British Pop Research Articles

Please please me: sixties British pop, inside out

Preface, Acknowledgements / Introduction / 1. The Velvet Glove: The Art of Production / 2. A Question of Balance: Engineering Art / 3. Mediating Change: Setting Musical Directions / 4. The Write Stuff: Songwriters / 5. Red-Light Fever: Musicians / 6. Please Please Me / 7. London Recording Studios / Discography / Bibliography

“The Thinking Man’s Filter”: J. L. Austin’s Ordinary Language Philosophy as Cultural Criticism

“The Thinking Man’s Filter”J. L. Austin’s Ordinary Language Philosophy as Cultural Criticism Michael J. Golec (bio) In his hands, philosophy seemed at once more serious, and more fun. —G. J. Warnock, John Langshaw Austin Cultural Appropriation G. J. Warnock’s assessment of the British philosopher J. L. Austin’s contribution to philosophy—both fun and serious—directly precedes his too brief account of Austin’s appreciation of America. The proximity of these two accounts in Warnock’s biographical “sketch” suggests that Austin’s special brand of philosophy and the welcoming ambience of the United States are related. Warnock’s account is “too brief” because Austin’s relationship to the United States and its culture has been too little studied, if at all. Certainly, there are the recollections of his American students who recall Austin’s impact on their studies and future careers. To date, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell has been the most vocal in his indebtedness to Austin’s contribution to his own “voice” in philosophy. His first published essay, “Must We Mean What We Say?” divulges Cavell’s debt to Austin as an “inheritance” of ordinary language philosophy (1969, 1–43).1 He lists, among many instances, Austin’s manner of attending to the voice that articulates astonishment at our “ability to say what we say . . . ” (1994, 59). As Cavell admits, “In the ordinary language challenge I felt released, cleared to do the work that seemed mine to do . . . ” (1994, 59). In his introduction of ordinary language philosophy to an American audience, Austin gave license to the kind of intellectual freedom that Cavell [End Page 66] describes as the result of having been in attendance when the British philosopher delivered his lectures. This was when Austin delivered the William James Lectures at Harvard University in 1955. The lectures were posthumously collected and, in 1962, published as How To Do Things with Words. Like Warnock, Cavell recalls Austin’s use of “jokes, puns, literary allusions, and the general repeated invitation to have fun in philosophizing . . . ” (2002, xi). Perhaps Cavell witnessed instances where, as Austin put it in his lectures, certain conditions were satisfied “if the utterance is to be happy” (Austin 1962a, 45). That Cavell has taken this aspect of Austin’s voice seriously should count as an instance of what American philosophy has inherited from Austin. In addition to the reception of Austin’s philosophy in the United States, there was, as Warnock tells us, the case of his fondness for America. This suggests that influences were reciprocal. Warnock claims that Austin “was fascinated, I believe, by the whole phenomenon of America—by its size, by its populousness and resources, by the sense there of endless possibilities and a wide-open future” (1962, 21). But more than this, as Warnock explains, Austin found the American “atmosphere of uncomplicated, undersigned friendliness” (21) to his liking. Such was the case that Austin appropriated American culture into his philosophy, much as British pop artists had in the 1950s when they appropriated images from American magazines and advertising. By now, the story of artists such as Richard Hamilton and Edourado Paolozzi and critics such as Reynar Banham and Lawrence Alloway looking to the United States for what Alloway once called “an aesthetics of plenty” is well known (and perhaps a bit worn).2 The story and significance of Austin’s appropriation of American culture, however, has yet to be told. If Austin’s cultural criticism seems far-fetched, it may be because instances of appropriation have all but been excised from his work. In January 1959, while concluding his Swarthmore College lecture on sense data, Austin quoted the American actor Steve McQueen from a commercial for Viceroy cigarettes. As George Pitcher, who had escorted Austin to the college, reports, Austin “turned to the blackboard and clamped his two hands around the words ‘It seems to me now exactly as if,’ saying ‘This is the thinking man’s filter . . . ’” (29). The combined force of a verbal perlocutionary act intended to produce an effect and [End Page 67] of a physical, “non-locutionary” act was akin to examples of “waving a stick or pointing a gun” so as to further secure...

