1996 Montréal

The dance floor: a hot space onto which cultural meanings are poured and mixed by the
agency of movement. When I decide to go to a dance club, I choose to place my body/myself in a
very specific space, and I need to draw attention to what I do in that space to emphasize my own
agency, and the agency of those who also decide to go their and dance.

Walking into a queer club enacts a marking of that body as queer, and in one specific space and
time in New York City — the Sound Factory Bar on Sunday night — the site and time of the Body
Positive HIV Tea Dance, that body is also marked as HIV positive. What are the meanings and
functions of a space such as this? At a time of epidemiological, political and cultural emergency,
is this space which is not only created by bricks and mortar, but by dance music, purely escapist?
What relationships might exist between dance music and dancing and survival and
celebration?

In this paper, I intend to investigate some of these issues, drawing on the historical meanings and
functions of queer dance clubs and dance music, on interviews with those who organize and
attend the Body Positive Tea dance, and on my observations and experiences within that club.
What are the meanings of such an event, both understood by the HIV-impacted people who
attend it, and what interventions might it have on the wider cultural understanding of HIV/AIDS,
queer club culture and dance music?

The Dead Space of Digital Audio

Iain Cook

In this paper I explore the ways in which the practice of digital audio works against a holistic
media practice. My paper investigates the ways digital audio practice contributes to the
elimination of silence in contemporary audio production. Already, silence – the absence of sound
- is problematic for different kinds of media. For radio and film, silence signifies equipment
breakdown. However, silence has not always carried this negative connotation. I shall investigate
the ways in which silence has been considered historically as an empowering and productive
cultural practice. Specifically, I shall look at the practice of silence as a community-building
strategy for 17th century Quakers in England, who viewed the ‘common space’ of silence as a
kind of sacred space. As well, I shall investigate the ways in which digital audio practice
re-inscribes a privileging of the visual senses over the aural. This privileging of the visual over
the aural works at the exclusion of silence, where the space of silence in digital audio practice
becomes a kind of ‘dead space’, to be avoided.

The Big 80s: New Wave and the Anglophone Transatlantic in Los
Angeles 1980-1985

Aureliano DeSoto

During the early part of the 1980s, British popular music served as an articulate and
powerful indicator of social, political, and cultural phenomena for youth in the UK under the
aegis of Thatcherite Tories and an explosion of money and media. Traveling under a variety of
names (New Wave, New Romantics, Ska etc.) and labeled popularly in the United States as the
musical “Second British Invasion” (vis-a-vis the first, represented most prominently by the
Beatles), UK music of this period was enormously influential on large and diverse groups of
young people around the world.

Aside from a few popular and well-known acts, such as Culture Club and Duran Duran,
UK “New Wave” music circulated largely in the United States through low-wattage college and
alternative radio. One of the most prominent of these radio stations in North America was KROQ
fm, broadcasting out of a small studio in Pasadena, California, a small leafy city adjacent to Los
Angeles. KROQ (known colloquially as K-Rock) showcased emerging and established UK
musical talent, which in turn helped fuel a lively and innovative musical scene in the Los
Angeles Metro area. Serendipitously located, Pasadena is hemmed into the northeast corner of the Metro
area; KROQ’s signal was sent to the eastern far suburbs and north to the San Fernando Valley,
where garage bands and suburban teenagers formed an attentive audience. To the west, KROQ
signal passed over East LA, Downtown, and East Hollywood to the Westside, Santa Monica,
and the beaches at Venice and Malibu. Here the signal, and the music it carried, passed over a
diverse collection of ethnic and economic differences: Mexican American East LA; Asian and
Latin American immigrant communities in East Hollywood and Midtown, and white
communities of privilege and money to the west.

This paper discusses the impact that KROQ had on youth culture in Los Angeles in the
early 1980s, specifically through the broadcast, and popular embrace, of British popular music.
In particular, the paper argues for a linguistic understanding of identity and the popular imaginary
through pop music and video: an Anglophone Transatlantic that affected young people of
different races and classes and aligned the social and political interests of these young people
with their peers in the UK. The paper explores these connections in an effort to envision differing
apparatus for cultural and social identity “politics.”

