• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

G Other titles from Atropos Press Music occupies a peculiar role in the field of American Studies. It is undoubtedly (EDS.) “It is not as simple as saying that music REVE/P JULIUS GREVE & SASCHA PÖHLMANN Resonance: Philosophy for Sonic Art recognized as an important form of cultural production, yet the field continues does this or that; exploring the musical On Becoming-Music: to privilege textual and visual forms of art as its objects of examination. The es- unconscious means acknowledging the Between Boredom and Ecstasy says collected in this volume seek to adjust this imbalance by placing music cen- very fact that music always does more.” ter stage while still acknowledging its connections to the fields of literary and Philosophy of Media Sounds ÖHLMANN Hospitality in the Age of visual studies that engage with the specifically American cultural landscape. In Media Representation doing so, they proffer the concept of the ‘musical unconscious’ as an analytical tool of understanding the complexities of the musical production of meanings in various social, political, and technological contexts, in reference to country, www.atropospress.com queer punk, jazz, pop, black metal, film music, blues, carnival music, Muzak, hip-hop, experimental electronic music, protest and campaign songs, minimal ( E music, and of course the kazoo. DS. ) Contributions by Hanjo Berressem, Christian Broecking, Martin Butler, Christof Decker, Mario Dunkel, Benedikt Feiten, Paola Ferrero, Jürgen AMERIC Grandt, Julius Greve, Christian Hänggi, Jan Niklas Jansen, Thoren Opitz, Sascha Pöhlmann, Arthur Sabatini, Christian Schmidt, Björn Sonnenberg- Schrank, Gunter Süß, and Katharina Wiedlack. A A ND TH AMERICA AND THE MUSICAL UNCONSCIOUS E MUSIC A L UNCON S CIOUS ATROPOS PRESS new york • dresden 5 6 4 7 3 8 2 9 1 10 0 11 AMERICA AND THE MUSICAL UNCONSCIOUS JULIUS GREVE & SASCHA PÖHLMANN (EDS.) America and the Musical Unconscious Copyright © 2015 by Julius Greve and Sascha Pöhlmann (Eds.) The rights of the contributions remain with the respective authors. All rights reserved. ATROPOS PRESS New York • Dresden 151 First Avenue #14, New York, N.Y. 10003 www.atropospress.com Typography and cover art: Christian Hänggi isbn 978-1-940813-84-4 CONTENTS Julius Greve & Sascha Pöhlmann Introduction: What Is the Musical Unconscious? 7 Martin Butler Timeless Tunes, Immortal Voices: On the ‘Historical Fate’ of the Protest Song and the Musical Unconscious of the ‘Other’ America 51 Christian Schmidt All Kinds of (Queer) Rednecks: The Sexual Politics of Contemporary Country Music 65 Mario Dunkel Constructing the American Hugues Panassié 93 Jürgen E. Grandt Welcome to Atlanta where the Bluesman Plays: Touring the Dirty South with Blind Willie McTell 105 Christian Broecking Blackness and Identity in Jazz 127 Hanjo Berressem Vibes: Tape-Recording the Acoustic Unconscious 140 Christof Decker “It flows through me like rain”: Minimal Music and Transcendence in American Beauty (1999) 187 Benedikt Feiten Music and Circular Narration in Jim Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation 212 Thoren Opitz “The White (Straight) Man’s Burden”? Race, Hip Hop and Homophobia in Macklemore’s “Same Love” 228 Katharina Wiedlack Punk Noise, Social Criticism, and Queer-feminist Decolonial Politics, Or “The Promise of No Future” 248 Paola Ferrero U. S. Black Metal, Folk Music and Political Radicalism: Panopticon’s Kentucky 271 Christian Hänggi “Harmonica, kazoo—a friend.” Pynchon’s Lessons in Organology 289 Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank & Jan Niklas Jansen Mixing Pop and Politics: Campaign Songs and the Battle for America’s Musical Unconscious 328 Gunter Süß Cultures of Loudness: From Jim Crow to Guantanamo 354 Arthur J. Sabatini Philadelphia’s Musico-Sonic-Optical Unconscious: Or, From the Legacy of A Glass Harp to Parades, Paradoxical Sublimations and Refrains 373 Contributors 411 Index of Names 418 The editors would like to thank the following institutions and persons who helped in vari- ous ways to make the America and the Musical Unconscious conference and the ensuing publi- cation possible: the Bavarian-American Acad- emy, Junior Year in Munich, Kulturreferat München, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Universität zu Köln; Hans-Peter Söder, Sommer Forschner, Wolfgang Rathert, Berndt Ostendorf, Lisa Maria Bayer, Hanjo Berressem, and Veronika Schmideder. We are indebted to Andrew Estes, Amy Mohr, Mark Olival-Bartley and Daniel Rees for their help in preparing the essays for publication. Our biggest thanks go to Christian Hänggi, who with his talent for design and keen eye for detail has turned a simple manuscript into a beautiful book. 7 INTRODUCTION WHAT IS THE MUSICAL UNCONSCIOUS? Julius Greve & Sascha Pöhlmann 1. THE MUSICAL UNCONSCIOUS OF AmERICAN STUDIES The project at hand, whose results you are about to read, is a labor of love, and that in itself tells you something about the position and recognition of music within