Debut Album Research Articles

A.B. Original’s "Reclaim Australia" is ensuring Australians can no longer say “I just didn’t know” about Aboriginal issues

Reclaim Australia is the debut album of hip hop duo A.B. Original that surged the voices and issues of Aboriginal Australia onto the airwaves and into the minds of the public. Fronted by Yorta Yorta man, Briggs (aka Adam Briggs) and Ngarrindjeri man, Trials (aka Daniel Rankine), A.B. Original stands for Always Black Original and their 12-track album released late in 2016 geared up political talks for the upcoming controversies of January 26th, known as Australia Day by some and as Invasion or Survival Day by others.

Recreating the Creation:

Recreating the creation is on the trail of a theory of remix. Using the example of the debut album of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, the question is asked how nature sounds and pop songs relate to each other and in the tension between production, composition and sampling. In doing so, contemporary poetics and techniques of music production are historically and aesthetically contextualized with the practice of a music that not only wants to reinvent itself, but refers to existing music and sounds.

“Hey Pepé!”: The Two Words That Changed My Life

"Hey Pepé!":The Two Words That Changed My Life Tony Kiene (bio) In the summer of 1978 I had only one record to my name; a 45 of the Jackson 5's "Dancing Machine." As my parents had recently purchased our first stereo system, a turntable with an 8-track tape deck, I made good use of the needle and played that 7-inch single constantly. Sometime later that summer, just a few months shy of my eighth birthday, I was visiting a friend's house where I noticed an 8-track tape on his shelf. The translucent image on the tape was of a man with a giant, perfectly shaped afro who seemingly channeled the backdrop of bright sunlight through his doe eyes and into my soul. I can't explain why, but it was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen and to this day it remains my favorite album cover of all time. On a gut feeling, I traded my Jackson 5 single straight up for this 8-track of Prince's debut album, For You, unaware of the enduring impact it would have on the rest of my life. I took the tape home, popped it in the stereo, and in those next 33 minutes and 11 seconds I became a lifer. From the harmonic genius of its a cappella title track to the prodigious drums and torrential guitar of its finale, For You left me mesmerized. It would be more than a year before Prince released his eponymous second album and nearly another year after that until Dirty Mind. By then I was earning a little bit of an allowance and had developed a distinct preference for the sound of vinyl, so, I began to steadily build a record collection. For whatever reason I never worried much about my parent's curiosity as to what I was listening to, but I wasn't confident that I could successfully hide the back of an album cover featuring nude Prince on a white, winged horse, much less the libidinous imagery of the Dirty Mind artwork or the famous shower poster that accompanied Prince's fourth LP, Controversy. Therefore, I would borrow those records from friends minus the packaging and hide them in the album sleeves of other titles I had purchased, such as Michael Jackson's Off the Wall, Kool and the [End Page 153] Gang's Something Special, the Commodore's In the Pocket, Earth Wind and Fire's Raise, and even The Time's first album. In 1981, I did not know that Jamie Starr was a Prince pseudonym and thus was initially unaware of the connection between him and The Time. However, by the summer of 1982 I knew a lot more about what was going on 500 miles or so northwest of my hometown of South Bend, Indiana, when Vanity 6 debuted their own self-titled album, immediately shadowed by the release of What Time Is It?, and soon after by Prince's masterstroke 1999. Since I was only around 12 at the time, my parents would never consider allowing to me witness the 1999 Tour (aka the Triple Threat Tour) when it arrived in nearby cities like Gary, Kalamazoo, and Chicago, let alone those locations a little further away such as Indianapolis, Detroit, or Cleveland. Notwithstanding my disappointment, I remained obsessed with the Minneapolis sound and I didn't believe anything could transcend the brilliance of 1999. Not to mention, now that André Cymone had embarked on a solo career, I couldn't think of a cooler sideman than Dez Dickerson. There was just something about his trademark Kamikaze headband and his black and white Gibson Explorer. And, of course, there was no way to convince me that there were three more beautiful women in the world than Vanity, Jill Jones, and Lisa Coleman. But then came Purple Rain. And with the mania that accompanied the soundtrack and the film arose the first wave of books about Prince's journey from North Minneapolis to international superstar, including unauthorized biographies by Jon Bream and Steven Ivory. It was in Bream's Prince: Inside the Purple Reign that I first learned of...

