ESSAYS ON THE SMITHS (book review, Popular Music History journal)

"The Smiths, Pop Culture Referencing, and Marginalized Stardom," Popular Culture Review 5, no. 1 (February 1994): 75-84., 1994

Echo: A Music-Centered Journal, 2015

The British Prime Minister’s privileged background and unpopular austerity measures have combined to make him a hate figure for the left; his musical tastes have been rebuked by fans, and the artists themselves, as being incompatible with his right-wing political program. This paper proceeds from the possibility that David Cameron was not being cynical in professing admiration for The Smiths and considers music’s role in the embodiment of a social identity. Drawing on recent examples in the UK and the US, the paper explores politicians’ problematic relationship with popular culture, alongside the notion that when an artist’s music is appropriated, they themselves are appropriated.

Muzikologija

In this article I refer to a number of examples of powerful manifestations of love for music that routinely fall under the radar of music historians. One of these is the present case study: the 'tenor cult' as a prominent feature of Soviet culture in the 40s and 50s. Discouraged by the authorities and scorned by critics, it led to extravagant behaviour that may seem anomalous for such a regimented society. This potent love for both music and performer was largely female-driven, and it delivered formative, life-defining experiences for many of the participants. I test the suitability of the concept of ?the middlebrow? for analysing this phenomenon and investigate how such studies can contribute to the project of a listeneroriented music history.

Patti Smith made her way to New York City in 1967 following a failed stint at teachers' college and a period of factory work in New Jersey, both of which left her disenchanted and dissatisfied. In New York, she contributed to the vibrant arts scene as a stage actress, an artist, a journalist, a spoken-word poet, and, most notably, a rock n' roll singer. Patti Smith became a prominent contributor to the emerging Eastern Manhattan music scene - a scene that would eventually be referred to as the New York punk scene - when she was the first of this breed of Manhattan rock musician to be signed to a major label. No narrative regarding the success of Patti Smith is complete without a description of her androgynous appearance, nor her markedly feminine appropriation of a rock n’ roll style vocal technique; one which combines her history of theatre, spoken word poetry, and her personal experiences of womanhood to produce something both hauntingly personal and unignorably distinct. I argue that Patti Smith performs this style of androgyny as both an inadvertent response to the gendered hierarchies of rock music, and as a form of resistance to the limitations of prescribed femininity in musical performance. Her self-styled androgyny, which recalls the appearances of rock icons from the previous decade, and her re-imagination of rock n’ roll standards customarily performed by male entertainers, challenged perceptions of the limited potentials of gender in rock n' roll while also allowing her to carve a space both for herself within them. Analyses of excerpts from Smith's 2010 memoir Just Kids, the studio recording of her first single "Hey Joe", and her 1978 performance of "Horses" on BBC-2's Old Grey Whistle Test, as well as a consideration of the existing discourses regarding the performance of androgyny in rock n' roll, will construct an understanding of how Smith engaged directly with the limited traditions of rock n' roll by at times locating herself directly within them, while simultaneously subverting them through her feminine appropriations and celebrations of her own freedom and authenticity.

Maton, K. (2010), in Campbell, S. & Coulter, C. (Eds.) Why Pamper Life’s Complexities? Essays on The Smiths. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 179-194.

gender forum, 2017

Two of the terms most frequently used by scholars and music journalists alike to describe former The Smiths singer Morrissey’s persona are ambiguous and ambivalent – an evaluation that applies among other things to his attitude towards gender and sexuality. While Morrissey refuses to classify himself in any predefined categories of gender and sexuality, his own and his band’s musical canon is rife with narratives of queer desire and instances of sexual intimacy, which often allow for both a gay and a straight viewpoint. It is precisely this ambiguity that offers the possibility of an interpretation offside a compulsory heterosexuality and –normativity, therefore opening it to a queer audience. It is furthermore among the reasons why lyrics by Morrissey and The Smiths, as I will argue, qualify as queer texts. In order to establish and defend such a view, this paper will draw on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s approach of a queer reading and her work on homosocial desire in literature, Harold Beaver’s examination of homosexual signs, and Teresa de Lauretis definition of queer texts. One of the pillars of de Lauretis’s classification is that of non-closure of a narrative and is thus closely linked to queer negativity and non-futurity. Morrissey and The Smiths’ oeuvre offers a significant set of songs that embrace these ideas. Deriving from Jack Halberstam’s concept of the queer art of failure, Lee Edelman’s critique of reproductive futurism, Judith Butler’s reflections on the term queer, and José Esteban Muñoz’s conceptualisation of a queer utopia I will show how Morrissey uses different formulas of negativity and longing to generate power from, thus transforming them into critique of regimes of the normal. It is in this diverse and subversive expression of queer negativity and desire that Morrissey disrupts normativity and its underlying stigmatising and discriminating potential.

