Intersections of Music, Politics, and Digital Media: Bandista (original) (raw)
Related papers
Making and sharing music in exile and fighting border violence
Violence: An International Journal, 2020
The chapter is written in collaboration with Beshwar Hassan, a kurdish musician who spent a few months in the camp of Grande Synthe, near Dunkirk, France. Music was highly important in the leadership role he played in the Grande Synthe camp, notably his ability to entertain the community, and to attract the attention and sympathy of humanitarian workers and volunteers, supported his position. During his time in the camp, he 'became' a musician through the recognition of both his musical skills and his leadership. The study analyses how he constructed his online presence through his relationship to music. using Facebook both as a social medium and as a technical tool, i.e. a space where music is "mediated" through the technical capabilities of the platform and used to share narratives of exile with an audience made up of Facebook friends. The research began while Beshwar Hassan and his family were resident of the Grande Synthe camp and ended one year later when they were granted asylum in the United Kingdom. https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/violence Violence: An International Journal F o r P e e r R e v i e w Making and sharing music in exile and fighting border violence. Abstract This article is written in collaboration with [name omitted for peer-review purposes, he will be
Social Media go to War, 2013
This study investigates the role of music and identity in the North African citizen uprisings, December 2010 - January 2011. The study analyzes lyrics and musical styles of protest anthems in Tunisia and Egypt. I have uploaded here the initial pages, table of contents, intro and author details of the book, Social Media go to War.
Music across Borders | 21st Quinquennial Congress of the International Musicological Society (IMS2022) August 22–26, 2022 Athens, Greece | Abstract Book, 2022
p. 104 Roundtable Organizer/Chair Ioannis CHRISTIDIS (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) Roundtable Participants Ioannis CHRISTIDIS (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) Melissa J. SCOTT (University of California, Berkeley) Graihagh CORDWELL (University of Oxford) Title: Music Infrastructures across Borders: Digital Media, Mobile Technologies, and Music among Syrians in Greece and Jordan Considering the increasing refugee movements of the last decade, ethnomusicologists have started to examine the changing musical, cultural, and social environments in many cities and countries of destination. Various themes and interests have emerged, most prominently the relationship between musical practices and experiences of trauma, both individual and collective; displacement and relations to place; and political mobilization against restrictive border policies. Syrian refugees are one of the largest and most widely dispersed groups of migrants and have subsequently attracted ethnomusicological in- quiry in a variety of settings and socio-political contexts, from Lebanon and Jordan, to Greece, Austria, and Germany, and to the USA and Canada. In this widening field of study, music making in Syrian migration is often framed in terms of the moral, political, and methodological consequences of power imbalances and misrepresentations. Indeed, such inequities are made explicit within contexts of displacement, where both policy and social attitudes limit the extent to which migrants have control over their lives. This panel considers, however, the potentially empowering role of mobile phones, Wi-Fi, so- cial media, and other media technologies for Syrian refugees throughout their journeys and experiences of resettlement. We focus in particular on migrant music making and listening practices, and the possibilities such technologies offer to create public and pri- vate spaces for musical performances, independent of spatial and political boundaries. Ioannis Christidis, on the basis of fieldwork in Thessaloniki (2016), will examine ways in which certain technologies that empower migration practices are used to am- plify, circulate, and experience music in response to restricted mobility, deprivation of rights, and dehumanizing living conditions in refugee camps. Melissa J. Scott will revisit the relationship between urban soundscapes and emplacement by focusing on the use of broadcasting and streaming technologies, such as radio and YouTube, among Syrian musicians in Jordan. Graihagh Cordwell will explore the place of media technologies and internet in Za'atari Refugee Camp in Jordan, including how Syrian musicians approach the challenges faced by the lack of access to certain technologies in their music making.
Dissonance Online: The Islamic Republic of Iran, Music, and the Internet
2012
Questions of the permissibility and regulability of music in Islamic jurisprudence and Persian/Iranian governance have been historically disputed. Since the Revolution of 1979, Iranian music and musicians have been suppressed by their theocratic state and its agencies. Religio-political censorship has ensured the prohibition of musicians performing in public, banned women from singing and, among several other examples, suppressed the production,distribution and consumption of music deemed "incompatible" with the values of the IslamicRepublic (H. G. Farmer 1975, 1942, Bo Lawergren 2011, Youssefzadeh 2005). In the last three decades, however, musicians and their music have harnessed new media technologies in the evasion of these censures. From ethnomusicological, new media, and network theory approaches, this thesis explores how music reproduction technologies and the Internet have altered dealings with barriers of bureaucracy facing music and musicians in Iran and the Iranian diaspora.
Imagining Politics, Popular Music and Remixing: YouTube, Remediation and Protest Song
This paper grew out of a year I spent lecturing in telecommunications, an arena that I thought I knew something about until I got there. It stems from issues raised in my dissertation research, where I became very interested in the relationship between media technologies, conceptions of performance in the technology-driven space of the recording studio, and of the reconceptualization of issues of space that come up as a result of these. This paper looks at questions of online community as a public, using Michael Warner’s 2002 definition and as a result raises questions that reflect the ongoing interest of scholars in musical techno-cultures and performance studies into the relationship between performance and communication technologies. (NB: this abstract is different than the one published in the SEM 2007 program book and has been revised to represent the contents of the paper.)
