Carnival Is Woman: Party Music and the Soca Diva

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hope Munro
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Trinidad And Tobago ◽  
Gender Diversity ◽  
Women Performers ◽  
Expressive Culture ◽  
Historical Trends ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Performance Context ◽  
Musical Change

This chapter examines the agency of women in soca and related genres, including various controversies they confront in this performance context. As women have created a space for themselves in Carnival mas and at the Carnival fetes, a number of “soca divas” have emerged to give voice to female revelers. This and other historical trends in soca underscore the rapidly changing nature of the popular music scene in Trinidad. The chapter considers the shifting attitudes and norms regarding gender roles, giving rise to gender diversity in various performance contexts, how these changes have played out in soca music, and how musical change and innovation continue to expand the possibilities within expressive culture in Trinidad and Tobago. It discusses the ways in which soca and its offshoots have created platforms for expression by women performers, including the two top female soca artists in Trinidad: Destra Garcia and Fay-Ann Lyons.

Conclusions

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hope Munro
Keyword(s):  
Trinidad And Tobago ◽  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Gender Diversity ◽  
Caribbean Literature ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Expressive Culture ◽  
Professional Advancement ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
Changing Attitudes

This conclusion summarizes the book's main findings, especially the important role that women have played in the maintenance, transmission, and innovation of musical practices in Trinidad and Tobago. Changing attitudes regarding Trinidad's indigenous expressive forms—calypso, the steelband, the Carnival arts, Caribbean literature and fine art—came hand in hand with other freedoms. Shifting attitudes and norms regarding gender roles in Trinidad facilitated gender diversity in various performance contexts, as well as professional advancement for women in both artistic and social realms. The quality of life of women and their ability to earn a living has improved considerably from the independence period to the present, but various problems continue to linger, such as domestic violence, rape, human trafficking, and the exploitation of female workers. This conclusion discusses the ways in which expressive culture has helped in improving social conditions for women in Trinidad and Tobago.

What She Go Do

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hope Munro
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Trinidad And Tobago ◽  
Future Development ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
Expressive Culture ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Steel Pan ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Caribbean

In the 1990s, expressive culture in the Caribbean was becoming noticeably more feminine. At the annual Carnival of Trinidad and Tobago, thousands of female masqueraders dominated the street festival on Carnival Monday and Tuesday. Women had become significant contributors to the performance of calypso and soca, as well as the musical development of the steel pan art form. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author in Trinidad and Tobago, this book demonstrates how the increased access and agency of women through folk and popular musical expressions has improved inter-gender relations and representation of gender in this nation. This is the first study to integrate all of the popular music expressions associated with Carnival—calypso, soca, and steelband music—within a single volume. The popular music of the Caribbean contains elaborate forms of social commentary that allows singers to address various sociopolitical problems, including those that directly affect the lives of women. In general, the cultural environment of Trinidad and Tobago has made women more visible and audible than any previous time in its history. This book examines how these circumstances came to be and what it means for the future development of music in the region.

Vamping the Stage

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Women Performers ◽  
New Music ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
The Many ◽  
Late Modern

Vamping the Stage is the first book-length historical and comparative examination of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia. This book documents the many ways that women performers have supported, challenged, and undermined representations of existing gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The case studies in this volume address colonial, post-colonial, as well as late modern conditions of culture as they relate to women’s musical practices and their changing social and cultural identities throughout Asia. Female entertainers were artistic pioneers of new music, new cinema, new forms of dance and theater, and new behavior and morals. Their voices, mediated through new technologies of film, radio, and the phonograph, changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today in all spheres of modern life. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that were rapidly changing. They were active agents in the creation of local performance cultures and the rise of a region-wide and globally oriented entertainment industry. Placing women’s voices in social and historical contexts, the authors critically analyze salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of “voice” in Asian popular music of the 20th century to the present day.