I Can’t Hear You: Volume and the Inhibition of Social Space href>

Terence Dick

The contemporary public presentation of popular music has, for material as well as
ideological reasons, become louder. Thp issue of high volume is most often addressed legally (noise
pollution and disturbing the peace) or medically (hearing loss). In my study of music an a means of social
control which silences the listener and obstructs communication, I have been lead to the space
where music overwhelms the public.

The dance club provides the central figure for this Issue participants do not take up traditional
listening position s while music provides an essential element of the social milieu that can either
be manipulative or liberating. Where music inhibits, volume is used to render only the simplest
conversational gestures coherent. At the same time, new modes of community form around such
obstacles, in sympathy with the new economy of music production that supports dance
culture.

Besides the physical damage of hearing loss, the offense of loud music is the social damage of
isolation. Overwhelming volume constantly challenges music lovers, daring them not to listen.
And if we no longer listen, can we any longer speak? My paper will examine that musical space
where the voice of the listener has to strain to be heard.

Homeboys and Production Posses: Localism and Regionalism in Rap
Music

Murray Forman

This paper starts with the theoretical dynamics established within the fields of cultural
studies and cultural geography whereby the current trends toward transnationalsim are said to
produce a complex tension between the varied scales of the global, regional, and local (Gupta &
Ferguson,1992; Harvey,1989; Massey,1992; Zukin,1991, etc.). This dynamic is rendered
culturally tangible and is made socially relevant through numerous practices including the
production of art or consumer commodities. As an art form and a commodity form, Rap music
offers one particular social “site” for the analysis of the tensions between the global, regional,
and local and the expression of cultural identities that emerge from it.

In this paper, I intend to explore the spatial discourses of Rap and examine the links
between production crews or “posses” and their affiliations with local or regional urban spaces.
In the lyrical and narrative structures of Rap music, the articulation of space and place has arisen
as a crucial element of the music’s character and is indicative of a sophisticated spatial logic that
is organized along a social axis of scale and value. By articulating this spatial consciousness, the
artists who create the music produce a rich resource for the closer understanding of how locality
and regionalism, framed within the broader scope of what has been referred to as “the Hip Hop
nation,” are made meaningful among primarily black and Latino youths who comprise the
music’s main producers.

Finally, the proliferation of production centers and artist-run recording studios indicates a
socio-spatial context in the Rap industry as well,with the production sites being simultaneously
associated with specific cities (i.e. New York, Atlanta, Seattle, Houston, Los angeles, etc.) and
individual artists (i.e. until recently, Dr. Dre and the Dogg Pound Posse on Death Row Records;
Too Short and Dangerous Music; The Geto Boys and Rap-A-Lot Records, etc.). The animosities
and challenges that are frequently expressed through the music often have an explicitly
geographical focus, whether this be formed through the tensions between East and West coast
rivalries or other inter-regional differences. The spatial locations and migrations of artists and
producers thus becomes a significant factor in the construction of their public personae and are
an important aspect of Rap music’s role in shaping identities within the wider Hip Hop culture.

‘I Came to Suck You Down’: Girl-Fronted Bands and Post-Alternative
Politics

Cynthia Fuchs

This paper looks at the current trend of girl-fronted bands, with an eye to their particular
configurations of sexuality, race, and class. While the girl-fronted band concept is not new, its
latest incarnations are peculiarly situated with regard to the music industry, audiences and fan
bases, and broader popular and political cultures (I’ll be limiting my discussion to U.S.
production, distribution, and consumption). My analysis will focus on videos by three different bands, No
Doubt’s “Just a Girl,” the Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly,” and Garbage’s “Queer” and “Stupid Girl,”
as these texts illustrate the problems of “post-alternative politics” (and I use this term ironically
(as most everything connected to “alternative,” the industry and the idea, must be used).

