Three kings for Christmas 2009

The three that I am talking about are, of course, Elvis, Michael... and Orson. Elvis is enjoying his usual festive attention, with an upcoming night of television shows and celebrations on January 8th of what would have been his 75th birthday. Michael Jackson's name has been prominent on TV schedules too, with retrospectives and concert re-runs. Finally, BBC 4 have been having an Orson Welles season.So what do the Kings of rock'n'roll, pop and film have in common? I will start with Welles, the portly genius whose kingly presence both fascinated and scared Hollywood. It is clear from the documentaries that his downfall was his obsession with control. Perhaps because he began his career as an actor who got into directing, his interests extended into over-seeing the whole process of film making....

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The end of the noughties

The BBC recently published its portrait of the decade. As the first segment of the new millennium draws to a close, what is interesting about such retrospective bouts of listmania is how little individual music performers or acts figure in the discussions. It is as if the likes of the Kaiser Cheifs never existed. They have disappeared because the notion of popular music being homogenized "content" to be squeezed down the cyber-pipeline is truely with us. Sure, rock acts still have their magic, but much more praise in the noughties has gone to the consumer technologies that deliver them: iPods, YouTube, Facebook, Spotify.The means to digitally replay and manipulate music have now been 'democratized' more than ever. These means help us feel that popular music is almost all the same, available...

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Public Image Limited - Manchester Academy, 19th December 2009

Well, I guess it all began in '78 when Johnny Rotten morphed back into John Lydon and decided that he would stick true to the artistic values of romanticism: pushing the musical envelope and staying true to your spirit. The result was Public Image Limited, and the music became a challenging brew of post-punk influences. Johnny, however, could never be post-punk like, say, The Pop Group, or even like Howard Devoto; Johnny would forever be Johnny Rotten. That was his albatross. As for PIL: how could they be anything more than an indulgence?? Would an unknown act have been allowed to release what they did? If Johnny was using his name to float something edgy and different then that was great, but how useful was the difference that PIL made? Albums in metal boxes? Okay. Chugging guitars? Passable....

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Mark's posts on Geography

The Tragically Hip (Canada's house band link fandom and nationhood)Don Cherry: Canadian Patriot (The hockey commentator who has become a national ic...

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New York Dolls - Liverool Academy, 9th December 2009

The New York Dolls are living (off their) legends as the most depraved specimens to terrorize early 1970s New York. Somewhere in the evolutionary chart between Mick Jagger and Steven Tyler, there was their lead singer, David Johansen. Johansen had an inauspicious beginning as the son of an insurance salesman and a librarian, but that doesn't matter here. For He was a creature of the Grand Guignol, a phantom of the rock opera who piloted his ill-fated Dolls into a welter of drugs and lipstick. The Dolls main crime was that they had the bottle to slap on make-up. Their white trash performance aesthetic and r'n'b protopunk legacy lived on in everything from Iggy to Morrissey to Michael Stipe, to long forgotten 1980s metal glamsters like Hanio Rocks, Poison and the Quireboys. Yet the Dolls faded...

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The The Tragically Hip - Manchester Academy 3, 2nd December 2009

You've got to love the Canadians. They say, "aboot" instead of "about", love ice hockey, have names like "Gord" and drink Molson's beer, so that we don't have to, but - as I found out from doing my masters degree at UBC in 1991 - they get a bum deal from their cousins south of the border. In the music industry that translates into a lack of international recognition. Delighted I was, then, that Canadian rock veterans, The Tragically Hip, got squeezed into the tiny Academy 3 last night and bought the house down. Every ex-pat in the North must have been there, knowing that they would have to have had lined up for days just to get the chance of a ticket to see these guys back home. I'd first seen the Hip play Vancouver as part of my studies in the early 1990s, a decade after they had formed (check...

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Michael Jackson's swansong: 'This is It' (2009)

Last night I got to see 'This is It', the film of rehearsals for Michael Jackson's abandoned O2 Arena stage spectacular. The film was interesting but went on for too long and lacked much of a narrative. Jackson came on as a kind of body-popping android / phantom of the opera figure who spoke in such a whimper that he frequently needed to be subtitled. At 50, he struck me as the kind of oldest adolescent on the block. 'This is It' was all about the show and not much about its creator. The film reminded me of how he sat so much at odds with the rest of his life, but how he used his perfectionism to transmute that angst - and various pop culture genres - into some fine music.The somber starting and somewhat contrived first interviews seemed odd, and general lack of audience was strange, but there...

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Literacy in the the hood!