Pop and the Nation-State: towards a theorisation

Popular Music ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Cloonan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
State Level ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
The One

Recent years have seen two noticeable trends in Popular Music Studies. These have been on the one hand a series of works which have tried to document the ‘local’ music scene and, on the other, accounts of processes of globalisation. While not uninterested in the intermediate Nation-State level, both trends have tended to regard it as an area of increasingly less importance. To state the matter more boldly, both trends have underplayed the continually important role of the Nation-State.

scholarly journals Gender messages in contemporary popular Malay songs

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Collin Jerome
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Romantic Relationships ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Gender Stereotypes ◽  
Text Analysis ◽  
Women's Roles ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Content Analyses

Gender has been an important area of research in the field of popular music studies. Numerous scholars have found that contemporary popular music functions as a locus of diverse constructions and expressions of gender. While most studies focus on content analyses of popular music, there is still a need for more research on audience’s perception of popular music’s messages. This study examined adult Malay listeners’ perceptions of gender messages in contemporary Malay songs. A total of 16 contemporary Malay songs were analysed using Fairclough’s (1992) method of text analysis. The content of the songs that conveyed messages about gender were the basis for analysis. The results showed that the messages revolve mainly around socially constructed gender roles and expectations in romantic relationships. Gender stereotypes are also used in the songs to reinforce men’s and women’s roles in romantic relationships. The results also showed that, while listeners acknowledge the songs’ messages about gender, their own perceptions of gender and what it means to be a gendered being in today’s world are neither represented nor discussed fully in the songs analysed. It is hoped the findings from this, particularly the mismatch between projected and perceived notions of gender, contribute to the field of popular Malay music studies in particular, and popular music studies in general where gender messages in popular songs and their influence on listeners’ perceptions of their own gender is concerned.

Malay Women Singers of Colonial Malaya

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tan Sooi Beng
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Women Performers ◽  
New Music ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Performing Artists ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
New Type ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Experiences Of Women

Popular Malay music developed in Malaya in tandem with socio-political transformations which took place as a result of British colonialism. It was at this time that a new type of local commodified urban popular music known as lagu Melayu (Malay song) emerged to entertain the multiethnic urban audiences from different social and class backgrounds. This new music was shaped by the convergence of the new social conditions, technology such as print, gramophone, radio, film, microphones, cultural forms, and performance sites that emerged. By examining the song styles and texts of 78 rpm recordings of Lagu Melayu, oral interviews with performers, and published texts of the colonial period, this chapter illustrates how the new popular music accorded women performing artists voice and agency to negotiate dominant discourses regarding modern colonial subjectivity and gender. Women singers promoted a type of vernacular modernity that was not defined solely in European terms butwas characterized by continuity, difference, and hybridity. The musical recordings and stories of their lives reveal the complex polyvocal and sometimes contradictory experiences of women performers in colonial Malaya.

“Peculiar ‘Til I D.I.E.”

Flaming? ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 115-148
Author(s):  
Alisha Lola Jones
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Same Gender ◽  
Male Homosociality ◽  
Shed Light

Focusing on Washington, DC’s gospel go-go music scene in the early 2000s, chapter 4 highlights the role of an understudied popular music in performances of socioculturally preferred black male homosociality. This chapter examines men’s performances against the stereotype of the softer, woman-like, flamboyant male vocalist through research on a percussion-heavy music from Washington, DC called gospel go-go. In essence, the go-go music band is a symbolic composite of perspectives associated with the unmarked male-dominant categories of the musicians’ pit and absentee men, who are talking back, providing musical contestation of the duplicitous preacher and choir director stereotypes. Chapter 4 aims to shed light on the musical and performative properties of male homomusicoenrapture and homosonoenrapture, the same-gender musical and sonic textures and visual dynamics that stimulate intense enjoyment while enveloping and propelling gospel go-go participants.

Adopting imports: new images and alliances in Brazilian popular music of the 1990s

Popular Music ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Magaldi
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Urban Youth ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Electronic Apparatus ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Bossa Nova ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Scene ◽  
Musical Styles

Anyone visiting Brazil today in search of an idealised ‘Brazilian Sound’ might, at first, be disappointed with the popular music scene. The visitor will soon realise that established musical styles such as bossa nova and MPB (Música Popular Brazileira (Brazilian Popular Music)), with their well-defined roles within the Brazilian social and political scene of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, have lost their immediate appeal with some contemporary audiences, and especially with Brazilian urban youth. In the 1990s, Brazilian radio and TV are saturated with a variety of new local genres that borrow heavily from international musical styles of all kinds and use state-of-the-art electronic apparatus. Hybrid terms such assamba-rock, samba-reggae, mangue-beat, afro-beat, for-rock(a contraction of forró and rock),sertaneja-country, samba-rap, andpop-nejo(a contraction of pop andsertanejo), are just a few examples of the marketing labels which are loosely applied to the current infusion of international music in the local musical scene.

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