Proceedings of the 10th International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus17), London, UK, September 13-15, 2017. Peter M. C. Harrison (Ed.). Selling Madness: How Mental Illness Has Been Commercialised in the Music Business Ekaterina Pavlova Department of Music, King’s College London, England
[email protected] intend to provide evidence of the high level of profitability of ABSTRACT the ‘mad musician’ gimmick'. Furthermore, I will consider the prominence of gendered madness in the contemporary music As history shows, madness has fascinated human minds for centuries. business. All in all, my analysis will allow me to demonstrate I reveal how this fascination has led to the establishment and, at times, that in the music business studies madness should be placed dangerous exploitation of the ‘mad musician’ gimmick - a profitable commonplace in the music industry. After a historical outline of social alongside more obvious and widely discussed tropes such as definitions of madness, I determine the trope’s contemporary gender and sexuality. relevance and profitability through an analysis of contrasting 20-21st- century case studies. I build a multidimensional narrative addressing II. FROM ASYLUMS TO CHARTS: A BRIEF not only how these case studies were marketed, but also ethical and HISTORY sociological issues arising from evocations of mental illness and Diverse factors, such as advances in medicine and suicide, gender and genre attributions, and the role of music journalism sociocultural changes, have contributed to the fluidity of the in systematic, occasionally post-mortem exploitation of mentally ill definition of mental illness. In music, varied attitudes towards musicians.