Media Narratives in Popular Music 9781501357275, 9781501357305, 9781501357299

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Media Narratives in Popular Music

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Media Narratives in Popular Music Edited by Chris Anderton and Martin James

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 This edition published 2022 Copyright © Chris Anderton and Martin James, 2022 Each chapter copyright © by the contributor, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 237 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image: Jimi Hendrix handwritten lyrics to the songs “Room Full Of Mirrors” and “Shame Shame Shame”. Photo by Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Anderton, Chris, editor. | James, Martin (Music journalist) editor. Title: Media narratives in popular music/edited by Chris Anderton and Martin James. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021027346 (print) | LCCN 2021027347 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501357275 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501387715 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501357282 (epub) | ISBN 9781501357299 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501357305 Subjects: LCSH: Popular music–Historiography. | Musical criticism. | Popular music–History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML3880.M43 2022 (print) | LCC ML3880 (ebook) | DDC 781.6409–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027346 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027347 ISBN:

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Contents List of Figuresvii Notes on Contributorsviii Introduction: Media Narratives and Music Histories  Chris Anderton and Martin James1 Section 1  Narratives of Identity 1 2 3

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Hidden in Plain Sight: Stories of Gender, Generation, and Political Economy on the Northern Soul Scene  Tim Wall and Sarah Raine Paid My Dues: Key Debates in the 1970s Feminist Music Press  Ann-Marie Hanlon “They’re Not in It Like the Man Dem”: How Gendered Narratives Contradict Patriarchal Discourse in Electronic Dance Music  Julia Toppin “Who Controls the Present Controls the Past. Who Controls the Past Controls the Future”: Washing Islam from the Media Narratives of Hip-Hop  Martin James

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Section 2  Narratives of Genre 5

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“Exiles in Madison Square Garden”: Critical Reception and Journalistic Narratives of Progressive Rock in Melody Maker Magazine, 1971–1976  Chris Anderton Alternative before Alternative: The Pre-Punk History of a ’90s Rock Genre  Theo Cateforis Never Mind the B …, Here’s Three Minutes of Prog: Rethinking Punk’s Impact on Progressive Rock in Britain During the Late 1970s  Andy Bennett “There’s a Crack in the Union Jack.” Questioning National Identity in the 1990s: The Britpop Counter-Narrative  Johnny Hopkins

91 109

125 141

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Section 3  Narratives Constructed 9

Compromised Histories: The Impact of Production Pressures on the Construction of Historical Narratives in Popular Music Documentaries  Lauren Istvandity, Sarah Baker, Zelmarie Cantillon, and Shane Homan 10 When a History of Gender Representation Meets the Nostalgic Storytelling of Hot Press Magazine  Yvonne Kiely 11 Punk Fanzines, Subcultural Consecration, and Hidden Female Histories in Early British Punk  Karen Fournier 12 Tales from the Turntables: “Narrating” and “Narrativizing” the “First Club DJ”  Maren Hancock

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Acknowledgments237 Index238

Figures 10.1 A  rm, chest, leg, and midriff exposure for women in Hot Press (HPW) 10.2 Arm, chest, leg, and midriff coverage for men in Hot Press (HPM) 10.3 Mouth open and at rest for women and men in Hot Press (HPW, HPM), and women and men in Rolling Stone (RSW, RSM) 10.4 Mouth closed and at rest for women and men in Hot Press (HPW, HPM), and women and men in Rolling Stone (RSW, RSM) 10.5 Arm and chest coverage for men in Hot Press (HPM) and men in Rolling Stone (RSM) 10.6 Arm and chest exposure for women in Hot Press (HPW) and women in Rolling Stone (RSW)

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Contributors Chris Anderton Dr Chris Anderton is Associate Professor in Cultural Economy at Solent University, Southampton, UK. His research interests focus on the music industries, music culture, and music history. He is author or coeditor of several books, including Understanding the Music Industries (2013), Music Festivals in the UK: Beyond the Carnivalesque (2019), Music Management, Marketing and PR (with James Hannam and Johnny Hopkins) (2022) and Researching Live Music: Gigs, Tours, Concerts and Festivals (with Sergio Pisfil) (2022). He has published in the academic journals Popular Music, Popular Music and Society, IASPM@ Journal, Rock Music Studies, Event Management, and Arts and the Market, as well as published numerous chapters in edited collections. He has also guest edited issues of Rock Music Studies (which focused on progressive rock) and Arts & the Market (which focused on live music research). Sarah Baker Sarah Baker, PhD, is Professor of Cultural Sociology at Griffith University, Australia. Her books include Community Custodians of Popular Music’s Past: A DIY Approach to Heritage (2017), Curating Pop: Exhibiting Popular Music in the Museum (2019), and Creative Labour: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries (2011). She is coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage (2018). Her most recent work has focused on popular music heritage and the pursuit of cultural justice in deindustrializing cities. For more on that project, see the website soundsofourtown.com. Andy Bennett Andy Bennett is Professor of Cultural Sociology in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia. He has written and edited numerous books, including Popular Music and Youth Culture (2000), Music, Style and Aging (2013), British Progressive Pop 1970–1980 (2020), and Music Scenes (coedited with Richard A. Peterson) (2004). He is a faculty fellow of the Yale Centre for Cultural Sociology, an International Research Fellow of the Finnish Youth Research Network, a founding member of the Consortium for

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Youth, Generations and Culture, and a founding member of the Regional Music Research Group. Zelmarie Cantillon Zelmarie Cantillon is Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow in the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia. Her research explores the intersections of heritage, spatiality, tourism, and cultural policy. She is author of Resort Spatiality: Reimagining Sites of Mass Tourism (2019) and coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage (2018) and Remembering Popular Music’s Past: Memory–Heritage–History (2019). Zelmarie’s work on popular music heritage focuses on cultural justice, urban transformations, and DIY institutions. Theo Cateforis Theo Cateforis is Associate Professor of Music History & Cultures at Syracuse University, USA, in the Department of Art & Music Histories. His publications include Are We Not New Wave? Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s (2011) and three editions of the Rock History Reader (2006, 2013, 2019). His articles and reviews have appeared in American Music, Current Musicology, Ethnomusicology, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Journal of the Society for American Music, and Popular Music and Society. Karen Fournier Karen Fournier is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Michigan, USA, where she teaches courses in popular music and cultural studies. She has published widely on issues of gender and popular music. Specifically, she has published the only book-length critical study of the music of Alanis Morissette (2015) and contributed a number of essays on the early British punk movement in such recent collections as The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis (eds. Lori Burns and Stan Hawkins) (2019), Finding God in the Devil’s Music: Critical Essays on Rock and Religion (eds. Alex DiBlasi and Robert McParland) (2019), and Beyond “No Future”: Cultures of German Punk (Eds. Mirko Hall, Seth Howes, and Cyrus Shahan) (2016). Fournier is also completing a book on the topic of gender in British punk rock. Maren Hancock Maren Hancock holds a PhD in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies from York University, Canada. The author of Lady Lazarus: Confronting Lydia