American Studies today. When we first started thinking about bringing together scholars in American Studies to discuss music, we did so out of what was no more than a rather vague feeling at the time that our field has neglected, and continues to neglect, this particular form of cultural production. Once we began to embark on the project in earnest, we encountered ample evidence to make this, just to start off with a cheesy classic rock reference, more than a feeling. While American Studies is cer- tainly one of the most interdisciplinary fields in the humanities, and while it has been very much at the forefront of exploring the many different forms that culture can take, it has still been a predomi- nantly philological field that privileges texts over other media in its perspective on American culture. Only recently has the so-called visual turn presented a strong challenge to this dominant paradigm within American Studies, and visual culture studies has since estab- lished itself as a profound new way of looking at things, quite liter- ally, that is here to stay. American Studies as a field is particularly eager to question what it is doing, and this strong undercurrent of self-reflection continually makes it a very fertile place for such new developments that co-exist with other theories and methods instead of really replacing them. This utter diversity has led scholars to ques- tion the concept of American Studies itself time and again, most recently for its evidently national focus, and yet no challenge has yet been successful enough to really do away with it, maybe because it 8 Julius Greve & Sascha Pöhlmann is simply more convenient to keep it. Instead of rejecting the notion for its diversity, American Studies scholars rather seem to embrace it, and they are quite happy to accept it as a space that allows them to do very different things in very different ways. This continually contested discourse has its fashions and its rules, and it speaks of its capacity for diversity that it can accommodate and even invite voices that present a challenge to its own dominant paradigms. There always seem to be those who call for a paradigm shift in one way or another, often by satisfying publisher’s demands for marketable originality by compiling a reader, and often apparently rather overestimating the more general relevance of their particular approach; yet this relevance is already judged from a normative per- spective that considers certain things more important than others, and dismissing such new approaches says more about the position from which they are dismissed than about what is dismissed itself. Like all discourses, American Studies is subject to a distributed net- work of power with its own local hierarchies. The definition of what it is or does is continually renegotiated by a number of individual and institutional actors, and the recognition of this flexibility may well be what makes the field so openly political at times. This, then, is how we understood (and do understand) American Studies when we wondered about the importance of music for it, and in conceiving the project that resulted first in a conference and then in the present volume, we rather quickly encountered some of the discursive rules that govern how music is represented in this partic- ular field of study, at least in Europe. As we both identify with and have great sympathy for certain musical subcultures, we were all too aware of the pitfalls of complaining about a certain lack of recogni- tion by the mainstream. Probably every scholar in American Studies feels that his or her particular interests are not central enough to the field, just like any fan of indie music might keep thinking the world would be a better place if only more people listened to [insert band name here], but both would probably be rather annoyed than sat- isfied if they got what they wished for. Similarly, you might tell all What Is the Musical Unconscious? 9 your colleagues that they should be analyzing the Deep Web rather than short stories in their classes, but once they all did that you would not really be so proud of your cutting-edge approach to culture any longer. In this spirit, we knew that calling for more attention to music in American Studies would risk being either an empty gesture or an entirely symbolic one, and yet we believe that, as an academic field of inquiry into the complexities of cultures, American Studies has indeed turned a deaf ear to musical production and reception to such an extent as to merit a reminder of its importance and an attempt to at least grant it more critical attention, nothing more and nothing less. We do not want to join in with those who propose a paradigm shift every three months and describe everything that more than a few people do as a so-called ‘turn.’ The project at hand is not as ambitious as that, but we believe it is important nevertheless, as music in American Studies occupies quite a peculiar role unlike any other form of cultural production.

Load more

  438

Copy Link