Pop Music + Cultural Resistance Study Guides

After the usual, wise and profound words of Father Guido here's the much agonized for Study Guides:

Popular Music here.
Remember that the exam is cumulative. Refer to the midterm study guide for that material.
Cultural Resistance here.

The World Tomorrow...

Here is a sampling of the articles that have appeared 'reviewing' Julian Assange's interview program, The World Tomorrow airing on RT (Russia Today) weekly. The Dissenter and Salon articles are very supportive of the program (based on the first installment and the interview with the notorious Sayyid Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah) while the articles from The Guardian and The New York Times are very critical of Assange himself and the program. After the links you can find the embedded video of the entire interview so that you can evaluate independently. As you read follow the hyperlinks in the articles themselves and note how the links are organized and where they each lead. (Please note that The NYTimes article might require you to register).

Gosztola, "About Julian Assange's Revolutionary New Television Show" from The Dissenter
Greenwald, "Attacks on RT and Assange Reveal Much About the Critics" from Salon.com

Harding, "The World Tomorrow: Julian Assange Proves a Useful Idiot" from The Guardian
Stanley, "The Prisoner as Talk Show Host" from The New York Times"




Also, as promised, here is the link to the Motherboard/Vice documentary on the Free Network Foundation and its work with the Occupy Movement as it strives to keep network communications open, public and decentralized.

Cinema, TV, Gender and Race

Mufasa and Scar Face Swap

Van Zoonen, "Gender, Representation and the Media"
Corea, "Racism and the American Way of Media"

Desjardins, "Cinema and Communication"
Thomas, "Myths in and About TV"

*Articles are from Downing et al (eds), Questioning The Media: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 1996)

Convergence Culture and Resistance

From The Cultural Resistance Reader: please have the articles in Section Five: "Dismantling The Master's House" read. The following articles from Section 8 are also required: Jordan on 'Reclaim the Streets'; Jason Grote on 'Revered Billy' and Ricardo Dominguez's 'Electronic Disturbance'

Did I mention that the following Jenkins article is something that you should read?

Henry Jenkins - Interactive Audiences? The 'Collective Intelligence' of Media Fans

(Final) Pop Music Readings

Assuming that at this point you are (basically) all done with the Garofalo textbook, here are the reading assignments up to the end of the semester:

On Jamaican Music:
from Dick Hebdige, Cut'n'Mix here.


On 'co-optation':
Thomas Frank's "Commodify Your Dissent" here.



On Gender:
Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, "Rock and Sexuality"
Simon Frith, "Afterthoughts"
"Richard Dyer, "In Defense of Disco"
Find these articles here as a single PDF file.



On 'sub-cultures':
Here are the Dick Hebdige chapters from Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Refer back to the Punk: Attitude film screening.

The Ramones, "Do You Remember Rock'n'Roll Radio?" Live in Rome, 1980



On sampling, mash-ups and the 'postmodern turn':
Andrew Goodwin, "Sample and Hold"
E Ann Kaplan, "A Postmodern Play of the Signifier?"
Negativland, "from Wired: Negativland Interviews U2's The Edge"

Also, to clarify (or further obscure) 'postmodernism' please help yourself --in case you have not encountered it in your other studies-- to Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society"

Photoshop For Democracy

Evil Bert & Che

Evil Bert is referenced in the Jenkins article below. Find the original Bert Is Evil website here at WayBackMachine. The story of the Bert Is Evil website is told here at Wikipedia. A contemporary site for all kinds of Evil Bert stuff is here.

Matt Mason - We Invented The Remix

Henry Jenkins - Photoshop for Democracy

You can find James Boyle's The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind --which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License-- available for download from Yale University Press here.

"Musical styles change over time and so do their techniques of appropriation. Sometimes musical generations find their successors are engaging in different types of borrowing than they themselves engaged in. They do not always find it congenial. It is striking how often musicians condemn a younger generation’s practice of musical appropriation as theft, while viewing their own musical development and indebtedness as benign and organic. … [Sampling] is a different kind of borrowing than the adaptation of a chord pattern from a gospel standard to make an R&B hit. But which way does the difference cut as a matter of ethics, aesthetics, or law?"

This is good material for those of you interested in copyright and appropriation especially if you are thinking of working on these issues for your final papers. Chapter 6 ("I Got A Mashup") is especially pertinent. Chapter 6 is here, from the 'annotatable' version on the website of Boyle's book.

Wark, "The Hacker Manifesto"

Also, Dancehall/Reggae History Bonus (Recommended Reading):
Dick Hebdige - from Cut'N'Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music

Finally, for those of you who still don't have it you can download Girl Talk's breakthrough Feed The Animals from the Illegal Art website as a free download. Enjoy the 'official' 372 overlapping samples. You can find detailed info on all of them here.

Bob Christgau, the "Dean of American Rock Critics", provides an inter-generational appreciation of Girl Talk on NPR here.