathcore label on Last.fm, I sketch out new practices and oppositions deriving from the structure of online publicity that emerged in the scene beside these subcultural conflicts. I argue that using the concept of the ‘genre music scene’ seems to be the most appropriate to understand these new musical / social patterns in the age of online social media.

Tamas Tofalvy, Guest Lecturer, Budapest University of Technology and Economics

Constructing Northern Soul Fandom in the Absence of an Artist: Issues of Identity, Originality, Ownership and Locality

2010-05-13T15:44:00.000-07:00

Northern Soul is a British music culture primarily located in the Midlands and north of England. The scene originated in the late 1960s, reaching its heyday in the 1970s and continuing to the present day. The music of choice was, and still is, 1960s black American soul. The 45rpm vinyl records that are fanatically collected and passionately dance to are predominantly rare, non-chart hits from often unknown artists and minor record labels. Via the direct acquisition of these vinyl records from the USA, northern English fans have created a scene unique to them and beyond the original USA intentions for that music. With a notably absent artist (Smith, 2009) the Northern Soul scene sits in awe of DJs and dancers who act as tastemakers, performers and connoisseurs. Dance is used by participants on the scene as a method of displaying fandom to peers on the scene and expressing the originality of Northern Soul to those outside of the scene. This paper will discuss the construction and performance of fandom on the Northern Soul scene, drawing particularly upon the relevance of the absent artist as a route to fan ownership and control of cultural practice, (de)constructions of the relevance of space, place and authenticity, and the altered significance of fan culture artefacts which move into - and are re-marked within – an 'alien' locality.

Dr Nicola Smith, University of Wales Institute Cardiff

'I Love You, Paul!' Adolescent Sexuality and Finnish Female Fandom at the Turn of the 1950s and 1960s

2010-05-13T15:42:00.001-07:00

In Finland, popular music fandom developed into a large-scale youth cultural phenomenon at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. From the start, the most eye-catching feature of Finnish fandom was its femininity: the fan communities of the most popular teen idols like Elvis Presley, Paul Anka and Finnish singer Lasse Liemola consisted almost without exception of adolescent females. This has naturally raised many questions and surmises about the role of sexuality in the fan cultures of the era. In my paper I discuss this theme by studying the different ways in which sexuality was expressed by fans in fan letters, concerts and the popular media of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Furthermore, I will discuss the multiple and varying meanings of adolescent female sexuality as a part of fandom. In this discussion I lean on the earlier and in part contradictory interpretations of scholars like John Fiske, Barbara Ehrenreich and Janice A. Radway on the subject, studying the validity of these interpretations in the context of early Finnish female fandom.

Janne Poikolainen, University of Helsinki, Finland

Metalheadz, Punks, Ravers: Genre, Fandom and the Non-musical Expression of Belonging

2010-05-13T15:34:00.000-07:00

When discussing fandom, we refer to the relationship between the fan and his or her liking of a specific object or person. In popular music studies, fans and fandom have been described and analysed in relation to a specific artist, band or performer. When this is the case, certain observations can be made that link the fan to his or her musical star: logos, photographs, items of clothing, accessories, or hair styles. There are genres of popular music whose units of musical production and performance are represented by bands or solo artists. In the case of electronic dance music, fandom has experienced a shift. Due to the public prominence of DJs and their subsequent treatment as stars, the image of a star has appeared from and disappeared into the underground. In this paper, I examine the ways in which fandom is celebrated in electronic dance music. A definition of fandom based on representations of non-musical values that suggest a strong social community and a sense of belonging is proposed. Furthermore, the historical development of superstar DJs and consequences for the practice of fandom are contextualised with a view to re-define the fan.

Dr Beate Peter, University of Salford

When the Researcher is a Fan: Methodological Points on Carrying Out Research into Your Favourite Artist

2010-05-13T15:31:00.000-07:00

In many cases, fandom feelings are an important reason why popular music researchers carry out projects into their favourite artists. While doing it, they get into situations where the fan needs to face his or her own feelings in order to have a desirable critical view on the subject and express impartiality. Dialoguing with existent literature, studying historical moments, finding primary sources and having contacts with the artist himself or herself may generate confrontation between the musicologist and the fan… Based on the personal experience of working on the works of Brazilian songwriter and musician Marcos Valle; the researcher being a longtime fan of his, this paper discusses some issues based on fandom in the pop music scene and on some cultural aspects of Brazil (the dialectics of passion and reason, the artists' points of view on audiences and fans, and the local media and music industry interventions) to illustrate methodological difficulties caused by the influence of fandom feelings on the popular music researcher's work.

Alexei Michailowsky, UNIRIO, Brazil

Beatlemania: In the Beginning there was the Scream

2010-05-13T15:26:00.000-07:00

“The images persist: four guys in suits or smart raincoats being chased by hundreds of fans, girls frenzied at their merest glimpse, sloping bobbies-arms linked, teeth gritted, straining to hold back the throng.”

Mark Lewisohn’s evocative description of one of the key images of the 1960s helps to focus attention on the phenomenon that was Beatlemania. While hysterical scenes had surrounded male stars before The Beatles (Valentino in the 1920s, Frank Sinatra in the 1940s, Elvis and Johnny Ray in the 1950s) and has subsequently (Rollermania and T.Rexstasy in the 1970s, boyband frenzies in the 1990s), Beatlemania remains, this paper will argue, the yardstick: an alliance between fans, the media and a cultural phenomenon unlike any other in UK pop history. The paper will argue that it is through Beatlemania that The Beatles were established as a global entity and that all that followed-their transgression of traditional expectations about the role of the male pop star, their role as men of ideas, their impact on the cultural landscape of the 1960s and their symbiotic relationship with the decade-stems from this. No Beatlemania - no Revolver or Sgt Pepper. The paper will explore the nature of Beatlemania in an attempt to explain why it remains the ultimate expression of fan worship. This includes discussion of the relationship between The Beatles and their fans, Xmas shows and flexi-discs, their appeal in terms of gender fluidity, early song lyrics as a form of communication with fans, the influence of 1960s girl groups and manager and mentor Brian Epstein’s role in creating a fan-friendly “product”. Differing perspectives on Beatlemania – from Paul Johnson’s damning Marxist critique to Barabra Ehrenreich et al’s claim that “the scream” personified second wave feminism as women found a voice in the early 1960s-will also form part of the discussion. The paper will also examine The Beatles’ first feature film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) - which had a working title of Beatlemania - as a text through which to read both the joys and dangers of fan worship.

Martin King, Principal lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan University

Hidden Fans? Fandom and Domestic Musical Activity

2010-05-13T14:01:00.000-07:00

Despite Joli Jenson’s (1992) contention that fandom should be conceptualised as being part of everyday concerns, there are still few studies that examine the extent to which fandom intersects with domestic activities. Utilising case studies from ethnographic research on the roles of music in the domestic lives of a group of people with learning difficulties, this paper will explore how everyday musical activities can become integral to communication and identity-formulation for people who are often precluded from engaging in the creative practices usually associated with music fandom. Such an exploration will highlight issues regarding access and opportunity to engage in ‘fan-related’ activity and raise questions about the limits of the concept of fandom.

Dr Nedim Hassan, University of Liverpool

Critiquing the Lyrics, Critiquing the Music: Inverting the Critical Work of Fanvids

2010-05-13T13:59:00.000-07:00

In ‘Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding,’ Francesca Coppa defines vidding as “a form of grassroots filmmaking in which clips from television shows and movies are set to music…to comment on or analyze a set of preexisting visuals.” This statement is consistent with the scholarly and popular assumption that a vid’s moving-image source is primary while its audio is lesser, used for framing its critique. It is my contention, however, that the inverse is also true. Vidders are often also fans of the music they appropriate and it is possible to see a critical reading of the audio taking place as well as the visual. To show this I will mount two close readings. The first highlights the critique of lyrics by examining how remixer, Sloanesomething, implicitly critiques the sexism of the song, ‘Too Many Dicks’ by Flight of the Concords, as well as the movie, Star Trek, in her vid, ‘…on the Dancefloor.’ Then, I will look at the melodic content of the music itself, using Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of secondness and reading Sweetestdrain’s ‘West of her Spine,’ in which soft music is laid over and contrasted with violent images from the show, Dexter.

Jack Harrison, Georgetown University, USA

David Bowie: A Case Study of the Established Artist as Fan

2010-05-13T13:54:00.000-07:00

“At another Bowie-organised party in Paris Kraftwerk had put in an appearance, receiving a five-minute standing ovation as they entered
blank-faced and got up in full- blown 1930s retro style, like the musical
equivalents of Gilbert and George. Bowie was enthralled: “Look how they are, they are fantastic!” he kept repeating…”

In his book on David Bowie’s Low, Hugo Wilcken recounts an oft-cited non-meeting of musical minds. What is illuminating here is the shallowness, the dumb enthusiasm of Bowie’s reaction, like a kid unable to contain his enthusiasm before a favourite sports hero. Or indeed pop star. This is because Bowie was, and remains, fundamentally a fan. This paper will use the example of David Bowie in attempting to understand the phenomenon of the established artist as fan, and the contribution that the fandom of these figures can make to the forward momentum of popular music, and it’s development as a form. In particular, it will address the usefulness of artist-fans as filters, isolating key elements of the more radical musical conceptions of their (generally less commercially successful) peers and making them suitable, by dilution or hybridization, for consumption by a mass audience; and their role as the ‘musical conscience’ of the mainstream, ensuring that the obscure but influential artists who provide their inspiration get their due.

John Harries, Recording Artist

From Fandom to Stardom in Punk: The Female Experience

2010-05-13T13:50:00.000-07:00

Perhaps more than any genre of popular music, early punk rock sought to blur the boundaries that separated performers from their fans and to lay claim to an inclusiveness that encouraged fans to make the transition from audience to stage. Early British spectators like Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious were emboldened to take this step because of punk’s “do-it-yourself” ethos, which challenged conventional notions of musicianship and performance. In the early days of the movement, these challenges seemed to extend to existing gender barriers, and many female fans appeared to make an easy transition to the stage (for example, the Slits, the Au Pairs, the Raincoats, and Sioux). However, as punk was absorbed into mainstream popular culture in the late 1970s, the promise of gender equality quickly evaporated and the genre tended to be more strongly identified with its male participants, particularly those who had signed to major record labels (the Sex Pistols and the Clash). Looking at the portrayal of women in fanzines and album covers, and descriptions of female performances in the press, this study will examine what went awry for female fans in their quest to move from fandom to stardom.

Dr Karen Fournier, University of Michigan

Fan Words: Towards a New Vocabulary of Fan Theory

2010-05-13T13:46:00.000-07:00

In 1976 Raymond Williams cemented his position as a central theorist of cultural studies with Keywords, a book that used the format of the glossary as an intellectual device to start rethinking social analysis. Word-by-word musing offered Williams a platform to both summarize the terrain of cultural theory and to extend it. His writing was based on the profound truth that academic thinking primarily takes place through language. While the academic process of ‘keywording’ has continued for pedagogic reasons in subject glossaries and text books, there seems to be precious little space to explore keywords as tools to advance theory. In this paper I will use a small handful of keywords to begin rethinking how we might study popular music fandom. The emphasis will be both on deconstructing existing words and suggesting some which have the potential to take fandom theory in new directions.

Dr Mark Duffett, University of Chester

With(in) the Band: The Queering of the Female Fan Experience

2010-05-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows what a groupie is: she’s That Girl, the fan hanging around after the gig, waiting for the nod, the chance to sleep with her chosen guy in the band. Or maybe she’s more than that: she might be his girlfriend, his wife, a woman working in the music industry. Defined narrowly or broadly, she’s there, a marker of an extreme expression of the heteronormative organization of society. The general critical debate concerns itself with the scope of the definition, not the paradigm itself. But there is another possibility, a community-centric approach to sexual desire for their favourite musicians: narrative slash fiction on the internet. Slash, same-sex relationship stories written primarily by and for women, is created to make explicit the interpersonal relationships of these celebrities. In the case of ‘bandom’ – for this paper, the fannish activity around the group of bands loosely held together by one degree of separation from Pete Wentz and/or Warped Tour in America – women are writing romantic relationships within and between the members of the bands. This essay investigates the queer act this entails. These women are not passively waiting by the stage door; they are (metaphorically) taking the members of these bands into their own queer space and using them to enact their own desires. There is no room for female agency in a woman’s interactions with the music industry – unless she finds herself a queer community.

