ABSTRACT

Popular Musicology and Identity paves new paths for studying popular music’s entwinement with gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, locality, and a range of other factors. The book consists of original essays in honour of Stan Hawkins, whose work has been a major influence on the musicological study of gender and identity since the early 1990s. In the new millennium, musicological approaches have proliferated and evolved alongside major shifts in the music industry and popular culture. Reflecting this plurality, the book reaches into a range of musical contexts, eras, and idioms to critically investigate the discursive structures that govern the processes through which music is mobilised as a focal point for negotiating and assessing identity. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, Popular Musicology and Identity accounts for the state of popular musicology at the onset of the 2020s while also offering a platform for the further advancement of the critical study of popular music and identity. This collection of essays thus provides an up-to-date resource for scholars across fields such as popular music studies, musicology, gender studies, and media studies.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

A musicology of popular music and identity

chapter 2|18 pages

‘She Said She Said’

The influence of feminine ‘voices’ on John Lennon’s music

chapter 3|10 pages

The classical closet

chapter 4|22 pages

Perfect duet?

Paradoxes of gender representation and mixed-gender collaborations on the Billboard charts from 1955 to 2017

chapter 5|15 pages

The pleasure(s) of the pop text

Subversion and theatricality in Cloroform and Tove Lo

chapter 6|20 pages

‘Everyone is a little bit gay’

LGBTIQ activism in Finnish pop music of the 21st century

chapter 7|16 pages

‘Keeping it real’, ‘Keeping it dandy’?

Male blackness and the popular music mainstream

chapter 9|12 pages

‘Very’ British

A pop musicological approach to the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Always on My Mind’

chapter 10|18 pages

Pulp

A paradigm for perversion in pornosonic pop

chapter 11|18 pages

Regina Spektor’s Small Bill$

The cute and the manic-zany as body-political strategies