Showing papers in "Popular Music in 2000"

‘Represent’: race, space and place in rap music

Abstract: Say somethin' positive, well positive ain't where I liveI live around the corner from West HellTwo blocks from South Shit and once in a jail cellThe sun never shined on my side of the street, see?(Naughty By Nature, ‘Ghetto Bastard (Everything's Gonna Be Alright)’, 1991, Isba/Tommy Boy Records)If you're from Compton you know it's the 'hood where it's good(Compton's Most Wanted, ‘Raised in Compton’, 1991, Epic/Sony)IntroductionHip hop's capacity to circumvent the constraints and limiting social conditions of young Afro-American and Latino youths has been examined and celebrated by cultural critics and scholars in various contexts since its inception in the mid-1970s. For instance, the 8 February 1999 issue of US magazine Time featured a cover photo of ex-Fugees and five-time Grammy award winner Lauryn Hill with the accompanying headline ‘Hip-Hop Nation: After 20 Years – how it's changed America’. Over the years, however, there has been little attention granted to the implications of hip hop's spatial logics. Time's coverage is relatively standard in perceiving the hip hop nation as a historical construct rather than a geo-cultural amalgamation of personages and practices that are spatially dispersed.

‘Roots’?: the relationship between the global and the local within the Extreme Metal scene

Abstract: Music’s ‘malleability’ (Taylor 1997) has always facilitated its export and import from one location to another. Indeed, such processes are central to the creation and dissemination of new musical forms. Yet in our contemporary globalised world, such processes occur ever more extensively and rapidly giving rise to new forms of appropriation and syncretism. Record companies from the developed world find new audiences in the developing world (Laing 1986). Musicians from the West appropriate non-Western music, sometimes collaboratively (Feld 1994; Taylor 1997). Non-Western musicians and musicians from subaltern groups within the West create new syncretic forms drawing on both Western and non-Western music (Mitchell 1996; Lipsitz 1994, Slobin 1993). The resulting ‘global ecumene’ produces considerable ‘cultural disorder’ (Featherstone 1990, p. 6) whose results cannot easily be summarised. Yet whilst there is no privileged standpoint from which to make an overall judgement on the results of the globalisation of music, it is important to attempt to find an analytical perspective that would enable us to relate particular cases to global processes. Certain global musics may produce so many knotty paradoxes that analysis may lose site of the general picture within the complexities of the particular. In this paper I want to examine one particular paradox, that of the career of the Brazilian Death Metal band Sepultura. I want to show how analysing their career through an examination of the ‘scene’ through which they travelled allows us to appreciate the unique way in which they responded to globalisation, without losing site of the global flows of capital that structured their career.

Music and the Internet

Abstract: The fact is, if you want to make a difference in music, you have to change the machine. (Christie 1998)In my book Rock Formation I borrowed from Walter Ong and Jacques Attali when I noted that, ‘The ability to record sound is power over sound.’ (Jones 1992, p. 51) I continue to believe that statement to be true. Arguments that I then made about the increasing role computers would play in the production of music have been borne out. They were not hard forecasts to make: one only had to imagine that the processing power of computer chips would continue to increase according to Moore's Law and then extrapolate the possibilities such increases would create for sound recording and reproduction. Even comments I made, vaguely tongue-in-cheek, expecting that we would have, in addition to the ability to record high-quality digital audio in the home, the ability to press CDs at home, and print colour inserts for CD jewel boxes, thus creating not only home studios but home pressing plants, have become a reality. However, with but a few years' hindsight, I want to append to these an argument that recording sound matters less and less, and distributing it matters more and more, or, in other words, the ability to record and transport sound is power over sound. Consequently, technology is an even more important element to which popular music scholars must attend.