Punk Stories: Four Memoirs of Rebel Women in Music

Punk Stories: Four Memoirs of Rebel Women in Music Kristine Somerville (bio) Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys by Viv Albertine. Thomas Dunne Books, 2014, 421 pp., $27.99 (hardcover). Reckless: My Life as a Pretender by Chrissie Hynde. Anchor Books, 2015, 312 pp., $16.95 (paper). Girl in a Band: A Memoir by Kim Gordon. Dey Street Books, 2015, 273 pp., $16.99 (paper). I Live Inside: Memoirs of a Babe in Toyland by Michelle Leon. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016, 215 pp., $19.95 (hardcover). When rocker and poet Patti Smith was a teenager, she loved paging through used copies of Vogue, eager for glimpses of the world beyond her working-class home and family in south Jersey. A black-and-white photo of wispy, white-haired Edie Sedgwick, one of the magazine’s “Youthquakers of 1965,” doing an arabesque on the back of a leather rhinoceros captured Smith’s imagination. She wanted to be that girl— self-possessed and connected to the moment. Smith moved to New York in 1969; she chronicles her years as an artist struggling to find a place in the downtown avant-garde scene in her 2010 National Book Award– winning memoir, Just Kids. Smith frequented some of Sedgwick’s old haunts, even living at the Chelsea Hotel, and in 1975 achieved critical acclaim with Horses, her debut album, which was a revolutionary marriage of music and poetry. The cover photography by Robert Mapplethorpe captures Smith’s androgynous beauty. Her jaggedly chopped hair, white button-down shirt, and black jeans and jacket became an early template for punk-rock fashion. Smith’s iconic look and uncompromising [End Page 179] art inspired young women who also rejected being “good girls” for the rigors and rewards of making music on their own terms. Just Kids also whetted readers’ appetites for stories of New York and London during the 1970s punk revolution and the 1980s postpunk aftermath, as told by women musicians who were at the center of the action. ________ Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys Viv Albertine. Thomas Dunne Books, 2014, 421 pp., $27.99 (hardcover). The title of Viv Albertine’s 2014 memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, announces the primary preoccupations of her female punk-rock cohort. These interests, with varying degrees of alcohol and drug use, figure prominently in the stories of women in the scene. The women assume all the rock-star privileges of men—who can blame them?—before becoming wives and mothers in their later years. Albertine, the lead guitarist and songwriter for the seminal band the Slits, begins her story with the in-your-face pronouncement that she “can’t be bothered” to masturbate. A pretty girl, when her hormones kicked in at age thirteen, she started messing around with bad boys and never stopped. Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1954, she grew up in North London. The family struggled financially, and, as Albertine put it, “I lived in a dump.” Listening to the Beatles on her record player provided escape and drowned out her parents’ fighting. In a moment of vulnerability, she told her father, “I want to be a pop singer when I grow up,” to which he replied, “You’re not chic enough.” There were few female role models: “It was inconceivable that a girl could cross over into male territory and be in a band,” Albertine writes. Instead she attended art school, a rite of passage for many punk and pop musicians. While a barmaid at Dingwalls in Camden Market, Albertine fell in love with the spirited chaos of the punk bands that played there. She met Kokomo drummer Jody Linscott, who told her that musical skill was not a requirement for membership; Jody had joined a band before she could play. Patti Smith’s Horses was another revelation: “Up until now, girls had been so controlled [End Page 180] and restrained. Patti Smith [was] abandon.” And Johnny Rotten, whose voice was neither trained nor tuneful, had an absolute sense of self-possession on stage that she admired. What Albertine thought were barriers—class, accent, lack of musical education—Rotten turned into virtues...

The Persistence of "Wild Style": Hip-Hop and Music Video Culture at the Intersection of Performance and Provocation

