7134 results in Media, mass communication
Index
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- Re-Imagining the Victim in Post-1970s Horror Media
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Contents
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8 - Victimhood and Rhetorical Dialectics within Clive Barker’s Faustian Fiction
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Summary
Abstract
Employing the philosophy of Georges Bataille, this chapter examines victimised characters within Clive Barker’s 1980s works The Damnation Game, The Hellbound Heart and Books of Blood short story “Sex, Death and Starshine.” These three works provide arenas for Barker’s main characters—and readers—to experience competitive coexistence of self and other, survival and death, and ecstasy and suffering. The works persuade readers to flirt with Faustian risk and become willing victims through the act of reading. Suffering through the dark fiction, readers engage with Barker’s dialectics by befriending characters (and Barker himself) via the text. The chapter argues that this type of victimhood-friendship contributes to the effectiveness of Barker’s literary rhetoric.
Keywords: literature, The Damnation Game, The Hellbound Heart, friendship, Georges Bataille, transhumanism
Faustian fiction—that is, stories of human characters who negotiate with devils to acquire power and knowledge—have been retold and reshaped throughout the centuries. They are based on an historical sixteenth-century magician, Dr Johann Faustus, who was suspected of consorting with the devil; accordingly, the fiction traces the character of Doctor Faustus/Faust (or a Faust-like character) interacting with a demon character, traditionally named Mephistopheles. Christopher Marlowe’s Tragicall Historie of Doctor Faustus (c. 1592) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1838) are two foundational versions of Faustian tales that are celebrated in the Western literary canon. Despite their thematic similarities, such as unmoderated desire, the limitations of human knowing and the betrayal of natural order, the two stories significantly diverge: Marlowe’s tale ends with Faust’s eternal damnation, while Goethe’s tale ends with his redemption. Within the sphere of contemporary horror fiction, Clive Barker admits that his long career of writing horror literature remains indebted to these Faustian texts, specifically, Marlowe’s bleaker Doctor Faustus (Barker, Damnation, xiii). The influence is evidenced throughout Barker’s corpus: from his first theatre productions in 1970s London to his 2015 novel The Scarlet Gospels. As a horror writer, Barker preserves the Faustian tradition in his stories but imaginatively develops the darker elements.
Over the decades, Barker’s approach to Faustian fiction aligns with a particular philosophy of storytelling.
9 - Pain Index, Plain Suffering and Blood Measure: A Victimology of Driving Safety Films, 1955–1975
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- Re-Imagining the Victim in Post-1970s Horror Media
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Summary
Abstract
This essay examines the unique victims that populated early driving safety films in the United States. In these films, like Safety or Slaughter (1958), Signal 30 (1959), Red Asphalt (1960), Mechanized Death (1961), Wheels of Tragedy (1963), Highways of Agony (1969) and Death on the Highway (1971), the victims viewers see are people who experienced actual injuries, pain and death. In the collision-experiment films like Crash Research (1955), Crash and Live! (1955), Safety through Seat Belts (1959) and Safety Belt for Susie (1962), crash victims are most often stand-ins for the human body, crafted in plastic and metal: the crash test dummy and children’s dolls.
Keywords: automobility, car crashes, safety gore film, collision-experiment film, industrial films, crash victims
These are actual scenes taken immediately after the accidents occurred. Also unlike Hollywood, our actors are paid nothing. Most of the actors in these movies are bad actors and received top billing only on a tombstone. They paid a terrific price to be in these movies, they paid with their lives.
– narrator of Signal 30 (1959)You know the fallible factor in driving, don’t you? It’s you and me.
– narrator of Safety or Slaughter (1958)For the first seven decades of the automobile, every accident on the road was the driver’s fault. At least, this is how it was seen both in the eyes of the public and the dictates of the law. Once behind the wheel, the driver assumed a responsibility, in essence, for every other person in every other vehicle on the road. It also meant that every other person in an automobile was a potential victim, and whatever their grisly fate, the driver was to blame, meaning the act of driving was always charged with a moral imperative.
