{"title":"Patches of Survival in the Anthropocene: Melancholy and Ecstasy within Go_A’s 2021 Eurovision Song Contest Performance of “SHUM” (ШУМ)","authors":"M. Reyes, Kristin McGee","doi":"10.1080/03007766.2023.2188363","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2023.2188363","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the Ukrainian electro-folk band Go_A and their multimedial performances of “SHUM” created for the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest. We highlight how Go_A’s performances feature an aesthetics of ecstasy and melancholia despite ongoing damage within Anthropogenic late capitalism. We compare two versions of the song, exposing critical contexts for the group’s local, transmedial, and international reception. Informed by musicological, eco-critical, post-humanist, historical, and feminist frameworks, our analyses meander through exploratory patches employing concepts such as borderland epistemologies, interspecies connectivity, the gaze, and hyperobjectivity. These juxtapositions reveal how, rather than the sensorial experience of radioactivity as hyperobject, “SHUM” promotes ecologically attuned survival strategies such as the re-integration of “wild” singing styles and ecstatic rituals. “Survival” is understood hereby as a form of resistance that evades the pitfalls of neoliberal resilience. Ultimately, through a participatory aesthetics, Go_A’s multimedial performance of “SHUM” invites audiences to imagine a regenerative ecology of survival in the damaged post-apocalypse.","PeriodicalId":46155,"journal":{"name":"POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY","volume":"46 1","pages":"191 - 212"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48492439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"One More Turn after the Algorithmic Turn? Spotify’s Colonization of the Online Audio Space","authors":"Håvard Kiberg, H. Spilker","doi":"10.1080/03007766.2023.2184160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2023.2184160","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the last decade, development of algorithmic recommendation systems has constituted the main competitive factor between music streaming services. In this article, we identify how a new turn, labelled ‘the auxiliary services phase’, is rising to prominence. We analyze Spotify’s move from being a mere music distributor, to becoming a general provider of audiovisual content – involving investments in podcasts, vodcasts, audiobooks, etc. – where expanded service offerings and exclusive content development constitute increasingly important platform strategies. Although this turn empowers innovation, it is worrisome from a music industry perspective as it challenges power balances between music industry and platform actors.","PeriodicalId":46155,"journal":{"name":"POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY","volume":"46 1","pages":"151 - 171"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49651591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"American Punk and the Rhetoric of “Political Correctness”","authors":"Michael S. Begnal","doi":"10.1080/03007766.2023.2184600","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2023.2184600","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the Trump era, conservative and alt-right commentators have framed punk rock subculture as a right-wing phenomenon, emphasizing punk’s individualism and “politically incorrect” rebellion as its defining characteristics. Taking a cultural studies approach, this article examines the rhetoric of so-called “political correctness” in contemporary American discourses surrounding the intersection of punk and politics. Its primary argument is that asserting an anti-PC stance disguises an underlying conservative agenda or reinscribes dominant narratives and that punk’s lack of a stable or inherent meaning (the “floating” nature of its signification, as Dick Hebdige described it) leaves it open to such rhetorical uses.","PeriodicalId":46155,"journal":{"name":"POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY","volume":"46 1","pages":"172 - 190"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42498338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Town’s Dead”: Contemporary Irish Popular Music and Dublin City","authors":"Orlaith Darling","doi":"10.1080/03007766.2023.2188629","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2023.2188629","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The increasing “common sense” hegemony of neoliberalism in the west and to the emergence of the internet as a dominant cultural influence have been linked to a “cultural slowdown.” For Mark Fisher and others, contemporary popular culture has lost track of the unfolding conditions of contemporary capitalism and the ability to produce anything new. Instead, it recycles old tropes and forms and is stuck in nostalgia for unlived eras. This article weighs this contention against the surge of contemporary popular music coming from Dublin, Ireland, focusing on the work of Fontaines DC, Kojaque, Pillow Queens, and For Those I Love.","PeriodicalId":46155,"journal":{"name":"POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY","volume":"46 1","pages":"225 - 241"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44469853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Searching for “Australia’s Woodstock”: The Forgotten Australian Rock Festivals of 1970 – 1975","authors":"C. Strong, A. Bennett, B. Green, Ian Rogers","doi":"10.1080/03007766.2023.2184595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2023.2184595","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Between 1970 and 1975, at least 18 rock festivals took place in Australia, often near regional towns. These have gone largely undocumented. By focusing on these “forgotten” festivals, this article contributes to our understanding of the festival’s role in Australian music culture, mapping the Australian context over the international rock music trends of the time. These festivals highlight the contribution of regional and rural settings to the development of contemporary Australian popular music. The use of the mythology of Woodstock in discourses around the festivals demonstrates conflicts within the youth countercultures of the time, and moral panics associated with them.","PeriodicalId":46155,"journal":{"name":"POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY","volume":"46 1","pages":"134 - 150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43748791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Singing a New Technology of Car Riding: Jitney-Bus Songs, 1915-1917","authors":"C. M. Balensuela","doi":"10.1080/03007766.2023.2182963","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2023.2182963","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Using personal cars for private taxi services gave rise to the jitney bus a century before Uber and Lyft. Songs with titles such as “Take Me Out in a Jitney Bus (and Pose as a Millionaire)” (Ruddy and Garrahan) provide a body of sheet music on a cultural issue of the early twentieth century that has striking similarities to issues in the early twenty-first century. In this way, they provide insights into how ideas, tropes, and memes are circulated in both eras and demonstrate a parallel communicative function between early sheet music and today’s social media.","PeriodicalId":46155,"journal":{"name":"POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY","volume":"46 1","pages":"117 - 133"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44959599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres","authors":"D. Biron","doi":"10.1080/03007766.2023.2178135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2023.2178135","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46155,"journal":{"name":"POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY","volume":"46 1","pages":"324 - 327"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46278259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Music Empowers: Listening to Modern Rap and Metal","authors":"S. Barone","doi":"10.1080/03007766.2023.2169875","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2023.2169875","url":null,"abstract":"telos of jazz, or the stages of social construction a young musician must pass to grow into what Dodds calls “a finished musician” (107). In Chapter 7, “Stylizing the Self: The Mechanic and the Domestic,” Espada-Brignoni discusses the main themes and metaphors that guide the autobiographers. Interestingly, he notes the autobiographers’ ambivalence toward the developing technologies. On the one hand, technology serves them as an effective metaphor (band as “a well-oiled machine” [121]) while, on the other hand, it threatens their livelihood and craft. They fear that some fans might prefer to stay at home with the recordings while others, who attend the performance, might prefer to hear the recording reproduced without the improvisation intrinsic to jazz. The autobiographers often discuss the band as family and tell stories of older musicians protecting the younger members from the hazards of the scene while also disciplining them as they would their children. More significantly, EspadaBrignoni situates the band-family in the context of the larger Black community with its “complex collectivistic notions and patterns of behavior” (126). Espada-Brignoni explores many other issues as well: the advantages and disadvantages of reading music and formal training, the danger of over-rehearsing, the quest of musicians to stylize or brand themselves into an authentic but marketable commodity, the conflict between the group and the individual, the modes and sometimes tyranny of micro-governability, the tension between early jazz and be-bop, and more. In addition, Espada-Brignoni, via Foucault, provides an approach for examining not only other musician autobiographies but also other music genres and their constructions and implementations of “authenticity.” In short, The Performance of Authenticity is a fascinating and perceptive study that makes a significant contribution to the study of pop music and culture that reaches beyond early jazz.","PeriodicalId":46155,"journal":{"name":"POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY","volume":"46 1","pages":"218 - 220"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44967620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Performance of Authenticity: The Making of Jazz and the Self in Autobiography","authors":"Thomas M. Kitts","doi":"10.1080/03007766.2023.2169876","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2023.2169876","url":null,"abstract":"out the book this concept, deriving from postcolonial theory, recurs). The fourth chapter is an inquiry into the abiding polarization between the aesthetic principles, language, and behavioral system characterizing the two adversarial branches of local jazz. Through the prism of Bourdieusian field theory with its emphasis on intra-field struggles for positions, competing hierarchies, and symbolic violence, the overall account of the jazz scene in which authenticity is at stake is rather disheartening. Despite citing selfcritical voices in both camps, Havas suggests that the ethnicized conflict by and large prevents musicians from expressing mutual respect or engaging in musical collaborations and exchanges across generic boundaries. It is interesting, however, that no reference is made to how the domestic jazz culture’s ethnic other, the Jewish minority, has been participating in this “black-and-white” dynamic after the resuscitation of jazz in the 1960s. The last and fifth chapter, titled “Othering Whiteness: Permanence and Change in Romani Musicians’ Jazz Habitus,” is dedicated to the musical socialization of Roma jazzists, the educational and symbolic role of family, kinship, and tradition whereby not only careers but also cultural meanings and identities are formed. Havas points out that, as with African American musicians, Roma jazzists’ socialization is inherently musical, and their aesthetic judgments are inherently social. The homology between jazz’s racial origins and Roma’s crucial status in modern Hungarian jazz is explored in great depth, detail, and nuance. Havas’s monograph is of great importance for scholars in cultural sociology, musicology, and jazz studies for his synthesis of diverse theoretical perspectives that help illuminate an expansive historical and ethnographic material. We must moreover welcome his erudition and analytic skills brought to bear on an internationally barely known jazz diaspora in a small semi-peripheral country like Hungary. However, his neglect to address the universally serious issues of gender in jazz and include such acclaimed women artists as Nikoletta Szőke, the late Juli Fábián, or Orsi Urbán – all of them vocalists – is unfortunate. Nonetheless, Havas’s love of Hungarian jazz, its innovators and virtuosos (György Szabados, Mihály Dresch, Gyula Babos, Béla Szakcsi Lakatos, Kálmán Oláh, Ferenc Snétberger, to name a few), lesser-known talents, and promising new hybrids with world music shines through the text. To spark international interest in this scene and this history is an additional benefit of his book.","PeriodicalId":46155,"journal":{"name":"POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY","volume":"46 1","pages":"216 - 218"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47969799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Music-making Beyond the Pub: The Importance of Community Music and DIY Enterprise in Maintaining Regional Music Scenes (Gippsland Case Study)","authors":"Cristian Stromblad, Andrea B. Baker","doi":"10.1080/03007766.2022.2161240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2022.2161240","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Regional music scenes in Australia face unique challenges tied to distance, deflated economies and youth flight to urban areas. Drawn from seven interviews with music workers from Gippsland during 2020, the article examines these challenges and the cultural practices that glue musicians to this south-eastern region of Victoria. Findings highlight that Gippsland’s music scene is sustained at the intersection of two cultural practices: community music enterprise and a do-it-yourself scene centered around the live pub circuit. In addition, locals have banded together to keep the scene alive through the online television program Live at Spectrum and performances at house parties.","PeriodicalId":46155,"journal":{"name":"POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY","volume":"46 1","pages":"242 - 264"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48968890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}