The Persistence of "Wild Style":Hip-Hop and Music Video Culture at the Intersection of Performance and Provocation Michele Prettyman (bio) Hip-hop, an enduring historiographical enigma, invites reflection on what is past and what is prologue, particularly in relationship to race and the visual archive of performance.1 I discuss the groundbreaking video for the South Bronx's Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five's (GMFFF) iconic song "The Message" (Alvin Hartley, 1982), then pivot to the twenty-first-century artist Donald Glover, and his musical alter-ego Childish Gambino, whose video "This Is America" (Hiro Murai, 2018) engages the archive of racialized movement and dance from the nineteenth century and became a viral phenomenon. Last, I consider how SoundCloud music streaming enabled the rise of new iterations of hip-hop music and video form, briefly discussing a video from the late provocateur XXXTentacion entitled "Look at Me" (James "JMP" Pereira, 2017). The phrase "wild style," first invoked roughly forty years ago by hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy, originally referred to graffiti, specifically to its bold, spray-painted, bubble style of lettering and later to the coded phrases, pictures, and full-blown painterly tableaus. It also refers to Charlie Ahearn's groundbreaking film Wild Style (1983), which, like music video, provided a visual account of hip-hop's nascent cultures of writing, movement, lyricism, and turntablism. Kodwo Eshun provides another useful take on wild style, explaining that it "exercises the senses, puts the eyes and ears through an escherized assault course."2 Embedded in the wild style trope is the notion of coding and decoding phrases, references and visual cyphers that may be disorienting, inaccessible, or [End Page 151] so purposefully cryptic that those who are uninitiated may not be able to gain access to the world of meaning created by its makers.3 My articulation of wild style takes flight by examining a series of hip-hop music videos, noting how particular gestures and styles of performance in these texts reanimate earlier modes of performance and social critique—what Daphne Brooks might call dissent—and how they flow across nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century popular culture.4 The videos I engage are not simply political, ironic, or controversial; rather, they deploy embodied, discursive, and aesthetic provocations to destabilize categorization and meaning. Provocation is a thing, a graphic depiction of violence or a gesture, for instance, and a mode of performative encounter. In what follows, I trace how these videos modulate the space between paradigms of legibility and illegibility. Legibility refers to ways that music-video form fosters accessibility, transparency, or familiarity and how these videos circulate to multiple audiences, triggering exposure and commercial viability for the artist. Illegibility, then, is an impasse or disconnect between the artist and some viewers, which includes conflicting or paradoxical interpretations of the video and its relationship to the broader archive of race and performance. To be certain, it is not always clear what is legible or illegible in a given video, but it is the tension between these paradigms that is intriguing: how these texts deploy both elements in a single video; how they often disturb, confound, and awe us simultaneously; how provocation and critique are wielded bluntly at times and used in precise and nuanced ways at others.5 "Don't Push Me, 'Cause I'm Close to the Edge." These lyrics, excerpted from "The Message" on GMFFF's debut album, became a clarion call, an anthem, the (graffiti) writing on the wall, announcing to listeners that hip-hop was an oral—and visual—provocation to be reckoned with. By then, artists including the Sugar Hill Gang and Kurtis Blow had already appeared in rudimentary music videos, but "The Message" became a groundbreaking hit record, and the accompanying video would create a stylistic template for hip-hop visual culture. While on-street and club performances continued to help spread hip-hop's momentum, music videos like "The Message" expanded the medium's popularity. The music video for "The Message" reflects the song's lyrics and depicts age-old social problems through early video distortion techniques, creating a nightmarish, dystopian aesthetic. Group members pose not simply in a classic...

Contributors

Contributors

Black Mothers and Black Boats: Queer, Indigenous, and Afro-Brazilian Intersections in Ney Matogrosso's "Mãe preta (Barco negro)"

As part of his 1975 solo debut album, Água do céu-pássaro, Ney Matogrosso recorded a cover of "Barco negro," a Portuguese fado made famous by Amália Rodrigues and based on an earlier Brazilian song, "Mãe-preta," written by Caco Velho and Piratini and recorded by Os Tocantins in 1943. Matogrosso conflates the two versions, titling the track, "Mãe preta (Barco negro)." This article marks Matogrosso’s recording as an iteration of transgender voice and locates—in his performance and album artwork—queer, indigenous, and Afro-Brazilian intersections that rework the mãe preta figure central to Brazil’s foundational narrative. Making use of Hortense Spiller’s theorization of the trans-Atlantic slave trade as "body-theft," I argue that Matogrosso’s referents and trans voice reembody the Luso-Afro-Brazilian black mother in ways that unsettle Lusotropicalism and haunt Portuguese nationalist tropes.

Religion and heavy metal music in Indonesia

AbstractWe trace the history of Indonesian Islamic metal bands, including Purgatory, Tengkorak and Kodusa, and the One Finger Movement that revolved around these bands (centred mainly on Jakarta). We look at the differences in symbols, heroes, rituals and values between One Finger Movement bands and the Bandung (Indonesia) secular Death Metal scene. We also study Bandung Death Metal band Saffar, which was known for its Islamic lyrics on its debut album but which has been for a few years in something of a limbo owing to the departure of vocalist and lyricist Parjo. We also look at Saffar's positioning of itself as a ‘secular’ band with Islamic and Anti-Zionist lyrical themes rather than as an Islamic bandper se. This dichotomy can be best explained by the phrase ‘a band of Muslims rather than a Muslim band’. The secular Bandung scene context is a significant explanatory factor here.