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2017

High Fidelity's January 1958 issue marked the 10-year anniversary of the long playing record (LP) with a pair of critical takes on the cultural impact of what everybody agreed was a stunningly successful new distribution channel for music. In less than a decade, the world had filled up with new records, enabling an unparalleled abundance of new listening experiences. But, editor Roland Gelatt (1958) noted, as the trickle of recorded repertoire grew into a steady stream and then a raging flood, the careful attention of the consumer was perhaps the first thing to wash away: I am writing this article after having listened on successive evenings to new recordings of La Sonnambula and Der Rosenkavalier, each of them a distinguished recreation. Two decades ago, either of these sets would have constituted the opera issue of an entire season. We would have had months to savor it without competition; indeed, it is very possible that we would have acquired it in installments, act by act, to spread the expense. Today, the two operas are pebbles in an avalanche. (p. 40) Music, he noted, had become much cheaper than previously: a pair of Mozart concerto recordings, which had once cost the equivalent of 10 meals at a decent restaurant, now fit onto an inexpensive, unbreakable LP which could be bought on casual impulse. Naturally, the purchaser valued it less. Gelatt anticipated two generations of sociologists by noting a temptation to "omnivorous listening" in all this abundance; with so much on offer, how was one to choose? The same fear of plenty seems to haunt rock critics today, but it's now data that seems to proliferate without limit; Ian Penman (2017), writing about David Bowie, longs openly for an earlier, more innocent time when, he says, "rock mattered" because it was almost impossible to find out anything about it: In the days when such figures were active you had to be satisfied with an occasional music-press annual, or the lyrics printed in your girlfriend's Jackie, or, if you were really lucky, a title like The Sociology of Riff (no photos or illustrations). Maybe one of the reasons the 1970s were such an incredibly creative time is that we weren't all reading biographies and blogs and tweets about (or even by) our heroes, who in turn weren't thinking about the best way to "grow their brand" exponentially through a social media arc. All that unmediated space waiting to be filled! (p. 21) Against this endless drumbeat of critical dyspepsia and scarcity worship, Ben Ratliff's Every Song Ever stands out for its generous embrace of omnivorous listening as the characteristic mode of sonic creativity in an era of peak musical abundance: "The teenager listens with near boredom and absolute confidence. He is engaging, identifying with the song: he has a sense of dominion over the song and the medium. He can take that song or leave it. There are a million others like it. He's got the power. He is the great listener of now" (p. 4). Ratliff is also a great listener, and the structure of Every Song Ever-after a framing introduction, it presents 20 short chapters devoted to modes of listening that cut across genre and history-is designed to let him show off his skill. As one reads, one comes to anticipate the moment when Ratliff will go walkabout, using his new phenomenological yardstick to erase the distance between closely related musical experiences that contingencies of race, class, gender, time, and space have torn asunder: You realize the power of a short silence when you hear it in a song. You realize it in the middle of Metallica's "All Nightmare Long," in the tiny break before James Hetfield takes a gulp of air to keep singing, or at the end of the

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2017

High Fidelity's January 1958 issue marked the 10-year anniversary of the long playing record (LP) with a pair of critical takes on the cultural impact of what everybody agreed was a stunningly successful new distribution channel for music. In less than a decade, the world had filled up with new records, enabling an unparalleled abundance of new listening experiences. But, editor Roland Gelatt (1958) noted, as the trickle of recorded repertoire grew into a steady stream and then a raging flood, the careful attention of the consumer was perhaps the first thing to wash away: I am writing this article after having listened on successive evenings to new recordings of La Sonnambula and Der Rosenkavalier, each of them a distinguished recreation. Two decades ago, either of these sets would have constituted the opera issue of an entire season. We would have had months to savor it without competition; indeed, it is very possible that we would have acquired it in installments, act by act, to spread the expense. Today, the two operas are pebbles in an avalanche. (p. 40) Music, he noted, had become much cheaper than previously: a pair of Mozart concerto recordings, which had once cost the equivalent of 10 meals at a decent restaurant, now fit onto an inexpensive, unbreakable LP which could be bought on casual impulse. Naturally, the purchaser valued it less. Gelatt anticipated two generations of sociologists by noting a temptation to "omnivorous listening" in all this abundance; with so much on offer, how was one to choose? The same fear of plenty seems to haunt rock critics today, but it's now data that seems to proliferate without limit; Ian Penman (2017), writing about David Bowie, longs openly for an earlier, more innocent time when, he says, "rock mattered" because it was almost impossible to find out anything about it: In the days when such figures were active you had to be satisfied with an occasional music-press annual, or the lyrics printed in your girlfriend's Jackie, or, if you were really lucky, a title like The Sociology of Riff (no photos or illustrations). Maybe one of the reasons the 1970s were such an incredibly creative time is that we weren't all reading biographies and blogs and tweets about (or even by) our heroes, who in turn weren't thinking about the best way to "grow their brand" exponentially through a social media arc. All that unmediated space waiting to be filled! (p. 21) Against this endless drumbeat of critical dyspepsia and scarcity worship, Ben Ratliff's Every Song Ever stands out for its generous embrace of omnivorous listening as the characteristic mode of sonic creativity in an era of peak musical abundance: "The teenager listens with near boredom and absolute confidence. He is engaging, identifying with the song: he has a sense of dominion over the song and the medium. He can take that song or leave it. There are a million others like it. He's got the power. He is the great listener of now" (p. 4). Ratliff is also a great listener, and the structure of Every Song Ever-after a framing introduction, it presents 20 short chapters devoted to modes of listening that cut across genre and history-is designed to let him show off his skill. As one reads, one comes to anticipate the moment when Ratliff will go walkabout, using his new phenomenological yardstick to erase the distance between closely related musical experiences that contingencies of race, class, gender, time, and space have torn asunder: You realize the power of a short silence when you hear it in a song. You realize it in the middle of Metallica's "All Nightmare Long," in the tiny break before James Hetfield takes a gulp of air to keep singing, or at the end of the

Études anglaises, 2018

Popular music has been more thoroughly studied from the point of view of the producer (structures, influences, instruments, innovations, etc.) than from that of the "consumer." This contribution looks at 1970s popular music in the UK from the perspective of its use in people's everyday life. Breaking with a tradition of studying niche genres, it concentrates on the number one hits of the time and, looking at "consumers" as active participants in the building of imaginary worlds, it hypothesizes that it is as role play that popular music is best understood. The gendered role plays inherent in new genres such as metal, glam and punk are considered, but also the positionings offered to the "consumer" by pop hits which do not fit into any identifiable genre.