Home on the page: a virtual place of music community

Abstract: In 1996 a small independent record company, Oh Boy Records, set up a ‘chat page’on its web site where fans of its major artist, John Prine, could exchange typedmessages in close to real time. The page became a place where fans could ‘virtually’meet to get information or exchange experiences and opinions relating to Prine.Through the chat page a fan community was established, in that the chat pagebecame a meeting place that could not exist within real-world boundaries. JohnPrine has had some recent commercial and critical success, but Prine fans are stilla minority in most geographic communities, and are, to some extent, isolated bythe lifestyle of their 35-plus age group. It could be said that the one and only placewhere Prine fans could regularly gather was online through the chat page providedby the record company. The Oh Boy Record’s homepage became a symbolicanchor – a recognition of shared experience and a sign of community. While musiccommunities are usually associated with ‘local’ places, ‘the notion of ‘‘communi-ties’’ or localities as bounded geographic entities increasingly has been seen as prob-lematic to the study of music in urban settings’ (Gay 1995, p. 123). Communitiesexist through dialogue; through an exchange of past social history and current socialinteraction. Developments in communication technology have contributed to a‘deterritorialization of space within a global cultural economy’ (Fenster 1995, p. 85),to a point where ‘local’ is no longer disconnected from ‘global’ and the identity ofa specific place is located both in ‘demarcated physical space’ and in ‘clusters ofinteraction’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, p. 8). In the absence of a communal physicalspace, the Oh Boy home page became the site of a ‘local’ Prine community.The ritual exchange of information online allows fans a feeling of communitybetween themselves and between them and the performer, facilitating a belief in acommonality, although they are dispersed geographically and disparate in needsand experiences. An electronic place in which to ‘gather’ enables a direct linkbetween fans, and even makes possible a direct connection between fans and per-formers. The link benefits not only the fans, but also the performer and the recordcompany, in that it provides a connection to a central focus of the performer andthe producer, the marketplace. However, an online community is subject to theinterpersonal dynamics of any face-to-face community, as well as the communicat-ive and social effects of possible anonymity.Early in 1998 a small group began to dominate the page with ‘off-topic’ chat,and someone began making abusive and offensive comments anonymously on thepage, resulting in a rapidly escalating exchange of vitriol, which included criticismof John Prine. Oh Boy responded by posting a disclaimer, briefly filtering theexchanges, and then closing the chat page.91

Lines of drift: festival participation and performing a sense of place

Abstract: It’s funny how the difference in each nation organised a different rhythm almost. The beat, the beat is different, it’s much faster here than in the States. Mainly in bush music it’s like that, if you call it bush music. You know this, this lagerphone? Well this lagerphone beat is usually much faster than you would hear in America, that’s the way we felt it when we first arrived. Now it’s fine, it fits, you know! But for some reason, it didn’t quite [fit], it was just a bit too fast for what I was used to from the States. (Glasco 1998) Frederique Glasco, a participant at the 1998 Top Half Folk Festival held in Mt Isa, Queensland, talks here about the unsettled experience she had upon hearing what she described as an ‘Australian rhythm’: it felt different, it was too fast, it did not ‘fit’ to her own sense of rhythm. Yet, her initial perception changed after living for a time in Australia and this new rhythmic pulse did feel appropriate to her in her new surroundings. Two questions arise from this: first, how does a musical coding of space help create a sense of place? Second, how does engagement with this aural symbol create an identity through connections to place? In this paper I am interested in examining this relationship between music and place by focusing on participation in the community music festival, specifically participation in the 1998 Top Half Folk Festival, which was held in northern Queensland. The phrase ‘community music festival’ suggests an occasion characterised both by its location and by the community involved. Festivals Australia, an Australian Federal Government cultural grant programme, defines it as ‘a regular celebration which is organised by members of the community and has clear and strong community support’ (Department of Communications, Information Technology and The Arts 1998, p. 3). The community music festival, then, can be seen as a means of promoting a community’s identity, or at least how that community would like others to see it. There is a sense of the local at various levels: through performances, the audience and how the festival is organised. Yet, although the community music festival can be seen as an articulation of local connections between identity and place, this is problematic. First, such festivals include non-local participation. The need to generate income in order to cover the expenses of such an event means that organisers invite performers from outside the community who are expected to attract larger audiences (Rodgers 1998). The creation of a local place is not in the music performance alone, but how this is framed within the structure of the festival. Second, there can be no simple linking of a bounded and identifiable group of