Recently I heard that 50 Cent has made a come back, not just with a new album but with a "business bible" (self-help book) on how to make things happen by conquering your fear and embracing the dog-eat-dog world of the hood... It all makes sense now: drug dealing, like rap artistry, is about entrepreneurialism, and Fiddy is the new Ophra... Of course, as its title and co-author suggest, this is not entirely Curtis Jackson's baby - it is actually Robert Green's, with Fiddy as the fall guy. Green's famous The 48 Laws of Power has been reworked with a touch of bling by adding hip-hop to the mix. The result is an interracial buddy book about how to be a man in the shark infested world of the street or the boardroom - an existential treatise on self-fashioning that pursues masculinity as something...

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Resources for dissertation students

Image: healingdream / FreeDigitalPhotos.netSome of these are power points, sole Word documents. Save them to your computer by using your mouse (right click each link then select "save target as"):Introduction to dissertation researchTerms in academic research - a glossaryLocating research within the disciplineDevising an appropriate question - the Disney strategyHow to take appropriate initiativeAcademic writing and citationAPA referencing guideCorrect academic styleIntroductions - how to create a great first paragraphAcademic qualityDoing a literature reviewWhat to include in a methodology sectionCritical thinkingImproving on a high grade50 tips to improve essays - full text - some bits may be useful50 tips to improve essays - summary - some...

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Florence + the Machine at the Academy, Manchester, 25th September 2009

Last night I saw Florence + the Machine play a sell-out show at the Academy and was not disappointed. With her ample vocal talent, Florence Welch has single-handedly made the name "Florence" cool to a new generation. Perhaps because the gig was timed to coincide with the end of Freshers Week, the Manchester crowd absolutely loved her. She has a tender, soaring voice reminiscent of Souixie Souix meeting Kate Bush on some pagan ritual site, with dashes of Chrissy Hynde and Dido thrown in for good measure. As you might gather, I'm a fan; I like the way she has arrived on the UK music scene with a strong voice and an aesthetic identity that combines 1970s vintage with slight undertones of the gothic macabre. Some of Florence's more tormented lyrics remind one of the sort of things Gordon Downie...

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Mark's posts on the music industry

Magazine, fandom and the music industry (how to avoid the mistakes of an artistic genius)The end of the noughties (a decade where attention to consumer technologies overtook conte...

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Magazine, fandom and the music industry

I've just finished reading Helen Chase's biography of my favourite band, Magazine. My experience as a fan began in the mid-1980s, when my younger brother introduced me to their music. It was, to say the least, an acquired taste, after my diet of early 1980s pop. Yet soon it had a hold of me: lead singer Howard Devoto's towering lyrics and cold cerebral voice seemed scary, surreal, knowing, too private and personal, out of time - intellectually triumphant but emotionally struggling. Like sexuality, music has a power to transform early trauma and unhappiness into something pleasurable.Devoto used his music to show us who he was and what art could be. It connected with me and I soon found myself on a mission to collect all the band's vinyl. There were times when I would walk into a record shop...

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NORTHWEST POPULAR MUSIC STUDIES NETWORK

POPULAR MUSIC FANDOM: A ONE DAY SYMPOSIUMBinks Building, University of ChesterFriday 25th June 2010Click here to see how the day went.Keynote speaker: Matt HillsHOW TO FIND USStart time: 9.30am, room 013/2, Binks Building, main Parkgate Road campus.While a range of researchers in cultural studies - notably Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills and Cornell Sandvoss - have moved the discussion about media fandom forward, much less work has been done specifically on popular music fandom. Confirmed speakers...Tonya Anderson, University of Sunderland:Still Kissing their Posters Goodnight: The Shift from Individual to Communal ‘Bedroom Culture’ as Pop Idol Fandom goes OnlineDr Lucy Bennett, Cardiff University: Triskaidekaphobics: R.E.M. Fans in Pursuit of the...

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Some 2009 pop research books

From a review list for the journal Popular Music, these recent offerings are mainly published by Ashgate and American university presses:Baraka, Amiri (2009) Digging The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music.UCLA Press. Bayer, Gerd ed. (2009) Heavy Metal Music in Britain. Ashgate. Bicknell, Jeanette (2009) Why Music Moves Us. Palgrave Macmillan. Cooper, David (2009) The Musical Traditions of Northern Ireland and its Diaspora.Community and Conflict. Ashgate.Charters, Samuel (2009) A Language of Song, Journeys in the Musical World of theAfrican Diaspora. Duke University Press.Dibben, Nicola (2009) Björk. Equinox/Indiana University Press.Ferris, William (2009) Give My Poor Heart Ease Voices of the Mississippi Blues.University of Northern Carolina Press.Hawkins, Stan (2009) The British...