Nancy Bruseker, University of Liverpool

Triskaidekaphobics: R.E.M. Fans in Pursuit of the Ultimate First Listen

2010-05-13T13:23:00.000-07:00

In this paper I discuss how the Triskaidekaphobics (Trobes), a social sub-group within Murmurs.com, an online community for fans of rock band R.E.M., assume a non-normative status, due to their temporary spoiler evading activities concerning the then forthcoming R.E.M. album. Driven by a nostalgic aim to recapture the experience of buying a new album without prior knowledge of its contents during the first listen other than officially released information, these fans endeavor to resist the new technology and instead aim to restore the pre-Internet experience of listening to and purchasing a new album as a singular event. I demonstrate how this pursuit of pleasure (pursuing the “first listen”) worked to disrupt the exchange of knowledge with other members and resulted in their precise cultural distinctiveness from the rest of the Murmurs community. Drawing on Fiske (1992), I show how this allowed Trobes to create a temporary form of inverted fan cultural capital that was distinct from the rest of the community and argue that this process places Trobes in a position between non-Trobes and “casual” fans, subsequently operating as a different, albeit temporary, interpretive community.

Dr Lucy Bennett, Cardiff University

FAQs - Popular Music Fandom: A One Day Symposium

2010-05-12T05:43:00.000-07:00

Which airport should I use in the UK?

If you intend to fly straight into the region, use Manchester or Liverpool airport.

Where do I find accomodation?
I'm sure you are concerned to book accomodation as soon as possible as Chester is not a huge place and I don't think there is anything available on campus. Looking for bed and breakfast rather than a hotel might increase your options. Try here or here for a range of accomodation.

If you can't find anything in Chester, you might try looking for accomodation elsewhere in the region. I'll be commuting in by train from Manchester that morning, which takes about an hour, so it is possible if you are willing to face a really early start! It might also be possible to commute in from Liverpool, or a station even nearer to Chester. You would simply have to catch a short cab ride across town once you got to Chester station. Check here or here for train times and tickets.

How do I find the campus?
Click here for directions to the main Chester campus and scroll down for a campus map to find the Binks building. It's right in the middle of the campus.

Do we speakers have to apply officially to the Symposium and pay any fees?
No - this is a little less formal than a paid conference event: there is no registration fee or forms to complete. The reason for this is that we avoid fees for facilities and red tape within our own institution. Hence we are calling it a symposium rather than a conference, but we shall be expecting you to sign in on the day so that we know that you are here to present your paper.

When must I arrive at Binks Building on the Symposium day?
We will be starting in room 013/2 at about 9.30am and running through until late afternoon.

Are we reading our papers in some order? Chronological by alphabetical order, perhaps? Or are there paper sessions that you've devised for us?
To accomodate everyone on the day we'll have to do two streams of papers (except the keynote). I'm aiming to group similar subjects and avoid putting two sessions on the same subject head-to-head. Unfortunately I probably won't be able to supply a schedule until the day itself, as I will have to arrange session chairs, etc. It will probably be just a page in length without any abstracts, so you should have a good look at the abstracts online now and decide on an ideal list of papers you especially want to see. If you miss people on the day, there is no harm in asking them for a printed version of their paper.

How long is each presentation?
Each paper will be twenty minutes long with a further ten minutes for questions from the audience. Please rehearse your paper so that we stay strictly to length as the schedule will be so tight there will not be room for over-running.

What about the audio-visual requirements for my paper?
Binks is quite well equipped and I hope we can meet them. It would be useful for you to put any powerpoints, etc, on a USB stick as this is quicker than booting up and hooking up you laptop. It also avoids connectivity issues.

Will there be any social activities on Friday night?
My own inclination with Friday night activities is to encourage them, but also to let them happen informally and spontaneously. While people from the region might be going home to see their families, there are bound to be some national and international attendees ready for a night out in Chester. If I try to organize restaurant reservations it creates work, people drop out, etc. It is very likely that we will be retiring to a local ale house after the event and probably going on for a meal. I always find that the most fun part of these events as people are no longer under the stress of presenting their papers.

Return to main page.

The passing of Malcolm McLaren

2010-04-09T03:40:00.000-07:00

Most of us will remember Malcolm as the provocative svengali who (mis)managed the Sex Pistols, but history will remember him as the man who catalysed a marriage between rebellion and commerce so deep that we are still feeling its shock waves. After all, putting punk aside for a moment, where would hip-hop be without Malcolm? Or the fashion world? Would Damian Hurst or the rest of the Brit art crowd even exist? He was a garrulous, effusive man of ideas - a style terrorist who understood that mutiny and exploitation could go hand in hand.

His running for Mayor of London was more a statement of provocation that a tactical moment of political pragmatism. After all, he would have been terrible in the role. In an era where Simon Cowell and Steve Jobs seem to be the biggest remaining forces in the music industry, we will remember Malcolm as the archetypal bohemian and ultimate English eccentric. Mayor of London? I'd much rather have seen Malcolm where he rightfully belonged: as Dr Who!

... Finally, check this link sent in by my Canadian friend Carol.

Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll (Damian Jones 2009)

2010-01-14T12:17:00.000-08:00

"Oi oi!" I've just been to see director Damian Jones's portrait of Stiff's cockiest cockney, the legendary Ian Dury. Jone's highly stylized biopic predictably explores - but I don't think exploits - the disability issue, with Dury hobbling through various moments of rock'n'roll excess in grubbiest London. Andy Serkis, who plays Dury, looks more like a thespian Gary Glitter, but does well in capturing Dury's charming growl and larger-than-life spirit.

What emerges is a story of fathers, sons, and a quest to compensate not just for polio, but for a kind of inferioity complex that expresses itself in Dury's family relationships. This, of course is an age-old formula, as biopics generally follow Romanticist tenets by seeing the artist's life as a series of traumas in which their nose-diving ego flails between broken personal relationships and the precarious recognition of their audience. In order to even connect with a fan base the questing genius must contend with the exploitative relations of the music industry. Entering the commodity form as a celebrity - their version of workaholism - is seen as a compensation that ultimately fails, however, as fame is such a cruel sea.

As we munch our popcorn, ultimately we realize that although performers are hell to live with, these ego-driven specimens more than make up for it with their on-stage charm. The biopic genre therefore becomes an nostalgic exercize (better yet an exorcism). In that respect I would like to have seen more of the pub rock scene and the Stiff Records family represented in this particular movie.

... One wonders what both Jones and Serkis will be up to next on the strength of this one.

The "Mention Elvis" rule

2010-01-12T09:35:00.000-08:00

The term I used to use was speaking through the popular; another way to put it, as Jeremy Gilbert (2003) has suggested, is that celebrities become our coinage, our currency, and we use them in everyday speech - and media interviews and products - to build alliances. We speak through the popular to create hegemonies. As such, pop culture icons circulate as in-jokes. All this is by way of a preamble to introduce the "Mention Elvis" rule:

The "Mention Elvis" rule states: in pop cultural products that have nothing to do with Elvis but still mention his name, the less he is mentioned, the worse the product.

This law of diminishing returns hits its zero point when the product makes no mention of Elvis at all. Products that make no mention of Elvis are outside of the set of cultural predictions made by this rule... I will give some examples to demonstrate what I mean.

Take Bubba Ho-tep (Coscarelli 2002), which recycled the image of the King as part of a strange scenario starring Bruce Campbell. It's quite a good movie. Honeymoon in Vegas (Bergman 1992), with its flying troop of Elvis impersonators, references Elvis a bit less, and is an passable feature film too. Then yesterday I got to see Daybreakers (Spierig 2009), a new vampire movie in which Willem Dafoe plays a renegade rehumanized vampire, named Elvis, of course. The Dafoe character introduces himself as "Elvis, like the singer" and does a little impression. That moment, and pretty much the rest of the film, are so cringingly bad that even this talismanic mention of the King cannot save it. Elvis gets a tiny mention, and the movie is predictably awful, making lame comparisons between the American military-industrial complex and, um, blood suckers.

So why does the "Mention Elvis" rule hold up? I think it is because film makers using an Elvis theme for any length of time know it will wear very thin, very fast, unless they do something interesting. Meanwhile, scripts that merely reference Elvis are doing so to evoke a cliche that will connect with any audience. Everyone gets the joke. Nobody goes, "Who?" The result is that a stinker about Elvis can give the worst of material just a bit more milage.

Of course the "Mention Elvis" rule does not apply to Elvis's films themselves: neither the films about Elvis (which were usually good) or the films starring Elvis as a racing car driver, native indian or American playboy (which were usually bad). It also finds an exception in Ghostbusters (Reitman 1984) which cleverly used a mention of Elvis to highlight the stupidity of the media.

Mark's postings on music genre

2010-01-11T07:24:00.000-08:00

Genre proliferation: the disease of the modern era (on noughties genre proliferation)

Genre proliferation: the disease of the modern era

2010-01-11T06:53:00.000-08:00

Simon Reynolds, perhaps the only person to really manage an overview of the contemporary music scene, has just written his review of the noughties where, amongst other things, he explores the idea of "landfill indie". Landfill indie notwithstanding, Reynolds cites around twenty-five different genres or variants in recent popular music. The Horrors, for example, are "mashing up Goth, shoegaze, post-punk, late-80s neo-psych in the Loop/Spacemen 3, etc". Here they are, as if to remind us that haircuts still matter despite any purported micro-genre explosion:

Reynolds adds a thumbs up for "Mica Levi, who bridges the considerable gap between riot grrrl and grime, between Woodentops-style indie-bop and Herbert's blippy, micro-syncopated glitchtronica." While I am sure there was always a whole heap of vernacular musics to mix, match and enjoy, the fissile, recombinant "meme-like" nature of contemporary music - or rather contemporary music reporting - in part reflects the recent social obsession with genetic futurism.

It is as if popular music criticism is now a laboratory which dissects the genetic codes of the tunes in order to guide packs of hungry consumers. I think it would be fair to say this linguistic move comes in part from the alienated world of electronic dance music. While the folk-related traditions of popular music were always about enhancing the "feel" of the music and combing those traditions was about getting something "cooking", this style of analysis is more about dissection, mutation and calculated recombination: playing with DNA rather then merely shaking it. The model for the modern musician and his or her critic therefore becomes Gregor Mendel, who of course was both a scientist and a priest.

Ironically, all this freeplay with musical memes not only makes genre lifespans shorter, but it also makes inheritance a more important concept than ever. Tradition isn't age old now, it's recent. That said, I am beginning to feel out of the Futurist loop, and that from a plain old denim-and-jeans (not genes) rock perspective, all this genre proliferation feels like fannish elitism, the endless assertion of cultural capital whose references are lost on any hapless outsider who might happen to catch about the pedigree of a recent tune.

Three kings for Christmas 2009

2009-12-31T04:11:00.001-08:00

The three that I am talking about are, of course, Elvis, Michael... and Orson. Elvis is enjoying his usual festive attention, with an upcoming night of television shows and celebrations on January 8th of what would have been his 75th birthday. Michael Jackson's name has been prominent on TV schedules too, with retrospectives and concert re-runs. Finally, BBC 4 have been having an Orson Welles season.

So what do the Kings of rock'n'roll, pop and film have in common? I will start with Welles, the portly genius whose kingly presence both fascinated and scared Hollywood. It is clear from the documentaries that his downfall was his obsession with control. Perhaps because he began his career as an actor who got into directing, his interests extended into over-seeing the whole process of film making. The studio system, with its ornate division of labour, was not in tune with someone who took so long to edit his own movies.

Welles is always painted as an artist, his hefty weight reflecting his huge appetite for life. In that respect his his vehicle was his own build; something that his personality and screen image always played upon. Whether he was acting as a media mogul, hustler or corrupt police officer, his larger-than-life presence authenticated the role in question. (He wanted to play in 'The Godfather' - can you imagine how great that would have been?)... Welles was therefore a kind of opera singer who happened to be working in the movies, a king-pin.

What is interesting here is to compare Welles' obesity to that of Elvis', because Elvis's portly physique was always seen as a stumbling block - in part because of his nimble youth and in part because he was never quite seen as a genius. Elvis was seen as a phenomenon, sure, but not an artist. What the two kings had in common (apart from their success with younger women) was that they were both reduced to playing cameos of themselves, disappearing into their own weighty parodies.

Michael Jackson, meanwhile, was a king without the weight, as he too was a phenomenon. One commentator on a retropective by BBC2's Culture Show noted that the journey of black identity was always from object (of white fears and desires) to subject, and that Michael made everyone else - black or white - into pawns in his world. He was like Welles in that sense - a king-pin - but one could also see him as a dandy, a flaneur, perhaps the ultimate American consumer, isolating himself in his own selfish kingdom, disregarding the norms and mores of his own society. He had certainly been taking notes off Elvis about how to grow your legend.

