Popular Music Culture Research Articles

Performing sound of the past: Remix in electronic dance music culture

The term remix, defined as an activity of taking data from pre-existing materials to combine them into new forms according to personal taste, relates to various elements and areas of contemporary culture. Whichever model used, consideration of the remix depends on recognition of pre-existing cultural codes. Therefore, as a second layer, the remix relies on the authority of the original and it functions at the meta-level. The audience may see a trace of history with the pre-existing object and the meaning creates in the viewer(s), reader(s), listener(s) or, in the contemporary world of DJs and popular electronic dance music culture - in dancer(s). With the aim of specifying modes of creating particular ambients, this paper will consider and examine the song Why Don?t You? remixed by Marko Milicevic, a Serbian DJ also known as Gramophonedzie, and illuminate how material from the past can create a constructive (musical) dialogue.

‘No caps, no coconuts, no all-male groups’ … the regulation of Asians in London clubs

Until now, British Asian popular music culture and leisure spaces have attracted little sociological investigation. This article redresses the lack of attention paid to this area by focusing on an ethnographic study of the ‘desi’ South Asian club scene in London. It explores the relationship between contemporary discourses of Asianness as they are constructed within an East London desi club space and made to matter through embodied social practices. Asian bodies are disciplined in the making of normative ethnic, gendered and sexual subjectivities, which demonstrates how discourses of difference create complex subjectivities and practices that theories of diaspora and cultural studies have not fully explored. It offers a rethinking of diasporic identities as lived and embodied experiences that are ambivalently constructed and performative projects, neither entirely resistant to white, dominant discourses nor wholly complicit with its existing norms.

Notes towards a typology of the DIY institution: Identifying do-it-yourself places of popular music preservation

This article presents some notes towards identifying what we have come to call ‘DIY institutions’: places of popular music preservation, archiving and display that exist outside the bounds of ‘official’ or ‘national’ projects of collection and heritage management. These projects emerge instead from within communities of music consumption, where groups of interested people have, to some degree, undertaken to do it themselves, creating places (physical and/or online) to store – and, in some cases, display publicly – the material history of music culture. In these places people, largely volunteers, who are not expert in tasks associated with archiving, records management, preservation or other elements involved in cultural heritage management, learn skills along the way as they work to collect, preserve and make public artefacts related to popular music culture. The article argues that these places are suggestive of broader desires from within communities of popular music consumption to preserve popular music heritage.

From Old Media Whore to New Media Troll

On the 18 January, 2009, an online pop music fan posted over fifty outtake images from Madonna's photographic shoot for her previously released Hard Candy album. These photos produced a backlash of abuse of the then fifty-year-old Madonna from music fans and can be situated in a wider online discursive sphere of brutal and offensive critique of Madonna's ageing body and femininity in social networking sites such as Facebook, for example. While longevity, experience and wisdom ensure that Madonna continues to be meaningful to nostalgic and new audiences alike, these attributes slide out of view as the focus remains upon her body, its femininity and its ability to ‘pass’ in a youth-centred popular music culture. In the wider context of a cultural, political and industry debate around the practice of releasing pre- and post-airbrushed images, the leaked photos are instrumental (albeit unintentionally) for interrogating the relationship between media and authentic ageing female bodies. This article offers a theoretical analysis of the online discursive (textual and visual) poaching and negotiation of Madonna's image, celebrity and marketing of the ageing female body.

Traces of spirituality in the Lady Gaga phenomenon

This paper will explore the type of spiritual expression of adolescents and young people in and through current popular music culture. In particular, the paper will propose the music and industry constructed by and around the popular singer and songwriter Lady Gaga as a test case. Her incessant use of religious language and religious symbolism has equally attracted praise and criticism. This paper will acknowledge that Lady Gaga is not simply an icon of this hypermodernity, but she is a complex phenomenon which brings together various elements as well as actors. It will explore if and to what extent the main spiritual elements are traceable in this phenomenon.

