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Englishness, Pop and Post-War Britain , livre ebook

Intellect Books - Kari Kallioniemi

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169 pages

English

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A propos
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Extrait

Description

English pop music was a dominant force on the global cultural scene in the decades after World War II – and it served a key role in defining, constructing and challenging various ideas about Englishness in the period. Kari Kallioniemi covers a stunning range of styles of pop – from punk, reggae and psychedelia to jazz, rock, Brit Pop and beyond – as he explores the question of how various artists (including such major figures as David Bowie and Morrissey), genres and pieces of music contributed to the developing understanding of who and what was English in the transformative post-war years.

Publication Forum (Finland) lists this book as a Level 2 publication, where ‘the highest-level publications are directed as a result of extensive competition and demanding peer-review’.For Intellect’s full listings in this catalogue, please click here.

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction: Englishness, History and Writing about Pop Music – Seeking the Authentic Voice of Pop-Britain

Chapter 1: Strategies for Conceptualizing Notions of Pop-Englishness

1.1. The Peculiarities of English National Pop Identity

1.2. Between Modernity and Tradition: Imaginary Englishness

1.3. Englishness and Pop Geography

1.4. Pop-Englishness and Transnationalism: The History of Americanization and Relation to Europe

1.5. The Peculiar Entrepreneurialism of British Music Management

Chapter 2: From Tommy Steele to Village Green Preservation Society

2.1. Pop, English Parochialism and Post-War Britain − Change and Continuity

2.2. Young England, Half English: Englishness, the History of National Music and the Emergence of British Rock’n’roll

2.3. The Myth of Swinging Englishness: The British Invasion and Swinging London

2.4. Lazing on a Sunny Psychedelic Afternoon − Englishness and the 1960s Nostalgia for Imaginary Spaces of England

Chapter 3: Anarchy and Enterprise in the UK and the Multiplying of Notions of Pop-Englishness