When Michael died, it was only about six months after Barak Ombama had been inauguared. The striking thing about coverage of Jackson's death was the extent to which the black community claimed him as their own. Back in his 1980s heyday, in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, disappointment with the lack of change sometimes meant that those with separatist agendas questioned any cultural icon that seemed to represent assimilation. Elvis had a (posthumous) tough time, and so did Michael. He was lightening his skin (if verbally claiming an Afro-American identity) and selling out black music, turning it into acceptable white-bread pop. Yet years later, the grounds for debate have shifted. Musically, Michael Jackson inaugurated an era of urban music which featured the message that it was a black-led party anybody could join. This played into an agenda of black embourgeoisment (which had begun as far back as disco, if not before). With the election of a distinctly non-separatist black president (and a sufficient time-lapse since any mention of child abuse), Michael Jackson was distinctly "in"... Ironically, so now is Elvis: The Guardian have just published confirmation from his childhood friend, Sam Bell, that they would go and see movies at the Lyric theatre. The mixed race pair would ignore the rope that separated the races and sit on the black side of the room: a point taken as evidence of Elvis's proto-typical race mixing.

With this as the preview, 2010, one hopes, will be a year of cultural assimilation endorsed by people of both races.

The end of the noughties

2009-12-28T10:51:00.000-08:00

The BBC recently published its portrait of the decade. As the first segment of the new millennium draws to a close, what is interesting about such retrospective bouts of listmania is how little individual music performers or acts figure in the discussions. It is as if the likes of the Kaiser Cheifs never existed. They have disappeared because the notion of popular music being homogenized "content" to be squeezed down the cyber-pipeline is truely with us. Sure, rock acts still have their magic, but much more praise in the noughties has gone to the consumer technologies that deliver them: iPods, YouTube, Facebook, Spotify.

The means to digitally replay and manipulate music have now been 'democratized' more than ever. These means help us feel that popular music is almost all the same, available at will, easily mixed and matched, no longer groundbreaking or unique. Arguments about the talent of contemporary artists seem to be redundant. Musicians are no more or less talented than before; it is rather that their talent inevitably means much less. The engine of commerce has switched focus from the phantasmagoria of music performance to end platforms that now deliver it. In association with that, popular music - though popular as ever - is somewhat sidelined in the public imagination.

If the noughties was a decade in which geeks were the new rock stars, it was because they were the gate-keepers of the technology that defined social relations. Witness the rise and rise of nerdy film characters; a phenomena listed by Empire film magazine as the second biggest movie trend of the decade. In an era where big advertising made gadgets cool and U2 hustled iPods, no Puff Daddy or Jay-Z could hope to be a mogul like, say, Steve Jobs.

It is as if the death of popular music has been a bloodless coup, different from the more obvious horror facing television. Consider some media history. In the 1950s, cinema was usurped by television, so it found ways to reinvent itself. In the noughties, television, too, has been usurped (by the net), and has already reinvigorated itself with things like reality TV, 'The Wire' and a revamped 'Dr Who' (making David Tennant into an unfeasibly successful UK celebrity). Popular music, on the other hand, is content: a maleable cultural form, rather than a specific media technology. It is not in need of rescue, but is now spread across the mediascape like a ghost in the machine, an absentee crew member rattling round a ship being steered from elsewhere. Piracy has become endemic and shrewd synergists like Simon Cowell have taken over what's left of the asylum... If I was starting a band right now, I would call it Facebook.

Public Image Limited - Manchester Academy, 19th December 2009

2009-12-22T05:00:00.000-08:00

Well, I guess it all began in '78 when Johnny Rotten morphed back into John Lydon and decided that he would stick true to the artistic values of romanticism: pushing the musical envelope and staying true to your spirit. The result was Public Image Limited, and the music became a challenging brew of post-punk influences. Johnny, however, could never be post-punk like, say, The Pop Group, or even like Howard Devoto; Johnny would forever be Johnny Rotten. That was his albatross. As for PIL: how could they be anything more than an indulgence?? Would an unknown act have been allowed to release what they did? If Johnny was using his name to float something edgy and different then that was great, but how useful was the difference that PIL made? Albums in metal boxes? Okay. Chugging guitars? Passable. Attacks on religion? Hmmm, more Pistols-style than anything else...

That was the thing: in Rotten, Johnny had created a persona that was more a more powerful an English archetype than he ever imagined. He has doomed to live in its shadow. At best he could inflect it, like he did for the cover of PIL's initial album First Issue. This is, I think, Johnny at his finest. The combination of his famous "thousand mile stare", suit and combed down hair makes him seem like an insane, repressed member of the Warhol family - holding it all in (for a change), ready to detonate... He also used what he learned from the Pistols in this excellent early interview with a surprizingly patient Tom Snyder:

Don't you just love how Johnny an a faint, bohemian Keith Levine play good-cop/bad-cop there? Doo-dah! After the Pistols, John was still a Pistol precisely because he still inhabited that most English of archetypes: the rebellious teenager. In a Western democracy deferentialism contains the seeds of its own destruction. Having a dysfunctional teen about the place is as English as eating a cooked breakfast, drinking tea and saluting the Queen.

Some thirty years on, Johnny is no longer a teen. He may have lapsed into pantomime mode as the English squire - a poster boy for Country Life butter - yet here he still is, coming on like a carrot-topped demon, telling us that Guy Fawkes should be our national hero. The audience knows that it is, ironically, now watching history make a stand. And when we ask ourselves how much we should endure from PIL in the name of art - Johnny's art - the answer comes at the end of the set, with 'Rise': the band showing that despite their angry meanderings, they still managed a perfect, melodic, sing-a-long pop song... For 'Rise', we will forgive all the abrasive guitar marathons. We will forgive the guy who played his banjo with a cello bow. We will forgive the bass player's kilt. And we will even forgive the embarrassment of Johnny never leaving his awkward teenaged years. It is his nature, and ours.

Mark's posts on Geography

2009-12-12T13:03:00.000-08:00

The Tragically Hip (Canada's house band link fandom and nationhood)

Don Cherry: Canadian Patriot (The hockey commentator who has become a national icon)

New York Dolls - Liverool Academy, 9th December 2009

2009-12-12T12:38:00.001-08:00

The New York Dolls are living (off their) legends as the most depraved specimens to terrorize early 1970s New York. Somewhere in the evolutionary chart between Mick Jagger and Steven Tyler, there was their lead singer, David Johansen. Johansen had an inauspicious beginning as the son of an insurance salesman and a librarian, but that doesn't matter here. For He was a creature of the Grand Guignol, a phantom of the rock opera who piloted his ill-fated Dolls into a welter of drugs and lipstick. The Dolls main crime was that they had the bottle to slap on make-up. Their white trash performance aesthetic and r'n'b protopunk legacy lived on in everything from Iggy to Morrissey to Michael Stipe, to long forgotten 1980s metal glamsters like Hanio Rocks, Poison and the Quireboys. Yet the Dolls faded away, at least until the 2004 Download Festival. Perhaps it was better that way. Now they are back, touring everywhere from Southampton to Leamington Spa to Prestatyn, or to put that another way, the UK's secondary markets.

Dressed like someone acting the role of a Bowery pawnbroker, the diminutive Sylvanian Sylvain still weilds his axe with phallic aplomb, while Johansen himself comes across as an unlikely elder stateman of trash, a specimen of spectacle with a large mouth but somewhat more mature ego. The rest of the band are probably young replacements, stalked by the ill-fated spectres of bassist Arthur Kane and guitarist Johnny Thunders. Unfortunately, the sound in the Academy, which is tucked behind Limestreet Station, is poor and muddy. The Dolls soldier on through various hits and a contrived attemp at 'Ferry Across the Mersey' (presumably so they don't seem to imperialist). Does rock'n'roll age that well? In my experience it depends on the performers and the genre, not on their sheer will to continue. Living legends are one thing, aging rebels are another. As Johansen says, "If we don't come back, you can contact us on the ouija board."

The The Tragically Hip - Manchester Academy 3, 2nd December 2009

2009-12-03T00:52:00.001-08:00

You've got to love the Canadians. They say, "aboot" instead of "about", love ice hockey, have names like "Gord" and drink Molson's beer, so that we don't have to, but - as I found out from doing my masters degree at UBC in 1991 - they get a bum deal from their cousins south of the border. In the music industry that translates into a lack of international recognition. Delighted I was, then, that Canadian rock veterans, The Tragically Hip, got squeezed into the tiny Academy 3 last night and bought the house down. Every ex-pat in the North must have been there, knowing that they would have to have had lined up for days just to get the chance of a ticket to see these guys back home.

I'd first seen the Hip play Vancouver as part of my studies in the early 1990s, a decade after they had formed (check my article on the cultural politics of sponsorship at their Canada Day performance here). Lead singer Gordon Downie echoed that episode when he explained yesterday that beer and nationalism don't mix. What was really amazing about his performance last night, though, was how well he was holding up.

In his younger years, Downie, a film studies graduate of Queen's University in Kingston (home of Canada's finest scholars), came on like a tranced-out hippie, spiritually lost in his own music. Perhaps he was channeling something. Now in his mid-forties, he affects a neater appearance, the hair gone but the look no less demented. He kept was mugging, aping around like a gorilla and playing with an endless supply of hankies thrown at him by his roadies. His glowing eyes belied a strange combination of distance and intensity, like Kevin Spacey meets Michael Stipe doing a mime act, all the while backed by the Eagles gone a bit punk! Yes, the mad genius of Gordon Downie has not gone; it has just changed. His band have matured and mellowed to include material like the magnificent, rapturous country-folk of 'Fiddlers Green' alongside classic rockers like the snakey, bluesy 'New Orleans is Sinking' and the tense 'Cordelia'... Like so many good bands, the Hip seem able to soak up rock influences from across the board. What they give back is uniquely their and subtly Canadian.

Ever the outsider, from a nation of outsiders, Downie summed up global culture by saying, "We didn't invent the gift shop, but we live next to the people that did." By the end of the first half, his shirt was saturated with sweat and I realized what a rare treat it was to catch the Hip so intimate and so unbound. Unfortunately my injudicious combination of cider and fast food left me feeling just rough enough to forego the end of the set. Now I feel a little cheated that I didn't catched their grand finale... I guess there is always Youtube.

Michael Jackson's swansong: 'This is It' (2009)

2009-11-04T04:19:00.000-08:00

Last night I got to see 'This is It', the film of rehearsals for Michael Jackson's abandoned O2 Arena stage spectacular. The film was interesting but went on for too long and lacked much of a narrative. Jackson came on as a kind of body-popping android / phantom of the opera figure who spoke in such a whimper that he frequently needed to be subtitled. At 50, he struck me as the kind of oldest adolescent on the block. 'This is It' was all about the show and not much about its creator. The film reminded me of how he sat so much at odds with the rest of his life, but how he used his perfectionism to transmute that angst - and various pop culture genres - into some fine music.

The somber starting and somewhat contrived first interviews seemed odd, and general lack of audience was strange, but there was also something glorious about seeing it all so half finished. I think the 'Thriller' segment began to show what might have been and it was nice to see a great female guitarist in action too. For me, though, while the film had its moments, it was neither a great insight into the man nor the best summation of his gifts.

Literacy in the the hood!

2009-11-02T02:18:00.000-08:00

Recently I heard that 50 Cent has made a come back, not just with a new album but with a "business bible" (self-help book) on how to make things happen by conquering your fear and embracing the dog-eat-dog world of the hood... It all makes sense now: drug dealing, like rap artistry, is about entrepreneurialism, and Fiddy is the new Ophra... Of course, as its title and co-author suggest, this is not entirely Curtis Jackson's baby - it is actually Robert Green's, with Fiddy as the fall guy. Green's famous The 48 Laws of Power has been reworked with a touch of bling by adding hip-hop to the mix. The result is an interracial buddy book about how to be a man in the shark infested world of the street or the boardroom - an existential treatise on self-fashioning that pursues masculinity as something of an authentic masquerade, about being yourself and about impersonating others.

Whether this will spawn a legion of imitations is yet to be seen, though that might happen, given that rap is about extending one's brand into new lines of commodities. If so, we might get more dope advice from DMX, Eminem, Ice T and P Diddy, or better yet Jay-Z, Dr Dre or KRS-One. Such rappers may well have something more interesting - but perhaps less useful - to say about changing your life than Paul McKenna.

Certainly, Fiddy's book marks a new incursion in popular music history, because this is a music star explicitly asking you in writing to role model yourself on him, rather than just asking you do something he would like you to do ("Share my pain", "Vote green", "Buy my record", etc).

