Order, Joy, Youth

Abstract

This talk identifies in popular music a common but largely untheorized phenomenon. Parade aesthetics are marked by an implied permeability between performers and audience, and the jubilant instrumentalization of individuals toward collective identity for its own sake. As a connoted medium (per Marshall McLuhan) the parade extends the body, rendering its participants larger, louder, and more opulently visible. It simultaneously miniaturizes the world, reducing it to the status of model, token, and toy. Such aesthetics then invite young pop audiences to step into roles with grownup attributes of instrumentalization, bigness, and access. These attributes are structural within parade aesthetics and largely independent of specific content. The talk concludes with an insight into the parade-like nature of first-wave hip-hop.