The Blue Notes: South African jazz and the limits of avant-garde solidarities in late 1960s London

ABSTRACTFor the Blue Notes, an ensemble comprised of South African jazz musicians living in Britain, 1968 was pivotal. After 3 years on the margins of the London jazz scene, their debut album Very Urgent was released in May that year to positive acclaim. Very Urgent was understood as an important statement of the British jazz avant-garde movement that captured the spirit of 1968, infused with the Blue Notes’ musical South Africanisms. In this article, I explore how shifting understandings of jazz in the 1960s aided and undermined the Blue Notes’ musical identities: as mbaqanga, hard bop, and free jazz musicians. I argue that Very Urgent and, to an extent, the Blue Notes cannot be understood solely in the terms favored by their early reception in Britain. Rather, both represent a complex matrix of personal, musical, and political relations that constituted British and South African jazz art worlds in the 1960s.

"Into the Arms": U2, America, and the 1980s

"Into the Arms":U2, America, and the 1980s M. L. Brillman In the early 1990s, U2 attained their apotheosis. The ZooTV/Zooropa tours, in America and Europe respectively, following the massive success of 1991's Achtung Baby, placed the band in a global space in which audiences told their secrets, broadcast in real time, in confessional booths, and the performers made prank calls to world leaders, everyone in on the fun. In the course of the tour's concerts, Bono's alter egos parodied pop culture and hero worship; he underwent a sea change in artistic persona that was tripartite in nature. It consisted of The Fly, a character as well as the first single from Achtung Baby; ZooTV's Mirrorball Man; and Zooropa's Mr. McPhisto, both of whom represented decadent has-beens, neither earnest nor organic, essentially devil reincarnates, always with a sardonic quip—but the band's political confidence was not always so ubiquitous. In the decade before the two-year postmodern touring circus that constituted ZooTV/Zooropa and cemented U2's status as one of the world's biggest bands, the quartet took three odysseys of identity: the question of their Irishness, their position as a rock group of political conscience, and a search for roots that they had never had. There is a crucial distinction to make about U2: it as always been less of an Irish rock band than it is a rock band from Ireland. Half of the collective are not Irish; The Edge, born David Evans in England, is Welsh, and Adam Clayton, also born in England, is English. Early in U2's career, it was not Irish tradition that gripped Bono, The Edge, and Larry Mullen Jr., but, rather, charismatic Christianity (Clayton reserved serious doubts); their Christian background was built around a strong fellowship at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin, where U2 had formed in 1978, after Mullen Jr. had famously stuck a note on the bulletin board inviting musicians to meet in his family's kitchen. Many of the band's initial themes would be devoted to religion. Such songs as "Gloria," "Rejoice," and "40" contain direct Christian references and evoke a faith predicated on the glory of salvation. The lyrics, however, though introspective, were far from morose, presenting instead a new more hopeful vision of what had been a culturally repressed Ireland. If U2 were going to be labeled [End Page 58] "post-punk," furthermore, one way in which they could squash the by-then hackneyed punk code was by promoting an optimistic outlook. U2 differed from other Irish musicians in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They neither sneered nor jeered, as did Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats. They did not thrust forward their pelvises or dabble in Celtic mythology like Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy. And they did not get drunk to the point of blackout and lament the exile of the Irish emigrant like Shane MacGowan of the Pogues. If U2 followed any Irish musicians' trajectory, it would fall somewhere between Rory Gallagher, who relished playing at home, and Van Morrison, who set out to conquer Britain and America. Around the island, in Dublin and Cork in particular, the early U2 began to garner a nonchalant (or even indifferent) public acknowledgment that they were certain to become the next big rock act to hail from Ireland. Hot Press, a homegrown Irish fanzine, underscored that U2 was the 1980s band tapped by the media to export Irish rock internationally.1 It had been a local contest in Limerick, sponsored by Harp Lager, which secured U2 their first record deal. By the time the band had signed with Island Records in March 1980, listener polls had already established that U2 augured a refreshing promise as their music departed from the nihilism of punk by offering images of grace and redemption. The early catalogue possesses, in fact, very few Irish connotations. "An Cat Dubh" or "The Black Cat" on their debut album Boy (1980) chronicles a feline toying with a dead bird in Dublin—but the city portrayed on the video could be any concrete jungle, and the Irish title is of little relevance to the song...

