Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Popular music Chilean poetry Popular culture Politics and culture Popular culture Politics and culture'

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 344-363). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

This thesis examines the politics of popular music and youth culture in two geographically close but socioculturally distinct Indian Ocean islands: Réunion (a French overseas département) and Mauritius (independent from Britain since 1968). Neither island has an indigenous, pre-colonial population: the respective societies have thus formed through successive waves of immigration, including the importation of slaves and indentured workers from Madagascar, Africa, and Asia, resulting in extremely ethnically diverse populations, on both a communal and individual level. The island societies both began the twentieth century as sugar-producing plantation colonies, but by the beginning of the twenty-first century, their socioeconomic landscapes had been dramatically transformed: independent Mauritius was proclaimed as an ‘African tiger’ thanks to astute state management of limited resources, and Réunion became a French département d’outre-mer, with living standards now similar to those of metropolitan France. Although both island societies experienced dramatic and rapid transformation, however, modern-day Réunion and Mauritius have come to represent opposing postcolonial experiences. This has resulted in the adoption of opposing approaches to the question of ethnic and racial difference: whereas the Mauritian Constitution officially acknowledges the existence of ethnoreligious ‘communities’, ethnic difference is not officially recognised in Réunion due to colour-blind French Republican policy. The following analysis seeks to show that the study of contemporary popular culture can provide particular insights into the workings of these two creolised, postcolonial societies. Considered here principally through the lens of popular music and youth culture, it will be argued that contemporary Réunionese and Mauritian popular music and youth cultures engage with political and social issues specific to each context. This is discussed in Part II in relation to Kreol language politics, which shows that popular music can be said to work towards changing mentalities still influenced by colonial language prejudices; and in Part III as concerns popular culture’s engagement with discourses of inclusion and exclusion within the national community.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2006.
Title from first page of PDF file (viewed February 28, 2006). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 206-220).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007.
The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on March 25, 2008) Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis is an ethnographic and gender-sensitive account of the identities urban Palestinian youth perform through their self-defined ‘alternative’ scene-based musical practices in the post-Oslo era. Departing from the problematic that Palestinian folkloric identity and/or the classical Palestinian national resistance paradigm dominate studies of popular and expressive musics in the Palestinian context, I ask instead how scene affiliates’ musical practices do, or do not do, political work, and in what way – if even at all – these relate to the nation, resistance, and Palestinianness. My approach is ‘bottom-up’ and qualitative, drawing on thirteen months of fieldwork in the interdependent cities of Ramallah (1967/West Bank), Haifa (1948/modern-day Israel), and Amman (Jordan). I carried out sixty-four in-depth interviews and fifteen focus groups with young musicians, bands, audience members, fans, DJs, beat-makers, emcees, producers, party planners, bar and club owners, and other related persons in the scene; as well as over eighty participant observations at concerts, parties, gigs, raves, and bars scenesters frequent. I conclude that their musics perform political work contingently, shifting according to the narratives and practices research lenses focus on, as well as the institutional and geopolitical backdrops hosting them. I argue that in a local Palestinian context, musics perform political, anti-colonial work beyond, and sometimes even against, the classical national resistance paradigm. Given Oslo’s failed ‘peace’ process, scene-affiliates critique the Palestinian Authority (PA), its institutionalisation of the national movement, and territorially-based two-state solution, re-drawing their community instead on the regional lines of bilad al-sham. However, while politicised content is foreground, it is not the only issue youth are concerned with. Many are reluctant to narrow their aesthetic positionalities to political frames, instead pushing musics’ social role as a site of conviviality where new (gendered and other) identities are imagined and enacted. Since Palestine’s globalising ‘turn’ in part enabled these emerging identities and social contexts, leisure and consumption play central roles in their embodiment. Hybrid and translocal in formation, scenesters use localised tropes of Palestinianness (dabke dancing, wedding musics), and globalised ‘hip’ fashions (tattoos, androgynous dress), musics (psy-trance, electro, reggae, hip-hop), and social practices (clubbing, raving, bar-hopping) to perform their imaginaries of alterity. Such translocalisms uncouple Palestinianness from Palestinian national identity, upholding Palestinian particularity while making room for internal differences. However, shifting research focus to a transnational context, I contend that when musicians are branded to London, their self-representations, or the representations their international hosts make of them, often foreground the national resistance, and/or folklorising identity paradigms disavowed locally. Reducing their complex subjectivities to narrow national-territorial frames, in this global circuit of consumption, Palestinian cultural practices perform British multicultural tolerance to ‘ethnic’ otherness on international stages. This, I argue, highlights that Palestinian musics’ reiteration of the nation, resistance, and/or Palestinianness often stems from the operation of geopolitical power, more than the musical content itself. My core argument in the thesis thus is twofold. Firstly, I make the case that scencesters’ musical practices express and enable neither merely resistance, nor solely submisson to the intwertwined status quos of settler-colonial occupation and neoliberal hegemony. Their musics are instead important sites of modest meaning-making. Moving beyond the revolution/co-optation binary reveals scenesters’ everyday and situated negotiations with various political and social powers. Secondly, I argue that since the transnational political economy of images often shapes how Palestinian musics travel in international spaces, we need not ask what Palestinian musics convey, but rather, why we are invited to take up a particular rendering of Palestinian art and culture, and – importantly – what can this tell us about the operation of geopolitical power translocally? Adopting transnational and translocal lenses to analyse how power shapes and normalises conceptualisations of Palestinian musics, my thesis thus calls for the need to see Palestinian cultural production beyond narrow national frames, and position it instead in the global contexts that inform, and are informed by, such aesthetic practices.