This all changed dramatically in 1965 with the publication of Ralph Nader’s best-selling book Unsafe at Any Speed, which revealed that it was actually the automobile itself that was most often responsible for crashes. Yet before Nader, the voice of authority on such matters largely stemmed from a group of driving education films that began appearing in the 1930s.
1 - Opening the Gate: Reconfiguring the Child Victim in Stranger Things
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Abstract
The hit Netflix original series Stranger Things (2016–) cites several influential horror texts which depict children either as passive victim or monstrous threat. Children frequently occupy these polarised positions in horror films aimed at adult audiences, exposing adult fears over the child’s growing social power, knowledge and autonomy. With young as well as adult viewers in mind, Stranger Things self-consciously sets out to avoid the ideological trappings of its resurrected horror texts, mobilising its informing sources not just for nostalgia but also for reflection and critique. This chapter explores how Stranger Things initiates a shift from the child’s long-established position as horror victim to actively engaged horror participant.
Keywords: Duffer Brothers, children, horror, trauma, monster, Netflix
Set in the 1980s, the hit Netflix original series Stranger Things (The Duffer Brothers, 2016–) cites many influential horror texts from the period, where children feature either as passive victims or monsters masquerading under the guise of childhood innocence. In a flashback from the opening episode, Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) presents her twelve-year-old son Will (Noah Schnapp) with tickets to see Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982), a film about a helpless child who disappears through a television set and is held at the mercy of evil spirits (ST 1.1). Like Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) in Poltergeist, Will disappears inside a frightening parallel realm known as the Upside Down, where he must hide from a carnivorous monster until Joyce finds him and brings him home. In the show’s second season, Will becomes possessed by a dangerous entity referred to by his friends as the Mind Flayer (ST 2.8) and recalls “an icon in American mass culture” which reached popularity in 1970s horror cinema (Schober 12). Textual allusions to demonic child films such as The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973), The Omen (Donner, 1976) and Children of the Corn (Kiersch, 1984) feature in several episodes, as Will, although appearing as himself, now poses a threat to those around him and the lives of his friends and family.
Children frequently occupy these polarised positions in horror films aimed at adult audiences, with the victim-monster binary exposing adult fears of losing a child to monstrous forces or a turn to monstrosity, but also to the child’s growing social power, knowledge and autonomy.
5 - Postmortem Victimhood: Necrovalue in Phantasm and Dead and Buried
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- Re-Imagining the Victim in Post-1970s Horror Media
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Abstract
Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm franchise and Gary Sherman’s Dead and Buried stage scenarios where the dead are brought back as undead labourers via embalming. This process is one of the technologies involving a postmortem condition in which the dead body is brought to life once again as an object. This new status as object pushes postmortem technologies towards capitalism, the latter based on processes of thingification where nature (including humans) is objectified to ensure exploitation. This chapter reads Phantasm II (1988) and Dead and Buried (1981) as examples of revictimisation, where necrotechnologies keep the bodies alive even when the victims scream for release and proper rest. As such, the films advocate for the rights of the postmortem subject amidst necropolitics.
Keywords: necropolitics, 1980s, capitalism, embalming, necrotechnologies, thingification
Capitalist ideology sustains the logic of labour-power, competition, accumulation, qualification and alienation. If the proletariat want money to get access to commodities, the market must be embraced, the whole working class becoming the victim of the continuing exploitation of wage labour. There is a “compelling parallel between a worker’s exploitation and alienation under capitalism and a victim’s exploitation and alienation at the market place,” since “workers must consider both the fruits of their labour and their labour itself as another man’s propriety” (Schwöbel-Patel 148). Not even retirement means the end of exploitation, as many senior people throughout the world must continue working to ensure economic survival after retirement from working at minimum wage. We came into this world to work, and only death stops the logic of being a cog in the machine of capitalism.
Horror fiction, however, can stage a scenario where the human continues labouring even after death, thus presenting a nightmarish version of the grand narrative of never-ending exploitation. Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm franchise (1979–98) revolves around a supernatural mortician known as the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) who kills and reanimates the dead as his misshapen slaves. The films establish a mythology in which human corpses must work for the Tall Man as a labour force. Gary Sherman’s Dead and Buried (1981), opening just two years after the first Phantasm, stages a similar premise.