Rock Clubs and Gentrification in New York City: The Case of the Bowery Presents

This article offers a new analytical perspective on the relation between rock clubs and gentrification to illuminate broader changes in urbanism and cultural production in New York City. Although gentrification is central to understanding how the urban condition has changed since the 1960s, the long-term implications for popular music and its evolution within new urban populations and cultural industries have received relatively little scholarly attention. Gentrification has often been dismissed as an outside threat to music scenes. This article, in contrast, argues that gentrification needs to be understood as a broader social, economic, and cultural process in which popular music cultures have changed. The argument is developed through a case study of the Bowery Presents, a now dominant concert promoter and venue operator with offices on the Lower East Side. Based on fieldwork conducted over a three-year period and on urban sociological macro-level analysis, this article develops an analytical narrative to account for the evolution of the contemporary concert culture in the mid-size venues of the Bowery Presents on the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as a particular instance of more general dynamics of culture and commerce in contemporary cities. The narrative opens up new perspectives for theorizing live music and popular culture within processes of urban social change. The article begins by reviewing conventional approaches to rock music clubs in popular music studies and urban sociology. These approaches are further clarified through the mapping of a deep structure in how music scenes have framed the relationship between clubs and gentrification discursively. The article then examines the evolution of the Bowery Presents within the expansive process of gentrification. The focus is placed here on the cultural profile of the now dominant mid-size venue culture and on three stages in the development of the company and its field-structuring impact on rock clubs on the Lower East Side in particular. The conclusion sums up the key points and suggests that gentrification might involve changing conditions of artistic creativity and performance, with implications for fundamental aspects of urban life; a point illustrated by the trajectory of Occupy Wall Street.

Mapping live provisions in Welsh-language rock, 1978–80

The article entails an analysis of the Welsh-language live popular music scene in the late 1970s. Composed of amateurs motivated by a desire to promulgate the Welsh language within the linguistic domain of youth popular music culture, Welsh-language popular music of this period was overwhelmingly dominated by rock artists such as Geraint Jarman, Eliffant, and Y Trwynau Coch (The Red Noses), whose pioneering national tours of Wales (1978, 1979, 1980) emulated those of Y Blew (The Hair) ten years earlier, and popularized the notion of touring, as opposed to gigging at weekends, for their contemporaries. Utilizing geospatial analysis techniques, the article examines live opportunities for bands in the period immediately preceding the late 1970s, and advances possible explanations for the observed development of provisions for Welshlanguage youth entertainment.

Talkin bout my generation: popular music and the culture of heritage

Raymond Williams once remarked that ‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (1983). He never said what the other ones were but had he been writing today, one of these might well have been ‘heritage’. Indeed, the imbrications of ‘culture’ and ‘heritage’, and the vexed nature of their relationship, particularly with regard to popular music, are such that each has come to serve as a synonym for the other in the wider sociocultural imaginary. This paper casts a critical spotlight on discourses of cultural heritage in the UK by questioning what makes popular music culture ‘heritage’ and considering the extent to which the UK popular music has become increasingly heritagised. Relating the specific example of popular music to wider debates on cultural heritage and heritagisation, the paper calls for greater problematising of discourses of popular music as cultural heritage, and considers, by way of conclusion, how a critical focus on the lived, performative and ‘hauntological’ dynamics of music heritage practices can illuminate understandings of the way cultures of music and memory are negotiated and transacted in the present.

Bedlam in mind: Seeing and reading historical images of madness

This article explores the mythical Bedlam of popular imaginings. London’s Bethlem Hospital was for centuries a unique institution caring for the insane, and its alter ego ‘Bedlam’ influenced popular stereotypes of insanity. For example, while the type of vagrant beggar known as a ‘Tom of Bedlam’ was said to have disappeared from English society with the Restoration, the figure of Mad Tom retained a visual and vocal presence within popular musical culture from the 17th century up to the present era. Using the ballad ‘Mad Tom o’ Bedlam’ as a case study, the article illustrates how an early modern stereotype of madness has maintained continuity within a popular song tradition while undergoing cultural change.

Pop Cult: Religion and Popular Music (review)