Strangely, its hard to decide whether 'The 50th Law' is a love song to black embourgeoisement or the kind of distillation of ghetto attitude that commentators like the BBC's Mark Easton might detest. When its author talks about "black gang culture" and "shiny-faced young children", Easton's blog echoes the stereotypes long ago forwarded by blackface. It reminds me of the old times when concerned Salvation Army founder William Booth made forays into the squalid hovels of London and wrote them up as his 1890 bestseller 'In Darkest England and the Way Out'. Over a century later, the same questions may just have a different answer: forget welfare and get an education, then transfer your hustling skills from the street to the office.

Of course the book's achillese heel is its Neo-Manichean, even Neitzschean view of life: smack 'em first, before they have a chance to fight back; tough it out, keep fronting; grab what you desire, because nobody will offer it you on a plate... Is this riding on the entrails of the Thatcherite project to destroy society and leave capitalism in its wake? If so, just where is the love? Can't masculinity be about altruism, seeing the bigger picture, acting responsibly and making bonds of love with your fellow travelers on this planet?

What seems clear is that there is a very interesting study to be conducted here about popular music, Foucaultian care of the self, explicit role modeling and 'The 50th Law' - both as an exposition of the dictum "Get rich or die trying" and as a treatise on being (and becoming) a man in an age where celebrities represent icons of social success: artistic spectacles and entrepreneurs, heavenly bodies and commodities.

So what is 'The 50th Law' ultimately about: celebrity endorsement, masculine therapy, business advice or existentialism? All of them and more. Its really a legal discourse with Fiddy in his role as judge and jury, rebranding himself in executive chic, and taking on the likes of rapper Alan Sugar in da bookstore. Now I bet you're fired!

Resources for dissertation students

2009-10-30T03:14:00.000-07:00

Image: healingdream / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Some of these are power points, some Word documents. Save them to your computer by using your mouse (right click each link then select "save target as"):

Introduction to dissertation research

Terms in academic research - a glossary

Locating research within the discipline

Devising an appropriate question - the Disney strategy

How to take appropriate initiative

Academic writing and citation

APA referencing guide

Correct academic style

Introductions - how to create a great first paragraph

Academic quality

Doing a literature review

What to include in a methodology section

Critical thinking

Improving on a high grade

50 tips to improve essays - full text - some bits may be useful

50 tips to improve essays - summary - some bits may be useful

Florence + the Machine at the Academy, Manchester, 25th September 2009

2009-09-26T03:00:00.000-07:00

Last night I saw Florence + the Machine play a sell-out show at the Academy and was not disappointed. With her ample vocal talent, Florence Welch has single-handedly made the name "Florence" cool to a new generation. Perhaps because the gig was timed to coincide with the end of Freshers Week, the Manchester crowd absolutely loved her. She has a tender, soaring voice reminiscent of Souixie Souix meeting Kate Bush on some pagan ritual site, with dashes of Chrissy Hynde and Dido thrown in for good measure. As you might gather, I'm a fan; I like the way she has arrived on the UK music scene with a strong voice and an aesthetic identity that combines 1970s vintage with slight undertones of the gothic macabre. Some of Florence's more tormented lyrics remind one of the sort of things Gordon Downie of the Tragically hip used to write. Lines like "There's a ghost in my mouth in it talks in my sleep" and "A kiss from a fist is better than none."

This time she was dressed in a black, wizard sleeve creation which looked like something out of a Hammer horror film - the garb of a high preistess - and she made it work, raising her arms and trailing them like a charred butterfly, even twirling on stage. She seemed to sing as if a trance, and when she stepped out of it for a moment, a different person could be glimpsed; a shy and jaunty young woman dressing up to explore the meanings of this new identity, gleefully stepping into a theatre of ritual just for the sake of art. Her band even have a classical harpist to give their sound an ethereal dimension.

It's great to see someone like that at the peak of their powers and appreciated for it by a live audience. Perhaps educated by Spotify, the crowd seemed to know all her songs and was behind her all the way. In some senses, Florence is of course conforming to traditional standards of feminity, but she is doing it with an aesthetic that runs so counter to the whole direction of contemporary plastic pop that you can't help supporting her for it... Maybe her sound marks a return to the kind of dreamy songwriting of the 1980s? If the major labels continue to find and promote artists like this, they may have more longevity than we might think.

Mark's posts on the music industry

2009-09-22T04:39:00.001-07:00

Magazine, fandom and the music industry (how to avoid the mistakes of an artistic genius)

The end of the noughties (a decade where attention to consumer technologies overtook content)

Magazine, fandom and the music industry

2009-09-22T03:46:00.000-07:00

I've just finished reading Helen Chase's biography of my favourite band, Magazine. My experience as a fan began in the mid-1980s, when my younger brother introduced me to their music. It was, to say the least, an acquired taste, after my diet of early 1980s pop. Yet soon it had a hold of me: lead singer Howard Devoto's towering lyrics and cold cerebral voice seemed scary, surreal, knowing, too private and personal, out of time - intellectually triumphant but emotionally struggling. Like sexuality, music has a power to transform early trauma and unhappiness into something pleasurable.

Devoto used his music to show us who he was and what art could be. It connected with me and I soon found myself on a mission to collect all the band's vinyl. There were times when I would walk into a record shop and not want to listen to anything else. (I still put Magazine and Devoto in their own genre on my ipod, as there's nothing else like it; they made it their own way.) I can remember pouring over Record Collector and going what seemed like half way across the country to find Adrian's Record Shop in Wickford, Essex and procure some rare Magazine 12 inch singles, like I was on the trail of something fascinating.

My encounter with Magazine was therefore as alienated as they sounded, and a bit fetistishic too. In 1988, after Devoto had re-entered the music industry and formed Luxuria, we - my two brothers and I - went to see them play in Colchester. Although his music never lost its grip and I remained a fan for years, Devoto went AWOL again until he reunited with the band last year for some dates. Needless to say I was at the front in the Forum to greet them on their return. As a side note here, I was a bit shocked by the audience of boozed-up fifty-something skinheads who made up the bulk of the crowd, aside from a few intellectuals of various ages. Nevertheless, they were still great, and I even met Howard and keyboardist Dave Formula momentarily backstage at their Aftershow party in Manchester.

I mention all this because Chase's biography presents a portrait of a band that I only ever really knew through their music, so it filled in some blanks for me. What is clear is that while Devoto was great for music, he was often bad for business, trying to prove his ego and refusing to play the game. One is never sure whether Devoto missed his mark or never really wanted the big time, but either way he made a few mistake that I want to explore, in hope that budding musicians out there might not make them too:

1) Insisting on doing everything differently, meant that Devoto screwed things up with his record company. The band had bad timing, purposely missing its first invitation to Top of The Pops. Devoto also made everyone pay to get in one showcase gig, a move hardly likely to endear him to the press or record company. To add to that, Magazine released one single without any promotion at all, and others within a very short space of time of each other, competing against themselves in effect. The only advice I can offer here is: by all means do it differently once you are very famous and selling heaps of records. In the meantime, like the art stay in the music and let the business operate around it as per usual.

2) Devoto's intellectual games with the press eventually backfired on him. Reporters started referring to him as "Howie" (urgh) and describing him and his music as pretentious. I give Magazine props for never maximizing their market like the more anthemic Simple Minds did, even though it cost them commercially. Nevertheless, Devoto used his Buzzcocks ticket to the spotlight to begin biting the writing hand that fed him, and when it bit back he shrunk from publicity altogether.

3) Ignoring the trend and being too clever never really worked in Magazine's favour. While their second album, 'Secondhand Daylight,' might just be my favourite record ever, it must have landed like an alien object in its day, as it completely ignored the plot. Of course, I don't believe in plots either, but doing so made no commercial sense. Critics panned the album as "prog rock" and attempted to bury the group. It was way too bleak, up-close and intense to be prog, but that was an easy label to hand. The moral is that you have to check which way the wind is blowing if you don't want it to blow you over.

4) Magazine's gift was that they had a range of players, styles and personalities to temper and bring the best out of Devoto. They made edgy music for an edgy lead singer - compare some of the more mellow material on Luxuria's second LP Beastbox, which killed Devoto's art in my opinion (though not in his). There was a penduluos dynamic in the band between keyboards and guitar on each album, which meant that their genius guitarist John McGeogh - the man who put the avant-jazz into post-punk - felt creatively suppressed, so he left for the more popular Soiuxie and the Banshees, ripping the heart out of Magazine's sound.

It's interesting to compare the careers of Devoto and the German musician Blixa Bargeld, as I think Bargeld had the career that Devoto should have had, straddingly rock and the avant-garde with surprizing ease. With his interest in border crossings and feeding the enemy, maybe Howard was just born in the wrong country.

NORTHWEST POPULAR MUSIC STUDIES NETWORK

2009-09-17T02:41:00.000-07:00

POPULAR MUSIC FANDOM: A ONE DAY SYMPOSIUM

Binks Building, University of Chester

Friday 25th June 2010

Click here to see how the day went.

Keynote speaker: Matt Hills

HOW TO FIND US

Start time: 9.30am, room 013/2, Binks Building, main Parkgate Road campus.

While a range of researchers in cultural studies - notably Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills and Cornell Sandvoss - have moved the discussion about media fandom forward, much less work has been done specifically on popular music fandom. Confirmed speakers...

Tonya Anderson, University of Sunderland:

Still Kissing their Posters Goodnight: The Shift from Individual to Communal ‘Bedroom Culture’ as Pop Idol Fandom goes Online

Dr Lucy Bennett, Cardiff University:

Triskaidekaphobics: R.E.M. Fans in Pursuit of the Ultimate First Listen

Nancy Bruseker, University of Liverpool:

With(in) the Band: the Queering of the Female Fan Experience

Dr Mark Duffett, University of Chester:

Fan Words: Towards a New Vocabulary of Fan Theory

Dr Karen Fournier, University of Michigan:

From Fandom to Stardom in Punk: The Female Experience

John Harries, Recording Artist:

David Bowie: A Case Study of the Established Artist as Fan and ‘Musical Conscience’ for the Mainstream

Jack Harrison, Georgetown University, USA:

Critiquing the Lyrics, Critiquing the Music: Inverting the Critical Work of Fanvids

Dr Nedim Hassan, University of Liverpool:

Hidden Fans? Fandom and Domestic Musical Activity

Dr Matt Hills, Cardiff University:

Keynote speech: Post-popular music, mnemic communities, and intermediary fandoms: Challenging general approaches to fan culture?

Martin King, Principal lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan University:

Beatlemania: In the Beginning there was the Scream

Alexei Michailowsky, UNIRIO, Brazil:

When the Researcher is a Fan: Methodological Points on Carrying Out Research into Your Favourite Artist

Dr Beate Peter, University of Salford:

Metalheadz, Punks, Ravers: Genre, Fandom and the Non-musical Expression of Belonging

Janne Poikolainen, University of Helsinki, Finland:

‘I Love You Paul!’: Adolescent Sexuality and Finnish Female Fandom at the Turn of the 1950s and 1960s

Dr Nicola Smith, University of Wales Institute Cardiff:

Constructing Northern Soul Fandom in the Absence of an Artist: Issues of Identity, Originality, Ownership and Locality

Simone Varriale, University of Bologna, Italy:

Politicizing Fandom: Music Listeners as Imagined Subjectivities in the 1970s Italian Music Press

Rebecca Williams, Lecturer, University of Glamorgan:

‘Anyone who calls Muse a Twilight band will be shot on sight’: Music, Fandom, and Distinction in the Twilight Franchise

Nancy Young, Lesley University, USA:

Highlighting Theory and Research Relevant to the Identity Development of GLBTQ Dusty Springfield Fans

... Speakers - click for FAQs.

Some 2009 pop research books

2009-09-02T09:28:00.000-07:00

From a review list for the journal Popular Music, these recent offerings are mainly published by Ashgate and American university presses:

Baraka, Amiri (2009) Digging The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music.
UCLA Press.

Bayer, Gerd ed. (2009) Heavy Metal Music in Britain. Ashgate.

Bicknell, Jeanette (2009) Why Music Moves Us. Palgrave Macmillan.

Cooper, David (2009) The Musical Traditions of Northern Ireland and its Diaspora.
Community and Conflict. Ashgate.

Charters, Samuel (2009) A Language of Song, Journeys in the Musical World of the
African Diaspora. Duke University Press.

Dibben, Nicola (2009) Björk. Equinox/Indiana University Press.

Ferris, William (2009) Give My Poor Heart Ease Voices of the Mississippi Blues.
University of Northern Carolina Press.