Filmography
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2 - Black Death: Black Victims in 1980s Teen Slashers
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- Re-Imagining the Victim in Post-1970s Horror Media
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Abstract
One of slasher cinema’s most notorious, but underexamined, tropes is the notion that Black characters die first. A sample of slasher films from the 1980s suggests the assertion is false, but this does not absolve such films of problematic racial constructions. Qualitative analysis shows Black victims and survivors of slashers play into anti-Black stereotypes. Most problematic here is that anti-Black stereotypes can be seen as part of the justification for the character’s slaying, thereby reflecting a broader social pattern of vilifying and minimising the suffering of Black victims. The findings of the chapter are important insofar as cinematic content trends correspond to contemporaneous sociocultural shifts and cinematic images have the power to shape the minds, conceptions and opinions of viewers.
Keywords: survivors, cinematic tropes, horror, race, racism, stereotypes
Although slasher cinema is one of the most academically scrutinised subgenres of horror (Hart 43), one of its most notorious tropes, that Black characters die first, remains underexamined. Along these lines, the chapter on 1980s horror films in Robin R. Means Coleman’s Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present is titled “We Always Die First” but offers no examples of Black characters dying first. Instead, she duly notes the deployment of the magic negro trope in The Shining (Kubrick, 1980), the continued stereotyping of Vodou in The Serpent and the Rainbow (Craven, 1988) and Grace Jones’s appearance in Vamp (Elias, 1986) as one of the few horror films to star an African American woman (145, 151–52, 155–56, 165–66). Her brief discussion of slasher cinema notes the subgenre was “extraordinarily grisly” and “very White”, leaving the trope that inspired the title of the chapter unexplored (158). Later, in the 2019 documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, Coleman clarified the Black-characters-diefirst trope, suggesting that it is not entirely true. Instead, Black characters, particularly Black males, can demonstrate the formability of the villain by serving as victims (Burgin). Do these observations pass empirical scrutiny? Prevailing literature gives no clear answer.
Several authors make glancing reference to the Black-characters-die-first trope. Here, in line with Coleman’s “very White” assessment, Isabel Cristina Pinedo argues teen slashers exclude “racial minorities altogether or relegates them to the status of victims, largely undeveloped expendable characters” (111).
10 - Biolithic Horror: Stone Victim/Victimisers in Resident Evil Village
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- Re-Imagining the Victim in Post-1970s Horror Media
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Abstract
This paper explores the horror of stone and nonhuman victimhood, aiming to contribute to Ecogothic research (Keetley and Silvis; Smith and Hughes) through a videogame case study that problematises the borders of victim/victimiser, player/avatar and animate/inanimate. Resident Evil Village (Capcom, 2021) is a game of Gothic minerals: castle masonry, caves, crystals and rusted metal. I use Cohen and Callois’s work to argue that Village’s stone problematises victimhood, agency and embodiment through what I term “biolithic” entanglements and that “visual” and “inert” background assets possess an underappreciated and unsettling centrality in videogames. Surviving Village involves reckoning with the ineffable and inexhaustible complexity of materiality that frustrates player agency: while pebbles may be trodden underfoot, from stone we emerge and to stone we return.
Keywords: minerals, nonhuman, monsters, Ecogothic, lithic, game ecocriticism
Bedrock
Resident Evil Village (Capcom 2021) is a videogame founded in an accretion of Gothic materials: castle masonry, caves, ceramic dolls and rusted metal. This litany of minerals subtends its first-person horror where Eastern European– coded werewolves and vampires are all progeny of a monstrous mold, as with its bayou-based prequel Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (Capcom, 2017; McGreevy et al.), but here the player excavates the monsters’ subterranean origins born from abject loss and fights creatures that leave crystal corpses. The catalyst for the action is the petrification of protagonist Ethan’s daughter, Rose, by a family of Gothic monsters whose matriarch is trying to convert her monstrous-feminine power (Creed) to bring her child back to life, entangling multiple human/nonhuman victimhoods. As Rose’s latent power intimates, all characters here are monstrous: the player-protagonist’s body is revealed to be nothing more (or less) than a cave-mold copy of a man with the same materiality as the magnetically empowered metallurgist Heisenberg and the vampiric Lady Dimitrescu, who are gunned down to ash and crystal. In an amplification and subversion of the survival horror relationship where the player-victim “exists only by and for the monster,” our avatar and fictive daughter are repeatedly broken and recombined, cast as a mutable, monstrous mineral substance abused by the different nonhuman agencies of the narrative (Perron 130). Moreover, these monsters are themselves all victims of subterranean experiments and internecine strife, given homes beneath the rocks of this mountainous landscape.