Reviewed by: Pop Cult: Religion and Popular Music Tim Craig Rupert Till . Pop Cult: Religion and Popular Music. London: Continuum, 2010. 215 pp. pbk $34.95 (US). ISBN: 978-0-8264-3236-0. Mainstream religions have lost their influence in this fast-paced, postmodern society, and in Pop Cult, Rupert Till explores new modes of religious expression centred around popular music. Taking the form of what the author dubs "Pop Cults," these systems of belief have sprouted in the gap between the modern (namely, Christian) church and contemporary culture, offering a distinctly new framework for scholars of this area. Till writes with an insider's take on the music industry. A senior lecturer in music at the University of Huddersfield, Till has critiqued, composed, created, or played most music forms. He has been a member of numerous bands, including specifically Christian ones, and has worked as a promoter in all levels of the music business. This insider pedigree works to give Till the credibility needed to parse through the murky world of the popular and the sacred. It is the parsing that becomes central to the thesis of the book. Till intentionally uses the term "cult" in the title and throughout the book as his way to "recontextualize, reconstruct, redefine, redeem, and reclaim" (1) the word from its connotative cultural use. Within the culture, dominated by anti-cultic groups, the term tends to generate a sense of moral panic or outrage. The sociological term, new religious movements (NRMs), the author deems insufficient because it lacks the power of the cultural use of the term and conveys a sense of neutrality toward the subject. Till, then, attempts to use this research as a way of pulling the term "cult" out of the traditional moral panic—while still keeping the power of the word—and into a post-NRM era that provides "new ways of understanding and relating to one another . . . in the void left by the old religious movements" (191-192). The author keeps the moral panic, connotative sense of the term "cult" by repeatedly using the terms "brainwash" and "brainwashing" when describing pop cult activities. Although he notes early in the text that "others say that such brainwashing is a myth" (3), he uses "brainwash" and "brainwashing" to describe a range of activities within popular music groups, from music business marketing practices (72) to drug use (45) to the methods of heavy metal music (129). This continual use of terms that many in the field would describe as referencing a myth may limit the validity of the overall thesis. The author asserts that popular music cultures fit within the framework of cult study because they fit the characteristics of a cult, including a focus around a person or group of people who are worshipped and/or who are seen as having a gift; requiring a high level of commitment among its adherents; figures that work behind-the-scenes to increase the cult's membership; and group activities employing forms of manipulative practices and modes of dress. But it is not just the classification that has allowed pop music cultures to be elevated to cultic status; postmodernity has given cults the ability "to challenge traditional religions for the allegiance of the populace" (10). After establishing this framework, the author moves to apply it onto different music cultures. Fairly obvious cult movements centred around sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll personalities follow. Musicians' use of transgressive sexual practices and personas, with Madonna as the model, becomes a basis for sex cults. The promotion of drug use by stars and their fans, Till notes, is "perhaps the easiest section" (44) to align with a cult. The enigmatic Prince is central [End Page 332] to a discussion of the cult of personality. While chapters on these particular movements seem obvious, the latter three areas of discussion focus on some overlooked areas that seem rich for additional research. Till's look at local music scenes, which engender pride in local communities among fans, seems to connect music fandom with civic devotion. Pop music's intriguing relationship with death—in its elevation of stars who have died, or in forms of heavy-metal music—allows devotees...

Gendering Islam: Ms Undastood and the search for alternative models of black womanhood

The aim of this article is to explore how black musicians, particularly those who proclaim a close relation with Islam, are using the cultural images from Islam to create new identities within black communities. Little has been written on the influence of Islam on female artists in African American communities. Since influence is not a one way road, this paper reveals that some female African American singers have appropriated the cultural symbols in Islam, recontextualised these symbols as female singers and manipulated them to speak to or elaborate on the women's new found Muslim identities. This paper selects some lyrics of Ms Undastood, a musician who openly proclaims her close relationship with and cites Sunni Islam names and the religious credo that she manipulates as a fertile source of her artistic imagination. It will be argued that the lyrics of this artist demonstrate a quest to create an ideal and alternative black community informed by the spiritual values of the Sunni version of Islam. Although in her lyrics she is aware of the struggles of beliefs within the versions of faiths articulated through Nation of Islam, The Five Percenters or the Nation of Gods and Earths, and Sunni Islam, Ms Undastood has drawn criticism for implying that Sunni Muslim values are better than those values in the other versions of Islam. However it will also be demonstrated that the political significance of her contribution to black females and Muslims is to have challenged the emerging mainstream but black male dominated Islamic popular musical culture.

