Blurring Boundaries: Music, Empathy, and Anti-Empathy Ethnicity and Gender in Transcultural Norway Karl-Magnus Bjorøy Master Thesis Department of Musicology University of Oslo Spring semester 2012 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This master thesis would not have been possible to complete without the support and advice from a number of friends and colleagues, and I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the following: First and foremost to my supervisor Professor Stan Hawkins, who has not only inspired, challenged, and motivated me in invaluable ways, but has also involved me in his ongoing NFR funded project Popular Music & Gender in a Transcultural Context. This has been such a valuable exercise that it inevitably led to us writing a collaborative forthcoming article on the use of music in the events leading up to the terror attack in Oslo July 22nd 2011. I have greatly appreciated this opportunity to get insights into academic writing at a high level, which have contributed to making this thesis what it is today. I would also like to thank all Professors and academic staff at the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo, as well as my fellow students throughout my many years of music studies. A big thanks is due to Kai Arne Hansen who has done a remarkable job in helping me with proofreading and copyediting in the finishing stages of my writing. Without you the end product would have been of lesser quality. And I would also like to thank you for your highly valued friendship and musical cooperation throughout the years. Thanks also to Nils Nadeau at Dartmouth College for copyediting my first chapter. Your comments and critical feedback has been of great value, and I appreciate you taking on the assignment on such short notice. ii Furthermore, to all my friends and family; none of my work would mean anything without you in my life. And thank you for all your support! And last but not least, the love and support from Ida Skoglund have brightened my days and have made all the hard work worthwhile. Oslo, April 25th 2012 Karl-Magnus Bjorøy iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS........................................................................................................................II TABLE OF CONTENTS ..........................................................................................................................IV INTRODUCTION.........................................................................................................................................1 PART ONE.....................................................................................................................................................5 POPULAR MUSIC POLITICS - SUBJECTIVITY AND AGENCY...................................................5 Ethnicity and Gender ..........................................................................................................................15 Inscriptions of National Identity in the Pop Score............................................................................20 Transculturalism .................................................................................................................................23 METHODOLOGY ........................................................................................................................................25 Hermeneutics and Homology .............................................................................................................27 Musical Codes, Audiovisual Rhetoric, and Intertextuality...............................................................31 Authenticating Identities.....................................................................................................................35 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................................................39 PART TWO .................................................................................................................................................41 STAGING EMPATHY AND ANTI-EMPATHY ..................................................................................41 Performed Masculinities.....................................................................................................................42 ‘Metro-Psychosis’: Knighthood and paganism.................................................................................46 Ere´ Our World Crumbles: Arcadian illusions .................................................................................52 Jarle Bernhoft: A queer antidote?......................................................................................................60 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................................................72 PART THREE .............................................................................................................................................75 TRANSCULTURALISM OR NATIONALISM? ..................................................................................75 Mitt lille land: A transculturalist mirage?.........................................................................................78 Virtual Spaces and Norwegian Identity Politics ...............................................................................85 Towards a Transcultural Askeladden? ..............................................................................................98 Naivety and the Politics of Representation..................................................................................... 106 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 114 FINAL REFLECTIONS ......................................................................................................................... 117 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................................... 121 iv Introduction I was on my way to a concert by Battles, one of my favourite bands, at the club Blå in Oslo the evening of August 16th 2011, when I was struck by a profound sadness. I had just seen a documentary on the Tea Party movement by the British journalist Andrew Neil that vividly portrayed the surge of evangelistic, right-wing, anti-government, anti-Obama thinking in American society.1 This same movement had just forced the Republicans to oppose any compromise in the American debt ceiling debate a mere fortnight earlier, which left the president with no choice but to cut public spending rather than increase government income by raising taxes on the wealthiest members of American society. Since then, Europe has been struck by the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, providing yet more fertile ground for extremist responses, especially in a post-9/11, ‘war on terror’ global political landscape. The Battles concert, in fact, was happening less than a month after the capital of Norway had been one of the sites of a horrific act of terror by the Eurocentric Norwegian nationalist and monoculturalist Anders Behring Breivik. Maybe my sadness was simply a belated response to the terror attack, but it felt as though it had been growing for some time as I became increasingly more aware of the mobilising conservative and extreme right wing in Europe in recent years. On this night, then, I never met my friends in the end; my contemplative mood led me to abandon the concert and return home, to ponder how my scholarly work might contribute to a better understanding of the socio- cultural turbulence that today seems to be challenging Norway’s supposed unity. At a time when such grave events as terrorist acts and murder can be motivated solely by a fear of ‘the Other’, how can popular music hope to matter, especially when so many see it as a supposedly apolitical vehicle for carefree fun, escapism and self- indulgent excess? Solving this quandary—making my musicological work relevant to society—is something I have worked towards for some time, as I have sought to combine my love of music with my political convictions. The answer, I have found, resides in the critical theoretical realm of popular musicology, where a particular interdisciplinary approach to cultural studies in fact refuses outright to accept music 1 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vv3pl (last accessed 12.04.2012). 1 as a politically neutral domain. This approach engages culture and its products by exposing the fissures and breaks in naturalised discourses of identity through its interpretations of performed structured sound. Considering the constant struggles and negotiations over identity that manifest themselves specifically through musical production and consumption, popular musicologists find themselves compelled to construct a politics of music, and ultimately engage with its relevance for discourses of power. As Robert Walser points out: “[An] understanding of cultural pleasures is an unavoidable precondition to understanding social relations, identities, structures and forces” (Walser 2003: 22). Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in his seminal work La distinction: critique sociale du jugement (1979), famously theorised the politics surrounding aesthetics. He looked at French society’s classification of art and ‘cultural pleasures’, concluding that nothing ‘classifies’ people as much as their taste in music (Bourdieu 1995: 63). While his thinking