“Search and Destroy”

2021 ◽  
pp. 451-473
Author(s):  
Jay Beck
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
The Self ◽  
Punk Rock ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Advertising Industry ◽  
Demographic Group ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
Search And Destroy ◽  
Means Of Production

Punk rock, as a movement within popular music, sought to differentiate itself from prior forms of commercial rock in both sound and attitude. Anti-corporate and anti-consumerist in orientation, punk’s guiding maxim of “do it yourself” was about taking control of the means of production and shifting the musical form outside of the nexus of capitalism. This chapter examines the resultant effects and contradictions surrounding the use of punk music in television advertisements from the 1990s to the 2010s. The advertising industry initially kept their distance from punk until after the self-appointed architect of punk style, Malcolm McLaren, began writing original music for ads in 1990. From Iggy Pop seducing Royal Caribbean customers to The Clash hawking Jaguars, punk has proven to be a lucrative way for advertisers to connect to a demographic group who define themselves as anti-consumerist.

Music for Socialism, London 1977

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-93
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN PIEKUT
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Good Time ◽  
Arts Funding ◽  
National Front ◽  
Music Genres ◽  
Rock Band ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Means Of Production

AbstractMembers of the rock band Henry Cow co-founded Music for Socialism in early 1977 with the assistance of several associates in London's cultural left. Their first large event, a socialist festival of music at the Battersea Arts Centre, gathered folk musicians, feminists, punks, improvisers, and electronic musicians in a confabulation of workshops, performances, and debates. The organization would continue to produce events and publications examining the relationship between left politics and music for the next eighteen months. Drawing on published sources, archival documents, and interviews, this article documents and analyzes the activities of Music for Socialism, filling out the picture of a fascinating, fractious organization that has too often served as a thin caricature of abstruse failure compared with the better resourced, more successful, and well-documented Rock Against Racism. As important as the latter was to anti-racist activism during the rise of the National Front, it was not concerned with the issues that Music for Socialism considered most important – namely, how musical forms embody their own politics and how musicians might control their means of production. Affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party (UK), Rock Against Racism produced massive benefit concerts and rallies against the fascist right, drawing together musicians and audiences from punk and reggae. The much smaller events of Music for Socialism enrolled musicians from a range of popular music genres and often placed as much emphasis on discussion and debate as they did on having a good time. The organization's struggles, I will suggest, had less to do with ideological rigidity than it did with the itineracy and penury of musicians and intellectuals lacking support from the music industry, governmental arts funding, labor organizations, or academia.

scholarly journals “At This Age, This Is Who I Am”: CeCe Winans, Exilic Consciousness, and the American Popular Music Star System

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 475-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela M. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
The Self ◽  
Star System ◽  
Christian Women ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
American Popular Music

Abstract My paper addresses the intersections of the American popular music star system, Black female Gospel singers, Gospel Music, and the exilic consciousness of the Sanctified Church with special attention to life and music of Gospelwoman Priscilla Marie “CeCe” Winans Love. I argue that CeCe Winans and the marketing campaign for Winans’ album Let Them Fall in Love, is indicative of the encroachment of American popular music’s star system into self-elected “exiled” Gospel Music and into the lives of “exiled” Gospelwomen. Gospelwomen are 20th and 21st century urban African American Protestant Christian women who are paid for singing Gospel Music and who have recorded at least one Gospel album for national distribution. The self-elected exile of Gospelwomen refers to their decision to live a life based on the values of the Kingdom of God while encountering and negotiating opposing values in American popular culture. Gospelwomen and Gospel Music are impacted by the demands of stardom in America’s celebrity culture which includes achieved success and branding. Gospelwomen negotiate these components of stardom molding them into mechanisms that conform to their beliefs and needs.

Gender Differences of Popular Music Production in Secondary Schools

2011 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Michael Abramo
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
Learning Styles ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Music Production ◽  
Musical Production ◽  
Music Class ◽  
Opposite Gender

In this case study, the author inv estigated how students’ gender affected their participation in a secondary popular music class in which participants wrote and performed original music. Three same-gendered rock groups and two mixed-gendered rock groups were observ ed. Would students of different genders rehearse and compose differently? How would same-gendered processes compare to mixed-gendered processes? Research suggests that girls learn differently from boys and that gender—as distinct from sex—is formed in social env ironments. In research on popular music education, howev er, the participation of girls has been under-documented and under-theorized. This study found that boys and girls rehearsed and composed differently: Whereas the boys combined musical gestures and nonv erbal communication into a seamless sonic process, the girls separated talk and musical production. In the mixed-gendered groups, tensions arose because participants used different learning styles that members of the opposite gender misunderstood. Broadening popular music pedagogies to incorporate different practices is suggested.

Gay-Made Space

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Amico
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Gay Men ◽  
Social Space ◽  
The Self ◽  
Shared Spaces ◽  
The Creation ◽  
East West

This chapter explores the relationships among spatiality, orientation, and corporeality by focusing on the ways in which a post-Soviet, gay social space is engendered, in part, via popular music. It first compares temporality and spatiality in relation to homosexuality in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras before discussing popular music's relationship to sexuality and the post-Soviet experiences of detemporalization and deterritorialization. It then assesses the importance of virtual, mediated, musical spaces in the creation of the self. It also analyzes how geographic spaces, cyberspaces, and media spaces, the material and the virtual, both conform to and act upon the embodiments of homosexuality, and how Russian gay men continually create and re-create salubrious spaces and places, in part via their experience as embodied subjects whose corporeal existence links them to others in shared spaces and places. The chapter shows that seeming binaries—inside/outside, here/there, now/then, us/them, East/West—as experienced via musical spaces do not preclude the formation of a situated, stable, sexual self, one affectively and physically connected to both sound and space.