The short version of the argument is that in a post-alternative world (where Hootie
somehow makes the same category as Helium), girls are variously positioned by their bands, .
consumable objects and consuming subjects (as the line in my title, from Garbage’s “Vow,”
suggests, this has everything to do with sexual imagery and sexuality); as performers and
spectators (depicted in the Fugees video, which also locates Lauren Hill, historically and
politically – by way of her hair [!] – in relation to Roberta Flack); and as canny, aggressive artists,
speaking to and for a next-generation of consumers/listeners (Shirley Manson’s feminine skirts
and masculine postures blur gender in a way not unlike Alanis Morissette). Indeed, what I find most
provocative about these bands is their express market-savvy. While Garbage has been most
loudly criticized for its cynical, commercial origins (the guys sought out a girl singer and landed Shirley
Manson), the issue of authenticity (as it might be opposed to cynicism) is an important one for all
the bands. This is mainly because authenticity tends to be collapsed onto identity (typically
defined by traditional gender and identity politics, recently under fire in academic and other
realms).

My paper, then, is less linear than exploratory. I’m considering the diverse political
possibilities that girl-fronted bands open up, in part by problematizing conventional distinctions
between (gender-specific) experiences and performances, by claiming authority within a clearly-
male-dominated sphere, and by destabilizing structures of identification (their audiences cross
race, gender, sexual lines).

‘I Can’t Draw, But I Can Trace’: Sketching a Canadian Subjectivity
in Canadian Popular Music

Scott Henderson

In this paper I will examine contemporary Canadian popular music, with particular
attention to what makes it Canadian. I argue that in the past decade Canadian popular musicians
have been able to create songs that are distinctly Canadian in terms of ‘voice’. The emergence of
this national sensibility is more pronounced than at any other time in Canada’s pop music history,
and seems to correlate with the national exposure offered by Much Music. This notion of a
Canadian ‘voice’ does not imply that artists must sing of specifically Canadian subject matter
(although certainly some do), but rather that both lyrically and musically they evoke a
particularly Canadian subjectivity, especially as relates to Canada’s relation to the United States. The themes evoked in their work, and the positions taken, are often similar to those defined in other areas of
Canadian culture. For example, a Canadian ambivalence towards American style heroes and hero
worship with their associated myths is evident in The Tragically Hip’s ‘Fifty-Mission Cap’ with
its exploration of singer/lyricist Gordon Downie’s reaction to discovering the ‘legend’ of the Toronto
Maple Leaf’s Bill Barilko.

While I anticipate expanding this project to include other bands and genres, for this paper I
will focus on the work of three groups: The Tragically Hip, Spirit of the West and Sloan. I
suggest that each of these bands constructs a different, but distinctly Canadian, position in
dealing with cross-border/cross-cultural relations and that each does so through their lyrics and their
music.

Canadian Content: Cultural Specificity in English-Canadian Popular
Music

Douglas Ivison

Canadian content regulations have long played a significant role in the Canadian recording
industry, yet the definition of Canadian content remains controversial, and the desired objective
of the regulatory regime remains unclear. The Government of Canada wishes to promote ‘Canadian’
music. But what is ‘Canadian’ about the songs and musicians that meet the Canadian content
requirements? How can we say that one piece of music is more Canadian than another? What is
or can be the relationship between popular musics and Canadian cultural identity?

This paper explores the problems faced by and caused by those who wish to define an
authentically Canadian popular music, and concludes that there is and can be no such thing. Yet,
this paper argues that Canadian musicians can strategically deploy signs of -Canadianness’ in
order to affirm their cultural distinctiveness and construct an audience. This paper concludes by
considering the extensive deployment of culturally specific references by the popular
English-Canadian rock band, the Tragically Hip, and suggests that this strategy enables the band
to participate in the global marketplace while allowing their English-Canadian fans to continue to
call them their own. The Tragically Hip do not articulate an authentically Canadian experience as
much as they construct ‘Canada’ for their English-Canadian fans.

Authorship, Autonomy and ‘The Voice’: Sinatra Sings,
1953-1962

Keir Keightley

‘Space is the Place’: Sun Ra, Masculinity and the Racial Politics of
Blaxpoitation

Gary Kennedy

Spatial Signature of Voice in Recorded Popular Music: An Introduction

Serge Lacasse

The theme given for this year’s conference, ‘Voice, Space and Time’, has led me to propose
an introduction to the research I have undertaken last year at the Institute of Popular Music in
Liverpool as a Ph.D. candidate. Mostly musicological, my research has to do with what Rick
Altman, a theorist of sound in cinema, has termed as ‘spatial signature’. In the context of
monophonic or stereophonic sound reproduction, spatial signature (commonly designated by
terms like ‘reverberation’, ‘echo’, ‘left-right panning’, etc.) may be defined as the perceived set of
spatial characteristics of a particular sound source.

