In today’s culture, popular music is a vital site where ideas about gender and sexuality are imagined and disseminated. Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions explores what that means with a wide-ranging collection of chapters that consider the many ways in which contemporary pop music performances of gender and sexuality are politically engaged and even radical. With analyses rooted in feminist and queer thought, contributors explore music from different genres and locations, including Beyoncé’s Lemonade, A Tribe Called Red’s We Are the Halluci Nation, and celebrations of Vera Lynn’s 100th Birthday.
At a bleak moment in global politics, this collection focuses on the concept of critical hope: the chapters consider making and consuming popular music as activities that encourage individuals to imagine and work toward a better, more just world. Addressing race, class, aging, disability, and colonialism along with gender and sexuality, the authors articulate the diverse ways popular music can contribute to the collective political projects of queerness and feminism. With voices from senior and emerging scholars, this volume offers a snapshot of today’s queer and feminist scholarship on popular music that is an essential read for students and scholars of music and cultural studies.
Author(s): Susan Fast, Craig Jennex
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 350
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Past is Present and Future
The Hopeful Politics of Pop
Themes and Connections
Displacing Whiteness
Rethinking Difference
Decolonizing Sound
Refusing Conventions
Voicing Resilience
Note on Citations
Works Cited
Part I: Displacing Whiteness
Introduction: Displacing Whiteness
Notes
Works Cited
Chapter 1: Visions of Wondaland: On Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturistic Vision
The Afrofuturist Framework
Afrofuturist Sound
The ArchAndroid of Wondaland
Anticipating the Human
Activism and the Digital Space
We Must Transform
Notes
Works Cited
Chapter 2: Listening to Difference: Recognition and Refusal in Queer Music Diasporas
Western Values
“Sum of Us/Made from Many Differences”
Sonic Refusal
Notes
Works Cited
Chapter 3: Who’s Your Daddy?Beyoncé, the Dixie Chicks, and the Art of Outlaw Protest
Beyoncé and the Dixie Chicks Rock the CMAs
Country Music, Outlaws, and Blackness: The Ghosts in the Machine
The Outlaw with a Difference: “Daddy Lessons”
Notes
Works Cited
Part II: Rethinking Difference
Introduction: Rethinking Whiteness
Notes
Works Cited
Chapter 4: “Brave New Ideas Begin”: Disability, Gender, and Life Writing in Twenty-First-Century Pop
Mandy Harvey: Sensing the Rhythm
Viktoria Modesta: Prototype
The Sisters of Invention: Brave New Ideas Begin
Notes
Works Cited
Chapter 5: “Round My Hometown”:
Listening to London in the Racial Politics of Post-Millennial British Soul
Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner
Beyond Retro-Soul
Temporal Fuckery
Notes
Works Cited
Chapter 6: Born to Run and Reckless: My Life as a Pretender: Rewriting the Political Imaginary of
Rock Music Memoir
Born to Run: Memoir as Repair
“Brilliant Disguise”
“The Ties That Bind”
Recovery Through Salvage
Reckless: Memoir as “Deconstruction” Politics
“Lost Girls”
“Don’t Get Me Wrong”
“My City Was Gone”
“Middle of the Road”
Notes
Works Cited
Part III:
Decolonizing Sound
Introduction:
Decolonizing Sound
Notes
Works Cited
Chapter 7: Sounding the Halluci Nation: Decolonizing Race, Masculinity,
and Global Solidarities with
A Tribe Called Red
The Emergence of the Halluci Nation
Decolonization Through Indigenous Feminism: Nationhood and Gender in the Halluci Nation
Decolonizing Masculinity and Celebrating Indigenous Manhood
Global Solidarities in the Halluci Nation
The Halluci Nation’s Complicated Citizenry
Allyship in the Halluci Nation
Hope in a Decolonized “Elsewhere”
Notes
Works Cited
Chapter 8: Addict(ive) Sex: Toward an Intersectional Approach to
Truth Hurts’ “Addictive” and Afro-South
Asian Hip Hop and R&B
Addict(ive) Sex
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Chapter 9: Hip Hop Dialogues: Sampling Women’s Hand Drum Songs
and the Canadian Popular Mainstream
“Maybe It’s Female Rappers That Got Me Into It”
Mainstream and Heritage Sampling in Taken
Collaborative Performance
Changing Expectations
Notes
Works Cited
Part IV: Refusing Conventions
Introduction:
Refusing Conventions
Notes
Works Cited
Chapter 10: Electro-Popas Trojan Horse: Hearing the Call to Arms in
Anohni’s HOPELESSNESS
Dancing while the World Burns
Desiring Surveillance
Overhearing Imperial Politics
The Pleasure of Hearing the Call to Arms
Notes
Works Cited
Chapter 11: Genders, Genres, Generations: Jacqueline Warwick and Susan McClary
in Conversation
Notes
Works Cited
Chapter 12: Power in the Darkness and “Angry Atthis”: Anthems, Genres and the Queer Voice
Notes
Works Cited
Part V:
Voicing Resilience
Introduction: Voicing Resilience
Notes
Works Cited
Chapter 13: Resisting the Politics of Aging: Madonna and the Value of Female Labor in Popular Music
“What it Feels Like for a Girl”: How Discourses of Misogyny, Sexism, and Ageism Frame Madonna
Adding Insult to Injury: The Multiple Constraints of Female Aging
You Better Work: Value and the Labor of Being Madonna
Notes
Works Cited
Chapter 14: Vera Lynn 100: Retirement, Aging, and Legacy
for a “National Treasure”
Does Anybody Remember When Vera Lynn … Retired?
Interlude: Nothing Like a Dame—Reinvention in the 1970s
Real Retirement?
National Treasure?
Notes
Works Cited
Chapter 15: Sounding Lockdown: Singing in Administrative Segregation at the
Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women
Arriving: An Overview of Lockdown
The Quiet: Sounding Space
The Noise: Sounding to Measure Time
The People: Sounding Social Relationships
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Contributors
Index