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Lunch (1999), Hancock has written, published, and presented extensively on gender and DJ culture in academic contexts. Hancock has been a professional DJ for twenty years, and is also a critically acclaimed recording artist and performer. Ann-Marie Hanlon Ann-Marie (Annie) Hanlon is a lecturer in music at Dundalk Institute of Technology in Ireland. She is musicologist with specialisms in cultural theories of music, French modernism, and popular music. Annie has contributed to a number of publications, including Made in Ireland: Popular Music Studies (2020), The Encyclopedia of Music in Ireland (2013), and Satie: Music, Art & Literature (2013). She is currently working on a monograph on music and queer community building in Ireland. Shane Homan Shane Homan teaches media studies at Monash University, Melbourne. He is coauthor (with Catherine Strong, Seamus O’Hanlon, and John Tebbutt) of Music City Melbourne: Urban Cultures, Histories and Policy (2021) and editor of the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Policy (2021). He is also a coauthor (with Stephen Chen, Richard Vella, and Tracy Redhead) of Born Global: The Music Export Business (2021). Shane is coeditor (with Catherine Strong) of the Popular Music History journal. Johnny Hopkins Johnny Hopkins is Senior Lecturer in Music & Media Industries at Solent University and a PR director. The focus of his PhD (Cultural Studies at University of Sussex, UK) is national identity, nationalism, and the uses of the Union Jack in pop music. He has published research on: Elvis Presley; William Eggleston; The Who, Swinging London and the rebranding of postcolonial Britain; Velvet Underground (with Martin James). He is co-author of the book Music Management, Marketing & PR (with Chris Anderton and James Hannam) (2022). Other research interests include John and Alice Coltrane; music photography; representation of Native Americans in popular music; popular music and the fight for Native American civil rights. With over thirty years of music industry experience, he was Head of Press at Creation Records and has worked with Oasis, Sinead O’Connor, Kasabian, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Graham Coxon, Bernard Butler, Adrian Sherwood, Primal Scream, and The Jesus & Mary Chain.

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Lauren Istvandity Lauren Istvandity researches at the intersections of music, heritage, and memory studies. She is the author of The Lifetime Soundtrack: Music and Autobiographical Memory (2019) and coauthor of Curating Pop: Popular Music in the Museum (with Sarah Baker and Raphael Nowak) (2019). Dr Istvandity is currently a Lecturer in the School of Business and Creative Industries at the University of the Sunshine Coast and an Adjunct Member of Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre, Griffith University, Australia. Martin James Martin James is Professor of Creative and Cultural Industries at Solent University, Southampton, UK. His areas of specialist interest include music journalism and the UK & US music press, music cities, and late-twentiethcentury alternative music: specifically punk, post punk, electronic music, jungle/drum & bass, and hip-hop. Martin’s academic and trade publications have focused on hidden histories in the mediated narratives of popular music. He coauthored Understanding the Music Industries (2013) and has contributed articles to journals including Popular Music, Celebrity Studies, and Punk & PostPunk. He has written several critically acclaimed books about music, including French Connections: From Discotheque to Discovery (2003) and State of Bass: Jungle—The Story So Far (2020 [1997]). Yvonne Kiely Yvonne Kiely is a music journalist, PhD student at Dublin City University, Ireland, and an occasional artist manager with a keen interest in women’s careers in Ireland’s music industries and gender representation on music magazine covers. She is features editor and founder of feminist zine Spread and owner of the music website Lazer Guided Reporter. She began her research career with an investigation into the cover spaces of Hot Press and Rolling Stone, subsequently taking the lead for Ireland’s data in the music festival research project, FACTS, conducted by the global feminist music network, female:pressure. Sarah Raine Sarah Raine is Research Fellow at Edinburgh Napier University, UK, and focuses on issues of gender and generation, authenticity and identity, and the construction of the past and present in popular music scene and industry. She is the author of Authenticity and Belonging in the Northern Soul Scene (2020) and the coeditor of Towards Gender Equality in the Music Industry (with Catherine

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Strong) (2019) and The Northern Soul Scene (with Tim Wall and Nicola Watchman Smith) (2019). Sarah is also the co-Managing Editor of Riffs, and acts as a Book Series Editor for Equinox Publishing (Music Industry Studies/Icons of Pop Music) and the Review Editor for Popular Music History. Julia Toppin Julia Toppin is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader of BA (Hons) Music Business Management at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. Julia also lectures on the BA (Hons) Music, Production, Performance and Enterprise, and MA Music Business Management degrees at the University of Westminster, UK. In addition to her academic career, Julia is Label and Events Manager at Digital 101 Recordings, a Drum and Bass label that she co-owns with DJ Grimeminister. She writes and broadcasts about Jungle, and Drum and Bass, women in music, music industry futures, and popular culture. Prior to academia, Julia had careers in secondary education, television production, entertainment journalism, film programming, and marketing. Julia tweets @Miss_Toppin and her memoire is forthcoming from Repeater Books. Tim Wall Tim Wall is Professor of Radio and Popular Music Studies and Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media at Birmingham City University. He researches into the production and consumption cultures around popular music and the media. He jointly edited The Northern Soul Scene with Sarah Raine and Nicola Watchman Smith, writing several of the chapters. His publications include the second edition of his book Studying Popular Music Culture (2013) and articles on music radio online, punk fanzines, the transistor radio, personal music listening, popular music on television, television music histories, jazz collectives, Duke Ellington on the radio, rock ‘n’ roll, cars and radio, The X Factor, and radio sound. He is currently writing the history of jazz on BBC radio from 1923 to 1973, and coediting Rethinking Miles Davis.