Introduction: Theorising the Victim
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- By Marko Lukić
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Summary
“Be my victim…” (Candyman, Rose, 1992)
It is with these words that the mythical figure of Daniel Robitaille, better known as Candyman, beckons Helen Lyle to submit herself to him and to accept him as her killer. While this particular moment will become an anthological point of reference within the horror genre due to the sheer power of the conveyed image, further strengthened by the metaphoric cultural and social meanings imbued within it, what strikes a particular chord is the established and emphasised relation between the two characters. This mythopoetic moment becomes synonymous with both the (re) affirmation of Candyman as the source of the monstrous, the urban myth come to life, and the particular position of Helen as an (in)voluntary victim. As the narrative steadily progresses and the audience becomes aware of Candyman’s tragic history and vengeful nature, the focus slowly starts to shift from the initial antagonist to Helen, who now, through Candyman’s doings, becomes reimagined as the actual source of the monstrous. This shift in purpose and functionality within the narrative becomes once more confirmed in a climactic scene at the very end of the film, with Helen becoming/ replacing Candyman himself, but now, devoid of the burden of Daniel Robitaille’s tragic history, rises as a violent urban myth in her own right. This is a key moment, along with many examples in recent decades, where the initial premise of the victim is challenged as a possibly fluid category and it becomes evident that the position of the victim is not a powerless one, as explored, for example, in the seminal work done by Barbara Creed (The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993, and The Return of the Monstrous-Feminine, 2022) or Carol J. Clover (Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 1992).
While both authors position their work within theoretical readings of gender and sexuality, with particular attention towards women as the most common victims within the genre, they also articulate two rather different theoretical paradigms. Whereas Barbara Creed observes women being “represented as monstrous” (Monstrous-Feminine 7) and subsequently argues that the now monstrous-feminine functions as a subversion of patriarchal power and the symbolic order, Carol J. Clover, through her concept of the Final Girl, argues the absence of a clear gender binary with the Final Girls/ victims being in fact “boyish” (Men 40).
Bibliography
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Re-Imagining the Victim in Post-1970s Horror Media
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Despite its necessary centrality within the genre, the concept of the victim has not received much direct attention within the field of horror studies. Arguably, their presence is so ubiquitous as to become invisible - the threat of horror implies the need for a victim, whose function never alters, often becoming a blank slate for audiences to project their desires and fears onto.
This volume seeks to make explicit the concept of the victim within horror media and to examine their position in more detail, demonstrating that the necessity of their appearance within the genre does not equate to a simplicity of definition.
The chapters within this volume cover a number of topics and approaches, examining sources from literature, film, TV, and games (both analogue and digital) to show the pervasiveness of horror's victims, as well as the variety of their guises.
11 - The Potential Victim: Horror Role-Playing Games and the Cruelty of Things
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- By Ian Downes
- Edited by Madelon Hoedt, Marko Lukić, Sveučilište u Zadru, Croatia
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- Re-Imagining the Victim in Post-1970s Horror Media
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- 09 January 2024, pp 213-230
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Summary
Abstract
This chapter explores ideas of victimhood and agency in horror roleplaying games through a lens of thing theory, drawing on the works of Mel Y. Chen, Bill Brown, Robin Bernstein and Jane Bennett to examine how the material objects that are used in such role-playing games are given the power to make victims of characters. In considering agential things against Christie’s “ideal victim,” the horror genre victim is reoriented in the changing relationship of objects and human subjects. This chapter argues that these objects, made into “things” by their power over the game’s narrative, reflect similar ideas of agency and subject-object relationships in day-to-day life.