Tom Zé, a “Grande liquidação” e a perspectiva do migrante na tradição narrativa da canção paulistana

Aqui será proposta uma leitura à luz das ciências da literatura sobre as líricas do disco “Grande Liquidação”, álbum de estreia do cantor e compositor Tom Zé. Interpretado conforme uma tendência quase conceitual, o disco será contemplado na proposta de trabalhar na canção certas narrativas sobre a cidade de São Paulo. Esse contexto é representado por Tom Zé ocupando um entrelugar, onde a vivência remete a formação como baiano que migra para a metrópole, porém reivindicando para si a tradição narrativa da canção paulistana. Essa tradição existe como rasto que alude às formações culturais paulistanas anteriores à modernização e que tem na narrativa cantada um de seus legados. Logo, iremos proceder na análise das canções do disco considerando essa conjuntura, que assim será compreendida através das teorias formuladas por Walter Benjamin sobre tradição narrativa.

The Grunge Effect: Music, Fashion, and the Media During the Rise of Grunge Culture In the Early 1990s

The Grunge Effect: Music, Fashion, and the Media During the Rise of Grunge Culture In the Early 1990s

Punk science album drops; dropping science on the concertgoing crowd

For those about to rock Ready your eardrums, Newscripts readers, because an unholy alliance of science and rock has come to a head. Pop-punk powerhouse Leucine Zipper & the Zinc Fingers, a fixture on the Atlanta science festival circuit, released its debut album, “Atomic Anarchy,” on streaming services and on CD Sept. 1. The band’s sound calls to mind the Ramones, Joan Jett, Kiss, or Iggy Pop. That is, if those icons wrote songs about enzymes that are suitable for performing in the presence of children. Each band member has a distinctive punk-rock science name. “Mine is X. O. Therm,” explains bass player and chemist Michael Evans, who by day works as Georgia Institute of Technology’s chemistry laboratory coordinator. Front woman and lyricist Leucine Zipper is the alter ego of molecular immunologist Jennifer Leavey, who develops interdisciplinary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics undergraduate programs at Georgia Tech. She aims to

Interview: Trio HLK

Trio HLK is an ensemble that draws on elements of jazz and contemporary classical music, and pushes the boundaries of both genres. They recently collaborated with Dame Evelyn Glennie (arguably the worldГўВҖВҷs foremost solo classical percussionist) and Dr Steve Lehman (contemporary jazz saxophonist and Guggenheim Fellow) on their debut album recording, Standard time. The trio launched Standard time at a concert featuring Evelyn Glennie at the QueenГўВҖВҷs Hall, Edinburgh, on 13 May 2018. This article is based on extracts from an interview conducted several days after the concert with Richard Harrold and Richard Kass, in which they discussed a wide range of topics, including their rehearsal and compositional processes, collaborations, performing, and development as an ensemble.

Islamic Religion and Death Metal Music in Indonesia

The Bandung (Indonesia) Death Metal scene is known for its secular orientation whereby religion and religious belief are viewed as personal matters that should be restricted to the private realm. Metalheads may freely go the mosque or church but in their capacities as private citizens only; religious identification and activity is not permitted to infringe upon the scene’s discourses and practices. We look at the differences in discourses and practices between the Jakarta-based One Finger Movement (Islamic) bands and the Bandung secular Death Metal scene. We also study Bandung band Saffar, which was known for its Islamic lyrics on its debut album but which has been for a few years in limbo due to the departure of vocalist and lyricist Parjo. We also look at Saffar’s positioning of itself as a “secular” band with Islamic and anti-Zionist lyrical themes rather than as an Islamic band per se. The secular Bandung scene context is a significant explanatory factor.