During the presentation, spatial signatures will be discussed with reference to a recorded example
(Jar of Clay’s ‘Flood’). After a short series of definitions, we will identify some spatial signatures
by listening to ‘vocal events’ throughout the song and by focusing on the spatial and timbrel
characteristics of those vocal events (distance, reverberation, echo, decorrelation, etc.). Then we
will look for some interpretations we may attach to one or two specific signatures present in the
song, mostly by bringing into light relationships between the spatial signatures, the lyrics and the
voice. Through what Philip Tagg has called ‘Interobjective comparison’ I will finally argue that
spatial signatures may convey specific meanings, generally consistent within the overall style of
recorded popular music, and that this consistency is mostly explainable by social cultural and
psychosomatic factors. I shall conclude that these observations tend to demonstrate that we may
treat spatial signature from a semiotic standpoint (i.e. spatial signature considered as sign), and
that we should include it in any serious stylistic analysis of recorded popular music.

I Wanna Be a Rock Star: Some Notes on the Pedagogy of Popular Music

Mark Lipton

As post-secondary students’ media habits shift away from the t.v. sitcom to popular forms of
music it is important for students to understand some of the ideological underpinnings of their
selected popular identities. An analysis of the structure of the form of any media can help to
understand these ideological tenants as these forms play on our senses and attitudes. But popular
music is one of the first doors which can provide access to the minds of post-secondary
students.

The social history of rock and roll, the study of popular music suggests strategies for
constructing a subjective voice which turns the crank of identity. Self through resistance. The subversive
pleasure of throwing a wrench in the works of identity building. The grain of Tom Waits’ voice is
represented in the piercing of a student’s tongue.

As Judith Williamson asks “How does Girl number 23 Understand Ideology?” I use popular
music and a critical reading of its forms and meanings to show my students how to construct,
deconstruct, and reconstruct their own conceptions of self and of identity, helping them to be
more critical of their own worlds, understanding their own ideological choices of style, taste, and
community.

I am a teacher — but I hate that word. “Teacher” marks the dominant linguistic landscape at a
level of answer imparter. My students are not blank slates to be written upon. So instead, I want
to be a rock star, subverting my power as I try to understand how 40 university students present
their own identities by talking about and listening to popular music.

Technology, Music and Living Rooms: A Look at Authorship and Performance in Audio Creation

Doug McDonald

Much has been said about the effects of technology on the consumption and production of
popular music. Most of the treatises have chosen either to focus on the advent of increased studio
competency of popular music-makers or on the development of sophisticated home-playback
equipment for popular music consumers. I propose to examine one often over-looked and
increasingly relevant junction toward which these two trajectories collide, that being the mobile
DJ unit. It is in this arena of audio creation that the technology of the studio is transported to the
context of home-playback systems for a broad range of uses from small semiprofessional parties
to solitary living room music play.

Hence, as the home stereo and stereo recording technologies informed the culture of rock, so too
did the advent of small and affordable mixing boards and sound amplification systems coupled
with an increased access to pre-recorded material previously designed for commercial usage, has
led to a change in both the context and the meaning of dance music consumption.

The focus of my presentation will be how home mixing technology has determined a new site of
performance and authorship. I will demonstrate this by discussing the evolution and
appropriation of relevant technologies for home nixing use within the context of the increased availability of music made for professional dance club-play. This discussion will be based in both personal
observations of various DJ “parties” and data gained by interviewing professional,
semi-professional, and amateur DJs as well as DJ music retailers and representatives of dance
record distribution companies.