‘I'd sell you suicide’: pop music and moral panic in the age of Marilyn Manson

Abstract: Music makes mutations audible. (Attali 1977) In his opening remarks as host of the 1998 Grammy Award Show, sitcom actor, substance abuser and convicted drunk driver Kelsey Grammer promised that Marilyn Manson's 'skinny white ass' would not be appearing on the show. It was a truly extraordinary moment. Referring explicitly to his own teenage daughter, Spencer, Grammer couched this slur in the form of an inside joke for the baby boomer parents of children with seemingly inexplicable musical tastes. In so doing, he affirmed not only the intractable conservatism of the Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences but also the arrogant hegemony of his own generation within mainstream musical culture. The show proceeded to reward Bob Dylan with Album of the Year, James Taylor with Best Pop Album and Elton John with Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, while lavishing unbridled approbation upon the newest crop of corporate hit-makers, including Babyface, LeAnn Rimes, Hanson and the ubiquitous Spice Girls. Mitch Miller could not have orchestrated a more thoroughgoing tribute to the pop music status quo in America.2 It has been twenty years since the French economist Jacques Attali wrote Noise, his seminal study of the political economy of music, but it remains one of my favourite texts. Attali was interested in the relationship of music to power. His radical approach was centred on two critical observations - firstly, that 'listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political'; and secondly, that 'music is prophecy . . . It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible.' From these premises he articulated his influential - and prescient - thesis on the uniquely subversive potential of the musician:

‘Funky Drummer’: New Orleans, James Brown and the rhythmic transformation of American popular music

Abstract: The singular style of rhythm & blues (R&B) that emerged from New Orleans in the years after World War II played an important role in the development of funk. In a related development, the underlying rhythms of American popular music underwent a basic, yet generally unacknowledged transition from triplet or shuffle feel (12/8) to even or straight eighth notes (8/8). Many jazz historians have shown interest in the process whereby jazz musicians learned to swing (for example, the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra through Louis Armstrong's 1924 arrival in New York), but there has been little analysis of the reverse development - the change back to 'straighter' rhythms. The earliest forms of rock 'n' roll, such as the R&B songs that first acquired this label and styles like rockabilly that soon followed, continued to be predominantly in shuffle rhythms. By the 1960s, division of the beat into equal halves had become common practice in the new driving style of rock, and the occurrence of 12/8 metre relatively scarce. Although the move from triplets to even eighths might be seen as a simplification of metre, this shift supported further subdivision to sixteenth-note rhythms that were exploited in New Orleans R&B and funk. From the 1950s on, songwriters working in the new styles of R&B and rock 'n' roll based on even eighths often collaborated with drummers in inventing distinctive patterns to drive their tunes. New Orleans drummers excelled in the creation of catchy beats (usually one- or two-bar repetitive patterns) that were innovative while being rooted in their city's percussive traditions. Americans may have become acquainted with the 'New Orleans sound' through the warm Creole voice of Fats Domino, but the unique rhythms brewed in this city profoundly influenced American popular music and played a vital role in the development of funk. After briefly examining the emergence of straight rhythms in the larger context of American music history in general, this essay develops three interrelated themes in connection with this metric transformation and the New Orleans roots of funk: (i) mixed metre or 'open shuffle', (ii) highly syncopated 'second-line' or street processional drumming patterns, and (iii) Caribbean influence. The careers of some popular artists span the entire period of this shift in metre. The next section briefly describes some of the elements that one of the most important of these performers,

The political meaning of Hong Kong popular music: a review of sociopolitical relations between Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China since the 1980s