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De roqueiro a integrante da bateria da Mangueira, de morador da zona sul carioca a ‗xerife‘ da cela 11 da Polinter (Política Interestadual), de militante do Partido dos Trabalhadores a líder das passeatas pelo impeachment da presidente Dilma Rousseff (PT): eis alguns desafios impostos a quem pretende compreender a insólita trajetória de Lobão. A carreira de Lobão foi marcada pela inconstância de seus posicionamentos. Esquerda ou direita? Rock ou MPB? Grandes gravadoras ou mercado independente? Compreender as ditas contradições e as guinadas do músico nos campos artístico e político constituem o grande objetivo desta pesquisa. A seu modo, Lobão se faz presente há mais de quarenta anos na vida cultural e política do país, justificando o interesse na realização de um estudo acadêmico sobre sua trajetória.
From rocker to member of the drum section of Mangueira samba school, from resident of Southern Rio de Janeiro to ―sheriff‖ of cell 11 of the Interstate Police Prison (Polinter), from Workers‘ Party (PT) militant to leader of protests demanding the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff (PT): these are some of the challenges faced by someone trying to understand Lobão‘s peculiar trajectory. Lobão‘s career was characterized by the inconsistency of his positions. Left or right? Rock or Brazilian Popular Music (MPB)? Major record labels or independent market? Understanding such contradictions and the twists and turns of the musician‘s path in the artistic and political fields represent the main objective of this research. In his own way, Lobão has been present in Brazil‘s cultural and political life for more than forty years, which justifies the idea of developing an academic study about his journey.

This dissertation explores issues of gender politics, market segmentation, and taste through an examination of the contributions of several artists who have achieved Adult Contemporary (AC) chart success. The scope of the project is limited to a period when many artists who figured prominently in both the broader mainstream of American popular music and the more specific Adult Contemporary category were most commercially viable: from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. My contention is that, as gender politics and gendered social norms continued to change in the United States at this time, Adult Contemporary – the chart, the format, and the associated music – was an important, if overlooked or even trivialized, arena in which these shifting gender dynamics played out. This dissertation explores the significance of the Adult Contemporary format at the end of the twentieth century through analysis of chart performance, artist image, musical works, marketing, and contextual factors. By documenting these relevant social, political, economic, and musical factors, the notable role of a format and of artists neglected by scholars becomes clear. I explore these issues in the form of lengthy case studies. Examinations of how Adult Contemporary artists such as Michael Bolton, Wilson Phillips, Matchbox Twenty, David Gray, and Mariah Carey were produced and marketed, and how their music was disseminated, illustrate record and radio industry strategies for negotiating the musical, political, and social climate of this period. Significantly, musical and lyrical analyses of songs successful on AC stations, and many of their accompanying promotional videos highlight messages about musical genre, gender, race, and age. This dissertation ultimately demonstrates that Adult Contemporary-oriented music figured significantly in the culture wars, second and third wave feminism, expressions of masculinity, Generation-X struggles, postmodern identity, and market segmentation. This study also illustrates how the record and radio industries have managed audience composition and behavior to effectively and more predictably produce and market music in the United States. This dissertation argues that, amid broader social determinations for taste, the record industry, radio programmers, and Billboard chart compilers and writers have helped to make and reinforce certain assumptions about who listens to which music and why they do so. In addition, critics have weighed in on what different musical genres and artists have offered and for whom, often assigning higher value to music associated with certain genres, socio-political associations, and listeners while claiming over-commercialization, irrelevance, aesthetic insignificance, and bad taste for much other music.

