From ‘Hard Rock Hallelujah’ to ‘Ukonhauta’ in Nokialand: a socionomic perspective on the mood shift in Finland's popular music from 2006 to 2009

Popular Music ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-252
Author(s):  
Mikko Ketovuori ◽  
Matt Lampert
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Random Sample ◽  
Hard Rock ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Business Unit ◽  
Social Expression ◽  
Comparable Sample

AbstractSocial mood in Finland shifted from generally positive in the spring of 2006 to generally negative by the spring of 2009. We identify this change in mood via eight indicators, including the onset of a financial and macroeconomic crisis, a decline in measures of sentiment, a rise in radical politics and the demise of an iconic business unit of one of the country's most successful firms. From the standpoint of Prechter's socionomic theory we hypothesise that this change in social mood is also evident in a greater level of pessimism in the songs on the country's pop chart in 2009 relative to 2006. To test this hypothesis, we introduce and validate a tool to measure optimism and pessimism in popular music. We apply this tool to a random sample of songs from the Finnish pop chart from 2006 and a comparable sample from 2009. Indeed, we find that the sample from 2009 in the aggregate is substantially and significantly more pessimistic than the sample from 2006. The study serves to enrich our understanding of what makes pop songs popular and how popular music is linked psychologically to broader popular culture and other domains of social expression through a shared social mood.

Becoming and being goth: How goths remember the scene’s transition from the eighties into the nineties

2021 ◽  
Vol 00 (00) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Trevor Bamford ◽  
Joseph Ibrahim ◽  
Karl Spracklen
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
The Political ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
The World ◽  
Mainstream Culture ◽  
The Way

Goth emerged from post-punk, and by the 1980s became an identifiable feature of the popular music scene and wider popular culture. Fuelled by the success of bands such as the Sisters of Mercy, goth music and culture spread around the world, interacting with wider alternative, gothic fashions. At the end of the 1980s, goth reached a peak of interest followed by retrenchment into the alternative, subcultural spaces from which it had emerged. Nonetheless, it survives. In this article, we interview goths who became active in the 1980s and who remain engaged in order to understand how they became goths and what goth meant to them then. Using memory work, we are interested in how these goths construct their own histories and mythologies, and what this might tell us about the political and sociological importance of goth as a counter-hegemonic space at a time of globalization, consumption and commodification. We explore how they remember goth emerging from the post-punk scene with its radical politics and alternative, anti-mainstream culture. We examine the way these individuals remember becoming goth and their awareness of being in a goth scene. We then show how they remember and construct stories of when goth retrenched in an alternative underground that reconstructed the counter-hegemonic politics of punk and post-punk. Finally, we show what happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s and argue that the scene, or that part of the scene represented by our goths, is following a dialectical path carved out of the neo-Gramscian concept of negotiation when faced with the culturally and aesthetically hegemonic effect of a dominant culture.

Humanism and Music

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher M. Driscoll
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Theoretical Relationship ◽  
Rock Band ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the relationship between humanism and music, giving attention to important theoretical and historical developments, before focusing on four brief case studies rooted in popular culture. The first turns to rock band Modest Mouse as an example of music as a space of humanist expression. Next, the chapter explores Austin-based Rock band Quiet Company and Westcoast rapper Ras Kass and their use of music to critique religion. Last, the chapter discusses contemporary popular music created by artificial intelligence and considers what non-human production of music suggests about the category of the human and, resultantly, humanism. These case studies give attention to the historical and theoretical relationship between humanism and music, and they offer examples of that relationship as it plays out in contemporary music.

“Poor Butterfly”: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Popular Music

Prospects ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 41-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Prigozy
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
42Nd Street

The seventy-one song titles (see chart below) and innumerable lyrics that sprinkle his works indicate the extent of F. Scott Fitzgerald's reliance upon popular music as a source of his art. Contemporaneous descriptions of him as “laureate of the Jazz Age” need not be considered derisive; Fitzgerald was thoroughly in touch with his culture, was aware of the meaning of his sources, and was a keen analyst of the effects of popular culture on American lives. Cecilia Brady, in The Last Tycoon, admits “some of my more romantic ideas actually stemmed from pictures—42nd Street, for example, had a great influence on me. It's more than possible that some of the pictures which Stahr himself conceived had shaped me into what I was.” Fitzgerald was shaped by movies, by musical comedies, and not least by popular music. Other writers of our century were influenced in the same way, but it was Fitzgerald who acknowledged his debt to popular culture, who used it with meticulous care, and who evaluated seriously its impact, for better or worse, on the American scene.