Introduction: Media Narratives and Music Histories Chris Anderton and Martin James

In the first three months of 2021, debate raged on Facebook about the accuracy of a historical popular music “truth.” The matter under discussion was the actual release date of David Bowie’s third album The Man Who Sold the World. The unfolding narrative of this seemingly insignificant piece of information revealed much about the constructed nature of histories and the ways that media processes may erase details of popular music histories. In the case of The Man Who Sold the World, the popular story of Bowie’s album had located the release date as November 4, 1970, yet many fans argued that it was in fact released on vinyl and 8-track some four months later on April 8, 1971, with the cassette following on May 7, 1971. On the surface this confusion lay in the fact that the album was available first in the United States and then later in rest of the world (including the UK), as record company release schedules were typically staggered in this way at the time. However, the actual US release date is a point of debate, since the US release schedules and press releases related to the album were not archived; hence, the only detail pertaining to this album comes with the dated submissions of safety masters in the United States in early November and the earliest press review on December 26, 1970. The erasure of the evidenced release date points to the limited availability of archival materials of even such a well-documented and influential figure as Bowie. Furthermore, it points to the music industry’s Americanization of the artist’s biography through which the proposed US release date has become accepted and repeated as the worldwide release date by the global media and music industries. Indeed, the 2020 fiftieth anniversary reissue of the album in its original title of Metrobolist was on the unconfirmed, but popularly mediated US release date of November 4, rather than the well-documented global release date four months later.

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Why is this so important? In this instance, the adoption of one detail results in the omission of another. The dominant discourse sits within a US-centric narrative and, despite the lack of evidence, becomes the mediated, narrativized “truth” of the album. Assumed detail takes precedence over evidence in an action that speaks of cultural and economic hierarchies that are subsequently replicated by a compliant media, itself acting as an extension of the promotional division of record labels. The narrative constructed from powerful half-truths is the story of omission, exclusion, and erasure—whether the “lost” detail, the unheard voice, or the unrepresented experience. The assumed details become part of a “truth cannon.” History has never been so ever-present in the machinations of the music industries as it is today. Albums by heritage acts are released in celebration of anniversaries, with the music industries reissuing long deleted vinyl and cassette versions in an act of commodity fetishism that reflects the growing markets for these formats. Entire issues of the music press are produced in celebration of canonized events, ranging from anniversaries of particular albums, live shows, and festivals, to the deaths of artists. Films, books, and memoirs are produced documenting and celebrating people and events from the same cannon. Each artifact is woven from a similar framework, prioritizing dominant narratives, or offering revised versions that remain framed by the popular narratives. These are constructed through the retelling of archival details and half-truths, alongside witness accounts that are blurred by time and informed by mediated versions of history. Keith Negus noted in 1996 that “the writing of music history should be approached with an awareness that [it] involves a process of re-presentation. As such, there may be other ways of telling the story” (137). He goes on to discuss and criticize what he refers to as “rock era” histories that begin with the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-1950s, valorize a period of progression and growth through the 1960s, before ending with the arrival of punk rock in the mid-1970s. This birth, growth, and decay narrative (139) is a common strategy within music histories that seek to create order out of the messy realities of the historical record; one which is always and necessarily incomplete because, to quote a famous formulation from the work of the philosopher and engineer Alfred Korzybski, “a map is not the territory it represents” but a model that represents reality (1933, 58). Similarly, Hayden White draws on the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss to argue that “any historical narrative consists solely of a “fraudulent outline” imposed by the historian upon a body of materials” (White

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1973: 287). As a result, all historical accounts are constructed (Tosh 2015) and interpretative in nature, with assessments being made regarding the “impact, influence, or significance” of what is being studied, while gaps in the historical record and the motivations of key figures are often filled by speculation or inference (White 1973: 287). White identifies a number of narrative strategies, or “pre-generic plot-structures” that are recognized by audiences and employed by historians, such as epic, romance, tragedy, and satire (296), though we might also suggest such tropes as “rags to riches,” the overcoming of adversity, the revolt of the working classes, or the “rise and fall” of genres (as seen in Negus’s “rock era histories”). Such tropes help to shape the arguments made by historians in their work, and may be underpinned by ideological or moral interpretations (liberalism, conservatism, Marxism, and so on). In assigning historical significance, Sarah Thornton argues that popular music histories draw on four principal criteria: sales figures, biographical interest, critical acclaim, and amount of media coverage. Furthermore, these are related to four strategies for “reconstructing” (or narrativizing) the past: listing, personalizing, canonizing, and mediating (1990: 87), though there are crossovers between these strategies and criteria, and they are not intended as an exhaustive classification (89). They are illustrative of some of the main issues that must be considered when reading histories of popular music. For instance, each strategy will “render irrelevant their omissions [thus the] cultural experiences of large parts of the population—not in tune with the tastes of music critics or not already represented in the music press—will be lost” (1990). This is because only a relatively small proportion of the music released each year will appear on sales charts, be given validation in the mainstream music press and media documentaries, or be chosen for re-packaging and re-release by record companies. Furthermore, a focus on personalities can lead to mythologized accounts—the “great men” style of historical narrativization—that serve to downplay or ignore others that were involved in particular scenes, events or activities, or entire sectors of music production. The simplification of narratives that historical writing presupposes not only leads to exaggerations, exclusions, or omissions (deliberate or otherwise), but may also lead to the construction of stereotypical myths that become accepted as fact due to their presentation in trusted sources. As Thornton notes: “the press is often treated as giving unproblematic access to the real … ” (91) and “[j]ournalists’ histories are expected to be straightforwardly ‘true’” (91, 93). The same might also be argued of television documentaries, the liner notes, and

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booklets that are now routinely packaged with re-released and archival CDs and boxsets (Maalsen 2016), and the cultural heritage exhibitions and tourist attractions that have been developed around the world, such as the “Beatles tours” and museums of Liverpool, Elvis Presley’s Graceland in the United States, and the Bob Marley museum in Jamaica (Bennett and Rogers 2016: 32). If, as Marshall McLuhan argued, “the medium is the message” (1964: 2), so these re-presentations, or “populist histories” (Thornton 1990: 92), gain the appearance of truth. Academic histories, such as those included in this book, must, therefore, examine the constructions of such mediated histories, to consider their omissions and exaggerations, and to critically reconsider the interpretations of history that we find in populist forms and narratives. These critiques, and the alternative narratives of history that are offered through them, will not be any more “true” than those whose constructions are examined, but they will highlight the ways in which those narratives are presented and created, and add to a multi-stranded understanding of the past; what John Covach (drawing on the work of Nietzsche) refers to as “perspectivism” (2020: 32). In a similar manner, George Lipsitz draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas of dialogic criticism, to characterize popular music (and by extension, popular music histories) as “the product of an ongoing historical conversation in which no one has the first or the last word” (Lipsitz 1990: 99). Popular music histories may focus on a very broad range of perspectives, approaches, and topics, from sociology, aesthetics, and popular musicology to encyclopedic reference works, biographies, and approaches that draw on feminism, globalization, postcolonialism, and more. However, as John Covach suggests, “rock-historical writing” tends to center on “the music and artists, on establishing important works and events” (2020: 25). There are many books charting different aspects of the histories of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and numerous other artists that have become valorized through the criteria noted by Thornton, with Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series of books focusing, for example, on specific album releases. More broadly, there are many books, both journalistic and academic, that address the histories of specific music genres such as punk (Savage 1991), progressive rock (Macan 1997), and hip-hop (Rabaka 2013), as well as the “hidden histories” of niche genres and musical scenes that run counter to the selection criteria noted by Thornton. Examples of the latter include the local scenes of particular cities (Finnegan 1989; Brocken 2010), and books that address the otherwise unacknowledged roles of women musicians in the history and development of music (Ammer 1980; Bayton 1998). There are also books

