“Spit and Sing, My Yugoslavia”: New Partisans, social critique and Bosnian poetics of the patriotic

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalibor Mišina
Keyword(s):  
Rock Music ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
Ultimate Objective ◽  
Radical Expression ◽  
Important Purpose

As “music of commitment,” in the period from the late 1970s to the late 1980s rock music in Yugoslavia had an important purpose of providing a popular-cultural outlet for the unique forms of socio-cultural critique that engaged with the realities and problems of Yugoslav society. The three “music movements” that embodied the new rock'n'roll spirit – New Wave, New Primitives, and New Partisans – used rock music to critique the country's “new socialist culture,” with the purpose of helping to eliminate the disconnect between the ideal and the reality of socialist Yugoslavia. This paper examines the New Partisans as the most radical expression of music of commitment through the works of its most important rock bands: Bijelo dugme, Plavi orkestar, and Merlin. The paper's argument is that the New Partisans’ socio-cultural engagement, animated by advocacy of Yugoslavism, was a counter-logic to the nationalist dissolution of a distinctly Yugoslav fabric of a socialist community in crisis. Thus, the movement's revolutionary “spirit of reconstruction” permeating its “poetics of the patriotic” was a mechanism of socio-cultural resistance to political, cultural and moral-ethical de-Yugoslavization of Yugoslav society. Its ultimate objective was to make the case that the only way into the future – if there was to be any – rested on strategic reanimation of the Partisan revolutionary past as the only viable socio-cultural foundation of the Yugoslav socialist community.

Commemorating Peterloo

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Popular Participation ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
Attitudes Toward Violence ◽  
The People ◽  
British Military ◽  
Parliamentary Reform ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Military Victory

Two hundred years after the massacre of peaceful protestors who had gathered in St Peter's Field, Manchester, to hear 'Orator' Henry Hunt speak for Parliamentary Reform, this volume brings together scholars of the Romantic Era to assess the implications of such state violence in England, Scotland, Ireland and North America. Chapters explore how attitudes toward violence and the claims of 'the people' to participate in government were reflected and revised in the works of figures such as P. B. Shelley, John Keats, Walter Scott, Sydney Owenson, John Cahuac and J.M.W. Turner. Their analyses provide fresh insights into cultural engagement as a means of resisting oppression and as a sign of the resilience of humanity in facing threats and force. On the whole, the book advances the hypothesis that 'Peterloo', as the event was termed to evoke the British military victory at Waterloo, was most of all a conflict over the perceived and aspirational identities of the participants and observers and that the conflict manifested the identity of 'the people' as claimants on government. Recognizing popular claim-making was crucial for the passage of Reform. Though Peterloo resulted in an immediate backlash of repression, it contributed in the longer term to the change in attitude enabling Reform. The book concludes that state violence ultimately proved ineffective against popular participation, though it also uncovers the ways in which repressive measures function as a subtle and hidden kind of violence that discourages civic activism and continues to call forth cultural resistance.

scholarly journals The Outlaw Machine, the Monstrous Outsider and Motorcycle Fetishists: Challenging Rebellion, Mobility and Masculinity in Kenneth Anger’s "Scorpio Rising" and Steven Spielberg’s "Duel"

Text Matters ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 81-99
Author(s):  
Kornelia Boczkowska
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Initiation Rites ◽  
The Road ◽  
Gay Community ◽  
Death Culture ◽  
Deep Sense

The paper analyzes the ways in which Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) and Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971) draw on and challenge selected road movie conventions by adhering to the genre’s traditional reliance on cultural critique revolving around the themes of rebellion, transgression and roguery. In particular, the films seem to confront the classic road movie format through their adoption of nomadic narrative structure and engagement in a mockery of subversion where the focus on social critique is intertwined with a deep sense of alienation and existential loss “laden with psychological confusion and wayward angst” (Laderman 83). Following this trend, Spielberg’s film simultaneously depoliticizes the genre and maintains the tension between rebellion and tradition where the former shifts away from the conflict with conformist society to masculine anxiety, represented by middle class, bourgeois and capitalist values, the protagonist’s loss of innocence in the film’s finale, and the act of roguery itself. Meanwhile, Anger’s poetic take on the outlaw biker culture, burgeoning homosexuality, myth and ritual, and violence and death culture approaches the question of roguery by undermining the image of a dominant hypermasculinity with an ironic commentary on sacrilegious and sadomasochistic practices and initiation rites in the gay community. Moreover, both Duel’s demonization of the truck, seen as “an indictment of machines” or the mechanization of life (Spielberg qtd. in Crawley 26), and Scorpio Rising’s (homo)eroticization of a motorcycle posit elements of social critique, disobedience and nonconformity within a cynical and existential framework, hence merging the road movie’s traditional discourse with auteurism and modernism.

