Talk: IASPM Research Seminar: Perspectives On The Politics of Popular Music (online, 16.12.2021)

IASPM Research Seminar: Perspectives On The Politics of Popular Music. Activists And Messages

online

16.12.2021, 17:30

We have two presentations this month.

The first presentation will be:

What Mass Culture Does to Everyday Activism. The French Communist Youth and Popular Music in the 1960s

When considering popular music and politics, scholarly work usually focuses on the former’s political relevance, its instrumentalization by parties and social movements, its role in advancing various agendas, etc. Rarely are these relations observed the other way around. This presentation will analyze the contradictions of the French Communist Youth’s new cultural strategy in the 1950s-60s. While aiming at integrating popular music in its propaganda and sociabilities to seduce the “new” French youth, it unsettled the movement's forces, organization and entire “governmental” structure.

Jedediah Sklower

Affiliation: Sorbonne-Nouvelle, IRMÉCCEN.

PhD in information and communication studies/cultural history. Member of Volume! the French journal of popular music studies. Author of Free jazz, la catastrophe féconde, co-editor of Countercultures and Popular Music (with S. Whiteley, Ashgate/Routledge), Politiques des musiques populaires au XXIe s. (with E. Grassy, M. Seteun). J. Sklower recently translated C. Small’s Musicking (Philharmonie de Paris).

And the second presentation will be:

Some uses and effects of antiracist songs

What do antiracist songs do? What are they for? Such songs have been praised for the “message” they transmit, or criticized as “virtue signalling” or “preaching to the converted”. This contribution, based on a corpus of British antiracist songs since the 1960s, and taking a view of popular song as "participatory theatre ", attempts to identify elements of their usefulness in people’s everyday life.

John Mullen

Affiliation: Université de Rouen, Research team ERIAC.

John Mullen is Senior Professor at the University of Rouen in France. He has published two books with Routledge on the Popular Music Industry during the First World War, and a large number of articles on the history of British popular music. His work on the politics of the Notting Hill Carnival, and on political rock, as well as his involvement in antiracist activism, led him to be interested in the present subject. His most recent work has been on how popular song communicates, and the meaning of singalong as a personal communicative experience.

More information here.