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'Gangsta Rap': Louis Theroux's Weird Weekend, BBC2

I've just been watching a re-run of the Gangsta Rap episode of Louis Theroux's Weird Weekend. Louis is infamous for craftily highlighting the abnormality of his subjects - usually religious fundamentalists, sex cults or celebrity eccentrics - by acting so unassumingly "normal" himself (read: white, middle class) that they appear to tell their own story. Here he is out to spear a bigger fish, the way in which the rap industry sells social dysfunction to America's black community.What the show makes clear, first, is that gangsta rap is promoted by a legitimate industry - a constellation of associated cottage operations (marketing, lyrics, recording, radio, etc). These craft units steer emerging artists towards a market place that demands extreme masculinity, rebellion and violence. They recruit...

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Discussions about academic writing

I recently found this article in which Lindsay Waters (commissioning editor for Harvard University Press) bemoans the focus on books and gimmicks in academia. Instead he celebrates the essay and journal articles as part of the solid groundwork of academic research. (Also see this piece by hi...

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IASPM International Conference 2009 - Some readings

I've just returned from the 2009 IASPM International conference in Liverpool and want to list a few sources mentioned by the many speakers. I will also categorize them...AUDIENCESSalgado-Correia, J. (2008) 'Do Performer and Listener Share the Same Musical Meaning?,' Estudios de Psicología 29, 1, 49-69.Kun, J. (2005) Audiotopia: Music, Race and America. Berkeley: University of California Press.Major, K. (1989) Dear Bruce Springsteen. New York: Vikings Children Books.Mulvey, L. (2005) Death 24 x a Second. London: Reaktion Books.Regev, M. (2007) 'Cultural Uniqueness and Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism,' European Journal of Social Theory 10, 123-138.Staiger, J. (1992) Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historic Reception of American Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press.St John, G. (2009) Technomad:...

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Walter Benjamin's 'Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century' (1939)

I've just been reading Benjamin's classic essay and wish to summarize and comment on it here as a piece of critical historical research. The Paris essay is a summary of a vast collection of quotes called 'The Arcades Project' which itself a blueprint for a different history of Paris. In this history Benjamin ignores the grand narratives and collects the detritus and refuse of the past instead, piecing it together to let it tell a story that subverts the recieved version. If the recieved story talks of great men, grand inventions and teleologiocal progress, Benjamin wants to talk about it as an apology for capitalist society. He does this by creating a different history that corrodes capitalism's centre piece: the exchange value of the commodity...

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Great bifurcations: Michael Jackson's posthumous roles and remainders

Already a motion in the US Senate to declare Michael Jackson “an American legend and musical icon (and) a world humanitarian” has been blocked by Republican Peter King who said on Fox News and CNN that Jackson was an alleged pervert, child molester and paedophile. Beyond its interesting racial and party political context (Texan Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee represented Congress and the U.S. Black Caucus at the Jackson memorial on Tuesday) this moment of cultural politics says something important about memory and celebrity in a wider sense. Jackson is not the first hero in popular music to be disputed: on a smaller scale memorials for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were both challenged by their home towns. How then should we see this debate?Writing about Elvis in 1990, Lynn Spigel opposed official...

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Mark's posts on Celebrity

Great bifuractions: Michael Jackson's posthumous roles and remaindersThe "Mention Elvis" ruleRonnie James Dio - laid to rest (a heavy metal funeral)Fiske Matters Conference (11th - 12th June 2010, with audios)Faking it (some useful questions to ask about imposters)I Have Admired You for Many Years (Star-fan encounters and the performance of identity)All Watched Over By Machines (Adam Curtiz' BBC2: our emotions as commodities online)Making Things Whole Again - Take That Reunion Events (Anja Lobert and Tim Wise's conference and exhibition on the living culture of 1990s Take That fand...

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A Michael Jackson bibliography

Anthony Neale, M. (2009) ‘Conjuring Michael,’ Blog post - available online: http://newblackman.blogspot.com/ (retrieved 6/7/09)Awkward, M. (1995) ‘“A Slave to the Rhythm”: Essential(ist) Transmutations; Or, the Curious Case of Michael Jackson,’ in Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender and the Politics of Positionality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 175-192.Baudrillard, J. (1993) The Transparency of Evil. London: Verso.Brackett, D. (2002) ‘(In Search of) Musical Meanings: Genres, Categories and Crossover,’ in Hesmondhalgh, D. and Negus, K. eds Popular Music Studies. London: Arnold, pp. 65-84.Dyson, M. (1993) ‘Michael Jackson’s Postmodern Spirituality,’ Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 35-63.Epstein, D. and Steinberg, D....