Discourses of popular politics, war and authenticity in Turkish pop music
Social Semiotics, 2013
Turkey and the United States have had a close mutually beneficial political and military relationship since the end of World War Two. However, this relationship came under pressure when the US government and Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) tried to cooperate closely in the 2003 military invasion of Iraq. AKP’s leadership failed to persuade Turkey’s parliament to accept the deployment of US troops and equipment in Turkey partially due to public opinion. Despite Turkish media and its government being intertwined to the extent where subversive discourses are all but silenced, some popular music videos were able to articulate discourses which questioned AKP’s military policies. This paper analyses lyrics, visuals and sounds of one of these songs to look at the way war and political issues become articulated through a form of simplified popular politics, despite being presented as serious and authentic by a number of key signifiers across the different modes. A number of scholars have addressed the issue of subversion in music both as actual political challenge and as popular counter culture. This case study is used to assess subversion in music in these terms in order to consider its likely place in political debate in Turkey.
Political discourses are found not only in speeches and newspapers, but also in cultural artefacts such as architecture, art and music. Turkey’s June 2013 protests saw an explosion of music videos distributed on the internet. This paper uses these videos as a case study to examine the limits and potential of popular music’s articulation of popular and populist politics. Though both terms encompass what is “widely favoured”, populism includes discourses which construct “the people” pitted against “an elite”. Past research has shown how popular music can articulate subversive politics, though these do not detail what that subversion means and how it is articulated. This paper uses specific examples to demonstrate how musical sounds, lyrics and images articulate populist and popular politics. From a corpus of over 100 videos, a typical example is analysed employing social semiotics. It is found that popular music has the potential to contribute to the public sphere, though its limits are also exposed.
Changing the Tune: popular music and politics in the XXIst century
Volume ! The French journal of popular music studies, Elsa GRASSY, Jedediah Sklower, Naomi Podber, Noriko Manabe, Ana Hofman, Olivier Bourderionnet, Marc Kaiser, alenka barber-kersovan, Bruno Agar, Anthony Kosar
Published: http://www.lespressesdureel.com/ouvrage.php?id=4483&menu=2 "Conference organizers Alenka Barber-Kersovan, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Arbeitskreis Studium Populärer Musik, Germany Elsa Grassy, Université de Strasbourg, International Association for the Study of Popular Music-branche francophone d’Europe, France Jedediah Sklower, Université Catholique de Lille, Éditions Mélanie Seteun / Volume! the French journal of popular music studies, France Keynote speakers Martin Cloonan, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom Dietrich Helms, University of Osnabrück, Germany Provisional scientific committee Ralph von Appen, University of Giessen, Germany Esteban Buch, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France Hugh Dauncey, University of Newcastle, United Kingdom André Doehring, University of Giessen, Germany Gérôme Guibert, University of Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle, France Patricia Hall, University of Michigan, United States Olivier Julien, University of Paris IV, Sorbonne, France Dave Laing, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom David Looseley, University of Leeds, United Kingdom Rajko Muršič, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Rosa Reitsamer, University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, Austria Deena Weinstein, DePaul University, United States Sheila Whiteley, University of Salford, United Kingdom The Conference Popular Music scholars have devoted considerable attention to the relationship between music and power. The symbolic practices through which subcultures state and reinforce identities have been widely documented (mainly in the field of Cultural, Gender and Postcolonial Studies), as has the increasingly political and revolutionary dimensions of popular music. Most studies have focused on the genres and movements that developed with and in the aftermath of the 1960’s counterculture. Yet little has been written about how the politics of popular music has reflected the social, geopolitical and technological changes of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, after the fall of Communism. Still, the music of the Arab Spring or of the Occupy and Indignados movements have been scarcely commented upon while they attest to significant changes in the way music is used by activists and revolutionaries today. This international conference therefore aims to explore the new political meanings and practices of music and to provide an impetus for their study. Broadly the themes of the conference are divided into five main streams: 1. Music as a Political Weapon The history of popular music cannot be divorced from that of social, cultural and political movements, and yet the question remains: if music is politically efficient, how can we measure its impact? It is not clear what role music plays in the struggle for political, ideological and social change. While musical practices and the writing of songs can strengthen existing activist groups, can it also truly change minds or upset the established order and destabilize it? If there are such things as soundtracks for rebellions and revolutions, do they merely accompany fights or can they quicken the pace and bring about change themselves? Of course it would be naïve to think of the political impact of music only in progressive terms; participants are encouraged to pinpoint the ambiguities and contradictions at work in the relationship between music and power. Popular music artists and whole genres can refuse to meddle in politics – and the non-referentiality of music makes it an ill-suited medium for the diffusion of clean-cut messages. It would therefore be ill-advised to consider popular music genres and artists as falling either into the political or apolitical categories. Music can also be violent in less political ways, and even carry nihilistic undertones – it can ignore or even mock its own alleged political power. This should lead us to a re-evaluation of subcultural politics. 