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examining the technologies of popular music, including histories of record production (Cunningham 1996; Burgess 2014), of reproduction technologies such as vinyl, cassette, CD, and the mp3 (Morton 2004; Sterne 2012; Osborne 2016), of broadcast media such as radio and MTV (Tannenbaum and Marks 2011; Michelsen et al. 2019), and of specific types of instruments—including Steve Waksman’s (2000) exploration of the electric guitar and Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco’s (2002) history of analog synthesizers. A growing area of interest is live music (Arnold 2018; Anderton 2019; Anderton and Pisfil 2022; Waksman forthcoming), while other objects of study include record labels, artist managers, music piracy, film and video game music, music journalism, and music fandom, though this is far from a comprehensive list. Recent years have also seen a growing interest in both the media and the academy in memoire, through which fresh and often contradictory perspectives have been offered. Comparative analysis of these texts has the potential to offer biographic detail previously missing from mainstream media narratives. Take for example the memoirs of members of the band New Order—Peter Hook (2012, 2016), Bernard Sumner (2015), and Stephen Morris (2020a, 2020b)— whose respective autobiographies present distinctly different observations on the same events. In these books we clearly see the subjective perceptional nature of history. Such contradictory narratives are often delivered in response to a media representation of events that prioritizes the voice of a band’s main spokesperson—usually the lead singer. Autobiographies thus become rebuttals of popular media narratives while also providing space for alternative perceptions of historical events. There has also been significant growth in studies of the museumization of popular music, including the creation and curation of exhibitions by both “authorized institutions” (national and city-based museums, archives and libraries, and so on) (Leonard 2007; Baker et al. 2019), and the Do-It-Yourself activities of communities of music consumers (Baker and Huber 2013; Baker 2015), which Andy Bennett has termed “DIY preservationism” (2009: 475; see also Dowd et al. 2016). There has also been rising interest in examining both the material culture of music’s past (including journalism, fanzines, photography, and memorabilia), as well as the immaterial field of cultural memory (Bennett and Rogers 2016). The latter encompasses the memories of scene participants and local communities that create “alternative narratives” (Carr 2019: 6) that are accessed by collecting people’s memories and experiences—oral histories that may reflect local community identities. Indeed, John Tosh suggests that histories

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help “people [to] develop a sense of their social identity and future prospects” (2015: 1), by providing a shared understanding of their past. Punk, for example, has undergone a reconsideration that has brought previously undocumented voices and event narratives to the fore. Albiez (2016) has reconsidered the conflicting stories surrounding the Sex Pistols’ gigs at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall while James (2018) has challenged the narrative of early Sex Pistols events—including the Lesser Free Trade Hall gig and the Sex Pistol’s residency at London’s 100 Club—through analysis of participant memories of an earlier Sex Pistols gig in High Wycombe. Of course, this is the case for histories at all levels, from locally based communities and city-wide branding projects through to national identities, translocal scenes (such as riot grrrl) and the virtual scenes and communities of fans and collectors made possible by Internet communication (Bennett 2004; Bennett and Peterson 2004). Material culture is also important as a way to access the past, whether this is through objects associated with music, such as vinyl, cassette, and CD trading, or the illicit distribution of recordings of out-ofprint records and live bootlegs both as physical media and as digital files online (Marshall 2005; Anderton 2006; 2016). An area that has yet to gain significant attention is that of the mediation of popular music histories through journalistic accounts or television documentaries—either by examining how they construct their histories or by making use of media archives and other sources to challenge the stereotypical or mythologized histories that have become part of the contemporary re-presentation of music history. It is to this area of research that this book seeks to contribute, presenting a range of authors and perspectives that analyze a range of media narratives in the spirit of Lipsitz’s “ongoing historical conversation” (1990: 99). The chapters in this book seek to open new discussions around the media construction of music history narratives. The arguments presented are divided into three sections, although arguably many of these discussions spill over into each other. Section one, “Narratives of Identity,” explores how music cultures and scenes shape our identity construction and how the mediation of those cultures and scenes prioritizes the experience of particular groups of participants. Subsequently, the popular understanding is presented as an imbalanced identity experience with certain voices becoming hidden from the mainstream conversation. The second section “Narratives of Genre” addresses the ways in which our understandings of genre become informed by highly subjective media processes that seek to simplify messy historical narratives. In the final section,

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“Narratives Constructed” the authors interrogate the often clumsy methods by which media gatekeepers aim to produce and frame the narratives that inform music meaning. In the opening chapter, Sarah Raine and Tim Wall pose the question “why are some aspects of a culture’s past relegated to fleeting moments in a scene when they were there in plain sight all the time?” With specific reference to the longevity of the Northern Soul scene and the relatively under-explored underlying political economy of the scene, the authors investigate how externally mediated histories and scene processes of “self-documentation” (Raine and Wall 2019) privilege some aspects of that past over others, and effectively silence the historic female experience in the process. Ultimately, the chapter considers how and why stories of pop’s cultural past are produced and then reproduced over periods of time and to what impact. The lack of opportunity for women in music of the 1970s, and the sexist and sometimes misogynistic representation of work in the rock press, may appear to have become an acknowledged part of contemporary popular understandings of the problematic construction of rock histories, but there has been limited exploration of the response of the women’s music movement in that decade. Paid My Dues was the first feminist music magazine of its kind, and played an important role in documenting the movement and “women’s music,” the feminist genre of popular music it supported. In her chapter, Ann-Marie Hanlon explores some of the main arguments of the women’s music movement in the 1970s as they appeared in the pages of the journal. Through an exploration of the issues of political consciousness, professionalism, and separatism, Hanlon reveals how this highly politicized musical culture represented a necessary and timely countercultural alternative to the heteronormative and sexist practices of the mainstream music industry. She also highlights the profound role music played in culture and community building for lesbian women in a period of social, legal, and political discrimination. Some fifteen years following the closure of Paid My Dues a plethora of media outlets emerged from the growth in interest in the post-acid house global electronic dance music (EDM) culture. Despite any suggestions that the dance scene promoted greater diversity in its participants, research by Julia Toppin suggests that women were silenced and in many media outlets removed from popular journalistic narratives. With specific analysis of the media representation of the Jungle/Drum & Bass scene, she notes how women in the industries associated with the genre became narrativized into supporting