Rock musicians in Germany and ideas for their promotion

Popular Music ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reiner Niketta
Keyword(s):  
Data Analysis ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Group Processes ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Project Report ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
Quantitative Data Analysis ◽  
Rock Musicians

In the field of scientific research on popular music there are a number of studies of the reception of rock music and various sociological analyses of the music industry, but there are few studies of rock musicians themselves. The empirical musician studies that do exist tend to use qualitative data analysis and to pursue limited research interests. There is thus work on the formation of rock bands (Jones and Harvey 1980; Schäffer 1996), on cover bands (Groce 1989), on group processes and structures (Groce and Dowell 1988; Tennstedt 1979), on female musicians (Groce and Cooper 1990) and on amateur musicians (Clemens 1983). Studies with standardised questionnaire and quantitative data analysis are rarer (but see Wills and Cooper 1988; and in Germany, Dollase, Rüsenberg and Stollenwerk 1974; Ebbecke and Lüschper 1987; Niketta 1986; Niketta, Niepel and Nonninger 1983; Weber 1990). The problem of these studies is their narrow database, and so I want to report here on a research project designed to provide empirically well-founded but broad-based evidence of the situation of rock musicians in West Germany. The research was undertaken in order to inform strategies for promoting rock music making in Germany (see Zickenheiner 1988). It was financed by the Federal Ministry for Education and Science and the Secretariat for Common Cultural Activities, in co-operation with the Centre for Music and Communication Technology, Wuppertal. The original project report was published in 1993 (Niketta and Volke 1993).

Yes, ‘Awaken’, and the progressive rock style

Popular Music ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN R. PALMER
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
Progressive Rock ◽  
The One ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Further Development ◽  
Musical Styles

Going for the One was a good rebirth of Yes at that time, to find its feet and really know what it wanted to do. And we made ‘Awaken’ . . . (Morse 1996, p. 58).Since the release of their third recording, The Yes Album, in March 1971, the music of the English band Yes has been associated with the rock music substyle called ‘progressive rock’. The first two Yes albums showcase a very capable, inventive group of musicians who drew freely from the multitude of sounds around them, emulating aspects of the various musical styles they found engaging. However, it was not until they composed the works appearing on The Yes Album that the band coupled this eclecticism with a quest for originality to develop a voice highly idiosyncratic when judged against prevailing popular music styles. Subsequent albums reveal a predeliction for experimentation and expansion, and successful record sales in both the UK and US encouraged further development in the same direction. Although not members of the ‘first wave’ of progressive rock bands, Yes became ‘codifiers’ and for many, especially later detractors, the flagship of the ‘progressive' fleet. Before I go on to describe and illustrate, through the analysis of a particular song, aspects of Yes's musical language, I will briefly describe the environment in which it appeared and flourished.

Sampling sexuality: gender, technology and the body in dance music

Popular Music ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Bradby
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
The Body ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Audience Research ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
Considerable Work

Bayton (1992) is right to be preoccupied by the mutual blindness between feminism and popular music. For if pop music has been the twentieth-century cultural genre most centrally concerned with questions of sexuality, one would expect more feminist critique and engagement with it. It is undoubtedly true that feminists have often been suspicious of pop music as typifying everything that needs changing for girls in society (McRobbie 1978), and of rock music as a masculine culture that excludes women (Frith and McRobbie 1979). Conversely, those who wished to celebrate the political oppositionality of rock music have often had to draw an embarrassed veil around its sexual politics, and have had good reason to be wary of feminism's destructive potential. Nevertheless, Bayton's own bibliography shows the considerable work that has been done by feminists on popular music, and the problem is perhaps better seen as one of marginalisation of this work within both feminist theory and popular music studies. In addition, I would argue that the work of Radway (1987), Light (1984), Modleski (1984) and others, in ‘reclaiming’ the popular genres of romance reading and soap opera for women, does have parallels in popular music in the work of Greig (1989) and Bradby (1990) on girl-groups, or McRobbie on girls and dancing (1984). Cohen (1992) shows some of the mechanisms through which men exclude women from participation in rock bands, while Bayton's own study of women musicians parallels other sociological work on how women reshape work roles (1990). And the renewed interest in audience research in cultural studies has allowed a re-valorisation of girls' and women's experience as fans of popular music (Garratt 1984; Lewis 1992), and as creators of meaning in the music they listen to (Fiske 1989; Bradby 1990).