In Search of a Model for Musical Style Evolution

Craig Morrison

I am working on a model of style evolution applicable to North American popular music.
This pursuit derives from my description of rockabilly in my book Go Cat Go! Rockabilly
Music And Its Makers (University of Illinois Press, 1996) where I outlined seven main
phases:

1. Creation (1954, a new style based on source styles: Elvis Presley’s first record)
2. First Wave (1954-1955, regional performers, vocabulary increases)
3. Commercialization (1956-1957, hit records, Elvis moves to RCA and appears on TV)
4. Fade Out (1958-1960, energy wanes and the style becomes absorbed into the mainstream)
5. Dormancy (1960s-mid 1970s, sporadic, localized, idiosyncratic activity)
6. Revival (mid 1970s-mid 1980s, new bands, new hits, pioneers reemerge)
7. Stability (mid 1980s-present, revival continues among the faithful, new styles use rockabilly
as a source)

I am testing the model against many styles, including blackface minstrelsy, ragtime, blues,
jug band music, and country music, but my current area of research, as a Ph.D student in the
Humanities program at Concordia, is San Francisco rock of the 1960s.

Expansive Space and Contractile Time: The Atlantic Fisheries’ Crisis in Newfoundland Song

Peter Narvaez

A popular tradition of songmaking responsive to tragic local events continues to thrive in
Newfoundland (Laws; Mercer). Like the sealing protests of the 1970s (Lamson), the latest event
to prompt song creation is viewed as a regional tragedy. Since July 1992 a moratorium on the
commercial fishing of northern cod, the staple of the North Atlantic fisheries, has been
maintained by the Canadian government. Moratoria on the fishing of other species (salmon,
turbot) have followed during the interim. These actions have put approximately fifty thousand
fishers and fish plant workers out of work in Atlantic Canada, thirty thousand of those in
Newfoundland. Although stopgap federal compensation and retraining programs have been
instituted, they have proved largely inadequate and in Newfoundland they have not offset what is
widely perceived as the demise of the province’s outport communities. This presentation
examines expressive responses to this crisis from Newfoundland, through an analysis of the lyrics of over
fifty songs and poetic monologues (“recitations”) from a variety of commercial and
non-commercial sources. Supplementary data include questionnaire responses and interviews
with songmakers. Written largely by outport residents, the lyrical sentiments of these songs and
poems reflect local reactions to government programs, as well as variables of age, gender, and
insider-outsider occupational status of the songmakers (see Porter). From a diachronic
perspective, the song texts move from positive and sometimes humorous responses to the initial
federal financial “package,” to later expressions of anxiety, frustration, anger, and political action
as the moratorium has continued and the extent of the ecological and economic disaster has
become apparent. Spatially these songs voice local concerns but, unlike typical local songs of the
past, they exhibit an expansive view of space that encompasses the province, and the nation,
sometimes situating Canada within an international context. Temporally, a common usage of
iconic and indexical signs combine to nostalgically lament the loss of a traditional outport “way
of life” where collective values of family and community have prevailed for many generations.
As signified in these songs, however, this past is contracted into several recurring images, the
heterogeneity of local history transformed into a remarkable instant of immutable uniformity. In
keeping with regional tradition, some songmakers explicitly maintain that they create topical
songs primarily because they view the medium of song as an appropriate vehicle for social
commentary and a useful political tool that can pressure for social change (Powell). On occasion,
however, the larger “arts community” of the province, primarily residing in the St. John’s region,
has exhibited a sense of cultural hierarchy in viewing such local expressions as inferior artistic
products, an evaluation which reflects differential class-regional (urban vs. rural) aesthetics
within the province.

Cultures of Conjunction: Bhangra Music, Identity and Community Through Deterritorialization

Katarina Soukup

In this paper I suggest that contemporary bhangra music emerges from a
deterritorialized twentieth century world wherein culture, by virtue of mass migration and
international media networks, has been dislocated from particular territories. Creating ‘cultural
flows’ through space, disparate images and practices from around the globe often swirl together
to produce innovative cultural forms, such as bhangra music. In other words, new cultural
representations emerge from a dislocation and recombination of imagined resources. Such
transnational bricolage also serves to bond (‘imagined’ communities which are dispersed over
space. Bhangra music provides a means of negotiating a conjunctural identity which is informed
as much by Punjabi ethnic values as it is by contemporary English subcultures.