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roles, while their contribution as DJs and producers was largely ignored in the key media outlets of the time. Toppin argues that this process has framed the narratives of contemporary dance music medias with the continued erasure of women’s contribution to the music, its industry, and the associated scene a pervasive and “violent” presence. If Toppin’s chapter points to a form of historical “washing” of gender, then Martin James’s chapter extends this theme to an exploration of the “washing” of Islam from the popular representation of hip-hop in popular music documentary films both pre- and post-9/11. James discusses the formative role that the teachings of Black Nationalist Islamic sects, such as the Nation of Islam and the Five Percent Nation, played in the origin stories and identity of hip-hop. He notes that in the mediation of hip-hop history, Islam initially became subsumed into Black Nationalist rhetoric. Post-9/11, however, Islam and Black Nationalism are entirely removed in favor of narratives of hip-hop’s gang cultures and modes of consumerism. In the second section of the book, we explore how histories of genres have become framed by mediation, especially through the popular music and rock press. As has already been noted, the “hidden histories” of punk have been an area of much activity in recent years, largely as a direct result of that generation taking increasingly senior positions within the academy and now reconsidering their own personal biographies. The Punk Scholars Network and its associated Punk and Post Punk Journal have been sites of considerable discussion around concepts of lost voices and hidden histories. However, even within these ethnographic analyses certain dominant narratives remain stubbornly in place. One such is the relationship between punk and progressive rock and the popular narrative of punk’s upturning of progressive rock’s monolithic dominance. This oppositional duality has seeped into the fabric of meaning that has gone on to frame both punk and progressive rock genres since the late 1970s, yet relatively little work exists that actually examines the validity of this perspective. Chris Anderton’s chapter presents a close reading of the Melody Maker as an archival source in order to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that led to the decline of the grassroots progressive rock scene of the early 1970s, while the top-tier groups found global success in the album charts and on world tours. In so doing, he offers a narrative that views the changing tastes of a new generation of music fans as only part of a set of business and cultural factors that led to the genre’s decline. In so doing, he challenges the popular story of punk’s David to progressive rock’s Goliath and instead provides a more nuanced analysis.

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Andy Bennett also challenges the narrative of punk “victory” over progressive rock during the years 1977 and 1978 in his chapter. By drawing on evidence of the British singles chart, he distills an alternative story of album-oriented progressive rock bands appearing in the British singles charts more than ever before. Bennett problematizes the popular notion that punk and new wave “revolutionized” the understanding and appreciation of popular music in Britain during this period and subsequently inspired a return to more direct music styles. He argues instead that progressive rock music was also an important part of the national pop soundtrack and provided a basis for the emergence of a new breed of progressive rock influenced British pop artists at the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s. Punk has also been presented as a key marker in the identity formation of 1990s American alternative rock as the progeny of its stylistic and ideological positioning. Theo Cateforis investigates the many ways that the popular music press had been using the word “alternative,” and its many connotations, to describe rock music well in advance of punk’s rebellious ascent. Through an examination of rock and pop criticism and journalism from the late 1960s and early 1970s, he shows how writers, musicians, and those in the industry used the word and label of “alternative” along specific stylistic, cultural, and industrial lines that anticipated its solidification as a genre in the 1990s. The concept of national identity as a foil for genre definition is explored in Johnny Hopkins’s chapter, in which he analyzes performative uses of the Union Jack flag from the pivotal period 1993–94, revealing counter-narratives of Britpop that question notions of English/British national identity through the articulation of Irish and South Asian perspectives on the liminality of their firstand second-generation diasporic positions. Although an exploration of “pop nationalism,” he thus challenges the dominant Britpop narrative. The final section of the book explores how the process of media production constructs narratives through numerous forms of bias including the personal biography of the author/producer and firsthand witness accounts, as well as the constraints imposed by funders, publishers, distributors, broadcasters, etc., and available archives. Inevitably, it is a process that actively omits some details as much as it prioritizes others. The chapter by Lauren Istvandity, Sarah Baker, Zelmarie Cantillon, and Shane Homan draws on interviews with music documentary makers to investigate the ways in which documentaries take shape by exploring the tensions between the documentarian’s intentions, the perspectives and memories of their interviewees, and the restrictions imposed

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by stakeholders. Significantly, the authors also examine how the curation of both interview and archival material can significantly shape the kinds of stories and themes of the final product. Magazine covers are also a clear site of narrative construction that frames the relationship between publication and reader. The cover produces meaning through its use of a range of design techniques in a process that produces an image of gender that is calculated to achieve high media visibility and commercial impact. Yvonne Kiely’s chapter investigates Hot Press magazine’s retelling of the publication’s forty-year cover history as a space, where nostalgia is shown to influence music media histories as told and retold by the media. Kiely argues that the gender narrative within the cover space of Hot Press presents limited expressions of gender and dominant images of both masculine and feminine identity, and a deliberate rejection of alternative expressions. The representation of gender is also the focus of Karen Fournier’s chapter in which she explores the erasure of women’s voices from the narratives of the fanzines Sniffin’ Glue and Ripped & Torn through the process of mainstream republication of archival collections. The easy availability of these reissues highlights how erasures take place in punk’s transition from the “specific” to the “popular.” Also concerned with erasure in the process of constructing histories is Maren Hancock’s chapter, which explores how specific books on music history have prioritized Jimmy Saville over French cabaret singer and nightclub impresario Régine Zylberberg’s in their claims to be the “first club DJ.” She argues that Régine’s exclusion from the history of DJing is a prominent example of how this history has been canonized as male. She also questions the viability of attempting to determine the first club DJ within a chronological and Eurocentric framework. While Hancock’s chapter explores exclusion, she also recognizes a more recent redressing of this narrative. In the era post-Saville’s charges over child abuse, a new emphasis has been placed on the importance of Régine in the story of club culture with her contribution becoming increasingly revealed as a “hidden history.” The chapters raise numerous questions over the construction of “hidden histories” and the extent to which they too are constructed according to the availability of archive materials, new frameworks of bias, and cultural and market forces. This notion presents what could be considered as a shortcoming in this collection. The works are formed around a canon of subject interest, which is employed in a number of the chapters included here, with a particular focus on the mediation of punk and its relationships to itself and its audience