Abstract: IntroductionThe aim of this paper is to analyse shifting themes in the meanings of Hong Kong popular songs relating to ideological and political changes in Hong Kong since the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident (TSI). In particular, the paper examines the relationship between Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China (PRC) concerning the transmission of Hong Kong popular music, and argues that Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese popular musics articulate fluctuating political meanings. Attention will be focused predominantly on the lyrics, but some aspects of the music are also invoked. After highlighting the political and cultural relations between Hong Kong and the PRC, I discuss the social transformations and the struggles for democracy delineated in Chinese popular music during the 1989 TSI. This is followed by an examination of the intensification of the conflict between the PRC and Hong Kong over the dissemination of popular songs carrying democratic messages in Hong Kong. Finally, the paper considers the rise of patriotism and/or nationalism through lyrics rooted in the notion of educating Hong Kong Chinese people into accepting the cultural and political identity of mainland China, and the promotion of popular songs in the official language of the PRC, Putonghua, since the late transitional period.

'Hybridity and National Musics: The Case of Irish Rock Music'

Abstract: The article explores the possibility of a national music culture within the global form of rock music. The various theoretical approaches to the issue are examined and then specific examples of Irish rock music are explored as forms of hybridity which marry a sense of the local with the sounds of the global. Among the artists considered are Van Morrison, Horslips, Sinead O'Connor and the Pogues

Exploring modal subversions in alternative music

Abstract: IntroductionThe concern of this article is with a particular set of harmonic practices that rock musicians, particularly those who participate in the domain of guitar-oriented ‘alternative’ rock, have been using with noticeable frequency in the last ten years. I am also interested in discussing the concept of the power chord (a term I shall explicate more clearly below) as a device in rock that has facilitated the above-mentioned set of harmonic practicesThe observations made in this paper come out of a previous research inquiry of mine into the devices which alternative musicians use to differentiate their music from other styles of mainstream rock. Also, the pursuit of this topic is partly a response to Allan Moore's admonition that ‘there is as yet very little concern for theorizing analytical method in rock music’, and his call for a ‘mapping-out of those harmonic practices that serve to distinguish rock styles . . . from those of common-practice tonality . . . and jazz’ (Moore 1995, p. 185).There has been some rather pointed criticism recently of musicological analyses of popular music (see Shepherd 1993; Frith 1990) on the charge that analysing music's purely sonic dimensions (i.e. melody, harmony, rhythm, structure, etc.) does not really help us understand musical communication. Speaking as a songwriter, however, I would argue that many musicians in rock are indeed concerned with harmonic progression (or ‘the changes’, to use the vernacular term) as an important device or jumping-off point in the process of songwriting. It also seems reasonable to suggest that harmonic progression is a contributing factor in the affective power of a song, although its importance here is likely to be variable and quite open to debate.

Losing the local: Sydney and the Oz Rock tradition

Abstract: In a tiny inner city pub The amps were getting stacked Leads were getting wound up It was full of pissed Anzacs 'Got no more gigs for Tuesday nights' said the barman to the star, 'We're putting pokies in the lounge and strippers in the bar' The star, he raised his fingers and said 'fuck this fucking hole' But to his roadie said 'it's the death of rock and roll' 'There ain't no single place left to play amplified guitar Every place is servin' long blacks if they're not already tapas bars (TISM (This Is Serious Mum), 'The Last Australian Guitar Hero', 1998)

Music industry research: Where now? Where next? Notes from Britain

Abstract: From 1995–2000 I was Director of the Economic and Social Research Council's research programme on Media Economics and Media Culture. One of my tasks was to organise meetings of researchers in the field and to this end I ran a series of seminars at the British Phonographic Institute for people studying the music industry. These seminars were thematic, covering music industry strategies in global media markets; methods for measuring the value of the music industry; the uses of music; and musicians. A final meeting, held in the then about-to-be-opened National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield on 16 February 1999, brought together nearly all the UK's academic music industry researchers to discuss future research in the light of the MEMC Programme's findings. What follows is a report from both MEMC research and the Sheffield meeting. The aim is to provide an overview of the current research situation in Britain.