Moulin Rouge! and the Undoing of Opera

AbstractWhile Moulin Rouge! (2001) riffs on and even exaggerates conventions from classic Hollywood backstage musicals, it owes a clear debt to an even earlier musico-dramatic genre – the opera. Combining operatic and film musical elements with those of pop videos, contemporary cinema and the rave scene, Baz Luhrmann's film engages with many of the thorny issues that have concerned opera critics of late, such as power, gender, exoticism, authorship, and identity construction and performance. The spotlight on the central love triangle of a consumptive courtesan, a writer and a wealthy patron makes possible a deeper scrutiny of traditional gender roles in the production and reception of Western art. The film's formulaic plot and the backstage musical format render transparent the commercial impetus behind the creative process and demystify the role of the Romantic artist-genius. Finally, the transnational and transhistorical elements of the film – a mostly Australian production team and crew, American and British pop songs, a Parisian backdrop, the Bollywood-inspired show-within-a-show, numerous anachronisms that refuse to stay confined within the specified time setting of the late nineteenth century – disrupt the Classical ideals of artistic unity and integrity and suggest new postmodern geographies and temporalities. This article considers how Luhrmann, by simultaneously paying homage to and critiquing operatic practices in Moulin Rouge!, deconstructs and reinvents opera for the postmodern age.

British film music and film musicals

Description British film music is one of the unsung stars of British culture. British cinema should be most proud of it, and yet it barely receives a mention in scholarly or popular writing. Yet during the 1930s, British-made musicals, starring actors such as George Formby and Gracie Fields, were the most popular films seen by British audiences. Any consideration of British music, or indeed of film music, could not fail to note William Walton's outstanding score for Olivier's Henry V (1944) and Malcolm Arnold's music for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Yet these are never mentioned in the kind of scholarly books and histories produced in the area of 'British film' studies. This book aims to open up debate on the subject as well as map a terrain that has for a long time been lost. This book will address music in British films, both as musical scores ,in the first half of the book and as British film musicals, in the second half. Each section will start with a detailed chronological review history. Contents Introduction British Film Music Wicked Sounds and Magic Melodies: Music in Gainsborough Melodramas Did You Hear the One about the Irishman? Sound and Music, Forging Ethnicity in Odd Man Out (1946) Experimenting with Film Scores, 1967-1970 Pop Music Culture, Synergy and Songs in Films: Hardware (1990) and Trainspotting (1996) History of British Film Musicals Stage to Screen: Whatever Happened to the British Musical Adaptation? The Perpetual Busman's Holiday: Sir Cliff Richard and the British Pop Musical The Musical Revolution: The Beatles in A Hard Day's Night White Labels and Black Imports: Music, Assimilation and Commerce in Absolute Beginners (1985)

Frank Bowling and the Appetite for British Pop

Frank Bowling and the Appetite for British Pop

US and Them: American Rock's Reconquista

This paper will examine the role of a single record, Mr Tambourine Man by the Byrds, in the fight back against the British Pop Invasion. It will suggest that this short work incorporates and assimilates musical discourses from both the American tradition (including Greil Marcus's “old, weird America”) and the British pop phenomenon (the Searchers, the Beatles) to create an example of bricolage par excellence. The paper will draw on both academic and music industry sources, including interviews conducted by the writer, to construct a rounded and illuminating point of view.

Creativity and Competition: The Beatles

ABSTRACT: This article examines creativity, in particular the success of the British pop group The Beatles. The results suggest that The Beatles should not be seen as creative geniuses but as a creative process. Seeing creativity as a process suggests that experimental studies of one creative act may have limited value to real-world creativity. Behind The Beatles creative process were two dominant forces. First was the importance of rivalry as a contributor to creative enhancement. Second was the nature of the working team that possessed high levels of exchange and complimentary blends of expertise and thinking styles. This article also suggests that the structure of incentives is important in determining the nature of creative output.

Rockin' las Americas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o America (review)

