Summer’s Gone: Late Style and Popular Music

The Beach Boys’ 2012 album That’s Why God Made the Radio is typically nostalgic, filled with seemingly sunny reminiscences and retreads that hark back to the 1960s. And yet other parts of the album look back in a more critical fashion, exploring unresolved melancholy through a rich musical language. What makes this even more complicated is the fact that it is possible to hear these two ‘sides’ of the album differently, for the retreads to feel like eerie simulations and the melancholy parts to align with earlier, similarly complicated Beach Boys music. This ambivalence embodies the album’s dual relationship with what I describe as the primary strains of late style: Goethean serenity and Adornian intransigence. In exploring this contention and in applying late style to other examples of popular music, notably David Bowie’s 2016 album Blackstar, I argue that the late-style lens helps to shed new light on popular music’s increasingly complicated knots of nostalgia, ageing and death.

The arrival of white women: Tourism and the reshaping of beach boys’ masculinity in Zanzibar

Mass tourism in Zanzibar has been accompanied by a virulent denunciation of the dress, bodily, and sexual practices of white women, who have been accused of perverting the local culture. More specifically, they have been held responsible for the emasculation and feminization of Zanzibar’s male youth engaging in compensated intimate relations with them. In this article I argue that sexual relations between white women and Zanzibari men show the capacity of young Zanzibaris to recompose the balance between the two traditional axes in the construction of masculinity, namely economic power and sexual performance. While the economic power of Zanzibari men has suffered from capitalist globalization, sexual potency and expertise, as well as competition between men for access to women’s bodies have become key aspects of affirming masculinity.

Marriage, aging, and women’s pursuit of commercial sex in Japan

A number of scholarly works have observed Western and Japanese women travelers who seek romance and adventure with local “beach boys” in the Global South. Despite the important criticism of geopolitical inequality contained in these works, what is missing is how those involved in such commodified sexual relationships make sense of what they do. This essay focuses on how well-heeled Japanese married women, who are concerned with the meaning and effects of aging, pursue a commodified form of sexual intimacy as a means to rediscover their sense of sexual subjectivity. How do they perceive their own involvement in sexual commerce? What kinds of sexual power dynamics do these women and their younger, precarious male partners shape at the intersection of gender, age, and class? How do these women make sense of the apparently masculine act of paying for sex, which requires them to transgress cultural norms of feminine passivity in sexual matters? By posing these questions, this article provides a fine-grained portrayal of a particular kind of feminist agency.