Religion, gossip, narrative conventions and the construction of meaning in Hindi film songs

Abstract: IntroductionThe commercial Hindi language cinema is among the largest and oldest music film traditions on the planet. One of the most widely remarked and inflexible conventions of this highly stylised popular film genre is the regular appearance of song and dance scenes in almost every commercial Hindi film. A huge body of over 40,000 film songs (filmī gīt, as they are known in Hindi) has grown along with the thousands of Hindi sound films produced since 1931; unlike the more recent development of music video in the west, Hindi film songs have been intimately connected with larger narrative traditions and visual images from their very inception. Filmī gīt comprise one of the most intensely consumed popular music repertoires on the planet. Across the range of visual and sound media and on into live performance, the audience for film song must be numbered in the hundreds of millions throughout the South Asian subcontinent and diaspora.

Going down like a song: national identity, global commerce and the Great Canadian Party

Abstract: On 1 July 1992 over 100,000 people assembled in various locations across Canada to see their favourite bands play live at the Great Canadian Party. Broadcast on television and radio, this Canada Day spectacle celebrated the country's 125th birthday, but rather than being organised by the state or a non-profit making citizen's movement, it was facilitated by more than $100,000 of corporate sponsorship. Drawing on fieldwork in Vancouver, I will argue that external funding initially helped Canadian musicians but soon allowed outside sponsors to control the live music industry. These sponsors could then co-opt anxieties about national unity in a selective celebration designed purely for their own ends. By addressing the Great Canadian Party's emergence and historic moment the following discussion will explore what it meant for Canada to be represented through a giant commercial, a commercial drawing on shared national identity in order to sell the products of a global industry. The Party revealed how judiciously agents of commerce could use popular culture to negotiate between geographic scales. Despite that success, however, the resistance of participating bands suggests that the Party could not secure full hegemony for its sponsor's project.

Jim Crow laws of the 1890s and the origins of New Orleans jazz: correction of an error

Abstract: A seriously misleading error has crept into almost all the literature on the origins of New Orleans jazz. The error mistakenly attributes to the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s a significant role in the formation of the city's jazz tradition.Jazz historians have done a reasonably good job of depicting the two black communities that existed in new Orleans from the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 until the twentieth century. One community comprised a French-speaking Catholic group who lived mostly in downtown New Orleans, i.e. the area of the city down-river from Canal Street. Before the Civil War this group, commonly called Creoles, or Black Creoles, but more accurately called Franco-Africans, comprised free people of colour as well as slaves, and after the war consisted of their descendants who perpetuated the group's language, religion and musical tradition, which combined French, African and Caribbean elements.Members of the other black community were English-speaking Protestants who lived mostly in uptown new Orleans. That group, before the Civil War, was made up largely of slaves brought to New Orleans by Americans who flooded into Louisiana after the 1803 Purchase, though it also included some free people of colour. After the war, the descendants of these immigrants continued their language, religion and musical tradition, which came mostly from the rural South. There Anglo-Africans were generally less prosperous and less educated than the downtown Franco-African or Creole community.

Popular music in the Welsh language and the affirmation of youth identities

Abstract: In this paper I attempt first to identify some of the ways in which the growth of Welsh-language popular music and of more assertive and confident ideas of identity among young Welsh speakers were closely linked in the period 1960–85. Secondly, I briefly examine some elements of a period of diversification and crisis that occurred in the 1990s, and finally I attempt to identify three positions from which different musicians and audiences that I have been involved with seem to be currently rehearsing, negotiating and constructing contrasting roles and stances.

String musicians in the recording studios of Memphis, Tennessee

Abstract: ROY BREWERIntroductionFrom the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, Memphis, Tennessee was home of one of the most successful recording industries in the USA and its popular recorded releases began to rival those of Nashville, Los Angeles, New York and Detroit. Solo artists, song writers, session musicians and arrangers became overnight successes and a rebellious and influential upstart recording industry emerged. But the growth was too fast and, fuelled by zealous egos and competition, an infrastructure was never formed resulting in a musical and financial cataclysm from which the Memphis music community has yet to recover. This article is about those classically trained string musicians who were hired to play in the studios of Memphis during that era.

