Riffs Vol 5 Issue 1: Popular music fiction

“Perhaps only imagination, in its full processes, can touch and reach and recognise and embody… There are many other kinds of writing in society, but these now—of past and present and future—are close and urgent, challenging many of us to try both to understand and to attempt them”
— Raymond Williams

“Good prose is like a windowpane”
— George Orwell

Perhaps you have a comic strip that you wrote on issues of representation in the music industry, or a piece of short fiction that considers popular music heritage, work that has not yet found a home. Or maybe your experiences as a musician, a music fan or researcher have provided you with rich characters, begging to be explored through a dialogue or a short story. We invite you to flex your imagination as a tool for analysis and criticism, to find a fictional form for your insights and arguments, and to imagine potential popular music futures (utopian or dystopian) as a means to critique the present.

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Popular Music and Populism

Special issue of Popular Music (41:4) on Popular Music and Populism (2022)

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/popular-music/popular-music-and-populism-cfp

Populism has been researched from a great array of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences over the last decades. In musicology and popular music studies, however, the concept has been relatively neglected so far. This is all the more surprising since populism and music have been intricately connected at least since the nineteenth-century populist movement in the U.S. (Patch 2016; Kazin 2017), and popular music studies have a long tradition of research into music and politics (Street 2017; Garratt 2019), subcultures and counter-cultural movements that challenge the hegemonic ‘power bloc’ (Clarke et. al. 1975; Hebdige 1979; Eyerman and Jamison 1995). This special issue, therefore, seeks to explore the nexus between popular music and populism.

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‘People Have the Power’: Songs of Resistance in Late Modernity

CITIES, Communities and Territories Special Issue 2021.

Guest Editors: Paula Guerra, University of Porto, Portugal; Elizabeth Turner, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand; Carles Feixa, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain

The aim of this special issue is to examine the unique force of popular music in response to recent and contemporary social problems, and the changing concepts of resistance and protest in popular music. Taking as an example the Portuguese reality in a context of crisis, when the International Monetary Fund intervened in the country, Guerra (2019) illustrates the importance of such reflection and discussion. The author shows how artistic manifestations – in this case, music and protest songs – are themselves a means and an object of social intervention, demarcating a specific, defined space in the acknowledgement and revelation of social problems, and in the contestation, deconstruction and accusation of problems that deal with social reality. Protest songs instigate readings, narratives and deconstructions of reality, and they are simultaneously significant elements of a collective identity.

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Prosecuting and Policing Rap 

Special issue of Popular Music 40.4 (2021)  

Contributions are invited to a special issue of Popular Music on the complex interface between rap music (taken in its broadest sense to include mainstream rap, gangsta rap, activist rap, drill, grime, etc.) and criminal justice systems around the world.

Rap music is an international youth-cultural powerhouse and, while its spread has been celebrated, it has also been attended by mounting criminalisation. This special issue asks researchers to explore the policing and prosecuting of rap and how this has been framed in media reporting. It also considers what might make rap susceptible to such state criminalisation and how rappers, communities, civil liberties groups, defence lawyers, and scholars have come to challenge ‘prosecuting rap’.

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Musical Regions and Regionalisms in the USA

Song and Popular Culture of the Center for Popular Culture and Music, Vol. 66 (2021), ed. by Julius Greve and Knut Holtsträter

Samuel A. Ward and Katherine Lee Bates’ America the Beautiful summons the Arcadian beauty of the natural and cultural landscape of the USA and the unity of the states from coast to coast is conjured up as fatefully harmonious; a “brotherhood from sea to shining sea”. This basic idea of the American Dream, enveloping both the diversity of regional cultures and the unity of national culture, is expressed in many rural and urban musical cultures throughout the United States. From its inception as a nation, the USA has always been musically constructed as a network of regions that are separated from and related to each other, but at the same time may contribute to a greater whole, a higher cause – E pluribus unum. While the belief in the integrative power of this unity-in-diversity proved to be both meaningful and problematic, this idea seems to be finally crumbling at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century. The focus of this volume will be on these aspects – not only with regard to the current crisis-ridden situation of US-American society, but also in terms of earlier historical developments of the USA. The yearbook volume for 2021 seeks to shed light on the wide field of musical regions and regionalisms in the USA and asks for corresponding contributions.

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Heavy Metal Music and Dis/Ability: Crips, Crowds, and Cacophony

Heavy Metal Music and Dis/Ability​ seeks authors to join this edited volume of essays.

While many metal scholars have discussed people with disabilities and their lives in/with heavy metal music informally, or as part of panel discussions, little is in publication about music and people with disabilities, let alone metalheads and disability. Studies on disability and popular music exist, but do not include the very corporeal genre that is heavy metal music.

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The U2 Conference

Heartland: U2’s Looking For American Soul
An International Virtual U2 Conference For Scholars And Fans
October 18 – 24, 2020
http://u2conference.com

U2 has journeyed – at times uneasily – through an America of pulsating metropolis, rugged heartland and shining sea. It long ago fell under the spell of America, but for just as long has felt it still hasn’t found America.

When U2 talks about America, it often describes it in terms of an idea, a dream or an experiment rather than a physical reality. Bono sings in “American Soul” (ft. Kendrick Lamar) on Songs of Experience: “It’s not a place / This country is to me a sound / Of drum and bass. … It’s not a place / This country is to me a thought / That offers grace / For every welcome that is sought.”

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Punk Scholars Network Annual Conference

THEME: GLOBAL PUNK
DATE: 12TH-19TH DECEMBER 2020
A VIRTUAL, ONLINE, GLOBAL CONFERENCE SPANNING EIGHT DAYS IS BEING
BROUGHT TOGETHER BY THE PUNK SCHOLARS NETWORK – BE A PART OF IT.

Punk is a truly global phenomenon that manifests in myriad ways in different scenes, political regimes, cultural contexts and individual experiences. Punk is many things to many people and seldom remains static over a lifetime. Increased globalisation, changes in connectivity and technology, and shifts in both capitalism and populism have impacted punk for better and worse. International and intranational punk scenes and connections are growing and finding commonality and conflict through music, education, mutual aid, performance, political activism and human behaviours. The global Coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the differences people face accessing resources and how governments respond. How have, and how will, various local punk scenes respond to this crisis, and what does their response tell us about punk as a global phenomenon?

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Music, Sound and Silence in Videogames

The scientific publication the Journal of Sound, Silence, Image and Technology (JoSSIT) grew out of the research group of the same name (SSIT), which is linked to the TecnoCampus university centres, affiliated with Pompeu Fabra University (UPF). The journal seeks to bring together academic debate and scientific research on the relationship between sound as a broad concept and an audiovisual context.

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Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt et la scène de Canterbury

International symposium, Strasbourg.

Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt et la scène de Canterbury : un regard différent sur le rock dans les années 1960 et 1970.

Musicological, cultural, sociological and literary approaches.

Thursday 19. november 2020 afternoon, Salle du Fossé des Treize – Friday 20. november 2020 morning and afternoon, Amphithéâtre du Collège Doctoral Européen ;
Concert on 19. novembre at 20h30pm with special guest John Greaves, Salle du Fossé des Treize.

The term “Canterbury scene” refers to a group of rock bands and musicians, mostly English, active from the late 1960s and during the 1970s. The town of Canterbury, Kent, was the place where many of the musicians in question, still in their teens, met and began to collaborate; from this first nucleus, several bands and musical projects developed here and there, such as Soft Machine, Caravan, Gong, Matching Mole, Hatfield and The North, National Health, or Robert Wyatt’s first solo projects.

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