3.1. From the Winter of Discontent to Free Enterprise: Thatcherism, Pop and Englishness

3.2. Punk, Disco and Progressive Rock: The Proliferation of Pop-Englishness in the 1970s

3.3. Dandyist Masks and Escape Rout(in)es of David Bowie and the New Pop

3.4. Pop-Englishness and Politics: The White British Soul Boys

Chapter 4: The Road to Britpop and Back

4.1. Blairism and Cameronism: Pop, Politics and Englishness

4.2. Morrissey as an International Outsider

4.3. The North Strikes Back − Madchester and the Northern Metaphor Revisited

4.4. The Battle for Britpop

4.5. Post-Britpop and the Ghosts of Englishnesses Past

References

Index

Sujets

Musique

Culture musicale

Musique

Popular Culture

MUSIC

Multiple signal classification

General officer

General

Cultural Studies

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	01 septembre 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783206018
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,3600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2016 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2016 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover design: Emily Dann
Production editor: Tim Mitchell and Mareike Wehner
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-599-8
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-600-1
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-601-8
Part of the Studies on Popular Culture series
Series ISSN: 2041-6725
Electronic ISSN: 2042-8227
Printed and bound by Gomer, UK
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction: Englishness, History and Writing about Pop Music – Seeking the Authentic Voice of Pop-Britain
Chapter 1: Strategies for Conceptualizing Notions of Pop-Englishness
1.1. The Peculiarities of English National Pop Identity
1.2. Between Modernity and Tradition: Imaginary Englishness
1.3. Englishness and Pop Geography
1.4. Pop-Englishness and Transnationalism: The History of Americanization and Relation to Europe
1.5. The Peculiar Entrepreneurialism of British Music Management
Chapter 2: From Tommy Steele to Village Green Preservation Society
2.1. Pop, English Parochialism and Post-War Britain − Change and Continuity
2.2. Young England, Half English: Englishness, the History of National Music and the Emergence of British Rock’n’roll
2.3. The Myth of Swinging Englishness: The British Invasion and Swinging London
2.4. Lazing on a Sunny Psychedelic Afternoon − Englishness and the 1960s Nostalgia for Imaginary Spaces of England
Chapter 3: Anarchy and Enterprise in the UK and the Multiplying of Notions of Pop-Englishness
3.1. From the Winter of Discontent to Free Enterprise: Thatcherism, Pop and Englishness
3.2. Punk, Disco and Progressive Rock: The Proliferation of Pop-Englishness in the 1970s
3.3. Dandyist Masks and Escape Rout(in)es of David Bowie and the New Pop
3.4. Pop-Englishness and Politics: The White British Soul Boys
Chapter 4: The Road to Britpop and Back
4.1. Blairism and Cameronism: Pop, Politics and Englishness
4.2. Morrissey as an International Outsider
4.3. The North Strikes Back − Madchester and the Northern Metaphor Revisited
4.4. The Battle for Britpop
4.5. Post-Britpop and the Ghosts of Englishnesses Past
References
Index
Acknowledgements
This fourth volume of the series Studies on Popular Culture by Intellect Books (Bristol, UK) and the International Institute for Popular Culture, IIPC (Turku, Finland) was partly based on my Ph.D., presented in the Department of Cultural History, University of Turku, some years ago. The idea for this volume came from the co-editor of the series, Professor Hannu Salmi, and together with him I came to the conclusion that there has been new momentum developing in the study of nationality and popular culture, and it was therefore an appropriate moment to revisit the issues raised in my dissertation. I would like to record my warmest thanks to him, and especially to Professor Bruce Johnson, the other co-editor of the series and the translation editor of this book. I would also like to thank Emil Aaltonen and Kone Foundations, for the funding I received while finishing this project. Some of the ideas presented in this book were also originally conceived as various conference papers, mostly presented at IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music) and EPCA (European Popular Culture Association) EUPOP conferences, and also discussed as working papers in IIPC (International Institute for Popular Culture) seminars at the University of Turku. My warmest thanks to everybody – too numerous to mention here – who participated in these discussions and commented on the papers. My final thanks go to the Intellect staff, especially Tim Mitchell, for all the help provided in producing this book and shepherding it to the marketplace.
Foreword
What do they know of England, who only England know?
(Rudyard Kipling, The English Flag , 1891)
As this book will suggest, imagining England from the outside, from the point of view of a foreigner and through pop music is both a strange and familiar feeling of Anglophilia, inviting me to construct such a highly contested subject as pop-Englishness – ambiguously associated with the precious sentiments that ‘only England know’. Very distant from these spirited sentiments, my tastes as a fan of English/British pop/rock music were formed in my early teenage years in the 1970s, listening to artists like the Sweet, Pink Floyd, David Bowie (1947–2016), Cockney Rebel and Genesis. This obsessive period of pop fandom consisted both of following current music and assimilating the 1960s through collecting records of an era of which I had little direct experience, apart from occasional songs heard and remembered as a child, like Sandie Shaw’s Girl Don’t Come (1964). This fandom, and especially punk- and new wave-ideology, made me a bit suspicious of the canon of the classic albums and the iconic bands, like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper (1967), which was already included in the progressive canons of 1970s rock culture. Avoiding the accepted wisdom, I imagined Englishness, not by English literature studies or my personal visits to Britain, but by pop music saturation, gazing on the unexpected and marginal nooks and crannies of British pop history.
Thus, while preparing this book, I reconsidered the view that notions of pop-Englishness can be best recognized in complexities and in hidden corners and distant flashes of culture, which I have been observing from outside as a Finn in my somewhat isolated society of the 1970s and 1980s, which had its own peculiar relationship with the West, including Britain. This was experienced, for example, by watching English TV comedies like Dad’s Army (1968–1977) as an act of mild rebellion for my generation: although it is a celebration of English characteristics, it was also read as an anti-military show broadcast in the land of compulsory military service. Or, in the case of pop music, artists like Syd Barrett representing the lunatic and free whimsy of liberal human (Anglo) behaviour, which was in stark contrast to Mitteleuropa stratifications and the grey conformity of the Scandinavian welfare state.
Thus, the approach I have taken in this book also reflects this situated account: this is not a definitive or comprehensive history of British post-war pop music, but an attempt to criss-cross through ephemeral debate concerning the various manifestations of pop music in its relation to Englishness. This debate has been circulating in sources of written media texts, fictional works and academic research – from weekly music papers to cultural commentators and intellectuals interested in popular culture. The background for this study is the tradition of cultural history, from which base the cultural past of British pop is also in dialogue with contemporary issues, through interaction with societal processes and continuity and change in British society.
The focus on Englishness as a model for the analysis of the construction of national identity through popular culture has been extremely topical since the mid-1990s. In the new reading of the national popular, apparent everywhere in early twenty-first century England, from national populist political parties and British devolutional/isolationist tendencies to magical embodiments of Englishness like James Bond, Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes, a convergence of popular/everyday culture and nationhood seems to provide the continuing reference point for Britain. At the same time, the field of British popular music and culture has been becoming more multicultural and fragmented than ever before, addressing ongoing European debates regarding not only nationalism, but also migration and multiculturalism.
The deeply rooted concern regarding English national authenticity and experiences of modernity thus appears from time to time in public debates on the nature of British culture. David Cameron’s 2011 speech on the failure of multiculturalism in the United Kingdom, demanding that immigrants embrace a British identity instead of remaining outside the culture of the majority, is one of the latest links in the continuing debate on British/English nationalism, which during the twentieth century has also been connected to the supposed threat of Americanization and popular culture. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the former Soviet bloc unexpectedly activated public debates on national authenticity and its political and cultural manifestations. These debates are still very much a topical issue, and are likely to remain so. Central to a post-Soviet (and so-called postmodern) age of neo-nationalisms, the emergence of strong devolutionist tendencies around Europe is also connected to this re-negotiation of the identity of Britain. England/Britain has also been debating vigorously its identity in relation to Europe, and its post-war history provides a particularly complex and ambiguous terrain for this discussion, once again activated by the financial crisis of the European Union and its repercussions.
While suffering the postcolonial blues, England has also experienced a cultural boom since the 1960s as one of the significant centres of global popular culture. Those changes that Britain has faced since the war, including principally the decline of Empire, the emergence of mass culture and mass media and the creation of urban youth cultures, have either accentuated a traumatic relationship with its o