Pop Stars Research Articles

Fans and Friendships: The Power of Live Concerts among Chinese Young Adults

This qualitative study explores the concert-going experiences of Chinese young adults, focusing on the role of parasocial relationships and interactive ritual chains in shaping their emotional engagement and social interactions. Through in-depth interviews with nine participants, the research reveals how social media fosters parasocial relationships, enhancing fans’ emotional connections with pop stars and motivating concert attendance. The study also examines the ritual of exchanging souvenirs, which strengthens communal bonds and distinguishes true fans through their non-commercial exchanges. The findings contribute to a nuanced understanding of the multifaceted appeal of live pop music concerts.

Descendants of the dragon: racialized mixed Chineseness in immigrant China

ABSTRACT Following China’s rise as an economic powerhouse, the country’s immigrant population has quickly increased and diversified, leading to an increase in romantic relationships between foreign and Chinese citizens. This article analyzes the racialization of belonging and citizenship of Chinese nationals born into Chinese-foreign families living in China. Drawing on data gathered through analyzing online debates and media reports, supplemented by interviews and fieldwork observations, the article investigates how discussions about the identity of vloggers, pop stars, and athletes of mixed Chinese-foreign descent shed light on rising Chinese racial nationalism at a time when China has become a destination for international migration and a new frontier for racial knowledge production. We argue that this process is characterized by a tension between China’s emergence as an immigrant society and the hardening boundaries of its national identity.

The unruly aesthetics of the pregnant pop star

The unruly aesthetics of the pregnant pop star

CBI CONTENT BASED INSTRUCTION AS INNOVATIVE TEACHING ENGLISH FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE AT HIGH SCHOOL

A CBI (Content-Based Instruction) lesson centres around a specific topic or subject matter. Throughout the lesson, students concentrate on learning about a particular subject of interest, whether it be a serious science topic, their favourite pop star, a current news story, or a film. This research utilizes a qualitative descriptive approach. It involves formulating a problem that directs the researcher to thoroughly, broadly, and deeply explore or capture the social situation under study. Content based instruction made some advantages for students. Learning a language can become more engaging and motivating. Students used the language to achieve a genuine purpose, which can increase their independence and confidence. Through CBI, students gained a broader understanding of the world, which can, in turn, enhance and support their overall educational needs. Incorporating group work into the aforementioned framework helped students develop their collaborative skills, providing significant social benefits.

Inauthenticity as a Disruption of Neoliberal Resilience Discourse in Brady Corbet'sVox Lux

Brady Corbet's Vox Lux (2018) depicts school shooting survivor Celeste's transformation into a singing superstar, connecting the trauma of a terrorist attack to the phenomenon of musical celebrity. In so doing, the film narrativises the relationship between the pop singer and neoliberal resilience discourse that has been explored by music philosopher Robin James. Mobilising Jacques Rancière's definition of political art, this article suggests that, rather than endorsing the resilience that it depicts, the film formally critiques the neoliberal function of pop stardom by disrupting the pleasurable affect associated with pop music and celebrity. Whilst Raffey Cassidy's performance of the soundtrack was praised in many reviews, the performance of Natalie Portman (playing the older Celeste) was criticised for its inauthentic delivery. Far from being a weakness of the film, my reading suggests that it is in the formal discord between the pleasurably resilient affect of the music and Portman's laboured performance that the film's political-philosophical critique of neoliberal resilience discourse comes to the fore. Taking an interdisciplinary approach grounded in the perspectives of political philosophy, girlhood studies, and celebrity studies, this article proposes that Vox Lux interrogates the neoliberal function of celebrity through a formal disruption of the pleasurable affect associated with the resilient pop star's musical performance.

Rhetorics of authentic hybridity and the racially mobile mestiça in “Girl from Rio”

ABSTRACT Brazilian pop star Anitta has achieved several indicators of a successful crossover to the U.S. music market. In this essay, I perform a close reading of the music video for “Girl from Rio” that pays special attention to how Anitta rhetorically deploys racial hybridity and mobility to construct and authenticate Brazilianness and Latinidad. Through a series of visual and textual dichotomies, “Girl from Rio” aims to appeal to a globally recognizable Brazilian identity that relies on well-known constructions of mestizaje. As rhetoricians continue to study how racial scripts prompt racial recognition, this essay contributes to this scholarly movement by focusing on Latinidad’s relationship to Blackness. Ultimately, Anitta’s music video is one among many examples of how rhetorics of mestizaje and Latinidad work together relationally to sanction both the movement and containment of certain bodies and move closer to whiteness and away from Blackness.