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Special bibliographies

GENERAL REFERENCESome 2009 pop research booksGlobal Culture (link to a USC course with a valuable reading list)IASPM book reviewsMichael JacksonCONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS / ABSTRACTSIASPM-US & Canada 2006IASPM-US & Canada 2007World Music Days (Hong Kong, 2007: canons, covers, glitch)Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Oslo, 2007)IASPM International Conference 2009 (fractions of most topi...

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Kraftwerk - men and machines

On Thursday 2nd July my colleague David Pattie, my friend Jon and I descended on the Manchester Velodrome to see a set by the electro-pop legends, Kraftwerk. With only Ralf Hutter left from the original line-up, they still managed to put on an amazing "performance" - I put the term in speechmarks because with Kraftwerk, you just see four men standing at lecturns clicking away on their laptops. They look like they might be aboard the Starship Enterprize as they call up samples and create their pioneering brand of electronic dance music.Kraftwerk have always faced a dilemma when playing "live": how can such calculated, pre-programmed music also seem spontaneous? They managed to keep the show successfully afloat with several integral gimmicks, the first being the British Olympic team who zipped...

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Fandom and Celebrity - recent bibliographic finds

Some recent sources found when looking for fan-related scholarship:Beebe, R. (2002) 'Mourning Becomes...? Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, and the "Waning of Affect",' in Beebe, R. et al eds Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Cultures. London: Duke University Press, 311-334.Franco, J. (2006) 'Langsters Online: kd lang and the Creation of Internet Fan Communities,' in Holmes, S. and Redmond, S. eds Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture. London: Routledge, 269-284.Hamilton, M. (2007) 'Searching for the Blues: James McKune, Collectors and a Different Crossroads,' in Weisbard, E. ed Listen Again: A Momentary History of Popular Music. London: Duke University Press, 26-49.Hesmondhalgh, D. (2007) 'Audiences and Everyday Aesthetics: Talking About Good and Bad Music', European...

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Mark's current research projects...

For spring 2011 I am focusing on several projects:a) A book on Elvis Presley for the Equinox series, Icons of Popular Music.b) A textbook on media fandom for Continuum.c) An article on Hitchcock's The Birds for the Journal of Celebrity Culture.d) A conference paper on the reception of Ben Myer's book Richard for the upcoming LitPop conference.e) Guest editing a special issue of Popular Music and Society on fandom.Follow my research on Twit...

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Mark's posts on Race

Judge Dread (The 1970s cockney reggae answer to Eminem)Michael Jackson (1958-2009) (The myth of pop's greatest legend)Michael Jackson's swansong: 'This is It' (2009)'Gangsta Rap', Louis Theroux's Weird Weekend, BBC2 (New Orleans rap and the glamorization of violence)Literacy in the hood (on Fifty Cent's new self-help book 'The 50th Law')Three kings for Christmas 2009 (Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and Orson Welles)Jews, Race and Popular Music (review of Jon Stratton's 2009 bo...

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Michael Jackson (1958-2009)

A couple of days ago I awoke early to hear the shock news that Michael Jackson had died of a heart attack at the age of 50. The Sun's headline that day - "JACKO DEAD" - caught the ambiguities of moment. Jackson had attained royalty status as the 'King of Pop' yet he was also 'Wacko Jacko', the most eccentric celebrity and global icon of our time. Paul Morley squared this circle on BBC 2's Newsnight Review by explaining that Jackson had culturally died, in effect, in the early 1990s, and his celebrity image - "remnants" as Morley put it - had been recycling in the media ever since.Certainly, the late 1980s and early 1990s were a turning point in Michael Jackson's long and fruitful career, or perhaps they were rather a point of inflection, like the middle of David Lynch's strange narrative in...

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"I don't deny history": on necessarily forging a passport to the past

Opening his 1953 novel The Go-Between, Leslie Poles Hartley famously wrote, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Hartley's dictum evokes the historian as traveller. He or she takes on the privileged role of both explorer and translator. Sometimes reluctant, sometimes shrewd, this confused interloper relentlessly investigates with the aim of sketching a narrative map to explain the terrain of yester year. In the process they become a tourist of Otherness in a land where eccentric natives necessarily go mute.Having been to a departmental research symposium today, I enjoyed it when my colleague Brian Machin presented a piece on his attempts to trace a family member who died in World War II. In his research Brian found...

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