Autor/es
Descripción
ver mas
Colaborador
Fernández, Sandra
Spatial Coverage
Temporal Coverage
1955-1979
Idioma
spa
Extent
368 p.
Derechos
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 2.0 Genérica (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Formato
application/pdf
Identificador
Cobertura
USA
1955-1979
Abstract
Between the mid-Fifties and late Seventies it took place a complex process of struggle and political mobilization, economic, social and cultural developments in the United States that found in AfricanAmerican leadership one of its key players. New political practices, new discourses, new artistic and cultural objects influenced American social life; their presence was felt in an unprecedented economic, cultural and social visibility that changed the racial landscape, affecting black men and black women as political and rights subjects, workers, consumers and cultural agents, reshaping the intrarracial map in an unusual direction of differentiation and producing a polyphony of African American voices (Marable, 1984; Winant, 2001; Zinn, 1965). In that polyphony, new expressions of black popular music had a significant role. The freedom songs, soul and funks, as absolutely unique creations of these two decade, were fundamental musical presences, widespread and massive. They reorganized ideas and discourses on black music, altered racial stereotypes and built experiences, perceptions and representations of the black condition which inscribed as subjective, cultural and political backgrounds. This research analyzes those new expressions of black popular music in order to understand the ways in which those led, resonated and turned audible changes in different levels -aesthetics, discoursives, political, media, market- that affected racialized experiences and social relationships.
After characterizing the period 1955-1979 in political and economic terms related to the living conditions of the black population and proposing a set of definitions around popular music, racializations, and black music (Brackett, 2005; Campos Garcia, 2012; Fabbri, 2012; Hall 1984, 1992; Ramsey Jr, 2003; Tagg, 1989) this research displays the analysis of a number of levels (sound, poetic, performative, visual, discoursive, economic and media) through which I propose to understand the characteristcs and modes by which those new genres participated in the social construction of new blackness and what these blackeness were. In that sense, considering this new black music in its multiple frames of production, consumption, uses and appropriations I have constructed my object tracking its complex resonances and audibilities, seeking to understand how those specific musical experiences were involved in an irregular series of clashes, negotiations, exchanges and sense disputes that opened musical, cultural and social areas for the African American experience, reconfiguring the experiences and meanings of blackness and therefore of race relations in America.
For this I identified a number of nuclei in which the freedom songs, soul and funk provided significant changes: 1. the aesthetics and musical inventions (generated as well in the field of militant actions as in the so-called music business); 2. the performances (dances and parties but also political demonstrations); 3. the visual representations of blackness; 4. relations with politics (involving both proximity and articulation as intraracial tensions and the denial of their social value); 5. the links between black music and media (especially record companies, radio and television); 6. the set of a new black market consumption (which exceeded music as object to influence in the "commodification of blackness" as style and consumable image). These nuclei appear in the Chapters and Parts that make this Thesis.
Seeking to satisfy the theoretical and methodological decision to approach music as a social multifaceted artifact, complex and involving sounds, words, bodies, images, practices and discourses (Middleton, 2003), I have constructed an archive consisting of: discs, radio programs, journals specialized in black music and popular music, articles of music criticism, liner notes (ie, the texts accompanying discs), testimonies of artists, publics and diverse agents linked to music (producers, owners of labels, show hosts, DJs, advertising agencies), photographs, cover art, songbooks, subscription cards, TV shows, promotional posters, advertisements and jingles. Working with these materials will allow me to present freedom songs, soul and funk affecting the meanings of racial experiences, holding as hypothesis that, rather than political programs, sterile and unequivocal artifacts of the cultural industry or expressions of a black essence, they propitiated and were conducive of dissimilar and unprecedented African American experiences and presences (aesthetic, political, media, business, cultural) expressing like no other area of culture, tensions between identification and differentiation (Hall, 2003) that defined the black condition during the period. In that sense, the hypothesis just enunciada will be complemented by another which states that the new genres of black popular music were a cultural area of multiple, heterogeneous racializaciones that differentiated blackness, setting a map of representations, experiences and complex expectations. This feature allows me to disable the tendency to see an alleged homogeneity in the culture of the black population and in the very category of black popular music (Adussei, 2002; Kelley, 1987; Stephens, 1984) Hence, the insistence of this research in tracking the freedom songs, soul and funk in their complexities and their dispersions, in its contradictions and ambivalences.