Martín-Barbero’s style

In Latin America, Jesús Martín-Barbero is a pop star and a beloved scholar with thousands of followers captured by his original way of thinking, imagining, and researching the relations between communication, culture, and politics. This essay explains five characteristics of Martín-Barbero’s style: (i) his reflections about expressions of popular and mass culture such as music, telenovelas, fairs, and celebrations; (ii) his gaze at and from local territories, identities; (iii) his innovative way of thinking from the Global South while in conversation with Western philosophy; (iv) his proposal for a theory of mediations as a way to understand cultural interactions and the production of social meaning; and (v) an intellectual passion that led him to engage daringly in political issues in society. As one of his students and colleagues, the essay ends with my own notions of what a communication researcher should do/be.

Queer communities, friendship, and moments of joy and wonder in Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World competition

ABSTRACT UK artist Andrew Logan has been creating art in many forms for over 50 years. Arguably his most joyously inclusive event, the Alternative Miss World competition, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2022. Adopting the same judging criteria as Crufts and offering an antithesis to the sanitised, commercially-driven pop star contest, this pageant celebrates camp excess, humour, and individuality. Logan, his friends, and colleagues – including Zandra Rhodes, Joan Bakewell, Derek Jarman, and Vivienne Westwood – exemplify an alternative version of queerness bound up with a vibrant, inclusive community. Drawing from Logan’s archive and Jill Dolan’s concept of ‘utopian performatives’ (2005), this article examines acts of solidarity and resistance that Logan and his peers/friends have exhibited over the past 50 years, highlighting the enchanting wonder and found family that have developed through mutual support. As contemporary life appears to eschew community and solidarity for independent consumerism, Logan provides an alternative way of living and creating art that advocates generous connection. This article examines how community and collaboration – in Logan’s work and beyond – can achieve positive change through utopic moments of wonder and hope.

“In the Name of the God of All Names: Yahweh, Obatalá, Olorum”: The 1981 Quilombos Mass as an Ecumenical Pilgrimage in Brazil

AbstractOn November 22, 1981, thousands of laypeople, along with bishops, priests, and theologians, gathered in Recife to celebrate the Eucharist. Offered during a military dictatorship in a period of popular insurgency, the Quilombos Mass mourned the death of millions in the African slave trade, sought pardon for the Church's past sins, and celebrated the resistance of Blacks in Brazil and beyond its borders. The acclaimed Black Brazilian pop star and activist Milton de Nascimento collaborated with an activist poet and three bishops to produce a multimedia performance; in the spirit of liberation theology, it was marked by striking visuals, dance, music, and the invocation of the sacred. This article draws on reportage, speeches and correspondence, military court and intelligence records, published interviews, and the author's interview with one of its composers. It offers a close textual analysis, with attention to Catholic theological debates, as well as an analysis of the performance itself, drawn from video recordings and bringing attention to aspects neglected by most commentators, who refer only to the album, as it was finally produced. Initially stifled by the Vatican, Milton's masterpiece, issued as an album on vinyl and performed in paid concerts, became a powerful cultural reference for activists, serving as a touchstone for a strategic alliance between Black activists and the liberationist Church.