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and in both opposition to, and antecedent of, other genres. In challenging media narratives, we use those same narratives as our foundation and in turn reveal nuanced readings that simultaneously challenge and support popular histories of dominant genres. The editors of this collection note that such genre specificity also extends to the limited foci of ethnicities and geographies contained herein. With a dominant interest in the discourses surrounding predominantly white, AngloAmerican forms, it raises questions about the narrow interests of media texts being analyzed in academic research. To what extent do we as cultural analysts question our own bias in the process of gate-keeping research interests and in the construction of analytical narratives? A companion collection to this book might explore inherent bias in both subject and methodological approaches and potentially present investigations into the erasure of global music genres, marginalized identities, and difficult “lost” histories that have barely been the subject of micro-archives, or the focus of a specialist media interest. Indeed, is it not a fact that the truly “hidden” histories of popular music sit so far outside of the mediation process that their existence has barely been written, photographed, or filmed into being? This final point potentially leads to the contribution of music fandom in the narrativizing of popular music histories via social media platforms, and creating prosumer narratives through activities such as crowdsourcing living archives—a form of “DIY preservationism” (Bennett 2009)—and meditating personalized narratives via a range of processes. The latter includes the uploading to YouTube of films that document the unboxing of collector’s boxsets: an activity that has become a cultural phenomenon associated with “digitized memory” (Brabazon 2018). Such activities offer new perspectives on the subject of this collection. Indeed, perhaps the dominant mode of mediated histories in the social media era is those histories that are socially constructed, which are perpetually in a state of flux, focusing and refocusing around the needs and beliefs of the public as archival prosumer. This in itself offers a fruitful space for further understanding of popular music’s media narratives.

References Albiez, Sean. 2016. “Print the Truth, Not the Legend. The Sex Pistols: Lesser Free Trade Hall, Manchester, June 4, 1976.” In Performance and Popular Music: History, Place and Time, edited by Ian Inglis, 92–106. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Ammer, Christine. 1980. Unsung: A History of Women in American Music. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Anderton, Chris. 2006. “Beating the Bootleggers: Fan Creativity, ‘Lossless’ Audio Trading, and Commercial Opportunities.” In Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music Culture, edited by Michael D. Ayers, 161–84. New York: Peter Lang. Anderton, Chris. 2016. “Sonic Artefacts: ‘Record Collecting’ in the Digital Age.” IASPM Journal 6 (1): 75–103. Anderton, Chris. 2019. Music Festivals in the UK: Beyond the Carnivalesque. London and New York: Routledge. Anderton, Chris and Sergio Pisfil, eds. 2022. Researching Live Music: Gigs, Tours, Concerts and Festivals. London: Routledge. Arnold, Gina. 2018. Half a Million Strong: Crowds and Power from Woodstock to Coachella. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Baker, Sarah, ed. 2015. Preserving Popular Music Heritage; Do-It-Yourself, Do-ItTogether. London: Routledge. Baker, Sarah and Alison Huber. 2013. “Notes towards a Typology of the DIY Institution: Identifying Do-It-Yourself Places of Popular Music Preservation.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 16 (5): 513–30. Baker, Sarah, Lauren Istvandity and Raphaël Nowak. 2019. Curating Pop. Exhibiting Popular Music in the Museum. New York: Bloomsbury. Bayton, Mavis. 1998. Frock Rock. Women Performing Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bennett, Andy. 2004. “New Tales from Canterbury: The Making of a Virtual Music Scene.” In Music Scenes: Local, Trans-Local and Virtual, edited by Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson, 205–20. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Bennett, Andy. 2009. “‘Heritage Rock’: Rock Music, Representation and Heritage Discourse.” Poetics 37: 474–89. Bennett, Andy and Ian Rogers. 2016. “Popular Music and Materiality: Memorabilia and Memory traces.” Popular Music and Society 39 (1): 28–42. Bennett, Andy and Richard A. Peterson, eds. 2004. Music Scenes. Local, Translocal and Virtual. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Brabazon, Tara. 2018. “Blunting the Cutting Edge? Analogue Memorabilia and Digitised Memory.” KOME—An International Journal of Pure Communication Inquiry 6(1): 63–74. Brocken, Michael. 2010. Other Voices. Hidden Histories of Liverpool’s Popular Music Scenes, 1930s-1970s. Abingdon: Ashgate. Burgess, Richard James. 2014. The History of Music Production. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carr, Paul. 2019. “Introduction to the Special Issue: Lost Musical Histories—Curating and Documenting Local Popular Music-Making in the UK.” Popular Music History 12 (1): 5–14.

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Covach, John. 2020. “Rock Historiography: Music, Artists, Perspectives, and Value.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research, edited by Allan Moore and Paul Carr, 25–36. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Cunningham, Mark. 1996. Good Vibrations. A History of Record Production. Chessington: Castle Communications. Dowd, Timothy, J., Trent Ryan and Yun Tai. 2016. “Talk of Heritage: Critical Benchmarks and DIY Preservationism in Progressive Rock.” Popular Music and Society 39 (1): 97–125. Finnegan, Ruth. 1989. The Hidden Musicians: Music Making in an English Town. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hook, Peter. 2012. Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division. London: Simon & Schuster. Hook, Peter. 2016. Substance: Inside New Order. London: Simon & Schuster. James, Martin. 2018. “No I don’t Like Where You Come From, It’s Just a Satellite of London: High Wycombe, the Sex Pistols and Punk Transformation.” Punk and Post Punk Journal 7, October 3, 2018: 341–62(22). Korzybski, Alfred. 1933. Science and Sanity. An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Lancaster, PA: The International Non-Aristotelian Library Pub. Co. Korzybski, Alfred. 1997. An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 5th edition. Englewood, NJ: Institute of General Semantics. Leonard, Marion. 2007. “Constructing Histories Through Material Culture: Popular Music, Museums and Collecting.” Popular Music History 2 (2): 147–67. Lipsitz, George. 1990. Time Passages. Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Maalsen, Sophia. 2016. “Reissuing Alternative Music Heritages: The Materiality of the Niche Reissued Record and Challenging What Music Matters.” Popular Music and Society 39 (5): 516–31. Macan, Edward. 1997. Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marshall, Lee. 2005. Bootlegging: Romanticism and Copyright in the Music Industry. London: Sage. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Michelsen, Morten, Mads Krogh, Steen Kaargaard Nielsen and Iben Have, eds. 2019. Music Radio. Building Communities, Mediating Genres. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. Morris, Stephen. 2020a. Record Play Pause: Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist: the Joy Division Years: Volume I. London: Constable. Morris, Stephen. 2020b. Fast Forward: Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist: Volume II. London: Constable.