Hawkins, Stan (2009) The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture.
Ashgate.

Kallimopoulou, Eleni (2009) Paradisiaká: Music, Meaning and Identity in Modern
Greece. SOAS/Ashgate.

Macías, Anthony (2008) Mexican American Mojo, Popular Music, Dance and Urban
Culture in Los Angeles 1935-1968. Duke University Press.

Morgan, Marcyliena (2009) The Real Hip Hop, Battling for Knowledge , Power and
Respect in the LA Underground. Duke University Press.

Perone, James. (2009) Mods, Rockers and the Music of the British Invasion.
Praeger.

Plasketes, George (2009) B-Sides, Undercurrents and Overtones: Peripheries to
Popular in Music, 1960 to the Present. Ashgate.

Ragland, Cathy (2009) Música Norteña, Mexican Migrants Creating a Nation between
Nations. Temple University Press.

Seniors, Paula Marie (2009) Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing, The Cultural of
Uplift, Identity and Politics in Black Musical Theatre. Ohio State University Press.

Sheehy, Colleen and Swiss, Thomas eds (2009) Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan's
Road from Minnesota to the World. University of Minnesota Press.

Smith, Graeme (2009) Singing Australian, A History of Folk and Country Music. Pluto
Press.

Smith, Chris (2009) 101 Albums that Changed Popular Music. OUP.

Tirro, Frank (2009) The Birth of the Cool of Miles Davis and His Associates.
Pendragon Press.

Elijah Wald (2009) How The Beatles Destroyed Rock'N'Roll, An Alternative History
of American Popular Music. Oxford University Press.

Wallach, Jeremy (2008) Modern Noise, Fluid Genres Popular Music in Indonesia
1997-2001. University of Wisconsin Press.

Welberry, Karen and Dalziell, Tanya (2009) Cultural Seeds, Essays on the Work
of Nick Cave. Ashgate.

'Gangsta Rap': Louis Theroux's Weird Weekend, BBC2

2009-07-31T06:46:00.000-07:00

I've just been watching a re-run of the Gangsta Rap episode of Louis Theroux's Weird Weekend. Louis is infamous for craftily highlighting the abnormality of his subjects - usually religious fundamentalists, sex cults or celebrity eccentrics - by acting so unassumingly "normal" himself (read: white, middle class) that they appear to tell their own story. Here he is out to spear a bigger fish, the way in which the rap industry sells social dysfunction to America's black community.

What the show makes clear, first, is that gangsta rap is promoted by a legitimate industry - a constellation of associated cottage operations (marketing, lyrics, recording, radio, etc). These craft units steer emerging artists towards a market place that demands extreme masculinity, rebellion and violence. They recruit raw material based on a dream of "making it", a dream which in this case - and this is what makes gangsta rap problematic - is associated with "keeping it real": dabbling in illegitimate industries like drug dealing and pimping.

In this murky world exploitation seems to be the watch word, as every element symbiotically feeds off each other. Sometimes the exploitation is mutual and sometimes it is not. Aside from his fumblings as a budding, white boy rapper who rhymes "Fiat" with "biatch", Louis' main point is that there are black victims here, as the gangsta industry revels in the glamour of the outlaw. Thus there is the black rapper who decides that he needs to keep pimping in order to stay real and avoid the tag of "studio gangster"; his prostitute, who is herself lured with the offer of making an album; and even the college-educated New Orleans black kids who are making porn while playing at the rap game.

In the weirdness of Louisville, rap becomes a hall of mirrors in which rappers pose as gangsters and real drug dealers also pose as drug dealers. Beneath the romanticist affirmations ("keep it real... you gotta have heart") that Louis encounters, everyone has a financial game plan and publicity agenda (including Theroux), and nobody is quite as they seem.

I am reminded of James Clifford who in Writing Culture described how anthropological explorers conceptually constructed the tribes they claimed simply to report. As a construction, Louis's Weird Weekend is a white report from the ghetto - still understood as a bitter-sweet gangsta's paradise. If the elements of tragedy are what keep us watching, what we forget is that gangsta is a variant on two much wider-spread ideologies of western life: the American dream and consumerism. While a select few like Master P make it, as Louis shows, the others can only live in poverty and in hope.

Discussions about academic writing

2009-07-21T06:03:00.000-07:00

I recently found this article in which Lindsay Waters (commissioning editor for Harvard University Press) bemoans the focus on books and gimmicks in academia. Instead he celebrates the essay and journal articles as part of the solid groundwork of academic research. (Also see this piece by him.)

IASPM International Conference 2009 - Some readings

2009-07-17T12:41:00.000-07:00

I've just returned from the 2009 IASPM International conference in Liverpool and want to list a few sources mentioned by the many speakers. I will also categorize them...

AUDIENCES
Salgado-Correia, J. (2008) 'Do Performer and Listener Share the Same Musical Meaning?,' Estudios de Psicología 29, 1, 49-69.

Kun, J. (2005) Audiotopia: Music, Race and America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Major, K. (1989) Dear Bruce Springsteen. New York: Vikings Children Books.

Mulvey, L. (2005) Death 24 x a Second. London: Reaktion Books.

Regev, M. (2007) 'Cultural Uniqueness and Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism,' European Journal of Social Theory 10, 123-138.

Staiger, J. (1992) Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historic Reception of American Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

St John, G. (2009) Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures. London: Equinox.

CELEBRITY
Bode, L. (2008) '"Casting From Forest Lawn Cemetary": Re-animating Dead Stars,' Conference Paper, 14th International Symposium on Electronic Art, Singapore.

Clarke, D. (2007) 'Elvis and Darmstadt, or: Twentieth-Century Music and the Politics of Cultural Pluralism,' Twentieth Century Music 4, 3-45.

Cowan, S. (2009) 'The Elvis We Deserve: The Social Regulation of Sex/Gender and Sexuality Through Cultural Representations of "the King",' Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2010; U. of Edinburgh School of Law Working Paper No. 2009/05.

Davis, S. (2009) Lionel Richie: Hello. London: Equinox.

Dibben, N. (2009) Bjork. London: Polity Press.

Griffiths, D. (2007) Elvis Costello. London: Polity Press.

Laing, D. (2009) Buddy Holly. London: Polity Press.

Marshall, L. (2007) Bob Dylan: The Neverending Star. Cambrdige: Polity Press.

Negus, K. (2008) Bob Dylan. London: Polity Press.

Whitesell, L. (2008) The Music of Joni Mitchell. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Witts, R. (2006) The Velvet Underground. London: Polity Press.

GENDER, VOICE AND BODY
Bredbeck, G. (1996) 'Troping the Light Fantastic,' GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, 1, 71-107.

Clarke, E. (1993) 'Generativity, Mimesis and the Human Body in Music Performance,' Contemporary Music Review 9, 1-2, 207-219.

Dibben, N. (2002) 'Constructions of Femininity in 1990s Girl Group Music,' Feminism & Psychology 12, 2, 168-75.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (2005) 'The Corporeal Turn,' The New Jewish Quarterly Review 95, 3, 447-461.

Maus, M. (2005) 'Techniques of the Body,' in Fraser, M. and Greco, M. eds The Body: A Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 73-77. (Listening can be seen as a "technique".)

Middleton, R. (2006) ‘Last Night a DJ Saved My Life’: Avians, Cyborgs and Siren Bodies in the Era of Phonographic Technology,' Radical Musicology 1, available online: http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/2006/Middleton.htm

O'Neill, J. (2004) Five Bodies: Refiguring Social Relationships. London: Sage.

Potter, J. (2008) Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Scott, N. (2008) 'God Hates Us All: Kant, Radical Evil and the Diabolical Monstrous Human in Heavy Metal,' in Scott, N. ed Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. New York: Editions-Rudopi, 13-240.

Toth, K. (2002) 'Looking for Hip Hop: Seeing the Body Communicate in Everyday Social Encounters and Visual Commodity Culture,' Yale Journal of Sociology 2, 25-64

MEMORY
Anderson, B. (2004) 'Recorded Music and Practices of Remembering,' Social & Cultural Geography 5, 1, 3-20

Frith, S. (1984) 'Rock and the Politics of Remembering,' Social Text 9, 10, 59-69.

Moore, P. (2009) 'Practical Nostalgia and the Critique of Commodicification: The "Death of Hockey" and the National Hockey League,' Australian Journal of Anthropology 13, 3, 309-322.

Van Dijck, J. (2007) Mediated Memories in a Digital Age. Stanford. (Also see his article here.)

COLLECTING
Belk, R. (2001) Collecting in a Consumer Society. London: Routledge.

Regev, M. (2006) 'Introduction: Special Issue on Canonization,' Popular Music 25, 1, 1-2. (Plus other pieces in the same issue.)

Shuker, R. (2010) Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Wheeler, L. (2006) 'Collectormania! I am a Woman... Record Collector,' Goldmine 673, 28.

INDUSTRY AND GEOGRAPHY
Burnett, R. and Wikstrom, P. (2009) The Music Industry: Music in the Cloud. London: Wiley.

Buxton, D. (1990) 'Rock Music, The Star System and the Rise of Consumerism,' in Frith, S. and Goodwin, A. eds On Record: Rock, Pop & the Written Word. London: Routledge, 366-377.
Huhn, T. ed (2004) The Cambridge Companion to Adorno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Robertson, R. (1995) 'Glocalization,' in Featherstone, M. and Lash, S. et al eds Global Modernities. London: Sage, 23-44.

Stahl, M. (2008) 'Recording Artists, Works for Hire, Employment, and Appropriation,' Social Science Research Network, working paper.

Stratton, J. (1983) 'Capitalism and Romantic ideology in the record business,' Popular Music 3, 143-156.

TECHNOLOGY AND LISTENING
Bernstein, D. ed (2008) The San Francisco Tape Music Centre: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Brown, S. (2006) The Perpetual Music Track: The Phenomenon of Constant Musical Imagery,' Journal of Consciousness Studies 13, 6, 25-44.

Bailey, P. (2004) 'Breaking the Sound Barrier,' in Smith, M. ed Hearing History. Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 23-35.

Born. G. (2005) 'On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity,' Twentieth Century Music 2, 1, 7-36.

Chow, R. (1993) 'Listening Otherwise, Music Miniaturized: A Different Type of Question About Revolution,' in During, S. ed The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 382-402.

Cooper, B. (1990) Popular Music Perspectives. Chapel Hill: Bowling Green University Press. (Explores lyrical themes and includes chapters on trains, death, etc.)

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1986) Nomadology: The War Machine. Semiotext(e).

Deleuze, G. (1990) The Logic of Sense. Columbia: Columbia University Press.

Katz, M. (2004) Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Keightley, K. (1996) 'Turn It Down! She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic. Space, and High Fidelity, 1948–59,' Popular Music 15, 2, 149–77.

Keightley, K. (2007) Long Play: Adult-Oriented Popular Music and the Temporal Logics of the Post-War Sound Recording Industry in the USA,' Media, Culture & Society 26, 3, 375-391.
Lebefvre, H. (2004) Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London: Continuum.

Murray, C. and Sixsmith, J. (1999) 'The Corporeal Body in Virtual Reality,' Ethos 27, 3, 315-343.

Nardi, C. (2004) 'Zen in the Art of Sound Engineering,' Playing by Eye, University of Berlin - Humboldt, PhD thesis.

Sterne, J. (2003) The Audible Past. Durham: Duke.

Straw, W. (2009) 'The Music CD and Its Ends,' Design and Culture 1, 1, 79-91.

RACE AND RELATED
La Chapelle, P. (2007) Proud to be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music and Migration to Southern California. Berkeley: University of California.

Mazor, B. (2009) Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America's Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ramesy, G. (2003) Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-hop. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schloss, J. (2009) Foundation: B-boys, B-girls and Hip-hop Culture in New York. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

OTHER
Brackett, D. (2000) Interpreting Popular Music. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Everett, W. (2009) The Foundations of Rock. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Garrett, C. (2008) Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hayward, P. ed (2009) Terror Tracks: Music, Sound and Horror Cinema. London: Equinox.

Moore, A. ed (2003) Analysing Popular Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Partridge, C. and Christianson, E. eds (2009) The Lure of the Dark Side: Satan and Western Demonology in Popular Culture. London: Equinox.

