Don Cherry: Canadian Patriot

Since I am off to Canada quite soon, I have decided to do a post about the country's most prominent patriot, the legendary Don Cherry.For anyone who doesn't know, hockey is a Canadian obsession. By coaching the NHL's Boston Bruins (with its legendary player Bobby Orr), Cherry managed to earn himself a footnote in the national myth. He expanded upon that by being sports commentator for CBC and growling the macho catchphrase "Rock em, sock em!"Slowly but tenaciously, Grapes, as he is known, took up his place beside Pierre Trudeau and Wayne Gretzky as a national cultural icon.... So why the cult of Cherry? The truth is that if Don had been born an American, he would probably have sunk without a trace. What matters is the way he contradicts Canadian notions of national identity: the way he flatly...

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Frank Sidebottom, RIP

Tonight Manchester is staging a live tribute to Chris Sievey, the recently deceased creator of one of the city's most-loved comedy characters, Frank Sidebottom. Sievey made his career by donning a papier machee head that made him look like a kewpie doll, and then exploring a kind of happy northern amateurism. Predictably, it was not long before Frank disappeared into his own parody. From the 1980s onwards the big-hearted, big-headed figure straddled a line between underground and mainstream media. In his heyday he appeared on national TV shows like The Tube. Indeed, Frank's forays into comedy, TV presenting, cabaret and popular music were ongoing. Sievey had been in a band called The Freshies and there is now a campaign to get Frank's recent football song to the top of the charts.Hailing from...

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Metal on Metal: Notes on the Crash in Popular Culture

Image: bigjom / FreeDigitalPhotos.netJames Dean, Jackson Pollock and Princess Diana died in them. Jim Morrison was supposedly traumatized by watching one. JG Ballard thought they were sexy. What am I writing about? Car Crashes. I can remember some years ago there was a headline in my local paper, "Double Death Smash: Wall of Silence." Since then, I have been interested in the social symbolism of these violent accidents and the way they resonate in popular culture.I should say right from the start, this has nothing to do with the immense personal tragedy of real crashes; real horrors that nobody wants and that have touched the lives of many I know. Ironically, popular culture glamorizes what in real life can only be experiences of deep personal...

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What are imagined memories?

Yesterday I had fun talking to Matt Grimes, a music industry lecturer at Birmingham City University who is starting a PhD on canonization and fans' memories of Crass. Matt is writing up a blog post about our day of discussion. He is particularly interested in the idea of 'imagined memories' that I developed in 2002-2003 in a pair of articles about Paul McCartney's webcast from the Cavern. At one point Matt asked me to explain how imagined memories come about. What I will do in the rest of this post is to define imagined memories and answer that question.Seeing the Beatles early live shows at the Cavern and seeing the Sex Pistols taunt Bill Grundy on The Today Show at the end of 1976 are classic examples of imagined memories. The first thing to notice is that these incidents really happened:...

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Without Fathers: John Lennon and Jim Morrison

Tonight I got round to watching two biopics of 1960s icons, BBC4's Lennon Naked and the new Doors feature documentary When You're Strange. What unites these films is their father and son rejection narrative. In Lennon Naked, Christopher Eccleston does a fine job of playing Lennon at his most acerbic and asinine - an angry and creative man who constantly walked out on his own family. Variously that family was represented as Cynthia and Julian, the Beatles, his fans, his home in Great Britain, and, ultimately, his absentee father (played by a Christopher Fairbank).The film climaxes with Lennon finding his rawest feelings of abandonment in the context of Primal Scream therapy, then recording 'Mother' as a record of his pain, and - in what may well be a fabricated dramatic moment - using the recording...

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Jews, Race and Popular Music by Jon Stratton (2009)

I was recently asked to review Jews, Race and Popular Music by Jon Stratton for the journal Popular Music. The book is an interesting case-by-case study of the Jewish input into musical performance, from torch singing to Amy Winehouse. Stratton suggests that dominant WASP culture has positioned Jews as neither black nor fully white, but oscillating in a kind of cultural transit somewhere in between the two. The argument neatly avoids issues of essentialism and self-definition by focussing on how Jewish performers have then manipulated their role to act as racial go-betweens: privileged interpreters of black identity for a white audience. One of the pleasures of the book is simply the roll call of Jews in the music industry: some obvious, some...

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Fiske Matters Conference, 11th - 12th June 2010

I must be getting slow - I just spotted that Madison, Wisconsin recently had a conference in honour of the work of John Fiske featuring keynotes by Fiske and Henry Jenkins. As I'm sure you know, with their emphasis on the 'active' audience, these two scholars defined a turn in reception studies that aimed to restore agency to fans... Click here for the keynote audi...

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Thanks for making it such a great day!

'Popular Music Fandom: A One Day Symposium' took place last Friday and was a great success. Speakers from as far a field as Brazil arrived at the Binks Building and Matt Hills gave a really interesting and dynamic keynote speech on 'post-popular music' fandom.Another speaker, Tonya Anderson, has just been on Laurie Taylor's long-running Radio 4 show Thinking Allowed to talk about nostalgic Duran Duran fans. The show also contained a discussion of metal's female fanbase and a commentary by Angela McRobbie.Matt Grimes, who came along and is starting a PhD on anarcho-punk fandom, has just posted an interesting review of the symposium.Some comments from our speakers:The conference was a truly terrific event, and I'm so glad to have had the opportunity...

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