Gavin Butt, No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment went Punk

Gavin Butt, No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment went Punk

Pop Stars on Film: Popular Culture in a Global Market

Book review

Behavioral Political Economy Analysis of Legal and Illegal K-Beauty and K-Health Products on Indonesian Women: Study Case of Post-COVID-19 Pandemic

As the K-Pop phenomenon in the world increases, there is increasing concern about physical appearance, especially oriental appearance. The phenomenon can be seen in the phenomenon of people who buy Korean cosmetics or even plastic surgery to have similarities with Korean pop stars. No exception in Indonesia, the phenomenon is also present in the community, especially among women. However, data on the behavior of Indonesian women to have similar oriental features such as Korean pop stars, especially post-pandemic, are not yet comprehensively available. Therefore, this study aims to find out how is the behavior of Indonesians, especially women, who purchase K-beauty and K-health products, legal and illegal, to improve their appearance to embrace the K-Pop beauty standard and its implications for Indonesia's political economy. This study considers that this research needs to be done to explore the behavioral political economy analysis of females from Indonesia who are looking for K-Beauty and K-Health products, legal and illegal, to improve their appearance, for a more collaborative understanding of the policy-making and education process of the public in the field of public health policy related to aesthetic beauty care or medical education for women, nationally and regionally, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Podcast Reenactments and the Sonics of Fictionalization from Cher to Swift

Podcasts often blend journalistic investigation with personal reflection, from Serial to Switched on Pop. Their veneer of fiction-as-fact especially confounds representation when podcasts’ voice acting and sound design portray pop stars in caricatured dramatizations. This paper examines reenactments of Cher and Taylor Swift in podcasts that investigate popular music industries and technology. As I show, these stars often are ventriloquized on podcasts due to their respective ages and visibility as women. Podcasts interrogate them for being too old or too young and for trespassing onto the often-male domains of business and technology. To show how podcast hosts represent women pop stars in particularly gendered and ageist ways, I listen to the sonics of fictionalization of two episodes that mythologize Cher’s Auto-Tuning and Swift’s battle to take back her masters from record industry men. First, American Innovations reenacts Cher’s request to producers to create the Auto-Tune effect, but the male host’s ventriloquy of her voice reduces her artistic and technological prowess to parody as they make her seem outdated. Then, in Business Wars, multiple voice actors reenact Swift’s career from its beginning and depict her as a child who doesn’t know any better. These podcasts blur facts and public opinion with alluring dramatizations of what “really happened,” placing listeners in the scene with compelling voice acting and ambient sound effects. In these reenactments, podcasts’ affordances of intimacy and immersion—which hosts often herald as democratizing—perpetuate cultural mythologies about gender and age in popular music.

Harry Styles as a Cecaelia: Sexuality, Representation and Media-lore in “Music for a Sushi Restaurant”

The music video for Harry Styles’s 2022 track “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” (directed by Aube Perrie) provides a surprising representation of the pop star (arguably at the peak of his career) appearing as a cecaelia (a monstrous figure with a human head, arms and torso giving way to tentacles around its midriff). The video is notable in two distinct contexts. First, in terms of Styles’s trajectory as a popular music performer who has received intense media attention because of his fan base, artistic persona and ambiguous sexual identity; and second, in terms of the articulation of a relatively minor media-loric (i.e. modern folkloric) entity in a high profile popular cultural context. The article discusses these aspects before moving to an analysis of the music video showing how Styles’s role as a cecaelia serves as a representation of his career position, public profile and desire to assert his creative-industrial agency in the early 2020s. The music video thereby illustrates the potential of media-loric figures to represent complex themes in contemporary cultural discourse.

No more parties”: Russian pop music in the context of self-isolation

The article analyzes how Russian pop music has responded to the coronavirus pandemic and its attendant quarantine and self-isolation. The songs that appeared under the quarantine restrictions and directly devoted to the issue could be divided into three theme blocks: politics, romance, and everyday life. In each of these areas, the author finds plot and music patterns that are consistent with the extreme situation or, conversely, attempt to ignore it. The article also deals with the features of video clips that have emerged under the new conditions. In particular, it discusses the contexts involving material quarantine symbols (mask, toilet paper), as well as different ways of incorporating the image of a doctor in the video clips. The article also specifies what distinguishes home-video clips shot by pop stars. In addition, the author analyzes the reasons for the phenomenal success of the song "Crying at a Techno Party" (performed by "Khleb" and "Cream coda"), which was written long before the pandemic, but suddenly became its music symbol.