Pacini Hernandez, Deborah, Hector Fernandez L'Hoeste, and Eric Zolov, eds. 2004. Hockin' Las Americas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o America. Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. $60.00 hc. $24.95 sc. 432 pp.This is the first scholarly collection of articles on Latin American rock, a necessary and significant milestone given the rise of rock en espanol in the global marketplace in the last decade. The contributors come from a variety of disciplines (e.g., music, anthropology, history, literature) and pursue a mix of critical approaches. The book does not offer a systematic history of rock in the region but presents an array of articles that treat the music as national and transnational phenomena. Four of the articles focus on Mexico, two on Brazil, one each on Cuba, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala, Argentina and Chile, one on Los Angeles punkeras, and one on the French musician, Manu Chao, who is based inTijuana.The majority of these articles look at particular national responses to rock music as imported, transnational phenomena remade into a national product. All the articles present Latin American rock as a hybrid music that synthesizes imported US and British rock with regional forms, co-opting a hegemonic music for the sake of particular local uses. All investigate how a particular music negotiates, successfully or not, cultural, political and economic landscapes, landscapes as various as the nations and histories which produce them.Yet, of the many issues that weave through this anthology, one-dictatorship, perhaps the most intense locus of political contestation in recent Latin American history-garners the most attention, featured in five of the fifteen articles. Because they teach so much about the music and the complex contexts which give rise to (and sometimes destroy) it, all of the articles in the volume are worthy of attention. This review, though, will focus on only three representative samples to discuss the book's main themes.Many of the writers use their articles to recover an unknown, or little known, history. In Onda Chicana: Mexico's Forgotten Rock Culture, Eric Zolov attempts to fill in a missing chapter of the history of Mexican rock, the period called La onda chicana from the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as delineate the social and political forces that not only led to its disappearance but to its erasure from Mexican memory. As much as the article fills a historical gap, it is also a study of cultural forgetting. Inspired by 1960s US and British pop and rock and often using English lyrics, La onda chicana celebrated a hippie (jipi) lifestyle that drew criticism from the right, for its break with traditional Mexican values, and the left, for bowing to the cultural imperialism of the north. After the Woodstock-style rock concert, Avandaro (1971), the government banned rock concerts for a decade, promoted authentic Mexican music and prevented La onda chicana groups from releasing albums, all but erasing the music from the Mexican landscape. Zolov produces a well-defined historical arc, effectively delineating the local and global cultural contexts that gave rise to the music as well as the political economy within which it disappeared.For as many articles that feature sociohistorical readings of the music, there are articles which pursue primarily economic interpretations. …

Reviewing Symbolic Capital

Reviewing Symbolic Capital

Does British Music Still Matter?

This article examines the present status of British popular music. It illustrates the declining global significance of British rock and pop recordings by considering the Mercury music prize (for the ‘best’ British releases each year) and the US sales charts (in which British records rarely now appear). The continuing political assertion that British musical talent is an important source of export earnings is shown to refer to acts (and often recordings) produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We can conclude that in this, as in other cultural spheres, ‘globalization’ has also meant a new account of ‘local’ production such that, in commercial terms, Britain is no more important than other European countries as a source of internationally successful recordings. ‘Anglo-American rock’ is no longer a useful label.

Outside in America

Six months after his controversial arrest for ‘lewd conduct’ at a men’s public restroom in Beverly Hills, British pop star George Michael released the song and music video ‘Outside’ which can be seen as an explicit commentary on the controversy. In this article, I read the music video in three ways: 1) as part of the star-text of George Michael, repositioning him as an openly gay megastar; 2) as a British/European critique on American heteronormativity and the criminalization of public sex; and 3) as a marketing tool to sell George Michael and his music on a global level.

Drum'n'dhol 1

British bhangra is a genre of British popular music fusing Punjabi lyrics and the beats of the Indian drum, the dhol, with black music genres and British pop sounds, producing an urban anthem and commentary about the lives of its British South Asian audiences. This article draws on qualitative research and interviews undertaken in Birmingham in the UK. It outlines how diasporic South Asian identities are made sense of through a conception of the way in which British bhangra music encapsulates an urban black British experience, how conservative lyrics of caste and gender in the music are negotiated by its listeners, and how some of the intergenerational formulations of British South Asian identities are performed at celebratory social gatherings.

Welcome to the Robbiedome

Welcome to the Robbiedome

Lives of the great 20th-century artists

Towards the modern the Fauves the Nabis cubism futurism German expressionism the Vienna sezession the Ecole de Paris the Russians Dada metaphysical painting surrealism the Bauhaus the new objectivity the Mexicans America between the wars England between the wars abstract expressionism post-war Europe the heirs of abstract expressionism American neo-Dada British pop art American pop art the artist not the artwork.

The land without music: music, culture and society in twentieth-century Britain

A British classical music? a story of British pop the romanticism of rock the landscape with music the muse of diversity.

INDIE: THE INSTITUTIONAL POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF A POPULAR MUSIC GENRE

This article is concerned with the complex relations between institutional politics and aesthetics in oppositional forms of popular culture. Indie is a contemporary genre which has its roots in punk's institutional and aesthetic challenge to the popular music industry but which, in the 1990s, has become part of the ‘mainstream’ of British pop. Case studies of two important ‘independents’, Creation and One Little Indian, are presented, and the aesthetic and institutional politics of these record companies are analysed in order to explore two related questions. First, what forces lead ‘alternative’ independent record companies towards practices of professionalization and of partnership/collaboration with major corporations? Second, what are the institutional and political-aesthetic consequences of such professionalization and partnership? In response to the first question, the article argues that pressures towards professionalization and partnership should be understood not only as an abandonment of previously held idealistic positions (a ‘sell-out’) and that deals with major record companies are not necessarily, in themselves, a source of aesthetic compromise. On the second question, it argues that collaboration with major record companies entails a relinquishing of autonomy for alternative independent record companies; but perspectives which ascribe negative aesthetic consequences directly to such problematic institutional arrangements may well be flawed.

