A Popular Culture Research Methodology: Sound System Outernational

Journal of Popular Culture

Beyond Style and Genre. Aesthetic Concepts in Popular Culture, 2024

Postcolonial Studies Meets Media Studies: A Critical Encounter, 2016

How can sound be analysed as an expressive form which plays a crucial role in the transformation of culture? What are the ramifications for the ways in which scholars think about culture as a concept, if this sonic perspective is taken into account? This essay aims at demonstrating that sound is not a natural given, but part of complex cultural, social, and mediatised practices. Everyday soundscapes of the city, the varied sounds that are designed for mobile phones and other devices , the cut, looped and layered sounds of contemporary popular and club music these sounds constantly reconstitute the world in which we live and how we perceive it and make sense of it. Therefore, studying sound cultures means exploring the specific social and cultural functions of sound in a particular time and space, across different media formats, production environments and listening habits. The first part of the essay gives an overview of some of the recent approaches in the emerging field of sound studies and highlights the close interaction of sound, media studies, and importantly, postcolonial studies. Subsequently , two examples will be given which demonstrate how sound cultures can be studied as an amalgamation of sonic, medial and postcolonial practices and thinking.

Popular Music Studies Today. Proceedings of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music 2017 (Ed. by Julia Merrill), 2017

Social semiotics is a new school of semiotics that has over the years been applied to the study of visual and multimodal communication in particular. As the study of signifying practices within certain cultural groups is one of the main fields of interest within social semiotics, it appears safe to assume that these ideas will be of interest in the analysis of popular music. In this article, I will present some preliminary results of my ongoing doctoral research on reggae and dancehall aesthetics as negotiated in Germany. Using methods drawn from cultural sociology, social semiotics, and musicology, I aim to empirically describe the genre’s discursive, visual, and sounding phenomena. In this context, musical diversity is identified as an essential part of the aesthetic discourse – both generally speaking as well as with regard to the singer’s voice. Using the song “Taking Over” by the vocalist Sizzla as an example, I would like to show how vocal expression can be interpreted aesthetically. In general, the intent of this article is to illustrate ideas of popular music analysis as inspired by social semiotics.

Temenos Vol 50 No 2, 2014

Rastafari is an Afro-Jamaican religious and social movement, which has since the 1970s spread outside of the Caribbean mainly through reggae music. This paper contributes to the academic discussion on the localization processes of Rastafari and reggae with an ethnographic account from the Nordic context, asking how Finnish reggae artists with Rastafarian conviction mobilize this identification in their performance. The paper focuses on one prominent Finnish reggae sound system group, Intergalaktik Sound. The author sees reggae in Finland as divided between contemporary musical innovation and the preservation of musical tradition. In this field, Intergalaktik Sound attempts to preserve what they consider to be the traditional Jamaican form of reggae sound system performance. For the Intergalaktik Sound vocalists, this specific form of performance becomes an enchanted space within a secular Finnish society, where otherwise marginal Rastafarian convictions can be acted out in public. The author connects the aesthetic of this performance to the Jamaican dub-music tradition, and to the concept of a ‘natural life’, which is a central spiritual concept for many Finnish Rastafarians. The article concludes that these sound system performances constitute a polycentric site where events can be experienced and articulated simultaneously as religious and secular by different individuals in the same space.

2015

Music is a multifaceted, pluridimensional notion, with complex dimensions. It is governed by the written tradition and/or oral which defines it creation of rules, but also its practices, usage, symbols, meanings and stakes. It is a form of organization of social behavior and communications. It is a culture of life, but also social representating, sharing and exchange. Of its shares, references and many achievements result all kinds of speeches and descriptions, through which broadcast also varied musical and extra-musical knowledge. By this knowledge also define the characteristics identities. How to translate such a polysemic reality? To date, analyzes of scholarly musical thought westernized tools to study the prevailing various world music. These analytical methods are not always suitable to elucidate the true nature and reality of oraliture music. Attempting to meet this challenge requires that we dedicated to new analytical experiments. This is the task that I am working here, ...

IASPM@Journal, 2016

Popular Music and Society, 1998

Issues of gender have inspired some of the most insightful and lively scholarly literature on popular music in the last decade. The best of this literature has reflected the insight, now familiar in cultural studies, that the meanings of a text, rather than being inherent in a work or hypodermically injected into consumers' minds, are co-produced by consumers. Accordingly, audience uses and gratifications, patterns of reception and consumption. and associated social practices have been recognized as integral to any holistic study of popular music. Actual studies of consumption, however, have lagged behind such insights in terms of quality and quantity. \loreover, much of the extant literature on reception, howewr insightful, still consists of academic speculation ungrounded in consurncr perspcctin:s. Scholarly literature on Caribbean popular music can be seen to reflect these concerns in various ways. Some of the most important recent publications on Caribbean popular music have focused on gender, including that of Pacini Hernandez (Bachata) on Dominican bachata, Aparicio on salsa, Rohkhr on calypso, and Cooper on Jamaican dancehall. \Vhile Pacini Hernandez's approach is broadly ethnographic and richly grounded in social history. the other authors are scholars of literature who approach their wbject primarily via the prism of song lyrics. Although each of these works reflects the author's theoretical sophistication, keen insights, and intimate familiarity with the culture in question, their often acute interpretations and thorough research do not, on the whole, incorporate extensive references to the perspectives of the people who actually consume and enjoy the music in question. 1 The general paucity of reception studies of popular music can be attributed in part to the difficulty of gathering opinions on subjective topics like identity and gender which do not lend themselves to questionnaires, statistical analyses, or any form of positivist mass study. Accordingly, d::ita yielded on Caribbean music by reception studies using such formats (e.g .. Douglas. Anderson and Langley) have tended to be rather predictabh! and unremarkable, although not without interest and validity.

This study examines how the particular performance practices associated with reggae music have contributed to the localization of dancehall culture in Finland. At the core of this culture lies the concept of the sound system, which, in addition to a DJ, includes a master of ceremonies, or MC, who during a performance, in various ways, interacts with the audience. This article is especially concerned with how Finnish sound systems localize through their performances a particular understanding of reggae as a genre in Finland, and promote reggae as what I define as the dancehall continuum. Theoretically, this study draws on the study of folklore as performance and on sociological genre theory. The empirical material consists of interviews with sound system operators and discussions on an Internet message board. Additionally, a close reading of the written history of reggae is conducted. The study shows that Finnish sound systems do not only act as intermediaries of Jamaican music, but engage the local audience in the creation of a particular adaptation of dancehall culture in Finland.

Small Axe, 2001