Kisan Andolan in India (2020–21): Punjabi singers’ perspective

ABSTRACT The Kisan Andolan (2020–21) was a unique protest in independent India that kept the struggle at high pitch for 13 months girding Delhi at all its borders. Besides the protesting farmers, the general populace too frequented the protest sites in huge numbers. It was much akin to doing pilgrimage and of participation in the peoples’ struggle. The top pop stars of the Punjabi music industry were active participants in entertaining the protesting masses and also writing and singing the protest songs. An attempt is made here to present their perspective on the kisan andolan revolving around four themes: the Indian state, peasants’ self-perception, issues involved and the protest site.

Authenticating Whiteness: Karens, Selfies, and Pop Stars By Rachel E.Dubrofsky, University of Mississippi Press. 2022. 174 pp. $30.00 paper

Authenticating Whiteness: Karens, Selfies, and Pop Stars By Rachel E.Dubrofsky, University of Mississippi Press. 2022. 174 pp. $30.00 paper

Review of Dubrofsky’s Authenticating Whiteness: Karens, Selfies, and Pop Stars

Review of Dubrofsky’s Authenticating Whiteness: Karens, Selfies, and Pop Stars

Soviet Pop Artists in Russian TV Series: Integration of Dramatic Models of Psycho- and Socio-Biography

This article deals with the dramaturgical and musical patterns of modern Russian television biopic series about Soviet pop artists. The concept of psycho- and sociobiography as developed by the Polish researcher Eva Mazerski is used as a means of analysis. The first section describes the regularities of particular dramatic models and traces their development in late Soviet cinema. The second section examines the convergence and integration of these dramatic models on the basis of extensive material drawn from Russian TV series dedicated to Soviet pop music stars. Special attention is paid to two series: Anna Herman. The Mystery of the White Angel (2012) and Born a Star (2015) with elements from the biography of Edita Piekha. In the final part of the article the soundtrack of these two series is analysed making use of the psycho- and sociobiographical model. On one hand, one can identify how the songs played in these series correlate with the dramatic collision of the episodes in which they appear. On the other hand, one can also identify the principles behind the selection of repertoire. These can be traced, in particular, to the ratio of songs related to civil and lyrical subject matter. The article concludes that, if in the late Soviet period the models of psycho- and sociobiography still exhibited some autonomy, an autonomy inversely proportional to the ideological consistency of the film, then the current stage is determined by the active convergence and integration of two models that no longer exist in their ‘pure’ forms. As for the musical dramaturgy and selection of repertoire in the soundtrack, Soviet pop star series continue to develop an active lyricisation of the Soviet scene, replacing civil and patriotic themes with foreign hits. Nevertheless, playing Soviet pop songs serves to reconfigure the cultural and historical context of the past.

Pop stars, Financial Speculation and Content issues: An empirical analysis based on the correlation between NFT market performance and social media attention

Starting from the data of NFT concept stocks of Shanghai A-shares, this study uses the methods of data mining and correlation analysis to discuss the mismatch between the network cultural vision of NFT development and the actual market orientation. The study found that there was no significant correlation between the stock market value of NFTs and the amount of social media attention. However, positive information about pop stars has a very significant correlation with the stock market value of NFTs. Therefore, the amount of attention on social media itself cannot directly cause changes in the actual NFT market performance. On the contrary, the NFT market changes caused by the celebrity effect of pop stars are very significant. From a technical logic point of view, NFT does provide emotional value, promotes the formation of the Internet community, and becomes a portrayal of the dependence between individuals and the Internet community, and will also become the pursuit of heterogeneity and creativity under consumerism. salient features of post-Internet culture. However, from the perspective of market performance, public opinions do not affect the involvement of finance and capital. The behavior of speculative finance by taking advantage of the celebrity effect of pop stars continues. The creation of online content is just a financial by-product engulfed by the traffic effect of pop stars. Once the content is insufficient to support financial speculation, speculators are very likely to leave the NFT market with the money of collectors and investors . Therefore, perhaps the market transaction of NFT itself is not the focus in the future, the real focus is the formation of community relations oriented by content and culture; it represents the pursuit of heterogeneity in the Internet age, especially social media After pushing art into the era of "high-end" reproduction, NFT represents the pursuit of creativity and the desire for social experience.