Keywords: objects, thing theory, ideal victim, Call of Cthulhu, Dread, Ten Candles
We are all victims of physics.
– Scientist in anecdotal tweet by Laurel HamersThat we all are, or can be, victims of physics inscribes an agential form to a classical understanding of ideas such as gravity and force. It invokes a reversal of who and what can behave. As Mel Y. Chen writes in Animacies, there is the possibility of a linguistic “conceptual order of things, an animate hierarchy of possible acts” that they trouble significantly as they ponder the borders between the inanimate and the animate (3). In Chen’s early example of “the hikers that rocks crush,” they engage with the problem that “the hikers … play an object role” (2). The solution to the linguistic difficulty emerges when we animate the object, when the traditionally inanimate rock is given the free agency and subjecthood quality to crush the hikers. Upon this animation, the object becomes a thing, described by Robin Bernstein as when “the amateur’s knife should slip and cut a finger … that knife suddenly becomes a thing that has leapt up and asserted itself, a thing that demands to be reckoned with” (69), which centres her idea of “dances with things” as the kind of interplay between a human and the substantive things that they interact with daily. Bernstein borrows heavily from thing theorist Bill Brown’s assertion that “[t]he story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject” (4).
4 - Through the Looking-Glass: The Gothic Victim in Jordan Peele’s Us
- Edited by Madelon Hoedt, Marko Lukić, Sveučilište u Zadru, Croatia
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- Re-Imagining the Victim in Post-1970s Horror Media
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Abstract
Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) resorts to the Gothic figure of the doppelgänger in its representation of the hybrid, ambiguous victim, blurring the (moral) lines between the two protagonists, Adelaide and her clone Red. Peele also inscribes a political meaning to the character of the victim by exploring the issues of systemic oppression and exploitation, only to show that the idea of an ideal victim may be an obsolete concept in a world where everyone is victimised by the socio-economic system—that is, capital itself. The horror and paradox arise from the realisation that everyone is complicit in creating such an oppressive society, which both unsettles the notion of a victim and makes it central to our human existence.
Keywords: oppression, victimhood, race, doppelgänger, clone, capital
Contemporary horror film can hardly be discussed without considering the work of Jordan Peele, “Hollywood’s most inventive horror voice” (McCann). His debut Get Out (2017) offers a scathing criticism of the evil of racism and racial exploitation, reminding audiences that America is far from “living a blissful state of post-racial harmony” (McCann). In his second horror feature, Us (2019), Peele casts a wider net by exploring further, equally haunting social issues such as capitalist exploitation, poverty and the ever-present trauma of disenfranchisement. While the film may certainly be explored by focusing solely on the issue of race (from the perspective of critical race theory, for instance, which can be a topic of a separate research), the theme of racism is somewhat less prominent here than in Peele’s earlier film, and, due to its focus on dual identities, Us seems to be more intricate and more widely devastating, like capitalism itself. Notably, the only White characters in Us, the Tyler family, are killed by their own White clones (who in turn are killed by Black clones). Peele thereby avoids blatant racist inferences, which would allow for a clear identification of the victim (Black) and the oppressor (White), as was the case in Get Out. In this way, Us rejects clear demarcations of responsibility along the racial lines and looks for them along class lines, where they become more elusive. As this chapter argues, Us reveals that in a capitalist society everyone is simultaneously victim and oppressor, which keeps “us” enmeshed in a web of conflicting identities.
7 - “If this is the last thing you see… that means I died”: A Taxonomy of Camera-Operating Victims in Found Footage Horror Films
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- By Peter Turner
- Edited by Madelon Hoedt, Marko Lukić, Sveučilište u Zadru, Croatia
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- Re-Imagining the Victim in Post-1970s Horror Media
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Abstract
This chapter formulates a taxonomy to classify the different kinds of camera-operating victim characters in found footage horror films: amateurs, students and cinematographers. It considers some key theoretical notions, including priming, Murray Smith’s structure of sympathy and how off-screen space is articulated in found footage horror films. In order to develop the taxonomy, this chapter examines how viewers respond to camera-operating victims in several key examples, including Man Bites Dog (Belvaux et al., 1992), Hollow (Axelgaard, 2011), Grave Encounters 2 (Poliquin, 2012), The Asylum Tapes (Stone, 2012), Afflicted (Lee and Prowse, 2013), Devil’s Due (Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett, 2014) and Blair Witch (Wingard, 2016).
Keywords: horror, diegetic camera, cinematography, off-screen space, student operators, cinematographers
Found footage horror films feature diegetic camera operators that will usually become the victims of whatever antagonistic force they are recording during the events of the narrative. Since Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Mike Williams went camping in the woods of Maryland in The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sanchez, 1999), the found footage narrational technique has become ubiquitous in the horror genre. Found footage horror films are perfect examples of what Thomas M. Sipos calls “pragmatic aesthetic … when a filmmaker puts technical and budgetary compromises to artistic effect” (29). Although the diegetic camera technique affects the way that viewers recognise and empathise with all of these victims, the ways that these operators use their cameras is often different. Therefore, there is a need to construct a taxonomy of how these victims use their diegetic cameras. This taxonomy will classify the different kinds of camera-operating victim characters in found footage horror films: amateurs, students and cinematographers. The different ways that camera operators approach cinematography must be carefully constructed in the opening scenes of the film in order to prime the viewer for a particular experience, and for a particular form of what I have previously labelled “mediated realism” (Turner, Found Footage 9). Amateurs, students and cinematographers have varying degrees of interaction with their profilmic subjects, and there are therefore varying degrees to which they are recognised as characters by the viewer. The more vocal they are as off-screen characters, the more the viewer is required to imagine off-screen space.
In order to create and elucidate this taxonomy, it is first necessary to consider some key theoretical notions.
Preface
- Rafal Zaborowski, King's College London
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- Music Generations in the Digital Age
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- 20 February 2024
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Summary
‘Mum, what’s that song that goes “Am-beh, am-beh?”’
It was Poland in the mid-1980s and I was three, maybe four. My mother didn’t know. It took, probably, a few weeks before the song was on one of the two television channels again (or was it on the radio?), and my father and I happened to listen to it together.
This is my first music-related memory. The second must have happened not long after that. I was in a music store, in a long queue, lifted up by my mother to a tall man behind the register, so I could proudly ask: ‘Can I have Michael Jackson’s album, please?’
‘Am-beh, am-beh’, as readers might have guessed by now, had been, of course, ‘I’m bad, I’m bad’, the chorus line from Jackson’s bestseller hit song ‘Bad’. It was the title song of his 1987 legendary album, and apart from the US, it charted in Canada, UK, New Zealand, and several European countries. I didn’t know anything about that at the time, naturally. I was just happy we were able to get the album (a vinyl record) and I could sing along to the tune at home. This was the first meaning-making through music that I can recall. Whereas the line ‘I’m bad’ has been interpreted by music experts as Jackson’s attempt at ‘roughing up’ his image and departing from his gentler pop style, for me, ‘am-beh, am-beh’ meant something cool, flashy and exotic. It also marked the beginning of my burgeoning music collection.
By the time I was ten, indulged by my parents I had amassed a collection of albums (now on cassette tapes). At the time, popular music (largely from the US, UK and Western Europe) was starting to become widely available in Poland, and it was cheap too, as in the absence of copyright law, the cassette tapes were usually pirated and sold unofficially at markets and fairs. There was rarely a period of silence; when a cassette ended, I would just flip it to the other side and push ‘play’ again. Unsurprisingly, the songs stuck in my head and, since I could not understand English, the foreign songs spurred a myriad of original interpretations of what I thought they meant.
As the music accompanied my everyday activities, I sang and I listened, recorded and dubbed.
2 - Listening and Listeners
- Rafal Zaborowski, King's College London
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- Music Generations in the Digital Age
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- 20 February 2024
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- 18 December 2023, pp 75-98
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Summary
Abstract: This chapter starts with the idea of listening practice and confronts it with research on listening modes as a way of conceptualising audience activity, encompassing meanings, emotions and interpretations. Social practices of listening are analysed through interview and observational data, linking the diversity of listening practices to the participants’ everyday lives and experiences, and discussing their listening profiles in terms of modes, playlists and interpretations. Listening emerges from the analysis as not necessarily functional, predominantly social (although not always overtly) and attentive to text. The chapter ends connecting these arguments back to wider debates on music audiences and empirical investigations of listening.
Keywords: listening modes, music, interpretation, karaoke, audience
How and why is music listened to? Do we let go and immerse ourselves in musical sounds as if they ‘wash around us’, like Mrs Phelps advised young Matilda in Roald Dahl’s classic novel? Or do we let the music ‘kick its way through to capture our hearts’, as in the popular lyric to Ikuze! Kaitō Shōjo by the idol band Momoiro Clover? What do we actually do when we listen, and how do these practices relate to everything else in our everyday lives: our demographic markers, jobs, families, emotional states and routines?
In this chapter, I argue that successfully linking the spheres of the personal with the social connection can be realised through conceptualising audience engagement as ‘practice’, that is, a regular and social set of activities (Bräuchler and Postill, 2010). This allows me to move from the linear musicological models towards a more circular account of listening, and will help answer the main questions for the chapter: namely, ‘What are people’s practices surrounding music?’ and ‘What is the role of music in people’s lives, and how is it interpreted in the context of social and cultural relations and identity work?’ In the second part of the chapter, I present a detailed analysis of the music engagements of five people. I chose these five out of the hundred participants from the study as aptly representing the various musical practices emerging from the data, as well as the demographics of the analysed audiences. Additionally, the five were chosen out of the 20 participants I had the most interaction with throughout the study as part of focus groups and individual interviews, as well as the actual practices of listening I observed.
5 - Idols and Virtual Idols
- Rafal Zaborowski, King's College London
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- Book:
- Music Generations in the Digital Age
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 20 February 2024
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- 18 December 2023, pp 157-178
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Abstract: This chapter turns to idols groups and virtual idols specifically to investigate the different yet meaningful engagements between them and the audiences. Through analysis of collected ethnographic data, the chapter demonstrates how fans make sense of music and the world through the concept of reality – a concept often contested and contingent on social and generational actualities of the audience. Voices of producers, musicians and managers, also salient in this chapter, help demonstrate and theorise the characteristics of audience-performer co-evolution.
Keywords: idols, vocaloid, jimusho, co-evolution, fandom, industry
Idols and Their ‘Offices’
So far, we have discussed Japanese ‘idols’ (aidoru) as mostly teenage male or female singers and/or media personalities, who also frequently model for magazines and appear in promotional campaigns. But exactly who is and who is not an aidoru? Or more specifically: how do they differ from virtual idols, i.e., non-corporeal music performers brought to life with technological assistance?
‘Completely different’, says Taiki (‘the relaxed’, man) about the similarities between idols and virtual idols’ songs. Taiki explains that with the former, all you get are boring and predictable accounts of summer flings (presumably, like the one by AKB48 in the previous chapter), or narratives of having a secret crush on a classmate. ‘How is this different?’ I ask, pointing to the karaoke screen from which Taiki’s friend, Shōta, is passionately singing the lyrics of ‘Melt’ by Hatsune Miku (written by ryo and Supercell in 2007). The song is energetic, the lyrics seem typical of J-pop: a protagonist in love but unable to confess their feelings. ‘Wait for it’, promises Taiki, and so we wait, singing along with Shōta. When the song is over, I feel like I missed the answer, so Taiki helpfully recalls the last line of the song: ‘Hug me now! … or something’. I must still look confused, and Taiki explains that because of the last phrase (‘or something’), you can see that Miku, the singing virtual idol, was only half-serious throughout the song, when she sang about preparing for a date. She was not cute, naive or bubbly – ‘that’s not who she is.’ Taiki says that it was all a ruse to get closer to that boy she likes in the song, but Miku is not girly like that. And the cover’s blown in the last line.
4 - Participation and Proximity
- Rafal Zaborowski, King's College London
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- Book:
- Music Generations in the Digital Age
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 20 February 2024
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- 18 December 2023, pp 135-156
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Summary
Abstract: This chapter begins with a brief modern history of popular music in Japan to understand the specificities of the Japanese music market and the relevance of pop idols. The overarching frame in the analysis is the distance between audiences and performers and the ways in proximity (good and bad) between popular music acts and their audiences shapes social practices of listening. The chapter argues that such artist-audience intimacy needs to be understood in the context of Japanese music history, its mode of production and circulation in the media mix.
Keywords: Japan, music, idols, proximity, parasocial, J-pop
Popular Music in Japan
To understand the relevance of idol groups for contemporary Japanese audiences, we need to look back briefly at the history of popular music in Japan, and the dialogue between local and global influences of the form and the content. Idol pop and vocaloid music emerge as influential styles for both analysed cohorts in this book, albeit in different ways. They are closely tied in with the spectrum of economic, social and technological transformations that Japan has experienced in the past 40 years.
For scholars of Japan, modern Japanese popular music usually begins with the start of the Meiji restoration in 1868 (Condry, 2011). After centuries of an isolationist stance, Japan was forced to open up to the world, and the changes, shaping and restructuring of the country for years to come, also included music, brought in on foreign vessels in the form of marching bands and military tunes – which was very different to popular shamisen or shakuhachi music of the earlier Edo period. Soldier training centres in Japan started incorporating the marches into the military regimen before 1868 (as early as the late 1850s, after Commodore Perry’s second visit to Japan), creating a style that scale-wise drew from earlier Japanese folk songs, but was undeniably more influenced by the sound of Western drum and fife bands (Mitsui, 2014, p. 3).
Military music bands accompanied Japan in periods of war surrounding the dawn of the 20th century and thereafter, but were only one aspect of the changing soundscape (Oba, 2002). Much of the musical shift was done through the education system, as Western (including, among others, English, American, German, Spanish) melodies became officially used in the Japanese elemental school music curriculum.
Introduction: Listening, Music, Generations
- Rafal Zaborowski, King's College London
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- Book:
- Music Generations in the Digital Age
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 20 February 2024
- Print publication:
- 18 December 2023, pp 13-40
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Summary
Abstract: This chapter introduces the author’s interest in the study, the aims of the book, and the approach to audiences and listening. The chapter also gives context to the presence of music in Japan and introduced theoretical, conceptual and methodological challenges surrounding research on Japanese music audiences.
Keywords: Listening, music, generations, audience, Japan, fieldwork
Dancing about Architecture?
Writing about music has always been difficult. Our personal experiences, just like mine detailed in the Preface, seem to suggest that music is hugely relevant to our lives, that it is embedded in and revealing of our routines and practices, that it is one of the meaningful threads in our everyday existence and the symbolic exchange. However, it is difficult to analyse what is actually going on when we interact with music, because on the one hand, music is very personal, and on the other, it is situated strongly in the social sphere of our lives.
When we think about music, we often imagine it as a social, cohesive force, much more than we do about new media. The academic and media debates suggesting that technology, and the internet, are driving us apart (Turkle, 2011) do not focus on music as often as they focus on social media or video games. Sure, moral panics have concerned various musical genres and artists (Jenkins and Maier-Katkin, 1992; Cohen, 2002; Wright 2000), but there has been much more research on cultures, sub-cultures, groups and collectives (now and in the past) which have told us that music can be understood as social behaviour or as mass communication, yet it is always strongly tied to group identity and belonging (Frith, 1978; Hebdige, 1979; Cashmore, 1984; Born and Hesmondhalgh, 2000).
Is this still true in the digital music soundscape, where audiences interact with songs more in isolation from each other: through individual playlists, personalised streaming sites, personal headphones and devices – and yet, through their generational experiences? In 1936 Walter Benjamin famously argued that with mechanical reproduction a certain mode (‘aura’) of engaging with art disappeared, and this opened up the potential to experience art differently. It happened with the invention of photography and film, as Benjamin noted, but we can easily make the connection to recorded music (cf. Benjamin, 1977).