From Manchuria to the tradition village: on the construction of place via pelimanni music

Abstract: IntroductionThere are no traces of the mid-Finnish village ‘Perikyla’ on existing maps. It features only in the ‘old folks’ memories', says the retired bus-driver, Matti Tulijoki, who wrote a melancholic waltz in memory of his native five-farm village, ‘in a weak moment’. He called the waltz ‘Memories of Perikyla’, and I have chosen it for analysis from the repertoire of the amateur musical group Virtain pelimannit, in which Mr Tulijoki is an accordion player and a pelimanni. Pelimanni is a term that has been used in Finland for centuries to denote a musician who plays a folk instrument. It is also used for the players who, from the start of the Finnish folk music movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, joined the groups that were being formed all over the country, carrying the name of each municipality. This paper uses the case study, Music and Identity at Grassroots Level (Jarviluoma 1997), in which I analysed the ways in which one such amateur music ensemble creates and maintains different sides of its identity. The group comes from Virrat, a country town of 9,000 people in central Finland. One of the central themes of the case study was place, and I will draw upon the study here to examine how ‘place’ is present in both the players' music and their speech about music.

Making modernity in the hinterlands: new Maroon musics in the Black Atlantic

Abstract: The runaway slave has had a special place in the literature of the anglophone Caribbean; and francophone, hispanophone and Dutch-speaking Caribbean writers have all displayed a similar fascination with the Maroon epic.2 In more recent times, popular music - a medium that has played a primary role in the constitution of a truly diasporic sense of identity spanning the Black Atlantic - has helped to carry consciousness of a heroic Maroon past across the globe. Both practitioners of Caribbean (or other Afro-American) popular musics and those who write about them continue to reference the Maroons of yore, often tracing the rebellious thrust of much of today's music to these original Black warriors, whose defiant spirit, it is felt, continues to inhabit and motivate the collective memory (Aly 1988, pp. 55-7, 65; Zips 1993, 1994; Leymarie 1994).3 In both literary and popular cultural productions, images of the Maroon usually serve an essentialising function. Not only do Maroons embody such positive values as defiance, resistance and autonomy, but they represent an original cultural authenticity never compromised by the experience of plantation slavery. In their remoteness, it is sometimes thought, these escaped slaves were able to preserve what elsewhere was lost. Because of their separatist mode of existence, they are imagined as having maintained a sacred, pre-modern cultural purity. From a certain anti-hegemonic perspective, the original Maroons stand for the survival and regeneration of all that was noble in the African character before this was corrupted by colonialism and slavery - qualities such as cultural integrity, social wisdom and an ability to live in harmony with the forces of nature. For some, this romantic image symbolises the very essence of a putative original African selfhood waiting to be reclaimed throughout the diaspora. This kind of essentialising imagery clearly shares something with the various Black nationalisms deconstructed by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993A) and other works. Like the latter, it glosses over complex and differentiated local histories and can lead toward cultural myopia, even as it points the way to social utopia.

