Music is not just a commodity that we passively consume: it shapes our perceptions of the world and informs our actions and interactions. It can make us laugh, cry, dance, sing, dream, forget, suffer, protest: It can even make us vote!
But how? How does identity affect the ways in which people listen to, perform, evaluate, engage with and respond to music—and how do social aesthetics in turn relate to issues of political economy?
But how? How does identity affect the ways in which people listen to, perform, evaluate, engage with and respond to music—and how do social aesthetics in turn relate to issues of political economy?
In the summer of 2018, I designed a new course at McGill University, a special topics course offered through the Department of Gender, Sexuality, Feminist and Social Justice Studies titled Popular Music and Social Justice. We analyzed interactions between music and parameters of identity and assembly, questions of agency and representation, issues of cultural legitimacy and marginalization, and social justice movements and claims. We branched out of Nancy Fraser’s three-dimensional theory of social justice to reflect on the various ways in which popular music can foster or hinder requests for redistribution, recognition and representation, at home and abroad.
How do human rights movements near and far use music as a way of inviting and maintaining transformative social change? And how have music-makers and musicologists worldwide influenced the development of new kinds of social-justice-oriented popular musics, as well as new modes of thinking about identity and social justice?
How do human rights movements near and far use music as a way of inviting and maintaining transformative social change? And how have music-makers and musicologists worldwide influenced the development of new kinds of social-justice-oriented popular musics, as well as new modes of thinking about identity and social justice?
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As a reparative to the more common emphasis on male figures in histories of music and politics to date (the Bobs Dylan, Marley and the like), my course centered on the contributions of women and gender minorities.
We discussed the relationship between identity (gender, sexuality, race, class, indigeneity, disability, age, body size; intersections thereof) and cultural context (familiar/unfamiliar, at home/abroad) in case studies that ranged from: protest songs worldwide (songs of the Maple Spring, Pussy Riots, Kendrick Lamar at the 2018 Grammy Awards) to voicing disability in Grimes, Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade, Tanya Tagaq and Canadian reconciliatory politics, music education for social change (El Sistema and others), Hilary Clinton’s campaign music, between twerking and #twerkgate, Justin Trudeau's Spotify playlist, sounding #metoo, popular music as a weapon of war, and more. |
© ST-GERMAIN FABRIQUE, 2019
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But it was also the beginning of the summer, after all, so on a beautiful sunny day in mid-June, Montreal-based protest percussion ensemble Movimento also took us out for a “musical march” across the university campus. No, no! Not a protest! A “musical march.” Totally legit! (🤞)
In This Issue
The articles included below aim to further the conversation we started that summer by reflecting critically on an artist or group that draws on popular music to engage issues of social justice. The authors ask the following questions: Why is this artist or group drawing on this particular song to advocate for social change? What are they trying to accomplish through the use of popular music, and how is this song particularly well-suited (or not!) for the function it was given? How can we best assess what it means for artists to be socially responsible given the simultaneous roles that they often perform as “non-elected political leaders”? Lastly, how might the study of popular music used to advocate for social change facilitate the understanding of what it means to “do” coalition/alliance politics? Can music be an active force for building a politics of hope?
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According to Kate Marr-Laing, the answer to the latter is a resounding yes. In her article, Marr-Laing analyzes the role of all-white Australian rock band Midnight Oil’s song “Beds Are Burning” in challenging settler understandings of settler-indigenous relations in Australia in the context of two commemorative events: Australia’s Bicentennial in 1988 and the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. As Marr-Laing argues, through Midnight Oil’s use of Indigenous political messages in their song, their performance of the song in spaces largely inaccessible to Indigenous politics, and the open challenge that the band posed in the lyrics of the song for white audiences to consider their positionality within the social and political hierarchies established by the colonial state, “Beds Are Burning” was an effective political tool for social change.
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Authors Mohammed Odusanya and Amritha Sanmugam revisit the musical-political trajectories of two of the most famous artists and political activists in the Americas, Mercedes Sosa and Tracy Chapman.
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Odusanya builds on recent scholarship which considers Sosa’s class and regional identities to contextualize the relationship between the artist’s racial/ethnic identity and issues of reception, Sosa’s artistic development, and aspects of her self-marketing strategies. Odusanya emphasizes the strategic importance for Sosa of reclaiming indigeneity in her music and persona, which worked, on the one hand, to cement the legitimacy of the white nation-state (Sosa as “unchanging,” “pre-discursive,” and thus “apolitical”) and, on the other hand, made apparent the centrality of Indigenous peoples to the Argentinian body politic.
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Sanmugam relates Tracy Champan’s 1988 debut album Tracy Chapman to Bush Sr’s nomination speech of that same year when the popular music charts “seemed to generally reflect the celebration of Bush’s succession from Reagan” (yup, that earlier “Make America Great Again” president). As Sanmugam argues, Chapman’s singles “Fast Car” and “Talkin’ ’Bout a Revolution” contrasted with the don’t-worry-be-happy types that were hitting the charts at the time by reminding Americans of the “real life” injustices affecting those on the other side of the poverty line.
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Lastly, Natalie Liconti takes us to the more recent MAGA case to explore Kanye West’s widely mediated endorsement of Donald Trump’s presidency. Liconti foregrounds an “aesthetics of failure” in West’s persona and music in order to account for his numerous “interruptions” in recent years to the flow of normative practices, which have worked to “unveil . . . a social system that is innately flawed, violently asymmetrical, and racially exploitative.” Liconti leaves us with much to ponder: is an aesthetics of failure always “a kernel of potentiality,” as José Esteban Muñoz has famously argued, or are there significant risks when it is endorsed by our musical and political leaders?
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Needless to say, I couldn’t be prouder of the articles included in this volume, and I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the authors and wish them all the best for what comes next. Thank you for the great privilege of thinking big thoughts alongside you!
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V.B.T.
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