Moreover, I argue that to fully understand where cultural phenomena like bhangra come from
and how they function requires a reconfiguration of traditional ethnographic strategies. Culture must
be approached not as a bounded mass of images, values, and representations that are shared
uniform-dy among a group of people, but rather as conjunctural in nature: that is, as a core of
more or less common elements that can only have meaning in the way they intersect and impact
upon regional, local, and individual situations.

Making Sense of Indie Rock in Montreal[?]

Geoff Stahl

While researching for a film maker who was looking to document the punk scene here in
Montreal from the late 70s to about 1983 it became apparent that there was a dearth of recorded
material. Talks with record shop owners, musicians and radio announcers confirmed that indeed
a great deal of music was never committed to vinyl or cassette. This began to confirm what has
often been seen as Montreal’s conspicuous lack of an independent music scene- which means the
absence or economic fragility of local indie record shops, little or no venues in which to play (or
you must pay to play) and little in the way of outside bands passing through (which might give a
semblance of market to which they might feasibly cater to without running at a loss).

Montreal labels have often prided themselves on developing local talent through local labels -
local musicians create a network of regional scenes and sounds that come together to define a
Montreal scene (think Ripcordz, Og etc). Although there exists a framework for local artists to
support one another and build a sense of localness through local modes of production and
distribution, a notable shift occurred in the late 80s and early 90s that affected the fragile state of
independent music in Montreal. The resurgence and effervescent aplomb of labels such as
Derivative boldly went beyond the narrow confines of Montreal and put in a place a continental
(and partially global) distribution node (node as opposed to network because there seems to be a
move on the part of countless independents to act more as distributors and less in the capacity of
musician-label affiliation).

What I’ll be exploring more specifically is how the method and modes of distribution of labels
such as Derivative represent a type of reflexive production – operating on a micro-level that
allows a certain reciprocity and dialogue between the musicians, label owners and the
fans/consumers. How complicated is the idea of the local (as it adheres to independent music)
when it enters a global network? (A curious inversion – Think globally, act locally) What sort of
stance has Derivative taken in Montreal that is: what makes it a Montreal/local label when a great
deal of its product is from anywhere but Montreal – and here it might be worth exploring the
complex history (musical and otherwise) of many of the people who run the label.

Macarena, eh? The Latin Invasion of North American Popular Music

Batia Boe Stolar

In this paper, I propose to examine the relationship between “latin” music and the Anglo
North American (English Canadian and American) pop music market(s) . I will situate this
relationship within the last fourteen years, 1982-96, which period marks a seemingly sudden and
rapid increase in “latin” influence. There are several reasons for the increasing presence of the
“latin” in Anglo North American popular culture, the most obvious being the growth of
Spanish-speaking and Latin American groups in both Canada and the U.S. into a significant
market, and the resultant development of economically viable Spanish-speaking cultural institutions.
However, the limited sales of traditional and “authentic” “latin” music does not account for the popularity
of “latin” pop music within the Anglo mainstream market. Another factor is the development of an
audience for “world music”, which incorporates some “latin” music, such as guitar-dance music
by the Gypsy Kings, and political music by “latin” performers such as Reuben Blades. Yet, the
“world music” audience is a limited one. “Latin” pop music differs from these other “latin”
genres in that it marks the anglicization of “latin” music, and works to construct a “latin” space within
mainstream Anglo North American culture.

I will examine this “latin” space by focusing on the marketing of mainstream “latin” pop stars
such as Gerardo, Julio Iglesias, and Gloria Estefan, as well as the marketing of “latin” pop music fads
like the Macarena and the Lambada. The Macarena is a useful cultural site since its three
versions (“latin”. Canadian. and American) embody the transformation of the “latin” into Anglo North
American “latin” pop, while highlighting some of the differences between the Canadian and the
American pop market(s).

