‘This gave me a Mastodong’: A decolonial analysis of the Black twerking dancers in Mastodon’s The Motherload music video

2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942199424
Author(s):  
Melina Aparecida dos Santos Silva ◽  
Beatriz Medeiros
Keyword(s):  
Heavy Metal ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Female Empowerment ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Metal Music ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Female Bodies

The article presents a decolonial and intersectional approach to production and reception of The Motherload music video (2014) in the context of heavy metal culture and how female Black bodies are displayed in media culture. We discuss the feminist dichotomic approach on the objectification of female bodies and the defence of Black female empowerment in the performances recorded. Our debate focuses on racial and sexual hierarchies in the metal music scene and in The Motherload music video, using the female Black body as a means of gaining visibility and adherence to this scene where women are often sexually objectified in its social dynamics.

2018. gada latviešu metālmūzikas albumi

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Ingars Gusāns
Keyword(s):  
Heavy Metal ◽  
Metal Music ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Digital Format ◽  
First Impression ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common

The aim of the study is to describe metal music albums of the year 2018 from the genre, textual and artistic aspects, looking for the common and diverse in the Latvian metal music world. It is recognised that there is still no unified collection of Latvian rock and metal music resources, and that makes the researcher’s work more interesting. Even though only ten metal albums came out in 2018, their metal styles are quite wide-ranging from symphonic metal and through thrash, groove, industrial metal to classic heavy metal, which is also played in an acoustic format. Album designs, in the author’s opinion, are classic but qualitative and do not damage the first impression, especially designs of those albums that were released on physical media. Because physical media is becoming an exclusive case, the trend continues to sell albums only in digital format (at least at first); this has been done by the bands “Revelation Attic”, “Yomi”, “Seira”, “NUVO”. Perhaps knowing that Latvia is too small to live on music only, as well as wishing to expand their audience and be noticed abroad, the 5 of the albums in question are recorded in English. The debuts of several newly formed bands (“Seira”, “Revelation Attic”, “Māra”) confirm the unlost interest in metal music and also show the attempts of these groups to build their way to Latvian and the world metal music scene, which manifests in their search for a strange sound (“NUVO”) or a strong female vocal use (“Oceanpath”, “Seira”, “Māra”). In general, Latvian metal music representatives continue the world’s metal music traditions, where it is extremely difficult to surprise because the number of existing bands is so large that it is almost impossible to be original, while the population of the planet is so big that many bands can access the listener so that each band also searches for its audience, both online and in concerts.

scholarly journals ‘A Cockroach Preserved in Amber’: The Significance of Class in Critics' Representations of Heavy Metal Music and its Fans

2014 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 719-741 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy R. Brown ◽  
Christine Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Heavy Metal ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Metal Music ◽  
Heavy Metal Music ◽  
The Uk

In this paper we engage with new cultural theories of class that have identified media representations of ‘excessive’ white heterosexual working-class femininity as a ‘constitutive limit’ of incorporation into dominant (middle-class) modes of neoliberal subjectivity and Bourdieu's thesis that classification is a form of symbolic violence that constitutes both the classifier and the classified. However, what we explore are the implications of such arguments for those modes of white heterosexual working-class masculinity that continue to reproduce themselves in forms of overtly masculinist popular culture. We do so through a critical examination of the symbolic representation of the genre of heavy metal music within contemporary music journalism. Employing a version of critical discourse analysis, we offer an analysis of representative reviews, derived from a qualitative sample of the UK music magazine, New Musical Express (1999–2008). This weekly title, historically associated with the ideals of the ‘counter culture’, now offers leadership of musical tastes in an increasingly segmented, niche-oriented marketplace. Deploying a refined model of the inscription process outlined by Skeggs, our analysis demonstrates how contemporary music criticism symbolically attaches negative attributes and forms of personhood to the working-class male bodies identified with heavy metal culture and its audience, allowing dominant middle-class modes of cultural authority to be inscribed within matters of musical taste and distinction.

Nina Simone as Poet and Orchestrator

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-147
Author(s):  
Marcus R. Pyle
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Content ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Black Female ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Nina Simone

How do you fashion an identity in a society that, at every turn, tries to snuff you out? In this article, I address Nina Simone's praxis of renaming and reinvention to demonstrate strategies of resistance. To this point, I analyze the musico-poetic setting of Nina Simone’s songs “Images” (1964) and “Four Women” (1965) to argue that her artistic musical choices sonically orchestrate varying issues of Black female subjectivity, identity, and self-making. In Simone’s songs, she refuses to discount the materiality of the Black body; instead, she envelops the Black body with signifiance and significance. The sonic bearers of semantic content become extensions of the Self—transmutable and heterodox. The compositional and poetic subtleties in these songs claim that the gaze of the Other can potentiate exteriority and freedom—what I term the “exo(p)tic.”

scholarly journals Looking Like People; Feeling Like People: The Black Body, Dress and Aesthetic Therapy in the Caribbean

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 857-872
Author(s):  
Marsha Pearce
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
New World ◽  
Black Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Therapeutic Discourse ◽  
Black Caribbean ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Bodily Practice ◽  
Instrumental Role

In the Caribbean, the practice of getting dressed matters because it is a practice of attending to the body. Under a colonial regime, black bodies were ill-treated and selves were negated. Clothing played an instrumental role in the abuse of bodies and the stripping of a sense of wellbeing. Attire was one key way of demarcating master and slave and rendering some members of society null and void. Enslaved Africans, who were forcibly brought across the Atlantic to the New World, were considered chattel or commodities rather than people and clothes functioned in a way that reinforced that notion. Yet, dress became a strategy of subversion – of making chattel, property or ‘non-people’ look like people. The enslaved recognised that, through clothes, it was possible to look and feel free. Today that legacy remains. Clothing is seen not only as that which can make a people ‘look like people’ but also feel like people – clothing sets up a specific structure of feeling. This paper pivots on notions of looking and feeling like people while deploying Joanne Entwistle’s conceptual framework of dress as situated bodily practice. The article locates its investigation in the Caribbean, examining the philosophy and practice of Trinidadian clothing designer Robert Young. The article establishes him as a source of aesthetic therapeutic solutions in the Caribbean. It argues that his clothing designs produce a therapeutic discourse on the Black Caribbean body – a discourse, which facilitates a practice of getting dressed that gives a sense of agency, self-empowerment and psychic security even if that sense is embodied temporarily; lasting perhaps only as long as the garment is worn.

scholarly journals Patriarcavirus, feminist dystopias and COVID-19: reflections on the phenomenon of gender pandemics

Feminismo/s ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 359
Author(s):  
Almudena Machado-Jiménez
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Female Empowerment ◽  
First Year ◽  
Value System ◽  
Female Population ◽  
Control Female ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Patriarchal Power

This essay examines contemporary feminist dystopias to study the phenomenon of gender pandemics. Gender pandemic narrative allegorises possible aftermaths of patriarcavirus, unleashing many natural disasters that force global biopolitics to hinder gender equality. The main objective of this essay is to explain how gender pandemics are appropriated in patriarchal utopian discourses as a pretext to control female empowerment, diagnosing women as diseased organisms that risk the state’s well-being. Moreover, the novels explore the interdependence between biology and sociality, portraying the acute vulnerability of female bodies during and after the pandemic conflicts, inasmuch as patriarchal power arranges a hierarchical value system of living that reinforces gender discrimination. Particularly, the COVID-19 emergency is analysed as a gender pandemic: the exacerbated machismo and the growing distress in the female population prove that women are afflicted with a suffocating patriarcavirus, which has critically gagged them in the first year of the pandemic.

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