Thompson, G. (2008) Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Waksman, S. (2009) This Ain't No Summer of Love: Conflic and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wald, E. (2009) How the Beatles Destroyed Rock'n'Roll. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Walter Benjamin's 'Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century' (1939)

2009-07-11T02:38:00.000-07:00

I've just been reading Benjamin's classic essay and wish to summarize and comment on it here as a piece of critical historical research. The Paris essay is a summary of a vast collection of quotes called 'The Arcades Project' which itself a blueprint for a different history of Paris. In this history Benjamin ignores the grand narratives and collects the detritus and refuse of the past instead, piecing it together to let it tell a story that subverts the recieved version. If the recieved story talks of great men, grand inventions and teleologiocal progress, Benjamin wants to talk about it as an apology for capitalist society. He does this by creating a different history that corrodes capitalism's centre piece: the exchange value of the commodity form. The Frankfurt scholar starts off with a quote from Maxime Du Camp: "History is like Janus; it has two faces. Whether it looks at the past or the present, it sees the same things." This sets up a resonance between the past and present that Benjamin will further exploit. I will now summarize Benjamin's work (in bold) with commentary.

The grand version of history forgets the effort that society makes to create its new inventions and forms of behaviour within a universe of illusory distraction. We can see this illusion by looking at its ideological work and separate details. Here the flaneur (wandering consumer) abandons himself to the illusory distractions of the marketplace. City dwellers need to stamp their individuality on their rooms. Commodity-producing society surrounded itself with pomp and glamour, but the Paris Commune showed it was nevertheless vulnerable. This is because newness cannot really save society so long as its inhabitants are still distracted.

The Paris arcades were built 1822-1837 by the textile trade as forerunners of the department stores. They sold luxury items and represented art put in service of commerce in microcosms of the city where construction was like the subconscious (a blueprint of what was to come). Their frames were developed of iron girders, themselves facilitated by the prefabrication technology used for rails. The utopian philosopher Fourier wanted society and its individuals to operate smoothly like a machine (not guided by moraility or virtue). His ideas were crystallized in the new shops and the apartments inhabited by flaneurs.

Preceeded by exhibitions of industry, world exhibitions were entertaining and educative place of pilgrimage for commodity fetishism. They taught the workers to believe in exchange value by the display of luxury goods from a world marketplace. Fashion was the ritual by which commodity fetishism demanded to be worshipped, as it made unnatural material sexy. With the emergence of the individual person (as opposed to group or class member), places of dwelling became important as private spaces. In a city lacking privacy it was here that people could sustain some illusion of it. In charge of this space, each individual collected and used art to represent their ideal universe, assembled from traces of far off places and distant memories. Their interiors became their cockpits. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century there is nowhere left to hide, so people started personalizing their offices instead.

The poet Charles Baudelaire used allegory to talk about his alienation on the streets of Paris. He was a flaneur - an intellectual grappling with the marketplace - a bohemian. Yet he couldn't rebel as he was too asocial to be anything more than an individual; in cities, individuals were now just representatives of their types. Allegory is like exchange value in its ability to compare everything, so Baudelaire added novelty to his work, but by now that too was a strategy of the commodity form.

Meanwhile Baron Haussman's despotic urban planning no longer made poor Parisians feel at home. Financial speculation drove them into the suburbs and Haussman demolished part of the city to prevent civil unrest. He was unsuccessful. As the Commune raised the barricades it broke an illusion by reminding workers that they had yet to succeed in collaboration with their masters. Finally, in 'Eternity via the Stars' the bohemian Auguste Blanqui traced out a version of society which was to be its next illusion - Paris as hell! - because "progress" really meant novelty parading as antiquity in diguise. Novelty and distraction are the hallmark of modernity, but for Blanqui they could be seen as attributes of everything sentenced to damnation.

... Benjamin's work is exemplary in some ways for the way it combines criticism with explanation and moves so smoothly between real place and events, ideas and sociological phenomena. The Frankfurt scholar goes after some big fish here (the ideological function of history, premised of the commodity form), but does so in a way that keeps things literary, fresh and interesting. There are a lot of lessons in that.

Great bifurcations: Michael Jackson's posthumous roles and remainders

2009-07-10T03:08:00.000-07:00

Already a motion in the US Senate to declare Michael Jackson “an American legend and musical icon (and) a world humanitarian” has been blocked by Republican Peter King who said on Fox News and CNN that Jackson was an alleged pervert, child molester and paedophile. Beyond its interesting racial and party political context (Texan Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee represented Congress and the U.S. Black Caucus at the Jackson memorial on Tuesday) this moment of cultural politics says something important about memory and celebrity in a wider sense. Jackson is not the first hero in popular music to be disputed: on a smaller scale memorials for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were both challenged by their home towns. How then should we see this debate?

Writing about Elvis in 1990, Lynn Spigel opposed official and popular memory, arguing that official memory seeks to close down the meaning of a life, but popular memory (such as tabloid gossip) continually opens it up, creating a welter of stories in which elements of the star's life become founding myths. Any moments of ambiguity about the star facilitate an endless stream of speculation and gossip. Here one example would be the genetic origin of Michael Jackson's children: Were they really his? Was Debbie Rowe their biological mother or was she impregnated invitro? Who was the real father - his skin doctor? etc. Equally, Jackson's sexuality and activities with children have always been in doubt.

It is important to realize that official and unofficial memory are both the vehicles for and results of different commodity markets. State institutions see Michael as a hegemonic figure as much as the tabloids that print revelations about him.

So was Michael a pervert or great entertainer? Maybe he was both. However, popular memory seems to have a hard time accepting the duality. Instead we are beginning to see a bifurcation: the emergence of two Michaels, each with its own shadow (or, in Lacanian terms, remainder). A good example of this was ITV's recent decision to rebroadcast Martin Bashir's extended interview documentary Living with Michael Jackson next week without the segment in which the singer argues for the appropriateness of 'non-sexually' sharing your bed with under-age boys. Is the channel appropriately celebrating a music hero or capitulating in the face of mass emotion supports that seeks to whitewash a celebrity criminal?

The media has such dilemmas because we increasingly unable as a society to separate cultural workers out from the contents of their work. While peers in the music industry can understand that, say, a songwriter can invent dramatic material which is totally unrelated to their private lives, audiences raised on the romantic myth of the artist have a tendency look for links between the two things. As the private lives of stars become commodities (commodities that they too manipulate), audiences are left to investigate a new distinction: the difference between the image and "the real man" (another phantom). Industry figures like Stevie Wonder and Quincey Jones could therefore happily separate the entertainer from the person, but the rest of the world could not.

This, then, is the irony: when a star dies their private life reaches rock bottom (at least in how we interpret it), yet their career reaches its peak. The renewed exposure of both their life-as-tragedy and their monumental work opens the floodgates for all manner of ambiguous readings, but it gradually extends the process of bifurcation too, as the "both / and" Michael - entertainer and potential child abuser - restlessly disappears under a growing need to simplify his legend. One wonders how the Neverland tour guides will cope!

On a ghoulish note, one way that cultural critics decided to close down the "both / and" reading of Michael was to see him as a ghost before he died, a reading which also fits in with the metaphysics of tabloid culture. On one hand Paul Morley said on BBC2's Newsnight Review that Jackson was already gone: his finest musical work behind him and over by the 1990s, as the tabloid freaky took over to recycle remnants of the giant that once existed. Equally, Paul Burger of Sony said in Music Week that they had already lost Michael ten years ago. In parallel, press coverage of Jackson's last days as paint him as a "frail" old man. Taking it to extremes, The National Enquirer this week discussed "The Shocking State of Michael's Body", anatomically breaking it into elements marking both his bodily abnormality (skeletal bodyweight, etc) and artificiality: wig, fake nose, pills in his stomach, surgical scars.

Pale as a corpse, in his last days Jackson was more than ever a ghost, fading from his musical achievements and public interactions, continually ghost-busted by the paparazzi. Despite the public's interest in his live musical comeback, in tabloid culture it was still as if, by popular demand, the man in the mirror had swapped places with his monstrous role in Thriller, and now he was post-natural and - in Deleuzian terms - a body (of work) without organs.

Check this blog on the cultural myth of Michael Jackson.

Mark's posts on Celebrity

2009-07-10T03:06:00.000-07:00

Great bifuractions: Michael Jackson's posthumous roles and remainders

The "Mention Elvis" rule

Ronnie James Dio - laid to rest (a heavy metal funeral)

Fiske Matters Conference (11th - 12th June 2010, with audios)

Faking it (some useful questions to ask about imposters)

I Have Admired You for Many Years (Star-fan encounters and the performance of identity)

All Watched Over By Machines (Adam Curtiz' BBC2: our emotions as commodities online)

Making Things Whole Again - Take That Reunion Events (Anja Lobert and Tim Wise's conference and exhibition on the living culture of 1990s Take That fandom)

A Michael Jackson bibliography

2009-07-09T06:11:00.000-07:00

Anthony Neale, M. (2009) ‘Conjuring Michael,’ Blog post - available online: http://newblackman.blogspot.com/ (retrieved 6/7/09)

Awkward, M. (1995) ‘“A Slave to the Rhythm”: Essential(ist) Transmutations; Or, the Curious Case of Michael Jackson,’ in Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender and the Politics of Positionality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 175-192.

Baudrillard, J. (1993) The Transparency of Evil. London: Verso.

Brackett, D. (2002) ‘(In Search of) Musical Meanings: Genres, Categories and Crossover,’ in Hesmondhalgh, D. and Negus, K. eds Popular Music Studies. London: Arnold, pp. 65-84.

Dyson, M. (1993) ‘Michael Jackson’s Postmodern Spirituality,’ Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 35-63.

Epstein, D. and Steinberg, D. (2007) ‘The Face of Ruin: Evidentiary Spectacle and the Trial of Michael Jackson,’ Social Semiotics 17, 4, 441-458.

Erni, J. (1998) ‘Queer Figurations in the Media: Critical Reflections on the Michael Jackson Sex Scandal,’ Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15, 2, 158-180.

Frith, S. (2002) Performing Rites. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fuchs, C. (1995) ‘Michael Jackson’s Penis,’ in Brett, P. et al Cruising the Performative: Interventions into Representing of Ethnicity, Nationality and Sexuality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 13-33.

Gilroy, P. (1996) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and the Double Consciousness. London: Verso.

Gray, H. (2006) ‘Michael Jackson, Television, and Post-Op Distasters,’ Television & New Media 7, 1, 41-50.

Haraway, D. (2004) The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge.

Hills, M. (2007) ‘Michael Jackson Fans on Trial? “Documenting” Emotivism and Fandom in Wacko About Jacko,’ Social Semiotics 17, 4, 459-477.

Johnson, V. (1993) ‘The Politics of Morphing: Michael Jackson as Scientific Border Text,’ Velvet Light Trap 32, 58-65.

King, J. (1999) ‘Form and Function: Superstardom and Aesthetics in the Music Videos of Michael and Janet Jackson,’ Velvet Light Trap 44, 80-96.

Kitzinger, J. and Moorti, S. (2007) ‘Introduction to “Framing Michael Jackson: Celebrity on Trial”,’ Social Semiotics 17, 4, 413-415.

Martin, G. (1995) ‘Slayed in Fame,’ in Kureishi, H. and Savage, J. eds The Faber Book of Pop. London: Faber and Faber, 775-785.

Mercer, K. (1993) ‘Monster Metaphors: Notes on Michael Jackson’s Thriller,’ in Frith, S. et al eds Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 93-108.

Silberman, S. (2007) ‘Presenting Michael JacksonTM,’ Social Semiotics 17, 4, 417-440.

Tate, G. (1992) ‘I’m White! What’s Wrong with Michael Jackson?’ in Flyboy in the Buttermilk. New York: Simon and Schuster, 95-99.

Wallace, M. (1990) ‘Michael Jackson, Black Modernisms, and “the Ecstacy of Communication,”’ in Invisibility Blues. New York: Verso, pp.77-90.

Whiteley, S. (2005) Too Much, Too Young: Popular Music, Age and Gender. London: Routledge, 36-44.

Williams, P. (2009) ‘Viewpoint: Michael Jackson – Nothing Left to Prove,’ Music Week 4th July, p.2-3.

Williams, P. (2009) ‘Michael Jackson 1958-2009,’ Music Week 4th July, p.1.

Willis, S. (1990) ‘I Want the Black One: Is There a Place for Afro-American culture in commodity Culture?,’ New Formations 10, 77-97.

Yuan, D. (1996) ‘The Celebrity Freak: Michael Jackson’s Grotesque Glory’ in Thomson, R. ed Freakery. New York: NYU Press, pp. 368-400.

Zuberi, N. (2002) ‘India Song: Popular Music Genres Since Economic Liberalization,’ in Hesmondhalgh, D. and Negus, K. eds Popular Music Studies. London: Arnold, pp. 238-250.