Adorno's Schreker: Charting the self-dissolution of the distant sound

2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
ADRIAN DAUB
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Self ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
Musical Production ◽  
Opera House ◽  
The One ◽  
Means Of Production

Franz Schreker's opera Der ferne Klang is usually discussed using the term ‘phantasmagoria’, as a guiding thread. This article argues that this term names not one but two phenomena: as used by Theodor W. Adorno in his analysis of Wagner, the term denotes the repression of musical production in order to create a music without origin. In a lesser-known piece Adorno uses the term slightly differently, in a sense pioneered first by his friend Walter Benjamin. This second sense is interested in the repression not of musical production, but of the acoustic means of production that conspire to create a unified, synaesthetic experience (rather than an aesthetic object). This second sense, the denial of any sense data outside of the one experience to be had in an opera house, is exceedingly fruitful when applied to Der ferne Klang, since its hero is questing for the titular sound which is located in that very space the aural phantasmagoria has to pretend does not exist. Reading Schreker's opera keeping both senses of the term in mind may allow us to overcome Adorno's own somewhat negative assessment of Schreker's modernism and to locate within the opera a certain self-consciousness of phantasmagoric production.

Popular modernism? The ‘urban’ style of interwar Tin Pan Alley

Popular Music ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulf Lindberg
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
The Self ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Internal Logic ◽  
Tin Pan Alley ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Song Writing ◽  
High Literature ◽  
Emotional Style

The approach of this article complements those of previous critics that account for the rise of the ‘mature’ style of Tin Pan Alley chiefly in terms of the internal logic of the field of American popular music. It suggests that the so-called golden age of the Alley (ca. 1920–1940) should be considered in broader cultural terms, provided by modernisation and especially the growth of a ‘cool’, urban sensibility, representing a crucial reassessment of Victorian emotional style. In their contributions to this reassessment, the Alley greats stretched the conventions of popular song-writing in a number of ways, usually described vaguely in terms of ‘wit’, ‘sophistication’ and the like. Qualifying these concepts by lyrical analysis, the article suggests that the self-reflexive use of irony, linguistic play and ‘realist’ imperatives makes a number of songs approach contemporary ‘high’ literature in such a way that it makes sense to speak of a popular modernism.

scholarly journals The Dialectic of the Nature-Society-System

1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
Raw Materials ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Production Model ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
Free Society ◽  
Nature And Society ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Means Of Production

There are four logical possibilities for conceiving the relationship of nature and society: the reduction of society to nature, the projection of nature into society, dualism, and a nature-society-dialectic. This differentiation results in four different approaches. Nature is a self-organizing system that produces an evolutionary hierarchy of interconnected systems with specific qualities. Society is a product of nature where humans produce and reproduce structures that enable and constrain human practices in dynamic processes. Parts of nature are observed and appropriated by humans from within society, these parts are socially constructed and form a subsystem of society. The self-organization cycle of nature and the self-organization cycle of the socio-sphere are mutually connected in a productive cycle of society where natural self-organization serves as the material foundation that enables and constrains social self-organization and human production processes transform natural structures and incorporate these very structures into society as means of production (technologies, raw materials). The economy is that part of the socio-sphere where the relationship between nature and the socio-sphere is established, the mediation is achieved by human labour processes. Nature enters the economic process as material input in the form of means of production (constant capital): machines, raw materials, auxiliary materials. Organized nature that is part of the production process in the form of technology increases the productivity of labour and hence reduces the costs of variable capital (total amount of wages) and increases the speed of the production of surplus value. The production system of modern society is oriented on economic profit and productivity, ecological depletion and pollution are by-products of modernization. The Fordist production model that originated in the West and was copied by the Soviet Union is one of the major causes of the global ecological crisis. The productive forces are in modern society socially and ecologically destructive forces. In late capitalism there is a tendency of commodification and privatization of nature and human knowledge. Especially in the later writings of Marx and Engels one can find formulations that suggest a productivist logic that sees nature as an enemy opposed to man, as a resource and object that must be mastered, exploited, and controlled. But throughout the works of Marx and Engels one can find many passages where they argue that there is an antagonism between capitalism and nature that results in ecological degradation and that a free society is also based on alternative, sustainable relationships between man and nature. The idea of an alternative society-nature-relationship and of nature conservation can already be found in the works of Marx and Engels, they are precursors of ecological thinking. In Orthodox Marxism dialectical thinking has been interpreted as deterministic and mechanic laws and misused for arguing that the Soviet system is a free society. An alternative is a dialectic that stresses human practice and that structures condition alternative possibilities for action. Dialectic thinkers like Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Bloch have argued that nature is a producing subject, a non-teleological subject (Marcuse). Describing nature as a subject implies that if man destroys nature the latter as a producing subject will probably produce uncontrollable negative effects on society and that hence nature should be appropriated in sustainable ways. Matter is a natural subject that acts upon itself, whereas man is a human self-conscious subject that acts upon nature and society.

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