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Morton, David L. Jr. 2004. Sound Recording. The Life Story of a Technology. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press. Negus, Keith. 1996. Popular Music in Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Osborne, Richard. 2016. Vinyl: A History of the Vinyl Record. London and New York: Routledge. Pinch, Trevor and Frank Trocco. 2002. Analog Days. The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Rabaka, Reiland. 2013. The Hip Hop Movement. From R&B and the Civil Rights Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Generation. Lanham, ML and Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books. Raine, Sarah and Tim Wall. 2019. “Myths on/of the Northern Soul Scene.” In The Northern Soul Scene, edited by Sarah Raine, Tim Wall and Nicola Watchman-Smith, 142–63. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing. Savage, Jon. 1991. England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London: Faber and Faber. Sterne, Jonathan. 2012. MP3. The Meaning of a Format. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Sumner, Bernard. 2015. Chapter and Verse—New Order, Joy Division and Me. London: Corgi. Tannenbaum, Rob and Craig Marks. 2011. I Want my MTV. The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, revised edition. New York: Plume. Thornton, Sarah. 1990. “Strategies for Reconstructing the Popular Past.” Popular Music 9 (1): 87–95. Tosh, John. 2015. The Pursuit of History. Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of History, 6th edition. London and New York: Routledge. Waksman, Steve. 2000. Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Waksman, Steve. Forthcoming. Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Jay-Z. Oxford: Oxford University Press. White, Hayden. 1973. “Interpretation in History.” New Literary History 4 (2), On Interpretation: II (Winter 1973): 281–314.

Section One

Narratives of Identity

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1

Hidden in Plain Sight: Stories of Gender, Generation, and Political Economy on the Northern Soul Scene Tim Wall and Sarah Raine

In 2019, the online pages of the Liverpool Echo featured the headline “Stunning pictures show clubbers and dance offs at a Wigan Casino all nighter” above sixteen black and white photographs.1 The photographs had not been in wide circulation before, and given the place of the Casino club, and the northern soul scene in British popular music lore, they gave a glimpse into the early era of a dance music scene that continues to this day. The Echo story asserts, “the stunning photos, taken by our sister paper the Daily Mirror during a Wigan Casino allnighter, show what it was like inside the venue back in 1975.” The short article repeats a standard history of the British northern soul scene: its early 1970s origins; the centrality of the Lancashire-based Wigan Casino dancehall; the “northern soul enthusiasts from all over the country” who make “regular pilgrimages” to the club; and the “love and appreciation” of rare “North American Soul music” by “a generation of Northern Soul fans,” which created the long-lasting music scene. The lead photograph centers on a young man, executing a backdrop amongst other dancers and a sea of onlookers. In the language of conventional press photography, this privileges the man and his spectacular dancing, and positions the others as mostly spectators. Even given what we can see of the Casino’s internal space, the photographer could have equally chosen one of the women dancers, perhaps emphasizing her embodied pleasure and freedom, or brought out the communality of the space and the people. In fact, given that objectified young women occupy the default focus for the majority of iconic dance photographs, it 1

The full article and the photographs can be viewed online (Shennan 2019).

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is noteworthy that they were not the focus for the camera. Attendees at this dance would have also known that the frame excludes other parts of the room that are vital to the functioning of the event: the process of admitting the participants; the positioning of the DJ and his equipment on the stage; and beyond the room in which records are perused and bought and sold. Actually, while fourteen of the images repeat the pattern of the lead photograph, in some, more women than men are shown, though the photographer consistently placed the male dancers to the fore. The remaining two photographs offer some other possibilities. In one of the dance floor shots, no one dancer is singled out, and the women are shown to be just as active in dancing as the men. In the other, the then-young Wigan Casino DJ, Russ Winstanley, is shown behind his mobile disco desks holding a copy of a seven-inch single. As we show below, such representations and selections are widespread. The prioritization of men over women when mediating the scene is just as apparent in Tony Palmer’s 1977 television documentary Wigan Casino, screened two years later than the Echo photographs were taken, and is repeated in almost all academic studies of northern soul, in later feature films like Soul Boy (2010), and even in the “self-documenting histories” of scene participants themselves. Palmer’s documentary does include a key woman as an interviewee, and we access some glimpses of the political economy of a northern soul club in the background, yet it is the spectacle of the male dancer on the dance floor that is the primary focus of this contemporaneous document of the scene. There have been more recent attempts to unearth the role of women: Cosgrove (2016) details the participation of his women friends, Milestone (2019) reflects explicitly on the issue, and Raine (2020) explores this historic marginalization in the contemporary multigenerational scene. Likewise, the participation of a younger generation of scene participants has become a theme for local television news items (e.g., Soul Boy (2020), part of the “Our Lives” BBC series), but they are most often positioned in relation to their veneration of a past history, and rarely framed as building a new history for themselves. However, as a scene that emerged in the early 1970s and continues today, regularly re-energized by younger generations of participants, the way the history of the scene is told is of vital contemporary importance. In this chapter, we explore aspects of northern soul history that seem embedded in these original 1970s photographs and in their selection and arrangement in the twenty-first-century Liverpool Echo. How we tell the story of the past of popular music culture is especially germane to a music culture like northern soul, in which

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the past is a pervasive part of the present multigenerational scene. In taking this example, we want to set out important ways in which we can retrieve aspects of hidden popular music histories that are actually available for all to see. First, we approach questions of gender and visibility, analyzing the absence of the historic role of women in the northern soul scene, and reflecting upon this through an ethnographic study of the current and multigenerational scene, which is itself hidden in many attempts to document northern soul, including the Liverpool Echo feature. While women are plainly participating in this dancefloor culture, their place in the story of northern soul never reaches that of the heroic male dancer portrayed in many of the Liverpool Echo images. This is a reversal of the dominant photographic practice that captures dancing to popular music; here, it is the spectacle of the male dancer that is objectified. Our act of retrieval draws particular attention to the role that men have had in transmitting the story of the past to younger members of today’s distinctly multigenerational culture, and in doing so we highlight the ways in which they have gendered this history and the continuing practices of northern soul. We then explore the scene’s tangible heritage as primary evidence for understanding the function of the scene. While the vital roles of music selection, record release, and commercial venue operation are apparent to those attentive enough to see, they are sidelined and transformed into the icon of the male personality-DJ. Taking some of the founding documents of northern soul from early 1970s Blues & Soul magazine, we argue that we must move beyond their use as touchstones in an existing story and to interrogate them to see what they can tell us about the political economy in which such DJs operated. Equally, we also need to understand who, today, has been enabled to speak about the scene’s past, and how it is made available to younger newcomers, who go unmentioned in the Echo’s feature. This chapter shifts from what is highlighted in the dominant processes of mediation and remediation to what is hidden in plain sight. In doing so, we excavate some of the stories less often told on the contemporary scene or in the retrospective documents that celebrate its past. This involves interrogating, and going beyond, the dominant stories told by academics, by “outsider” documentarians and “insider” historians through books, magazines, films, and YouTube videos. Here we ask what these hidden histories tell us about how northern soul’s—and more generally, pop’s—past is constructed; how we can handle the nuances and multilayered experience of popular music culture; and what these dominant histories do in relation to our claims to belong to a music subculture.