Sex, Pulp and critique

Abstract: In an article entitled 'Sexist Pulp ads attacked', the Independent on Sunday (IoS) reported public reaction to the posters advertising Pulp's new album This is Hardcore (posters had been defaced with the words 'this is sexist'), and described the advertisements as part of a turn away from political correctness towards a new 'anything goes' realism (Kelly and Clay 1998). The poster shows the naked upper torso of a woman face down on a red leather cushion, in an awkward and ambivalent posture, with lipsticked, half-open mouth. Emblazoned across the centre of the image (which is a reproduction of the album cover) are the words 'This is Hardcore' in pink capitals. A leader in the paper on the same day, under the heading 'This is violent. This is offensive', interprets the image as a demeaning, sexist and violent representation of women and as an offence to the record-buying public. The leader asserts that 'Just to sell a few songs, it shows a woman violated', and concludes with the words: 'To ban it [the poster] now would only generate more publicity for Pulp. So the only advice we have is for anyone thinking of buying the album. Don't bother.' (IoS Leader, 1998, p. 4) Whether or not the image is really as demeaning as the IoS suggests (a matter to which we return), there are two possible interpretations of the newspaper's advice. Either the IoS assumes that the album is completely compromised by its offensive advertising, utterly discrediting any critical meaning or value that the music might have; or it assumes an identity between the advertising and album in which the music is as violent and offensive as the poster. In this second case, a fundamental issue is raised: how is it possible to attribute social content (in this case qualities such as 'violence against women', or 'offensiveness') to music? Furthermore, how might music be identified as having either a critical or an affirmative stance towards any such content? This paper is an attempt to show, for the specific case of 'This is Hardcore', that the music does indeed have a critical quality, albeit of a rather uncomfortable kind, and that the IoS's verdict on both the album and the poster is superficial and hasty. Although arguably many of the tracks on the album deal with related issues using methods similar to those discussed below, for the purposes of this paper we focus solely on the title track of the album. We start with the question: Is the track about the same subject matter as the poster, and if so how? An obvious place to start is with the words: the opening line of the track ('You are hardcore. You make me hard.') is unambivalent in its declaration that this is a track about a male experience of sex. In terms of content, the text contains few indications of a critical attitude to its subject matter - except perhaps for the lines 'It's what men in stained raincoats pay for' and 'I've seen the storyline played out

‘A song goes round the world’: the German Schlager , as an organ of experience

Abstract: In recent work in film and cultural studies, the set of social configurations, practices of everyday life, and ideological formations that constitute twentieth-century ‘modernity’ have been increasingly the subject of research and debate. Fuelled by a renewed interest in critical phenomenologies of modernity, most prominently the work of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, scholars have focused the debate on the specific historicity of visual culture in the early years of the twentieth century, in order to illuminate the contradictory and fragmented nature of modern mass cultural experience. Fusing the theoretical traditions of critical theory with the empirical and theoretical interest in contradiction and contestation typical of cultural studies, not only does this debate open new perspectives for considering the problem of mass and/or ‘popular’ visual culture, it can also contribute to rethinking the way we discuss the historicity of popular music. Conversely, a more precise understanding of the historicity of popular music practice in modern mass culture, its institutions and modes of experience, can broaden the scope of this debate beyond the spectacles of visual culture to the ‘attractions’ of the acoustic.

Getting into the groove

Abstract: Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender. Edited by Sheila Whiteley. London and New York: Routeledge, 1997, 353 pp. Sex, sexuality and articulations of gender are well-established components in the production and performance of popular music. Hence, Sexing the Groove, edited by Sheila Whiteley, is a very welcome addition to this vital and growing area of popular music studies and cultural theory more generally. The collection reflects the reality that studies of gender and sexuality in popular music are born of a hybrid lineage; accordingly the book approaches its subject from a range of disciplines such as sociology, cultural theory, media studies, sychology and musicology, and as such is a vibrant mix. Despite its relative diversity, the book's structure and progression is fluent and focused.

The Montreal International Jazz Festival

Abstract: The Festival International de Jazz de Montreal (Montreal International Jazz Festival), which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 1999, has become one of the most popular music festivals in the world, attracting in just twelve days more than a million and a half people. Most visitors are Canadians and Americans, but Europeans are attending in greater numbers each year.The first Festival, held in the summer of 1979, lasted less than a week. Since then, it has progressively expanded and has moved from one site to another several times to accommodate the growing number of visitors. At its current site in downtown Montreal, in the neighbourhood of the Place des Arts, it now lasts a full twelve days. In 1998, thirty-six concert series and two film series were offered for a total of 411 events. Of these, 103 were paying concerts, and 298 were free concerts held for the most part out of doors. Jazz presented in more than twelve bars all over the city also forms part of the event.From noon to 6 pm, a free outdoor concert is held every hour. From 6 pm to midnight, two more free concerts are performed simultaneously. During the day, street bands give strollers a taste of a wide range of musical styles. For more than twelve hours the public can hear music nonstop by moving from one venue to the other. The downtown site is big enough to avoid the overlapping of music from simultaneous performances. At the end of the afternoon and in the evening, Festival-goers can enjoy the indoor paying concerts.