Special bibliographies

2009-07-09T06:05:00.000-07:00

GENERAL REFERENCE
Some 2009 pop research books

Global Culture (link to a USC course with a valuable reading list)

IASPM book reviews

Michael Jackson

CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS / ABSTRACTS
IASPM-US & Canada 2006

IASPM-US & Canada 2007

World Music Days (Hong Kong, 2007: canons, covers, glitch)

Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Oslo, 2007)

IASPM International Conference 2009 (fractions of most topics)

Kraftwerk - men and machines

2009-07-09T03:44:00.000-07:00

On Thursday 2nd July my colleague David Pattie, my friend Jon and I descended on the Manchester Velodrome to see a set by the electro-pop legends, Kraftwerk. With only Ralf Hutter left from the original line-up, they still managed to put on an amazing "performance" - I put the term in speechmarks because with Kraftwerk, you just see four men standing at lecturns clicking away on their laptops. They look like they might be aboard the Starship Enterprize as they call up samples and create their pioneering brand of electronic dance music.

Kraftwerk have always faced a dilemma when playing "live": how can such calculated, pre-programmed music also seem spontaneous? They managed to keep the show successfully afloat with several integral gimmicks, the first being the British Olympic team who zipped round the track for 'Tour de France' and added a physicality to the portrayal of gender. Then they wheeled out the dummies (dummies were more performative than they were!). Finally the audience donned 3D glasses for a grand finale.

The group wore dull or "networked" suits for the whole show and - along with some computer animation behind them - audience members were asked in effect to focus squarely on their heads. This, after all, is head-led music. I therefore found myself wondering what I was seeing. As Ralf Hutter gestured to speak out his vocals, was it worth getting a closer look? It was as if the smallest traces of their bodily performance - the tap of a foot here, the shifting of an elbow there - revealed that they were feeling and thus humanly making them music. Their slightly moving bodies gave away clues that they were feeling their form of music into being, and that notion humanized the event. Meanwhile it was clear that artists like Daft Punk and Squarepusher have now taken the thrillride into digital futurism much further than the German four piece, and yet nobody cared. As Ralf Hutter anonymously shuffled back on the shuttle to Dusseldorf, perhaps he was feeling fine with the idea that Kraftwerk are now an object of retro-tech nostalgia.

Fandom and Celebrity - recent bibliographic finds

2009-07-09T03:02:00.000-07:00

Some recent sources found when looking for fan-related scholarship:

Beebe, R. (2002) 'Mourning Becomes...? Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, and the "Waning of Affect",' in Beebe, R. et al eds Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Cultures. London: Duke University Press, 311-334.

Franco, J. (2006) 'Langsters Online: kd lang and the Creation of Internet Fan Communities,' in Holmes, S. and Redmond, S. eds Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture. London: Routledge, 269-284.

Hamilton, M. (2007) 'Searching for the Blues: James McKune, Collectors and a Different Crossroads,' in Weisbard, E. ed Listen Again: A Momentary History of Popular Music. London: Duke University Press, 26-49.

Hesmondhalgh, D. (2007) 'Audiences and Everyday Aesthetics: Talking About Good and Bad Music', European Journal of Cultural Studies 10(4): 507-27.

Hills, M. (2007) 'Fans on Trial? "Documenting" Emotivism and Fandom in Wacko About Jacko,' Social Semiotics 17, 4, 459-477.

McCann, G. (1995) 'Biographical Boundaries: Sociology and Marilyn Monroe,' in Featherstone, M. et al eds The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory. London: Sage, pp. 325-338.

Mihelich, J. and Papineau, J. (2005) 'Parrotheads in Margaritaville: Fan Practice, Oppositional culture, and Embedded Cultural Resistance in Buffett Fandom,' Journal of Popular Music Studies 17, 2, 175-202.

Stevenson, N. (2009) 'Talking to Bowie Fans: Masculinity, Ambivalence and Cultural Citizenship,' Euopean Journal of Cultural Studies 12, 1, 79-98.

Zanes, R. (2002) 'A Fan's Notes: Identification, Desire and the Haunted Sound Barrier,' in Beebe, R. et al eds Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Cultures. London: Duke University Press, 291-310.

Mark's current research projects...

2009-07-09T01:33:00.000-07:00

For spring 2012 I am focusing on several projects:

a) A book on Elvis Presley for the Equinox series, Icons of Popular Music.

b) A textbook on media fandom for Continuum.

c) An article on Hitchcock's The Birds for the Journal of Celebrity Culture.

d) A conference paper on the reception of Ben Myer's book Richard for the upcoming Cultural Studies at the Crossroads conference this July in Paris.

e) Guest editing a special issue of Popular Music and Society on fandom.

Follow my research on Twitter

Mark's posts on Race

2009-06-28T16:07:00.000-07:00

Judge Dread (The 1970s cockney reggae answer to Eminem)

Michael Jackson (1958-2009) (The myth of pop's greatest legend)

Michael Jackson's swansong: 'This is It' (2009)

'Gangsta Rap', Louis Theroux's Weird Weekend, BBC2 (New Orleans rap and the glamorization of violence)

Literacy in the hood (on Fifty Cent's new self-help book 'The 50th Law')

Three kings for Christmas 2009 (Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and Orson Welles)

Jews, Race and Popular Music (review of Jon Stratton's 2009 book)

Michael Jackson (1958-2009)

2009-06-28T10:44:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I awoke early to hear the shock news that Michael Jackson had died of a heart attack at the age of 50. The Sun's headline that day - "JACKO DEAD" - caught the ambiguities of moment. Jackson had attained royalty status as the 'King of Pop' yet he was also 'Wacko Jacko', the most eccentric celebrity and global icon of our time. Paul Morley squared this circle on BBC 2's Newsnight Review by explaining that Jackson had culturally died, in effect, in the early 1990s, and his celebrity image - "remnants" as Morley put it - had been recycling in the media ever since.

Certainly, the late 1980s and early 1990s were a turning point in Michael Jackson's long and fruitful career, or perhaps they were rather a point of inflection, like the middle of David Lynch's strange narrative in 'Lost Highway': a time when a charmed prince turned into a disillusioned king. The reason was that Michael Jackson was essentially in between and could never be anywhere else. He was adolescent, between ages -boyhood, manhood and fatherhood never sat easy with him - but equally he was between races, genders and musical styles. Jackson was the man in the middle: empire builder of a hegemonic brand that fused song, dance and show business glamour.

By jazzing up exhuberant black disco-pop and blacking up easy listening ballards, there was a sense in which Jackson's heyday post-Motown albums set the gold standard for both urban music and R'n'B slowjams. Yet as his image and stage show became more bombastic they seemed to be less and less meaningful, to the point where his ego sent a giant statue of himself floating down the Thames. By that time, his sales had gone down and coverage of his scandals gone up, leaving Jacko to disappear and focus on his process of personal reinvention: as an adolescent child-man, a young black woman (like Diana Ross or Beyonce) straightening his hair, singing like a girl and gradually getting whiter. Despite dancing opposite so many young models and frequently grabbing his twitching pelvis, somehow mature sensuality never seemed to enter his performance. He never really lasted with his wives and employed a surrogate, but those women gave him children that were half-white. In the Jackson family myth, it is his father that represented the hyper-masculine stereotype of blackness he sought to so obsessively to escape. When an increasingly white Jackson got his revenge, all his fights were choreographed. Upon his death, however, the black community reclaimed him and that was the mark of his abilities as a bridge-builder.What was that cultural centrality of Michael Jackson all about? In the last two decades, as his face changed and his skin lightened, his age seemed to settle at about 14 and his idealistic politics (at least expressed in music) remained equally universalist and utopian. Sometimes angry, sometimes happy, he seemed to oscillate around a kind of sexless, exhuberant universal centre point of identity. His personality was extremely introvert, but his performance style was extrordinarily extrovert. And in that Jackson was both the consumate performer and ultimate consumer, an American perfectionist believing that the world could be reshaped to his own desires by money - a masochist running from the pain of persecution he had himself created. Finally he disappeared into a kind of frail cyborg simulation of himself, with his children's faces shrouded in veils of gothic mystery. His last incarnation left 'Jacko' as a dandy wrecklessly bouncing about the planet, like a balloon propelled by the gas wheezing out of it: out of control, occasionally flickering into the public eye but representing nothing more than showbiz insanity. Then came the annoucement that he was to stage a huge series of fairwell concerts: a final chance to display his perfect stagecraft.

After the news came of Michael Jackson's sad demise it seemed obvious that his comeback tour would have put a huge strain on his frail psyche and aging body. What was perhaps more surprizing was the whole Elvisness of his death. There were the instantaneous outpourings of grief (now on Twitter) by friends, fans and celebrities, lurid news stories about Jackson's addiction to prescription medication, retrospective re-evaluations of Michael's contribution to popular music. A Times journalist hit the nail on the head by saying that nobody alive in the field of music had a bigger legend than Michael Jackson, but nobody had done more to get in the way of their own legend.

Now that the King of Pop has got out the way of his myth, I will take the opportunity to predict cultural cavalcade similar to that of Elvis:

Tacky newspaper insights into Jacksons private life and last days.
Bootlegs, box sets and other posthumous releases.
A few Jackson biopics.
An academic re-evaluation of Michael Jackson with PhDs, conferences, monographs, special journal editions and of course readers.
Michael Jackson's estate emerging as a financial player in protecting and licensing the Jackson brand and cleaning up the Jackson image.
Tribute concerts and live-after-death video screen spectaculars.
Insider revelations in the form of books and documentaries from friends and family egged on by entertainment journalists (Uri Geller is probably already ghostwriting his).
Coffee table Michael Jackson photo-albums.
A new generation of fans who will cite June 2009 as the starting point of their interest in Michael.
Neverland opening as a pilgrimage site.
A national day and or stamp in America featuring Michael Jackson.
Jacksonian retrospectives and re-evaluations of various sorts.
Spooky Jackson-a-like sightings.
The rise of Michael Jackson impersonation as a spectator sport.
A vast cultural afterlife (think "Dead Elvis" by Greil Marcus).
Anniversary events, fan holidays and conventions.
An ambiguous separation between the two Michael's: as 'Wacko Jacko' the potential paedophile and cultural joke (freighted with slights against emotional fandom and anti-Americanism), and as 'Michael' the gentle humanist and univeral musical legend.
Estranged pronouncements that his servile and misguided fanbase is forming a "religion".

The King of Pop's life has just ended, but his cultural career is only just beginning. He was weird, wired, unique, and the stage was his true home... I will finish, fittingly, with a recollection of reading Mixmag last year, on their 25th Anniversary edition, polling various DJs and musicans about what was their highlight in 25 years of dance music. Daft Punk said it was first seeing Michael Jackson first do his moonwalk at the Grammys in 1983. When I read that, I was unsure about whether the robotic duo were just joking. Seeing footage of the event again last night, I was sure they were not. Whoever Michael Jackson actually was - and we really don't know - he contributed such passionate vocal stylings, well crafted beats and choreographed gestures to the would of pop culture that the rest is bound to pale.

For more commentaries on MJ click here, here and here. Also see this bibliography.

"I don't deny history": on necessarily forging a passport to the past

2009-06-25T11:43:00.000-07:00

Opening his 1953 novel The Go-Between, Leslie Poles Hartley famously wrote, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Hartley's dictum evokes the historian as traveller. He or she takes on the privileged role of both explorer and translator. Sometimes reluctant, sometimes shrewd, this confused interloper relentlessly investigates with the aim of sketching a narrative map to explain the terrain of yester year. In the process they become a tourist of Otherness in a land where eccentric natives necessarily go mute.

Having been to a departmental research symposium today, I enjoyed it when my colleague Brian Machin presented a piece on his attempts to trace a family member who died in World War II. In his research Brian found several accounts that did not match and he began to consider the instability of memory as a source material for historic narratives.

As a researcher, Brian was stuck behind enemy lines without a solid map. We have often discussed the dilemmas of history and memory that he encounters and I have no intention of stealing his thunder here, but I want to discuss some things that struck me during Brian's paper. In particular, while the central narratives of history are freqently deconstructed for being "porous" and ideologically motivated, it seems to me that we sometimes forget an associated issue: that of the historian as a reflexive agent in the narrative they are creating.

Image: dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I recalled James Clifford's argument about anthropologists, that by subtly exporting Western language and concepts (for example, the bloodline notion of the "tribe") researchers have actually created the very phenomenon they are claiming to report. Transposed to the colonizing narrative of history, here the historian is not just editing the past, but empire-building from the present, making in an effort to annex the foreign country that they are actually creating through their maps. And I suppose that - since ideologies are slippery and hidden as "known unknowns" - that process happens in part unconsciously, as we project on to the past. The historian therefore plays God as their subject then becomes a zombie-like doppelganger, wandering the half-forgotten marshlands of narrative memory, looking for a closure that we can choose whether we want to give them. I suggested to Brian that, in a sense, he was responsible for closing that narrative that he had started to excavate / create / curate.