Lonely Starmen, Young Americans, and China Girls: David Bowie’s Critical Sexualities

Popular music is often analysed in terms of its sexual politics. Scholars generally concur that music’s cultural role is inseparable from its articulation of sexual identity, sexual desire, and gender roles. While David Bowie is often lauded for disrupting the gender and sexual orthodoxies of his time, the sexualities embodied in or suggested by his music are neither liberating nor celebratory per se. I term these in this article as ‘critical sexualities’: faulty, collapsing, morbid, and dissatisfying. By mapping the trajectories of blocked desire drawn across the length of Bowie’s oeuvre—from his much-neglected self-titled debut album, through classics such as Ziggy Stardust and Let’s Dance, to his final studio work Blackstar—I offer a detailed analysis of the artistic means by which Bowie’s music helps problematise the very conditions of possibility of a ‘normative’ sexuality in post-industrial societies and postmodern culture.

The Posse Cut as Autobiographical Utterance of Place in the Night Marchers' Three Dots

Two hundred and forty years after contact and one hundred twenty years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom, the process and project of conquest continues. Hawai'i's Indigenous people and settler populations remain caught in a tense, back-and-forth process of place-making and identity formation. The poles of Native and settler exist in the same time and place, reflected in the land and lyrical life writing as if two turntables were playing very different songs synced to the same BPM, their peaks and valleys complementing each other, the horizon of their soundscape always competing. Understanding Hawai'i thus requires the crossfade—the constant movement between two decks. In 2012, the Night Marchers, a local and Hawaiian hip-hop posse, released their debut album Three Dots, across which, Indigenous, Asian settler, and Black diasporic rap artists crossfaded across their tense geography through overlapping verses and dialogic life writing. The complexities of their work together, understood as synced but choppy, reveals the dense layers of Hawai'i's rich, symbolic, and politically overdetermined landscape.

Between Hyorish and Hyorism: A Korean TV Star and Social Media Activism

Since her solo debut album in 2003, Lee Hyori, one of the most famous stars in Korea, has kept her name in the limelight as a singer, actress, show host, advertising model, and fashion trendsetter. The Beyoncé-like diva in Korea metamorphosed after declaring a hiatus due to plagiarism on her fourth album. Suddenly, she became an animal-rights activist, a vegetarian, and a donor to poor citizens and encouraged political engagement. On her Twitter account, she updated all of her practices asking for public attention to social issues. Gradually, she transformed from a sexy TV diva to an exemplar of celebrity activism. However, she did not abandon her life and popularity as a top star; rather, she repositioned herself in between a beloved celebrity and a respected activist. This article examines how she has accomplished these two different tasks and what roles her social media engagement has played in the achievement.

Learning the altissimo register of the saxophone

Name: Emma Jones Main Subject: Classical Saxophone Research Supervisor: Pete Saunders Research Title: Learning the altissimo register of the saxophone. Research Questions: What are the different approaches to teaching the saxophones altissimo register? Can a combination of these approaches lead to a confident and comfortable use of this register? Summary: This paper looks at how the altissimo register is taught by a number of performing saxophonists and teachers and how advice from lots of different voices can lead to the moment of understanding with the altissimo register. Several method books exist to help access the register but there are few resources for the initial stages of its performance. A collection of short studies based on selected standard repertoire have been composed as a resource for students who are approaching works that demand the use of the altissimo register. A recording of the study and the excerpt of the original material accompanies a small pedagogical text to help the reader towards success. Biography: Emma Jones is a British classical saxophonist. She graduated from the Birmingham Conservatoire with a 1st class honours in 2015 studying under Naomi Sullivan and is in her final year at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. She aspires to perform regularly as an orchestral saxophonist and makes up half of the Element Duo who released their debut album in 2015.

“We Are in the Feminine Aspect Now”: Women Artists, Prince, and Visions of Utopia

Prince’s 1978 debut album For You credits the artist with production, arrangement, composition, and performance. This signaled not only his inimitable musical mastery but also his singular clarity of vision. Central to this vision were Prince’s unique aspirations to Utopia—a thread that would run throughout his musical career. This imagined society was rooted in nonconformity and, among many other things, granted men and women, Black and white, rich and poor equal access to love, sexuality, success, and peace. Utopian aspirations existed within the creative production of Prince’s earliest incarnation as an artist until his untimely death. A fictitious and very real Paisley Park, backing bands such as The Revolution, and record titles such as The Rainbow Children all point to his reach for a different more egalitarian world. This utopia would include significant challenges to constructions of race, gender, and the composition of Blackness. Prince’s singular vision of utopia cast women as essential to its creation. This paper specifically explores Prince’s unwavering support of women artists as well as their function in building and sustaining this vision. This discussion confronts the media focus on women in Prince’s musical life as simply paramours/muses and reinterrogates his commitment to female artistry and, above all, a utopian world.