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Copyright by Paxton Christopher Haven 2020 The Thesis Committee for Paxton Christopher Haven Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Thesis: Oops…They Did It Again: Pop Music Nostalgia, Collective (Re)memory, and Post-Teeny Queer Music Scenes APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Suzanne Scott, Supervisor Curran Nault Oops…They Did It Again: Pop Music Nostalgia, Collective (Re)memory, and Post-Teeny Queer Music Scenes by Paxton Christopher Haven Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin May 2020 Dedication To my parents, Chris and Fawn, whose unwavering support has instilled within me the confidence, kindness, and sense of humor to tackle anything my past, present, and future may hold. Acknowledgements Thank you to Suzanne Scott for providing an invaluable amount of time and guidance helping to make sense of my longwinded rants and prose. Our conversations throughout the brainstorming and writing process, in addition to your unwavering investment in my scholarship, made this project possible. Thank you to Curran Nault for illustrating to me the infinite potentials within merging the academic and the personal. Watching you lead the classroom with empathy and immense consideration for the lives, legacies, and imaginations of queer and trans artists/philosophers/activists has made me a better scholar and person. Thank you to Taylor for enduring countless circuitous ramblings during our walks home from weekend writing sessions and allowing me the space to further form my thoughts. Thank you to Andy for grounding my often unnuanced optimism, thereby making my work and personal understandings of the world better informed. Thank you to Kira for nuancing and broadening my queer perspectives. Thank you to Juan for providing much needed encouragement, support, and reassurance during moments of doubt and insecurity. Lastly, thank you to Rina Sawayama, Dorian Electra, and p1nkstar whose work provided endlessly generative material for this project. I hope my work provides an accurate reflection of each of your artistic perspectives, as well as further reiterates the incredible significance of your performance practice to me and to the histories of queer and trans musicians. v Abstract Oops…They Did It Again: Pop Music Nostalgia, Collective (Re)memory, and Post-Teeny Queer Music Scenes Paxton Christopher Haven, MA The University of Texas at Austin, 2020 Supervisor: Suzanne Scott This thesis reckons with contemporary trends for early aughts nostalgia to examine the power of collective memory in musical genres and the role of temporality in preserving and deconstructing queer identity. Through intersections of music scene theory, queer temporalities, and cultural memory studies, I argue the collective power and translocal permeation of this scene creates, sustains, and circulates a virtual network of independent music and performance artists. Using textual and discourse analysis, this project explores how this networked music community revises dominant cultural memories of a largely heteronormative moment in popular music history to produce a shared performance language of past sonic, aesthetic, and sartorial references. In merging appropriations and reimaginations of mainstream pop music within queer practices of camp and satire, DIY practices of community-building, and virtual practices of co-production and networked connectivity, this Post-Teeny scene uses (re)memory of pop music’s past to structure their contemporary queer and trans positionalities as imaginative embodiments of more inclusive and utopic futures. The case studies of Rina Sawayama, Dorian Electra, and vi p1nkstar illustrates this Post-Teeny scene’s unique performative negotiations within frameworks of mainstream pop music and networks of physical and virtual queer subcultures. I contend that these artists’ dynamic temporal and spatial intersections challenge attendant academic binaries of mainstream and subcultural, as well as displaces the heterocentric cannon of music scene literature, to further queer contributions to popular music scholarship. With the increasing global hybridity and digital connectivity of contemporary music cultures, this thesis asserts the power of queer temporality, queer community-building, and queer performance practice to reformat previous music industry exclusions, suggest interventions in contemporary scholarship, and imagine future potentialities of mainstream popular music culture. vii Table of Contents List of Figures ......................................................................................................................x Introducing the Post-Teenys: Mainstream (Re)memories, Subcultural Disruptions, and the Future of Queer Music Scenes ..........................................................................1 Queer Revisions of Teenybopper’s Past as Post-Teeny Futures ................................6 Not Just Queens And Punks......................................................................................15 Music Scenes and The Digital Contemporary ..........................................................23 Pop Is The (Queer) Future ........................................................................................30 Chapter One: (Re)memoring of the Past: The Spaces, Places, and Faces of Post- Teeny Nostalgia Critique .............................................................................................33 Cultural Memory Studies and Music Scene Theory .................................................36 Nostalgia, Popular Music, and Cultural Identity ......................................................40 Queer Nostalgia and its Subsequent Temporalities ..................................................43 Rina Sawayama’s Ordinary (Global) Superstar ........................................................53 All Queers are V.I.Ps to Dorian Electra ....................................................................74 A Post-Teeny Past is a Future State ..........................................................................89 Chapter Two: Contemporary Constraints of (Re)memory: Rina Sawayama's Popular Press Constructions and Disidentificatory Negotiations within Mainstream Systems of Promotion ..................................................................................................91 Simone Drichel’s Performative Hybridity of Stereotypes ........................................96 Multiracial Asian Perspectives and Media Activism ................................................98 Sawayama’s Digital Anxiety as Millennial Experience .........................................103 Sawayama’s East Asian Heritage in Western Music Industry ...............................110 Sawayama’s Queerness as Representational Difference ........................................122 viii Sawayama's Disidentifications as Post-Teeny Counterpublicity ............................132 Chapter Three: The Futurities of Networked (Re)memory: Virtual Co-Production in the Trans*Media World-Building of p1nkstar ...........................................................134 Virtual Music Scene Technology and Virtual Co-Production ................................136 Queer and Trans* Perspectives on Virtual World-Building and Networked Music Technologies ..........................................................................................141 p1nkstar “ur fav electr0nic pop superstar!" ............................................................149 “Certified p1nkstar Fan” and the Subversive Branding of (Re)memory ...........151 Transcending Space and Place in (Re)memory’s Activist Logic ...........................155 The Pop Futurities of p1nkstar’s (Re)memory Performances ................................160 Trans*cending Conclusion .....................................................................................171 Reflections (and Refractions) of/on Mainstream Pop Muisc Pasts, A Post-Teeny Present, and Queer Futures ........................................................................................172 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................183 ix List of Figures Figure 1.1: Sawayama’s tweet detailing for her Alone Together concert program ........63 Figure 1.2: Takarazuka "Ordinary Superstar" example (1:59) ........................................67 Figure 1.3: Noisey thumbnail for "Ordinary Superstar" video ........................................69 Figure 1.4: "Ordinary Superstar" western cultural imperialism example (2:36) .............72 Figure 1.5: Photo taken by author at Electra’s 2019 The Flamboyant Tour on September 23, 2019 at Mohawk in Austin, TX ............................................78 Figure 1.6: Early aughts fashion example from "VIP" (0:10) .........................................83 Figure 1.7: K. Rizz and fellow femmes take the dancefloor (1:31) ................................85 Figure 3.1: p1nkstar's satire of aethetics in her vlog-style transmedia work (0:05) ......158 Figure 3.2: "SUPER P1NKSTAR" multimedia co-production (1:06) ..........................160 Figure 3.3: Photo taken by author at the second-annual CYBERBABES event on September 8, 2019 at Cheer Up Charlie’s in Austin, TX. ..........................168 x Introducing the Post-Teenys: Mainstream (Re)Memories, Subcultural Disruptions, and the Future of Queer Music