Student music

PurposeThis research aims to explore in detail aspects of the role and character of student unions as venues for live music in post‐war Britain. Guiding questions ask: what part have student unions, entertainment officers and the wider body of students – in their role as consumers – played in the economics of the live music business? What is specific to the business of live music in student unions? How is this sector of activity related to national and local scenes, promoters, non‐student audiences and the wider popular music culture and economy?Design/methodology/approachThe research draws upon formal and informally archived sources to formulate definitions and scope for research, tracing the historical emergence and fortunes of popular music programming in universities.FindingsThe research traces a history of professionalization of music provision by students, a result of co‐ordination efforts by the National Union of Students. It outlines the specific character of live music business in student unions as determined by its subsidized nature.Research limitations/implicationsSources for research are unevenly preserved and the scope of activity – historical and contemporary is considerable. Further empirical research is required in order to fully explore this important, if neglected area of cultural and economic activity.Originality/valueThe role and character of student unions in the economy of the music industry is rarely considered and this paper offers set of concepts for further research and detailed historical insights into this sector of business.

Music Radio and the Record Industry: Songs, Sounds, and Power

The nature of the economic, social, and cultural relations between the radio industry and the record industry is most often characterized by both academics and practitioners as symbiotic, that is, both parties benefit from the interaction. Music radio needs records to fill airtime and to attract audiences and the record industry needs the kind of pervasive exposure that airplay still provides to sell product and to build artist profiles.1 The rewards, it has been suggested for decades, are mutual and equivalent. This article argues that the symbiosis argument is an over-simplification of a complex set of relationships. Drawing on interviews with record industry promotions personnel and music radio programmers, I make a case that not only does music radio hold the dominant position in the relationship between itself and the record industry but also that this has had important consequences for record industry A&R practices (signing policy and release schedules) and the production of popular music recordings (the actual sounds on the records). The power of music radio extends far beyond simple promotion of records and artists—it has a profound influence on the sound of popular music and the shape of popular music culture.

Preliminary thoughts on Hindi popular music and film production: India's ‘culture industry(ies)’, 1970–2000

The unique nature of the relationship between popular film and music production in India has defined the nature of popular music as an industry and as a cultural commodity from 1931. This relationship solidified during the first roughly 25 years of Indian independence in response to specific industrial, regulatory, and cultural conditions; but as those conditions began to shift after 1970, the relationship became increasingly fluid. This study offers an initial understanding of the complex set of industrial, musical and cultural changes in the world of Indian popular music during a period of unprecedented change in film industry personnel, industrial structure and logic, music and film recording and consumption technologies and governmental regulation. I argue that these ultimately resulted in a series of shifts in the ideological and cultural position of film music in India's popular music culture.

Metal Studies? Cultural Research in the Heavy Metal Scene

Given its popularity, visibility and complexity, the scholarly study of heavy metal needs no justification. Like other popular music cultures, heavy metal is a contested and controversial marker of...

Latin Down Under: Latin American migrant musicians in Australia and New Zealand

AbstractThe global significance of Latin American popular music is well documented in contemporary research. Less is known about Latin American music and musicians in Australia and New Zealand (collectively termed ‘Australasia’): nations that have historically hosted waves of migrants from the Americas, and which are also strongly influenced by globalised US popular music culture. This article presents an overview of Latin American music in Australasia, drawing on ethnographic research, with the aim of providing a historical framework for the understanding of this music in the Australasian context. It begins with an explanation of the early 20th-century conceptualisation of ‘Latin’ in Australasia, and an investigation into how this abstract cultural construction affected performance opportunities for Latino/a migrants who began to arrive en masse from the 1970s onwards. It then discusses the performance practices that were most successfully recreated by Latin American musicians in Australia and New Zealand, especially ‘Andean’ folkloric music, and ‘tropical’ dance music. With reference to prominent individuals and ensembles, this article demonstrates how Andean and tropical performance practices have developed over the course of the last 30 years, and articulates the enduring importance of Latin American music and musicians within Australasian popular music culture.

From Global to ‘Glocal’: The Evolution of Popular Music Culture in Northeast Asia

From Global to ‘Glocal’: The Evolution of Popular Music Culture in Northeast Asia

Musically mapped: Czech popular music as a second ‘world sound’

This article broadly considers the developments and contemporary dynamics within Czech popular music culture since that country’s post-communist transition, specifically exploring the relationships between local musicians, the local music culture industries and the dimensions and operations of the global music industry. The interests and objectives of these entities and the complexities of their interconnectivity is explored, especially as it relates to integrating Czech popular music culture into the global realm, the transnational articulation of cultural identity through popular music and the musical geopolitics surrounding transnational distribution policies and practices. Utilizing ethnographic insights, it seeks to contribute to the understanding of global corporate music production processes and the complexities present at the intersections of corporate and music cultures in historically specific contexts.