As will be seen, artists, publics, media, market, political activists staged, to varying degrees and in different ways, a process of musical changes through which new black popular musics broke divisions and cultural boundaries hitherto stable or perceived as such: the ones which separated politics from religion and traditions from innovation, the fixed and stereotyped representations about black subjectivity as emotionally simple, poor, homogeneous or hyper-sexualized and the idea of music as an emanation of a compact and undifferentiated community (Moten, 2009). Against the common perception that "blacks account cultural, social and economic homogeneity and intraracial relationships without conflict" (Smith, 2000), the production and consumption of these new musical genres shows that, for the decades investigated, the opposite is true. Hence throughout this Thesis I will present black music not as a territory of clumps but as one of political, racial, gender and class differentiations, as the opportuniy to explore different emotions, affections and sexuality, as a way of aesthetic experimentation, as the tool for the reconfiguration of the market (not only of music but of black blackness consumption and as an object of consumption), and as the redefining the culture of the party and dance.
After characterizing the period 1955-1979 in political and economic terms related to the living conditions of the black population and proposing a set of definitions around popular music, racializations, and black music (Brackett, 2005; Campos Garcia, 2012; Fabbri, 2012; Hall 1984, 1992; Ramsey Jr, 2003; Tagg, 1989) this research displays the analysis of a number of levels (sound, poetic, performative, visual, discoursive, economic and media) through which I propose to understand the characteristcs and modes by which those new genres participated in the social construction of new blackness and what these blackeness were. In that sense, considering this new black music in its multiple frames of production, consumption, uses and appropriations I have constructed my object tracking its complex resonances and audibilities, seeking to understand how those specific musical experiences were involved in an irregular series of clashes, negotiations, exchanges and sense disputes that opened musical, cultural and social areas for the African American experience, reconfiguring the experiences and meanings of blackness and therefore of race relations in America.
For this I identified a number of nuclei in which the freedom songs, soul and funk provided significant changes: 1. the aesthetics and musical inventions (generated as well in the field of militant actions as in the so-called music business); 2. the performances (dances and parties but also political demonstrations); 3. the visual representations of blackness; 4. relations with politics (involving both proximity and articulation as intraracial tensions and the denial of their social value); 5. the links between black music and media (especially record companies, radio and television); 6. the set of a new black market consumption (which exceeded music as object to influence in the "commodification of blackness" as style and consumable image). These nuclei appear in the Chapters and Parts that make this Thesis.
Seeking to satisfy the theoretical and methodological decision to approach music as a social multifaceted artifact, complex and involving sounds, words, bodies, images, practices and discourses (Middleton, 2003), I have constructed an archive consisting of: discs, radio programs, journals specialized in black music and popular music, articles of music criticism, liner notes (ie, the texts accompanying discs), testimonies of artists, publics and diverse agents linked to music (producers, owners of labels, show hosts, DJs, advertising agencies), photographs, cover art, songbooks, subscription cards, TV shows, promotional posters, advertisements and jingles. Working with these materials will allow me to present freedom songs, soul and funk affecting the meanings of racial experiences, holding as hypothesis that, rather than political programs, sterile and unequivocal artifacts of the cultural industry or expressions of a black essence, they propitiated and were conducive of dissimilar and unprecedented African American experiences and presences (aesthetic, political, media, business, cultural) expressing like no other area of culture, tensions between identification and differentiation (Hall, 2003) that defined the black condition during the period. In that sense, the hypothesis just enunciada will be complemented by another which states that the new genres of black popular music were a cultural area of multiple, heterogeneous racializaciones that differentiated blackness, setting a map of representations, experiences and complex expectations. This feature allows me to disable the tendency to see an alleged homogeneity in the culture of the black population and in the very category of black popular music (Adussei, 2002; Kelley, 1987; Stephens, 1984) Hence, the insistence of this research in tracking the freedom songs, soul and funk in their complexities and their dispersions, in its contradictions and ambivalences.
As will be seen, artists, publics, media, market, political activists staged, to varying degrees and in different ways, a process of musical changes through which new black popular musics broke divisions and cultural boundaries hitherto stable or perceived as such: the ones which separated politics from religion and traditions from innovation, the fixed and stereotyped representations about black subjectivity as emotionally simple, poor, homogeneous or hyper-sexualized and the idea of music as an emanation of a compact and undifferentiated community (Moten, 2009). Against the common perception that "blacks account cultural, social and economic homogeneity and intraracial relationships without conflict" (Smith, 2000), the production and consumption of these new musical genres shows that, for the decades investigated, the opposite is true. Hence throughout this Thesis I will present black music not as a territory of clumps but as one of political, racial, gender and class differentiations, as the opportuniy to explore different emotions, affections and sexuality, as a way of aesthetic experimentation, as the tool for the reconfiguration of the market (not only of music but of black blackness consumption and as an object of consumption), and as the redefining the culture of the party and dance.
Título obtenido
Doctor de la Universidad de Buenos Aires en Ciencias Sociales
Institución otorgante
Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales