Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 169-170
Author(s):  
Jake Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Music Genres ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
American Values ◽  
Passive Response

The Epilogue briefly peers into Mormonism’s unfolding relationship with American culture, suggesting that the story of Mormons and musical theater might well be a fitting encapsulation of the American interception of modernity. Musicals and Mormons have come a long way since their rootedness in Jacksonian principles; their regional genesis quickly fanned out to become immense global expressions of American values. In the meantime, America changed. What was once ideal and reputable has become goofy and outmoded, and Broadway and Mormonism have been forced to pay for their naive pasts with cynicism and guffaws. The musical theater industry opted to change its image by aggressively appropriating popular music genres. Mormon leaders have chosen a more passive response, having faith that stasis will eventually reveal the radical qualities of Mormon ideals. As a result, musical theater has begun to escape Mormonism as its once-familiar venue for practicing its theology of voice. Book of Mormon is one example of this fallout--its message both a condemnation and an invitation to become something better. In the end, the tale of Mormons and musicals is another story about how new ways of sounding create opportunities for other ways of living.

Exoticized Voices, Racialized Bodies

2019 ◽  
pp. 83-112
Author(s):  
Jake Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Cultural Center ◽  
White American ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
American Values ◽  
History Of ◽  
Polynesian Cultural Center ◽  
The 1960S

Just as Mormons used musical theater to purchase whiteness in the early twentieth century, so too do Mormons begin in the 1960s to use musical theater to associate other racial minorities with white American values. By allowing certain groups the opportunity to voice whiteness through the conventions of musical theater, Mormons reimagined the genre as a tool to transform some minority members into exemplars of whiteness. This chapter first details the history of Mormonism in Hawaii and the musical theater productions at the Mormon-owned Polynesian Cultural Center that began there in 1963. Importantly, Mormons have long understood dark-skinned Polynesians, like themselves, to be a chosen people, rather than cursed--displaced Jews, in fact, whose origins are explained in The Book of Mormon. The chapter then analyzes the Mormon musical Life . . . More Sweet than Bitter, billed as a sequel to Fiddler on the Roof, for its narrative explicitly connecting Mormons to Judaism. The musical stage thus becomes for modern Mormons a reckoning device to demonstrate belonging and acceptance in exotic terms--“whitening” the dark-skinned Polynesians and demonstrating fluidity between Mormonism and Judaism.

Hybrid in Form, Socialist in Content: The Formal Politics of Chŏlga in the North Korean Revolutionary Opera Sea of Blood

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-445
Author(s):  
STEPHEN JOHNSON
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Music Genres ◽  
The North ◽  
Kim Jong Il ◽  
Analytical Standards ◽  
Korean Nation

AbstractKim Jong Il considered the 1971 premiere of the opera Sea of Blood a watershed moment in opera history. He lauded its innovative use of chŏlga (‘stanzaic song’) rather than aria and recitative. By Western analytical standards, however, chŏlga is simple and predictable, so scholars have thus far glossed over its conventions and their signification. This article instead argues that chŏlga conventions exhibit cultural hybridity and that Kim leveraged such hybridity to advocate a modern, popular, and national sound for North Korea. I begin by outlining hybrid characteristics of colonial-era popular music that chŏlga inherited. I then explore Kim's engagement with such trends in his speeches on chŏlga and demonstrate that cultural hybridity was central to his understanding of sonic modernity. Finally, I analyse a scene from Sea of Blood that pits chŏlga against other music genres, leading to a symbolic victory for the form and for the Korean nation.

Allow Peace to Reign: Musical Genres of Fújì and Islamic Allegorise Nigerian Unity in the Era of Boko Haram

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
DEBRA L. KLEIN
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Peaceful Coexistence ◽  
Boko Haram ◽  
Music Genres ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
Praise Poetry ◽  
Cultural Fusion

AbstractA proliferation of popular music genres flourished in post-independence Nigeria: highlife, jùjú, Afrobeat, and fújì. Originating within Yorùbá Muslim communities, the genres of fújì and Islamic are Islamised dance music genres characterised by their Arabic-influenced vocal style, Yorùbá praise poetry, driving percussion, and aesthetics of incorporation, flexibility, and cultural fusion. Based on analysis of interviews and performances in Ìlọrin in the 2010s, this article argues that the genres of fújì and Islamic allegorise Nigerian unity—an ideology of tolerance, peaceful coexistence, and equity—while exposing the gap between the aspiration for unity and everyday inequities shaped by gender and morality.

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.

Joseph Smith's Translation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Morris Brown
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Joseph Smith ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
Metal Plates ◽  
King James Bible ◽  
The Church

Among many remarkable claims, Mormon founder Joseph Smith reported that he had translated ancient scriptures. He dictated the Book of Mormon, an American Bible from metal plates associated with Native antiquity; directly rewrote the King James Bible; and produced a scripture, derived from Egyptian funerary papyri, that he called the Book of Abraham. Smith and his followers used the term “translation” to describe the genesis of these English texts, which remain canonical for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most commenters see these scriptures as merely linguistic objects; the central and controversial question has been whether Smith’s English texts are literal translations of extant source documents. On closer inspection, though, his translations are far more metaphysical than linguistic. These translations express a nonordinary power of language to connect people across barriers of space and time. Within these metaphysical scriptures, Smith expounded a theology of human deification that he also termed “translation.” This one word thus referred to a scripture capable of mediating between the living and the dead and to the transformation of humans into divine beings. Joseph Smith’s projects of metaphysical translation place Mormonism at a productive edge of tense transitions later associated with secular modernity, a modernity challenged by the very existence of the Latter-day Saints. Smith’s translations and the theology that supported them illuminate the power and vulnerability of his critique of American culture in transition as they set the stage for two more centuries of cultural change.

Music in Mexico City, 1880–1960

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo Pérez Montfort
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Urban Center ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Music Genres ◽  
The Way ◽  
Musical Styles

From the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, Mexican popular music underwent a significant transformation, thanks to the growth of Mexico City as an urban center and to the influence of both regional and international music genres. At the same time, the Mexican public experienced a profound shift in the way music was consumed. Over the course of five generations, traditional modes of encountering music gave way to a more cosmopolitan enjoyment of new and old musical styles.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Habits Of Mind ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
The Church

This concluding chapter contains reflections on scholarly investigations into religion and American culture, arguing that southern gospel as a field of religious thought, action, and feeling asks us to reimagine the concept of “organized religion” as a phenomenon—in this case, a popular music culture—that exists alongside, within, and beyond the church. It envisions a relational dynamic in which evangelical habits of mind and feeling and the expression of feelings shift along lines of individual and collective needs and desires. Furthermore, the chapter briefly delves into and defends the notion of gospel music as a meaningful language for postmodern transcendence.

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