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- Volume 10, Issue 2, 2019
Journal of European Popular Culture - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2019
Volume 10, Issue 2, 2019
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We’d love to turn you on: Considering Bakhtin and the music of The Beatles, ‘A Day in the Life’
Authors: Lindsay Neill, Nigel Hemmington and Luca SturnyFrom the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, this article re-reads The Beatles’ classic song ‘A Day in the Life’. Our re-reading uses Bakhtin’s chronotope. While ‘A Day in the Life’ was released in 1967, our chronotopic perspectives of it are timely. In using the chronotope to re-read this classic, we have developed an equation linking utterance to culture, time, history, the individual and interpretation. In those ways, our article not only reveals how texts are interpreted within socio-temporal constructs, but through our equation also shows how other texts may be understood and interpreted. Indeed, our equation explains the process of interpretation. Applied to ‘A Day in the Life’, our interpretation reveals the relevance of the songs lyric and music to contemporary understanding that transcends ways of being and becoming. That understanding also reflects The Beatles’ own change from four ordinary Liverpudlians to global mega-stars. Our interpretation of ‘A Day in the Life’ shows how, through lyric, The Beatles addressed their celebrity by reinstating their ordinariness within the music and lyric of the tune. Consequently, and while we concentrate on ‘A Day in the Life’ our article provides a wider view and understanding of how text and music combine to generate a timeless understanding of both meaning and interpretation.
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The impact of the fostering of European industry and Victorian national feeling on African music knowledge systems: Considering possible positive implications
More LessThe European (Victorian) missionary influence on traditional African music in South Africa is largely seen in a negative light and not much focus is placed on possible positive implications. This article therefore serves to explore how external European influences, harnessed by some African musicians, partially aided in preserving and generating conceivably ‘new’ Euro-African hybrid traditional music genres – while at the same time preserving some fragmented forms of indigenous music knowledge for future generations. In general, the ultimate aim for the European missionaries was to allow Africans to, in effect, colonize ‘themselves’ by using their influence of Victorian (British nationalist) religion, education, technology, music and language as a means to socially ‘improve’ and ‘tame’ the ‘wild’ Africans. However, specifically with reference to music, African composers and arrangers – despite this colonizing influence – occasionally retained a musical ‘uniqueness’. John Knox Bokwe, an important figure in what can be termed the ‘Black Intellect’ movement, displays this sense of African musical uniqueness. His arrangement of ‘Ntsikana’s Bell’, preserved for future generations in the Victorian style of notation (or a version thereof), best illustrates the remnants of a popular cultural African indigenous musical quality that has been combined with the European cultural tonic sol-fa influence. Furthermore, the establishment of the popular cultural ‘Cape coloured voices’ also serves to illustrate one dimension of the positive implications that the fostering of European industry (industrialized developments) and Victorian national feeling/nationalism left behind. This is largely because this choral genre can be termed as a distinctly ‘new’ African style that contains missionary influence but that still retains an exclusive African quality.
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Temporal tapestries: Transforming cityscapes in Berlin pop music videos
By Maria StehleThis article analyses a selection of pop music videos released between 2012 and 2014 that rescript Berlin’s Zeitlichkeit (temporality), the relationship between city spaces, history, and time. Examples include videos by German and non-German artists, ranging from David Bowie to Miss Platnum, Lilly Wood & the Prick, Alanis Morissette and Andreas Bourani. Striking synergies between the different sound-image-texts emerge around questions of historic memory, time, and time passing. Close analyses show how these Berlin music videos released between 2012 and 2014 challenge linear narratives of pasts and progress. In the non-linear conceptions of time suggested in these videos and songs, new and old agents can coexist and create images and narratives of a different temporal tapestry of the city.
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Nostalgia, community and resistance: Counter-cultural politics in a Finnish skinzine
More LessCulture and community building are an essential part of the appeal of the far-right and fascist movements. Studying their cultural products is therefore important for a deeper understanding of the movement and their modus operandi. One elemental part of their culture are the so-called zines, small-scale do-it-yourself magazines intended for scene members. In certain respects, the far-right zines, skinzines, follow the forms and trends of other underground publications, especially punk-zines, with which they also share the resistance identity as stigmatized and marginalized actors. However, the political visions in skinzines are more or less opposite to ‘democratic zines’, creating certain tension between their political goals and the general media logic. In this article, I will explore a Finnish skinzine Ukonvasama and their community, analysing the efforts to build a nationalist movement and to mobilize support in relation to a retreat to nostalgic counter-culture they also promote. Ukonvasama is both a nostalgic project of former skinheads and a political project of far-right activists.
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From audio broadcasting to video streaming: The impact of digitalization on music broadcasting among the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland
Authors: Johannes Brusila and Kim RamstedtThis paper investigates how digitalization has affected the role that Finland’s Public Service Broadcasting Company (YLE) plays for the popular music culture of the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland. Drawing on theories from popular music and cultural industry studies, the study explores to what extent new technology has changed practices, structures and perspectives of minority artists. The paper, which forms a sub-study of a larger research project on the impact of digitalization on minority music, focuses on two case studies, the comic duo Pleppo and comedian/artist Alfred Backa. The analysis illustrates how important the public service broadcasting company still is for minority culture despite the structural changes caused by digitalization. However, the radio’s quality norms have led to a paradoxical situation where the digital productions of the musicians need to compete with the technical standards of the international entertainment industry, whereas the channels’ own productions can follow DIY norms. As the broadcasting company is increasingly moving its focus towards the web, it must in the future achieve a balance between the different dynamics of commercial interests, controversial creativity and traditional public broadcasting objectives.
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Reviews
Authors: Elizabeth Cherry, Jennifer Craik, Paul B. Thompson and Justin O’HearnMaking Taste Public: Ethnographies of Food and the Senses, Carole Counihan and Susanne Højlund (eds) (2018) London: Bloomsbury Academic, 232 pp., ISBN 978-1-35005-268-0, h/bk, £85
European Fashion: The Creation of a Global Industry, Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Vèronique Pouillard (eds) (2018) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 344 pp., ISBN 978-1-52612-209-4/978-1-52612-210-0, p/bk, £20
Food Justice and Narrative Ethics: Reading Stories for Ethical Awareness and Activism, Beth A. Dixon (2018) New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 175 + viii pp., ISBN 978-1-35005-456-1, h/bk, $102.60
The Thorny Path: Pornography in Early Twentieth Century Britain, Jamie Stoops (2018) Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 300 pp., ISBN 978-0-77355-468-9, h/bk, $39.95 CAD/$34.95 USD
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