Songs of the Stones: An Investigation into the Acoustic History and Culture of Stonehenge <br> doi:10.5429/2079-3871(2010)v1i2.10en

This paper investigates the acoustic culture of Stonehenge, an iconic British prehistoric stone circle. It addresses references to the structure within popular music culture, as well as Thomas Hardy’s discussion of the site. It investigates ritual activities in prehistory from an analytical consideration of its acoustics, using theoretical, digital modeling, physical modeling and field measurement approaches. Stonehenge in prehistory is found to have significant acoustic features that are likely to have had an impact in prehistory. Conclusions are drawn about what we can learn from the similarities between ritualistic musical culture in prehistory and in contemporary popular culture.

Nina Simone's Triple Play

Nina Simone's Triple Play Daphne A. Brooks (bio) Listen to the opening notes of Nina Simone's remarkable 1957 debut album Little Girl Blue and one hears a performer asserting her intentions, throwing down the glove: the exuberant "motor running-running" (Dobie 232) trademark vocals, the playfully virtuosic dance of a pianist's velocity that turns the tempo of a Duke Ellington classic inside out and breaks open the melody to mine the ironically pulsating energy, the propulsive beat of non-stop "indigo" heartbreak. As jazz critic Scott Yanow states in the liner notes to the album, Simone's take on Ellington was one of many "unexpected" and "memorable" twists that introduced the artist to the world. "[R]ather than begin the [recording] with one of her more accessible vocals," says Yanow, "Simone starts out with a surprisingly up tempo and abstract piano exploration of 'Mood Indigo' before her vocal makes the song a bit more recognizable" (Yanow). It remains the first (public) record(ing) of Nina Simone's counterintuitive brilliance as an artist who defied the center, ran circles in the margins, and wove together "highbrow" and "lowbrow" forms to create an off-beat repertoire that was, some might argue, "emo" before "emo," Afropunk, folk eclectic, jazz torch song magic.1 No one critical apparatus can sustain a sufficient reading of Nina Simone, an artist celebrated in part for having stylized a heterogeneous musical repertory of songs for nearly four decades. A classically-trained pianist who shifted into jazz, pop, cabaret, and folk performing in the mid 1950s as a way to support her education and subsequently to shore up her income, Simone gained notoriety for having moved fluidly from playing the music hall chanteuse by covering Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy" (inspired by Billie Holiday's interpretation) and the Norwegian folk lilt of "Black is the Color of My True Lover's Hair" to "Duke Ellington compositions, Israeli folk songs, and songs by the Bee Gees" (Bernstein B6). She was the ultimate queen of popular music "crossover" in the most exhilarating and unconventional sense of the word, and she deftly and consistently called upon this ability to mix and match musical forms as a way to break free of the racial and gender circumscriptions placed upon her in popular music culture. Simone frequently commented on the significance of her generic moves, boldly proclaiming that "'It's always been my aim to stay outside any category'. 'That's my freedom,'" she insisted to one reporter. But it was a "freedom" that, according to biographer David Nathan, "drove industry pundits and the music press crazy as they tried to categorize her" (Nathan 232). [End Page 176] "There Must Be Some Kind of a Way Out of This Place": Nina Simone's Musical Maroonage In many ways, Nina Simone would shape the bulk of her career in response to an aesthetic conundrum: what should a black female artist sound like? Some of Simone's most famous song titles summed up this query. Through her music she sought to make her listeners grasp how "it would feel to be free" and to be "young, gifted, and black," as well as female. Her songs thus served as sonic struggles in and of themselves, as embattled efforts to elude generic categorizations as a black female performer. These points would likewise resonate throughout much of Simone's intense and absorbing memoir, I Put a Spell On You, a text in which the artist assails the cultural myopia of critics too obtuse to read the aesthetic range and complexities of her material. "[S]aying what sort of music I played," Simone observes, "gave the critics problems because there was something from everything in there" (Simone and Cleary 68-69). For Simone, the constant (and, in her mind, completely erroneous) comparisons to Billie Holiday were signs of the music press's inability to read the depth of diversity in black female musical expression. People, she argues, "couldn't get past the fact we were both black. . . . Calling me a jazz singer was a way of ignoring my musical background because I didn't fit into white ideas of what a black performer should be" (Simone...