2. Political Change, Musical Revolution? The Question of Artistic Legacy The musical styles that accompany social and political change are part of a musical continuum. This prompts the question of originality and relation to tradition. Has the new historical context shaken up the old codes for protest music? What are the new politically conscious forms and genres of today, and how do they relate to older protest movements? The covering of songs from the Civil Rights era and the Great Depression in the aftermath of Katrina and the participation of singers from the 1960s counterculture in the Occupy Wall Street movement raises the issue of correspondences between groups of artists and activists. We will also look at how contemporary movements connect with one another. Can it be said that protest music is globalized today? How does the music of the Arab Spring compare to the songs of the Occupy Wall Street movement or of the Maple Spring protesters? 3. Music, Identity and Nationalism Popular music has a hand in the building and solidification of (sub)cultural communities. Songs have expressed the emergence of new group identities in fall of Communism, the breakup of Yugoslavia and during other political schisms in Latin American countries more recently. People sing and play the old regimes away, or they use music to connect with fellow migrants or refugees in an upset political landscape. Songs serve as a bridge between past and present by pairing traditional patterns to new instruments, new technology, and new media – by associating nostalgia with the wish for change. They can also smooth out the transition to a new life and a new identity as individuals and groups assimilate into another culture. Reversely, they can reflect new cultural antagonisms and class conflicts and follow the radicalization of group identities. In the Balkans, Eastern Europe and Russia, nationalist movements have their own anthems, too. 4. Aesthetics, digital practices and political significations The increased use of computing technology in musical practices as well as the advent of social networks has opened new aesthetic vistas (with the increasing use of sampling, mashups, or shreds), as well as changed the way music is shared, advertised and composed. How do those technical changes affect the political uses of music and its weight? Of course while these changes have led to a wave of increased artistic creativity, they might also obliterate symbolic legacies and political meanings. When do reference and reverence turn into betrayal? New technologies might have opened a new battleground where political awareness competes with cultural emancipation. 5. Marching to a Different Beat? Censorship, Propaganda and Torture The political weight and the mobilizing capacities of popular music can be gauged by how authorities react to them. Some states consider them a threat to their stability and to an established order in which the voice of the people is seldom heard – and never listened to. In the 21st century, popular music is still censored and repressed all over the world. From the ban of irreverent songs after 9/11 to the violence directed against emos in Iraq and the trial against Pussy Riot more recently, the regimes contested by deviants and/or protesters can take musical criticism and anticonformist artists very seriously. Political and moral authorities with a sense of how powerful music can be may also use it for their benefit, as propaganda. Soldiers’ moral and psychological states can also be altered by listening to aggressive playlists during military operations. Music is never further away from its role in political struggles than when it is meant to numb the will of individuals, subdue or even torture. This might constitute the most extreme way in which its emancipatory power can be subverted." Schedule Friday 7 June 2013 12:00: Lunch 13:00-13:30: Conference opening, MISHA conference hall: Alenka Barber-Kersovan, Elsa Grassy, Jedediah Sklower 13:30-14:15: Dietrich Helms intervention 14:15 -14:30: Coffee break 14:30-16:00: Panels I 1. The democratic agency of protest music I: music, society & political change 2. Scenes I: the politics of indie music 3. Hijacking popular music I: persuasion & propaganda 16:00-16:15: Coffee break 16:15-17:45: Panels II 4. The democratic agency of protest music II: performing activist soundscapes 5. Scenes II – racial and postcolonial issues in glocal popular music 6. Hijacking popular music II: Star politics, influence & the masses 18:00-20:00: Visit of Strasbourg’s historical center 19:00-20:00: Visit of Strasbourg by “bateau mouche” 20:30: Dinner at the Maison Kammerzell Saturday 8 June 2013 9:30-11:00: Panels III 7. The democratic agency of protest music III: struggling with commitment 8. Scenes III: glocal hip-hop & the politics of authenticity 9. Identity polemics I: assessing the political past 11:00-11:15: Coffee break 11:15-12:45: Panels IV 10. The democratic agency of protest music IV: political movements & strikes 11. Hijacking popular music III: State policies & propaganda 12. Identity polemics II: the polysemic recycling of popular music 12:45-14:30: “Buffet” at the MISHA conference hall, and short concert within the Jazzdor Strasbourg-Berlin festival 14:30-15:15: Martin Cloonan presentation 15:15-15:30: Coffee break 15h30-17:00: Panels V 13. The democratic agency of protest music V: revolutionary soundtracks? 14. Scenes IV: politics, ethics & aesthetics 15. Identity polemics III: tributes & national myths in the United States 17:00-17:15: Coffee break 17:15-18:00: Conference conclusion & debate Abstracts