The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture.Music Hall and Modernitydemonstrates how such pioneering cultural ...critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. These social arbiters were, at the same time, devotees of the spontaneous culture of "the people."In examining fiction from Walter Besant, Hall Caine, and Henry Nevinson, performance criticism from William Archer and Max Beerbohm, and late-Victorian controversies over philanthropy and moral reform, scholar Barry Faulk argues that discourse on music-hall entertainment helped consolidate the identity and tastes of an emergent professional class. Critics and writers legitimized and cleaned up the music hall, at the same time allowing issues of class, respect, and empowerment to be negotiated.Music Hall and Modernityoffers a complex view of the new middle-class, middlebrow mass culture of late-Victorian London and contributes to a body of scholarship on nineteenth-century urbanism. The book will also interest scholars concerned with the emergence of a professional managerial class and the genealogy of cultural studies.
British Rock Modernism, 1967-1977 explains how the definitive British rock performers of this epoch aimed, not at the youthful rebellion for which they are legendary, but at a highly self-conscious ...project of commenting on the business in which they were engaged. They did so by ironically appropriating the traditional forms of Victorian music hall. Faulk focuses on the mid to late 1960s, when British rock bands who had already achieved commercial prominence began to aspire to aesthetic distinction. The book discusses recordings such as the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour album, the Kinks' The Village Green Preservation Society, and the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, and television films such as the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus that defined rock's early high art moment. Faulk argues that these 'texts' disclose the primary strategies by which British rock groups, mostly comprised of young working and lower middle-class men, made their bid for aesthetic merit by sampling music hall sounds. The result was a symbolically charged form whose main purpose was to unsettle the hierarchy that set traditional popular culture above the new medium. Rock groups engaged with the music of the past in order both to demonstrate the comparative vitality of the new form and signify rock's new art status, compared to earlier British pop music. The book historicizes punk rock as a later development of earlier British rock, rather than a rupture. Unlike earlier groups, the Sex Pistols did not appropriate music hall form in an ironic way, but the band and their manager Malcolm McLaren were obsessed with the meaning of the past for the present in a distinctly modernist fashion.
Punk Rock Warlord explores the relevance of Joe Strummer within the continuing legacies of both punk rock and progressive politics. It is aimed at scholars and general readers interested in the ...Clash, punk culture, and the intersections between pop music and politics, on both sides of the Atlantic. Contributors to the collection represent a wide range of disciplines, including history, sociology, musicology, and literature; their work examines all phases of Strummer’s career, from his early days as “Woody” the busker to the whirlwind years as front man for the Clash, to the “wilderness years” and Strummer’s final days with the Mescaleros. PunkRockWarlord offers an engaging survey of its subject, while at the same time challenging some of the historical narratives that have been constructed around Strummer the Punk Icon. The chapters in Punk Rock Warlord address issues including John Graham Mellor’s self-fashioning as “Joe Strummer, rock revolutionary”; critical and media constructions of punk; and the singer’s complicated and changing relationship to feminism and anti-racist politics. These diverse chapters nevertheless cohere around the claim that Strummer’s look, style, and musical repertoire are so rooted in both English and American cultures that he cannot finally be extricated from either.
The Bedford Music Hall FAULK, BARRY J.
Victorian review,
04/2013, Letnik:
39, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
There were scores of music halls in metropolitan London in the 1890s, but it is the Bedford music hall in Camden Town that still matters most to posterity, for the single fact that painter Walter ...Sickert took for his subject Image omitted: Sickert started chronicling the Bedford at a time when music hall fare—ballet, comic singers, and novelty acts—began to attract a more affluent and educated audience than the working class patrons who had long been the entertainment’s core constituency. Little Dot Hetherington at the Bedford Music Hall (c. 1888–89) catches the singer in mid-gesture, pointing to her love object seated in the “gods” as she hits the critical moment of the chorus. On the interior, the seats were re-covered in red plush, the balcony seats were widened, and a motorized stage curtain, a major labour-saving device, was added.
... unlike the many television or film appearances made by these bands, the groups exerted a degree of creative control on their selfpresentation. ... both projects seem provoked by anxious ...competition with Bay Area rock bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, whose music was part of a local scene and consequently appeared to have a more organic relation with their audience.
The Rolling Stones: Sociological Perspectives, edited by Helmut Staubmann, draws from a broad spectrum of sociological perspectives to contribute both to the understanding of the phenomenon Rolling ...Stones and to an in-depth analysis of contemporary society and culture that takes The Stones a starting point. Contributors approach The Rolling Stones from a range of social science perspectives including cultural studies, communication and film studies, gender studies, and the sociology of popular music. The essays in this volume focus on the question of how the worldwide success of The Rolling Stones over the course of more than half a century reflects society and the transformation of popular culture.
This collection explores the relevance of Joe Strummer within the continuing legacies of both punk rock and progressive politics. It is aimed at those interested in The Clash, punk culture, and the ...intersections between pop music and politics, on both sides of the Atlantic. Contributors represent a wide range of disciplines and their work examines all phases of Strummer's career, from his early days as 'Woody' the busker to the whirlwind years as front man for The Clash, to the 'wilderness years' and final days with the Mescaleros. Punk Rock Warlord offers an engaging survey of its subject, while at the same time challenging some of the historical narratives that have been constructed around Strummer the Punk Icon.