scholarly journals Football and the sounds of the Black Atlantic

2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942110153
Author(s):  
Daniel Burdsey ◽  
John Doyle
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
British Society ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Deep Listening

This article maps and analyses the relationship between football and black sound cultures in the UK. Employing a chronological and thematic approach, specifically, it examines the inclusion of football in post-Windrush calypsos, the appropriation of black music forms in football stadia, reggae as cultural critique of English football and British society, and the connections between transnational sounds and a diasporic footballing consciousness. Theoretically, this article draws on – and places in dialogue – Paul Gilroy’s concept of the ‘Black Atlantic’, Josh Kun’s notion of ‘audiotopia’ and Les Back’s emphasis on ‘deep listening’. This framing illuminates how music forms travel back and forth along diasporic roots and routes between Africa, the Caribbean, the United States and the United Kingdom. Critically, the article locates the relationship between football, music and race as providing the context and capacity for progressive change, and foregrounds its role as an important medium and method of cultural resistance to the marginalisations experienced by Black Atlantic diasporas and within football itself. The article concludes by looking forward, in an era of Black Lives Matter, to consider the spaces and practices of fandom and consumption that might open up as a result of listening and responding sociologically to the relationship between football and black sound cultures.

scholarly journals Biographical Aspects of Rock Music

2021 ◽  
pp. 366-379
Author(s):  
V.N. Syrov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Rock Music ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
Creative Personality ◽  
John Lennon ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Many

It is necessary to make difference between biography as a history of a person’s life and biography as a retelling of this story made by a professional author. It is this “author’s” biography that is the subject of this article. Turning to biography as a genre, we note that it exists in the environment of other genres and forms: these are various kinds of diaries, chronicles, memoirs, testimonies. It can be based on a collection of interviews, publications from different years, and even correspondence. Among the many biographies, chronicles and biographies of musicians and rock bands, the author selects those in which a bright individuality stands out against the background of parallel and commensurate creative values. The biographies of The Beatles and, in particular, John Lennon, the versatile character of whose creative personality is demonstrated by a vivid example of an “opening” biography, are considered.

scholarly journals Russian rock music: “Orthodox art”, new religion or “lovely paganism”?

2020 ◽  
pp. 10-28
Author(s):  
Andrey Beskov
Keyword(s):  
Rock Music ◽  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
Russian Orthodox ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
Russian Orthodox Church ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
Christian Rock ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
Scientific Periodicals ◽  
New Religion

This article is dedicated to examination of the art of several famous Russian rock bands, which leaders have repeatedly declared their religiosity and to some extent are engaged in missionary activity of the Russian Orthodox Church. The author covers the questions whether it is appropriate to attribute the art of such rock bands to the genre of “Christian rock”, and do the rock musicians contribute to popularization of Orthodox doctrine and churching of their fans, or rather to desecration of religious values and ideals. For solution of the set tasks, the author analyzed song lyrics of the prominent Russian rock bands, as well as interviews of their leaders and other publications in mass media and scientific periodicals that touch upon a religious aspect in rock music. The art of various Russian rock bands often attracted the attention of researchers, who noticed religious (primarily Christian) symbolism in the song lyrics. However, there has not been previously raised a question of whether it is possible to define the art of such rock bands as “Christian rock” or “Orthodox art” based on existence of references to Christian symbolism. It is demonstrated that leaning on the comprehensive analysis of the art of several Russian rock bands that use religious symbols and allusions in their lyrics, there are no grounds to attribute them to the genre of “Christian rock”. Despite the fact that the majority of leaders of these bands and the authors of texts are Orthodox, the lyrics, visual arrangements and videos often have the elements of Neo-Paganism.

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