In this thesis, First Nations popular music is examined as a polysemic sign (or symbolic form) whose meaning is mediated both socially and politically. Native popular music is a locus for the action of different social forces which interact in negotiating the nature and the meaning of the music. Music is socially meaningful in that it provides a means by which people construct and recognize social and cultural identities. As such, First Nations popular music functions as an emblem of symbolic differentiation between Canadian natives and non-natives. Native pop music plays host to a number of political meanings embedded in this syncretic musical form. Struggle over meaning is mediated within the music itself: in the lyrics, in the music, in the juxtaposition of musical styles, and between music and text. Mediation on all of these levels is further influenced by the mass media. Meaning on individual, local and national levels is dependent on the socio-political positioning of both the performers and the audience. Because socio-political positions are themselves fluid, political meanings are also in constant flux. As a polysemic sign vehicle, First Nations popular music is a locus for these various meanings and a site for the construction and deconstruction of political discourse.

This dissertation seeks to explore how the exercise of political power and the music industry impacted each other in South Africa under apartheid during the 1980s. It does so by looking firstly at the ways in which the South African government used music to promote apartheid. Secondly, it looks at the role of South African popular musicians in the struggle against apartheid in the country, specifically their role in civil society and the methods they employed to fight apartheid while avoiding censorship. It looks at key musical developments of the decade and explores their political implications, focusing on three popular genres: bubblegum (or disco), crossover and reggae. Thirdly, it explores the role of South African music and musicians in the struggle against apartheid outside South Africa. Finally, it looks at the role of music in the international anti-apartheid movement and the contribution of the international music community to the struggle.
Political Sciences
M.A. (African Politics)

The topic of my thesis focuses on the phenomenon of popular music in the area of Central Europe, which in the 20th century had been characterized by the presence of the ruling Communist ideology. The work will be based primarily on popular music and its changes in the 70s and 80s of 20th century in Hungary. The issue will be approached from cultural- historical perspective and its focus will be tension between the official cultural program and the need to respond to the requirements of the recipient at the time. Basic structure consists of the situation in Hungary, which will be compared to the situation in Czechoslovakia, there will be outlined the main common points that have an impact on Central European culture and politics, as well as the specifics of the Hungarian situation. Also the relation to the export of Hungarian popular music abroad will be mentioned.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
Opposing the culture of différance created through American cultural media, this thesis argues, Arab hip-hop artists revive the politically conscious sub-genre of hip-hop with the purpose of normalising their Arab existence. Appropriating hip-hop for a cultural protest, Arab artists create for themselves a sub-genre of conscious hip-hop – Arab-conscious hip-hop and function as Gramsci’s organic intellectuals, involved in better representation of Arabs in the mainstream. Critiquing power dynamics, Arab hip-hop artists are counter-hegemonic in challenging popular identity constructions of Arabs and revealing to audiences biases in media production and opportunities for progress towards social justice. Their identity (re)constructions maintain difference while avoiding Otherness. The intersection of Arab-consciousness through hip-hop and politics of identity necessitates a needed cultural protest, which in the case of Arabs has been severely limited. This thesis progresses by reviewing literature on politics of identity, Arabs in American cultural media, Gramsci’s organic intellectuals and conscious hip-hop. Employing criticism, this thesis presents an argument for Arab hip-hop group, The Arab Summit, as organic intellectuals involved in mainstream representation of the Arab community.