Invented Dances, Or, How Nigerian Musicians Sculpt the Body Politic

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Dotun Ayobade
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
African Music

AbstractPopular dances encapsulate the aliveness of Africa's young. Radiating an Africanist aesthetic of the cool, these moves enflesh popular music, saturating mass media platforms and everyday spaces with imageries of joyful transcendence. This essay understands scriptive dance fads as textual and choreographic calls for public embodiment. I explore how three Nigerian musicians, and their dances, have wielded scriptive prompts to elicit specific moved responses from dispersed, heterogenous, and transnational publics. Dance fads of this kind productively complicate musicological approaches that insist on divorcing contemporary African music cultures from the dancing bodies that they often conjure. Taken together, these movements enlist popular culture as a domain marked by telling contestations over musical ownership and embodied citizenship.

Two Factors of Creativity

1986 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur G. Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Factor Analysis ◽  
High Schools ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Random Sample ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Comparable Sample ◽  
Grade 11

This research was designed to inquire into factors in creativity. In Study 1, a battery of eight creativity measures was administered to a random sample of 275 Jamaican middle-class 16-yr.-olds (73 boys and 202 girls) drawn from the Grade 11 population of high schools in Kingston. Study 2 mounted two years later was a replication involving a comparable sample of 320 subjects (101 boys and 219 girls). Factor analysis of the creativity scores collected in Study 1 indicated the presence of two factors of creativity, a verbal factor and a nonverbal factor. Similar confirming findings also emerged in Study 2.

Hallyu tourism: The effects of broadcast and music

2021 ◽  
pp. 135481662110482
Author(s):  
Chew Ging Lee ◽  
Shi-Min How
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Research Note ◽  
Destination Image ◽  
Inbound Tourism

Limited studies have empirically shown that the inbound tourism of South Korea (hereafter Korea) is positively influenced by Hallyu, a Korean popular culture. Conceptually, some studies have suggested that in recent years, the popularity of Korean popular music is greater than Korean dramas, which spread Hallyu beyond the boundary of Korea since the late 1990s. This research note is the first attempt to analyse the effects of the two main aspects of Hallyu: broadcast, inclusive of Korean dramas and variety shows, and Korean popular music, on Korea’s inbound tourism. The findings suggest that broadcast has a stronger positive impact than Korean popular music on Korea’s inbound tourism because broadcast improves the destination image by featuring locations.

‘ROCK SPECTRALE’: THE CULTURAL IDENTITY OF THE ELECTRIC GUITAR IN TRISTAN MURAIL'S vampyr!

Tempo ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (274) ◽  
pp. 22-32
Author(s):  
Ben Jameson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
New Music ◽  
Electric Guitar ◽  
Concert Music ◽  
Analytical Approaches

AbstractThe electric guitar is one of the most iconic musical instruments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and, due to its ubiquitous use in much rock and popular music, it has developed a strong cultural identity. In recent years, as the electric guitar has become increasingly common in contemporary concert music, its cultural associations have inevitably shaped how composers, performers and listeners understand music performed on the instrument. This article investigates various issues relating to the electric guitar's cultural identity in the context of Tristan Murail's Vampyr! (1984), in the hope of demonstrating perspectives that will be useful in considering new music for the electric guitar more generally. The article draws both on established analytical approaches to Murail's spectral oeuvre and on concepts from popular music and cultural studies, in order to analyse the influence that the electric guitar's associations from popular culture have in new music.

Imagining the Next Day

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roshi Naidoo
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
National Narrative

If popular culture shapes subjectivity in an individualized and collective sense, popular music heritage must affect “meaning-making” in the present. In examining the battle for meaning within music heritage displays, the author considers two things. First, how and why subversion, resistance, creative dissent, and the imaginative possibilities of identity are reconfigured within a consensual national narrative. Second, how some heritage expressions resist such containment by signaling the power of identity to facilitate both present and future rebellion.

scholarly journals Where is the Law in ‘Unlawful Combatant’?: Resisting the Refrain of the Right-eous

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-159
Author(s):  
Melissa Gregg ◽  
Glen Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Leading Edge ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Holy War ◽  
War Machine ◽  
The Us ◽  
Saddam Hussein ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right

The rhythms of war and popular culture intermingle, amplify each other and become expressive. At the leading edge of the US military’s war machine assemblage, as the nation of Iraq is deterritorialised from the despotic signifier ‘Saddam Hussein’, the soldiers’ music consolidates a milieu of the battlefield. It also consolidates a space-time of the here-now with something less horrific. The popular music refrain produces a home away from home. In their patriotism, many of these singer–soldiers see a religious act. When someone is saying ‘God is on our side’ they are no longer talking about the nation-based context for which, whatever the rules of war might be, such rules are relevant. They’re talking about a Holy War. It has different rules. How to hold them to any actual account is the difficulty we seek to explore here.

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