The Perpetual Busman's Holiday: Sir Cliff Richard and British Pop Musicals

Theodor Adorno's assertion that “popular music for the masses is a perpetual busman's holiday” (Adorno 210–11) suggests to me the Cliff Richard film Summer Holiday (1963). In the film, Cliff Richard plays a mechanic who with some coworkers borrows a bus from their workplace and drives across Europe, serving up a number of wholesome songs along the way. Adorno's rather catchy phrase underlines what he saw as the conservative nature and function of popular music, and Cliff Richard's career perhaps has substantiated Adorno's observation. Starting as a rock 'n' roll singer, Cliff (as he is fondly known in Britain) developed into a unique British cultural institution. He became a born again Christian and spoke in favor of censorship, represented Britain in the Eurovision Song Contest, and sang spontaneously to the rain-drenched crowd at the Wimbledon Tennis Championship. His status as a key icon of Britain since the 1950s was confirmed by his knighthood in 1996, which was an almost unprecedented acknowledgment of the power of pop music and a confirmation of Cliff's cultural status. In light of his popularity, it seems timely to reassess the earliest period of his career and the part that films played in his conversion from a rock 'n' rolling Elvis look-alike to a mainstream youth figure. The conversion directly reflected the changes in pop music culture, the British negotiation of American youth culture, and the addition of rock 'n' roll to the traditional musical film.

Derek Jarman: dreams of England

Derek Jarman's extraordinary cinematic achievement and his pivotal role in postwar English culture are at the heart of this pioneering study of an enigmatic figure who was both a major filmmaker and an artist, a gay activist and an English patriot. Michael O'Pray, who knew Jarman in the 80s, weaves together a compelling account of his life with illuminating analysis of his films, from the home movies through the pop videos to the acclaimed feature films including Caravaggio and Blue. Beginning with Jarman's family life and his early immersion in the British Pop art world, Michael O'Pray traces Jarman's emergence as an ambitious filmmaker who always challenged received categories, both political and aesthetic.

Policing Bohemia, pinning up grunge: the music press and generic change in British pop and rock

After a decade of relative stability a flurry of closures and launches has changed the face of the British popular music press (see Table 1). This article examines the new structure and its development in three interlocking areas: in music industry organisation, rock and pop genres, and the process of discursive formation in the press itself. On the first of these, I argue that the function of the music press as an ‘institutional regulator’ (Hirsch 1990, p. 132) of music industry output has been subverted, during the 1980s, by a fluctuating record market and the growth of music programming on television and radio. A uni-directional model of cultural production is now problematic. Media, including the press, may be sponsors or initiators of music texts rather than mere filters. Secondly the New Pop, and more recently rave, has threatened the straightforward alignment of taste and cultural capital which underpinned rock hegemony. In the patchwork world of contemporary youth music the para-pedagogic work of the rock press in both guiding and excluding communities of taste has an extra urgency. My third point concerns critical method. Just because the rock/pop field has become decentred, the drive to fix meaning tends to generate crisis as successive critical solutions break down, revealed as monstrously excessive, as ‘more than’ the music. Journalists usually anticipate failure. But this only serves to speed up change and the movement towards the next untenable position.

Ideology, gender and popular radio: A discourse analytic approach

Abstract This paper outlines a new approach for the analysis of radio, and for studies of the media and popular culture more generally. It argues that the study of radio has been eclipsed by research on television, film and the press, and that more research on radio—and pop radio, in particular—is necessary. Studies of radio broadcasts direct our attention towards the need for developing coherent ways of analysing talk, and this paper sets out just such an approach. Drawing on two case studies concerned with British pop radio, it attempts to show the value of a discourse analytic approach which takes naturally occurring discourse seriously in all its messiness and variability. More specifically, the paper examines the implications of discourse analysis for how we conceptualize ideology, a key concept in media research. It argues that it is important to maintain a critical definition of ideology, but suggests that we need to move beyond approaches which see ideology as residing in particular syntactic structures, forms of language or single images. The case studies discussed highlight the fact that ideology is far more complex, inconsistent and flexible than is traditionally assumed. They also show that sexism.—as a particular ideological discursive practice—remains a pervasive force, shaping British pop radio both on and off the air.