Loungecore Anthropology

Will Straw

Ethnicity, Place and the LA Sound

Greg Wahl

Long a centre of production for popular music, Los Angeles has emerged as a city
hyper-aware of its ethnic and geographic politics. Especially in hip-hop and avant-garde pop, the
city’s musicians have begun to produce texts rich in local cultural self-awareness, texts that seem
designed to show American consumers a Los Angeles awash in a heightened postmodern tension
about ethnicity and intercultural exchange. This paper first focuses on the New York / L.A.
“split” in hip-hop, then moves on to musical texts by a variety of L.A. hip-hoppers in order to
reach conclusions about the city’s effects on the rest of North America’s attitudes toward race and
place. Primary texts covered here will include those by the Beastie Boys (Jewish transplants from
New York), and their DJ, Hurricane; Afro-Latin lingoists Cypress Hill; Jupiter resident Dr.
Octagon (and his Japanese producer Automator and Filipino DJ Q-Bert); the “gangsta” sound of
Dr. Dre’s Death Row Records (with its roots in Parliament-Funkadelic); and white art-funk
rockers Soul Coughing. Secondary texts will include Brian Cross’ It’s Not About a Salary:
Rap, Race, and Resistance in Los Angeles, Tricia Rose’s Black Noise, Russell
Potter’s Spectacular Vernaculars, and others.

Lost in Hyperspace: The Disembedding of Time, Space and Elvis

David Wall

An increasing amount of our social activity is now taking place in an area that is not
physically bounded. This area is called hyperspace which is a synthesis of Gibson’s cyber-space
and Baudrillard’s hyper-reality.

Hyper-space has proved to be a fertile environment for the development of culture. One
such culture has been the Elvis image. The unregulated growth of the internet effectively placed
the image and likeness of Elvis into the public domain and facilitated the further creative
development of the image and, to a degree, its re-authoring.

It will be argued in this paper that these processes have disembedded the image and
likeness of Elvis, from its legally structured framework which located it in a specific time, space
and place. In doing so they have re-created Elvis as a globalised cultural icon (post-Elvis) which
has acquired a new global cultural symbolism quite different to that which Elvis himselvis gave
to it.

Whilst the music of Elvis has been formally copyrighted, his signs trademarked and the
physically reproduction of his image and likeness legally secured as a property right, the
hyper-spacial development of the Elvis image has both given new meaning to the traditional
Elvis symbols and has also taken it to a new and much larger market, thus facilitating and ensuring its
cultural reproduction. This paper will inform our understanding of the broader impact of music
and of the cultures it creates.

The themes developed in this paper are drawn from the findings of a broader legal analysis
which explored at the role of law in the maintenance of Elvis’s intelletual property value. This
research will be published in 1997 as a book entitled ‘Policing the Soul of Elvis’.

Compositions of Freedom: Punk and Rap in Jacques Attali’s New Paradigm of Sound

Steve Williams

In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali proposes the radical
notion that music – alone among the creative arts – is capable of extricating itself from the
reciprocal relationship between base and superstructure, and moreover, that music alone
foreshadows or “heralds” significant changes in social organization before they are visible in
material conditions or superstructural realignments. He then suggests that a qualitatively distinct
kind of musical practice currently exists “in embryonic form” heralding the arrival of new social
relations. The former he terms “composition;” the latter, “freedom.” Attali’s text was originally
published in 1977 and first translated into English in 1985. Both these dates may be considered
significant pivot points in recent popular music history: the eves of widespread recognition of
punk/new wave and rap/hip-hop respectively. In this essay an investigation into the relative
success of these two movements vis-a-vis Attali’s predictions is conducted. For Attali, an
essential characteristic of composition is that it is conducted by and primarily for oneself outside of
specific strategies for usage and exchange. In addition, it is suggested that voices from the margins are
most likely to produce such music. The extent to which disenfranchised youth – working-class
British and black American have created a space for other compositions of freedom or have been
colonized by an omnivorous culture of repetition is thus the primary focus of attention.

What do you want a rock star to be?: A pragmatic approach to musical sociology

Robin Winer

Analysis of some elements of pragmatism suggest that weaknesses in certain semiotic
approaches which attempt to understand the production and consumption of popular music can
be reconsidered to produce a truer sense of the relationship between the individual subject and
musical performance. Specifically, a mutable or pragmatic semiotics allows for a subject that
both affects and is affected by the experience of attachment to a given music genre. Accompanying
this notion is a greater degree of subjectivity invested in the performer as individual. This paper will
provide a commentary on the state of individuality in performance in terms of the generic
expectations of the audience.

Search

Categories

Archives

Admin

Search

Categories

Archives

Tags

Admin