The episode reminded me of Jean Baudrillard's comeback when he was accused of eschewing the historic mode of explanation. With a whiff of irresponsibility he replied, "I don't deny history. It's an immense toy." If history is such a toy, why do we play with it the way we do? To call the narrated past an individual and collective projection is not to reduce it to mere psychology. Ideologies always become values and beliefs, which in turn give events personal meanings. These meanings are emotionally expressed as memories which in turn contribute by allowing survivors to select facts and interpretations that acts as founding moments in accepted historic narratives. Finally those narratives feed back to become a resource for personal and social identities once again. (Think, for example, of the role of national identity in understandings of the trauma of war.) To cut things short I would say that we tell stories about ourselves on the basis of faulty premises, basis because our own ideologies act as founding filters for our emotively remembered past.

I wondered, would my colleague Brian have written differently if he had no family connection to his subject? Although the dispassionate historian is a myth, the distanced historian can more easily become a punk. I am thinking of Michael Lesy's book Wisconsin Death Trip in that respect.

Lesy both closed his narrative of frontier America (around local insanity) and opened it up again (but juxtaposing a craftily selected range of historic and fictional sources). The result was entertaining - as Lesy trawled through various vandals, arsonists and tear-aways - but I always thought it was a bit irresponsible on its author's part. I mean, how would you like it if your family was selectively portrayed as a gaggle of frontier fruitcakes? Oddly, one answer came from an enthusiastic reviewer on Amazon.com who took Lesy's story as unproblematic reportage and explained that it had motivated him to examine his own family roots in Wisconsin. To me he seemed like naively mistaking a constructed parody for an authentic resource.

Relativists might say that, well, as audiences we all make up the meanings in our own heads. What this argument forgets is that historians give us the initial resources and tools that we deploy in our quest. While people do make their own meanings, they do so in contexts not entirely of open or of their own making, situations in which - whether for pleasure, closure, or ideological affirmation - readers frequently collude with narratorial leadership.

Historians, then, necessarily forge their passports to the past in the process of (re)making the terrains that they travel. Their debt is not to some mute original fiction, but ultimately to the ideologies, values, beliefs, feelings, and of course disciplines, that guide them as authors.

Mark's posts on History

2009-06-25T11:42:00.001-07:00

'I Don't Deny History' (Considers historians as ideological agents)

Walter Benjamin's 'Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century' (1939) (A good example of history as critical commentary)

Public Image Limited - Manchester Academy, 19th December 2009 (A rebel relives his history, again)

What are imagined memories? (How do fans use pop's past?)

Frank Sidebottom RIP (On the passing of one of Manchester's comedy legends)

Popular Music and British Television (Brief review of Ashgate's 2010 edited book)

In the Shadow of Your Rattan Cane (Chaplin's Modern Times as a critique of modernity)

Mark's posts on Gender

2009-06-24T20:13:00.000-07:00

Tears, Tiaras and Transsexuals (considers the performativity of male cross-dressing)

Kraftwerk (men and machines make music)

Florence + the Machine (dark and dreamy feminity at the Manchester Academy)

The New York Dolls (aging trash metal legends play Liverpool's O2 Academy)

Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll (Ian Dury biopic 2010)

Heaven 17: Inside Outsiders Playing to Win (30 years after 'Penthouse and Pavement')

Without Fathers: John Lennon and Jim Morrison (review of Lennon Naked and When You're Strange)

Metal on Metal: Notes on the Crash in Popular Culture (Cars, technology and masculinity)

Don Cherry: Canadian Patriot (Canada's premier hockey commentator)

In memory of Mick Karn (1958-2011) (Japan's bass player and his artful play with gender)

Marilyn: The Last Sessions (More 4 documentary on Marilyn Monroe's pyschoanalysis)

Tears, Tiaras and Transsexuals

2009-06-24T18:52:00.000-07:00

With its focus on the first transsexual beauty contest in Las Vegas, the documentary Tears, Tiaras and Transsexuals aired on Channel 4 last week (17th June) and it weighed in somewhere between a serious exploration of gender realignment and car crash docu-soap television. Though the musical soundtrack was nothing particularly special, I'm doing a post for it here because it had a lot to say about what Judith Butler might have termed the performativity of gender. It also made an interesting comparison to a documentary that the infamous Turner prize-winning artist Grayson Perry (pictured below) made on transvestitism.

In Perry's documentary, a focus group of British transvestites sat round explaining how they felt so straight-jacketed by masculinity that they could only express their feminine side by dressing like women (or in Perry's case young girls). Surprizingly, this positioned the British transvestites as hyper-masculine men short-changed by the limitations that came with the traditional polarity of their gender. They were, ironically, more manly than most.

In contrast, the documentary on the unconventional beauty queens made clear that some transsexuals, at least, are actually effeminate gay men (and post-ops). One of the touching aspects of the documentary was seeing their early family photos as boys and more hearing commentaries from their more conventional - and wonderfully understanding - relatives about their transformations. There was an interesting kind of ambiguity around the nature or nurture issue and whether their identities emerged on the genetic middle ground between genders, or was a kind of abberant learned behavior.

While the transsexual contestants' biographies and family backgrounds were examined in some detail, relatively little was said about their relationships, boyfriends or working lives. What clearly came across, however, were the dimensions of class and sexual orientation. Although one contestant worked at a make-up counter, it seemed that most were from working class backgrounds. Since there are transvestites and transsexuals from all classes, I wondered whether the Las Vegas show - with the lure of its prize money, career potential, and the particular way in which it bolstered their self-esteem - only selected working class contestants.

It was also clear that the contestants were part of a supportive homosexual culture. Not only was the glitzy Las Vegas competition organized and run by gay men, but the documentary showed that the contestants had grown up and met their partners in gay communities. This is significant, because the divas had adopted gender ideals that marked out them out in very narrow terms. Their idea of feminity wasn't about, say, having period pains or becoming mothers, but was instead structured entirely upon looking glamorous and voluntarily objectifying themselves. One was then left wondering which male gaze they were so enthusiastically courting. There were times when they created a riot of gender confusion, freaking out macho homeboys down on the Las Vegas strip. Yet when the various divas did their thing for the camera, they had a tendency to to throw voguing poses that caricatured femininity in a very stylized sense. The poses performatively marked the contestants out as part of gay culture. A final pont here was that the contestants sometimes referred to their female names as created identities, saying things like, "When I created Dana, she was a wild and adventurous person."

I was left considering how this set of transsexuals, at least, were fundamentally gay men who wanted to participate in a charade of feminity in order - ironically - to find their place in the gay community. Their backgrounds showed that many had tough times growing up: stealing their sister's clothes or mother's make-up, hiding their emerging identities, being taunted when they came out. Their acceptance in the gay community propelled them on their journeys to emulate and perform womanhood of a sort - a sort that was really a kind of gay hallucination about the place of womanhood in the (dominant) world of heterosexual desire.

While Perry's fellow transvestites were uncomfortably macho, the queens converging on Las Vegas were, then, playing it straight.

Other resources

2009-06-12T07:17:00.000-07:00

Birmingham Music Archive and Birmingham Music Heritage

Celebrity Culture (Andy Miah's 2005 Scottish conference)

Discogs (discographies)

eBay (memorabila auctions)

Experience Music Project

Home of Metal (archive)

IASPM 2005 (conference proceedings)

MediaEd (educational documentaries online)

MediaActive (special issue on celebrity)

Open Content Australia (also see OCR Research Review blog on 'political music')

Popsike (record price evaluation database)

Raving (DJ History ebook)

Society for Music Theory (they have two journals)

Spotify (music streaming application)

Upstairs at Graceland

Wolfgang's Vault (streamed concert bootlegs)

... please email me if this page requires updating.

News stories

2009-06-12T07:06:00.000-07:00

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Clubbing

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (clubbing documentary)

Music Industry

Google v PRS over Youtube (March 2009)

... please email me if this page requires updating.

Youtubes on punk

2009-06-12T06:53:00.000-07:00

The infamous Today interview of December 1976 needs no introduction:

Sex Pistols interview with Bill Grundy

Sex Pistols interview with Bill Grudy (with commentary by Steve Jones)

Sid Vicious casually imploding on US public access TV, with Nancy taking over:

Sid Vicious interview (part 1)

Sid Vicious inteview (part 2)

PIL were at the forefront of the post-punk movement, with Lydon still posturing in this American interview:

PIL on the Tom Synder Show (part 1)

PIL on the Tom Synder Show (part 2)

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Youtubes on music and race

2009-06-12T06:47:00.000-07:00

'Sharevari' on the Scene show (the missing link between Kraftwerk, disco and Detroit techno)

Vanilla Ice on the Arsenio Hall show

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Youtubes on live concerts

2009-06-12T06:35:00.000-07:00

In October 1992 singer Sinead O'Connor tore up a photo of the Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live to protest against child abuse in the Catholic Church. Not long after, she was booed at a Bob Dylan tribute concert in New York. The incident in proved that a vast audience could be critical on ideological grounds:

Sinead O'Connor heckled at Bob Dylan Anniversary tribute

Sinead O'Connor interview (about the incident)

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Youtubes on club culture

2009-06-12T06:25:00.000-07:00

Image: photostock / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Sit down, stand up (an unusual dance from DC10 club in Ibiza 2007)

The Wunderkind DJs (child stars)

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Youtubes on fandom

2009-06-12T06:05:00.001-07:00

In 2007 the Chris Crocker phenomenon and its immediate cultural aftermath was a particularly interesting play on fan stereotypes:

Chris Crocker on wikipedia (superfandom, gender)

Chris Crocker's 'Leave Britney Alone' rant (super-fandom, gender)

Chris Crocker's 'Leave Briney Alone' trance mix

Chris Crocker on Jimmy Kimmel show (super-fandom, gender)

General scholars homepages

2009-06-12T05:43:00.000-07:00

Chas Critcher (moral panics)

Jeremy Gilbert (cultural theory)

Christina Goulding (ethnography, consumerism, dance)

Lawrence Grossberg (cultural studies, hegemony

Matt Hills (fan cultures)

Mark Jankovitch (cult fandom, film)

Henry Jenkins (fandom)

Angela McRobbie (cultural studies, gender)

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Popular homepages and blogs

2009-06-12T05:30:00.000-07:00

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

HOMEPAGES

Dave Haslam

Nelson George

Spencer Leigh

Jon Savage

Writers for Rock's Back Pages.

BLOGS

The B-Side

Greybike (A pop and politics blog)

Guardian music blog

Online Fandom

New Music Strategies (online music distribution blog)

Simon Reynolds

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Blogs

2009-06-12T05:15:00.000-07:00

Image: Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Paul Carr (Zappa, rights)

Andrew Goodwin

Rupa Huq

Henry Jenkins

Mark Antony Neale

Geoff Stahl

Mark Sumera (music and violence bibliography)

Tim Wall

Also see...

Interactive Culture (Birmingham-based scholars looking at changing media technologies)

Interesting music stuff (Conferences, etc, created by University of London music librarian)

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Music scholars homepages

2009-06-12T04:29:00.001-07:00

Apologies in advance for anyone who I have missed - email me for inclusion:

Barbara Bradby

Rob Bowman

David Brackett

Shelley Brunt

Michael Bull

Robert Burns

Daniel Cavicchi

Martin Cloonan

Nicola Dibben

Mark Duffett

Jan Fairley

Murray Forman

Simon Frith

Andrew Goodwin

Line Grenier

Dai Griffiths

Jill Halstead

Stan Hawkins

Paul Hodkinson

Shane Homan

Rupa Huq

Keith Kahn-Harris

Dave Hesmondhalgh

Bruce Johnson (and his earlier writing)

Henry Johnson

Steve Jones

Sven-Erik Klinkmann

Marion Leonard

Lee Marshall

Susan McLary

Kevin McNeilly

Richard Middleton

Allan Moore

John Mundy

Keith Negus

David Pattie

Motti Regev

Hillegonda Rietveld (and her Myspace)

David Sanjek

Jacqueline Springer

Graham St John

Matt Stahl

Rob Strachan

Will Straw

John Street

Phil Tagg

Jason Toynbee

Fred Vermorel

Steve Waksman

Elijah Wald

Tim Wall

Robert Walser

Deena Weinsteen

Tony Whyton

... Please email me if I've missed you out, or this page needs updating.