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Beyond the Spectacle: Gender and Generation in the Northern Soul Scene The photographs taken for the Daily Mirror at Wigan Casino in 1975 are clearly posed to place the acrobatic male dancers in the front of the shot, and as a clustered backdrop the onlooking audience all look to the photographer behind the lens. As any attendee at a northern soul event will attest, these photographs do not capture the “allnighter” experience: the press of the people, the heat of the room, the distorted blare of the speakers. More importantly, they relegate the role of women participants in the historic northern soul scene to the edges of the dance floor, clutching their handbags in the shadow of their male counterparts. This positioning of gender in the northern soul scene within the media histories of popular music is a common one. Frequently placed in contrast to the mainstream clubbing experience of the female dancer, the northern soul dance floor has traditionally been represented, and since remembered, as a stage for the performance of competitive masculinity. As we have argued before, by reiterating shared scene stories as accurate testimonies—rather than analyzing personal and shared narratives as processes of claiming to belong—academic studies have further inscribed the pervasive male hero of the historic dance floor (see Raine and Wall 2019; Raine 2020). For instance, Barry Doyle’s (2005) analysis of the 1970s scene completely removes women participants from consideration, and many other academic studies rely upon the same male voices—mostly of well-known DJs—as key interviewees, some even quoting from self-documenting histories as evidence to back up claims (see, for example, Smith 2006: 190). As the photographs published by the Liverpool Echo show, equal numbers of men and women attended Wigan Casino. And yet, in the stories of the Casino’s past, like the subjects of these posed photos, the acrobatic male dancer commands center stage. At best, women are relegated to the edges of the dance floor. The story is repeated for many other personal and shared stories of since-mythologized northern soul allnighters. The contemporaneous and retrospective documents of the historic scene consistently foreground the experiences and activities of men. Images similar to these—of young men springing up into the air or down into backdrops—adorn many northern soul books (see, for example, Cosgrove 2016, and Jones 2016) and the marketing posters for films (for Soul Boy 2010 and Northern Soul 2014), becoming icons of the northern soul scene, past and present. This gendering of the northern soul fan during the 1970s is also clearly set out in the media texts

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that document the scene or use this cultural form as a setting for feature films or fiction (e.g., McDonald 2008 and films cited above). The motif of the acrobatic male dancer is further reiterated by male insider “experts” who set out published histories of the scene, regaling the assumed insider reader with tales of drugs, allnighters, and a passion for the music (e.g., Nowell 1999; Waterhouse 2011; McKenna and Snowball 2013). This claim to authoritatively and authentically speak of, and for, the scene is backed up by the personal experiences, material evidence, and social networks of the author, demonstrated in the firsthand accounts, flyers and photographs, interviews, and forewords of the text. These self-documented histories reiterate a dominant northern soul story, focusing on certain people, venues, records, and periods. Books offering “definitive” or “official” northern soul histories start to appear in the 1990s and have proliferated in recent years, with insider authors recounting personal experiences, carefully weaving these into an authenticating and shared remembering of what northern soul meant “back in the day.” Significantly, these published histories are primarily written by men active on the scene in the 1970s, individuals who quote other men well-known within the scene in the roles of DJ, record collector and dealer, and of specialist journalists (especially Blues & Soul columnist, Dave Godin) as they attempt to construct a linear narrative for their readers. As we have noted in other publications, this pervasive male voice, experience, and reliance upon a network of “experts” in male-dominated scene roles relegates women to the “girlfriend” of key players. This, therefore, is an analysis of an absence rather than an argument for its presence. The “writing back in” of the contributions of women to accounts of popular music culture has been undertaken by scholars across a range of fields, from understanding the dynamics and processes of popular music as gendered (see Cohen 1997; Leonard 2007; Reddington 2012) to identifying and giving voice to “hidden histories” (e.g., McGee 2009; Attrep 2018; Wolfe 2019). Interviews with women who were active on the UK northern soul scene have been included in studies by Milestone (2019) and Catterall and Gildart (2020), finally adding their voices to the oral histories of scene participation, albeit within academic publications rarely accessible to members of the now multigenerational scene. It is also clear that women did hold the influential roles of DJ and record collector in the 1970s, albeit more rarely, and some have gone on to build successful careers in the contemporary scene (see Raine 2020). However, the power of the image of the acrobatic male dancer—and indeed the knowledgeable male record collector and DJ, also depicted in the collection of photographs explored

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within this chapter—continues to permeate the contemporary scene and to push women of all ages to its edges. Raine’s four-year ethnographic study of the current younger generation of “northern soulies” makes clear that the gendered remembering of the historic scene—and the subsequent gendering of insider roles of dancer, DJ, event organizer, and record collector/dealer—has had a significant impact on the experiences of women, irrespective of age. For female members of the original generation, not only are their contributions notably absent from the media texts that attempt to document and remember the historic scene, but their current engagement remains undervalued. Indeed, some of the women event organizers that Raine spoke to even deferred to their male partners as the “brains behind the operation” or the “true fan.” This discomfort about applying a valued role to their own activities is not limited to the northern soul scene but evident in other male-dominated music scenes and industry roles, such as by open mic singer-songwriters (Martin 2019) and studio producers (Reddington 2021). This may be an issue of confidence in claiming expertise within these roles and their associated skills, or reflective of a wider community assumption that men organize events (Raine 2020: 188–9 discusses this further). This reticence to self-identify leads to an increased silencing of the experience of women and a continued spotlighting of men as influential individuals, from those willing to be interviewed by researchers to loud voices within the current scene politics. As we have argued in greater detail (Raine and Wall 2017, 2019), for young newcomers, the role of men within the development and refinement of the scene is unmistakable. They are the central characters of the scene’s shared and mythologized origin stories, from the coining of the term “northern soul” to the discovery of rare vinyl in dusty US record company warehouses. In the contemporary scene, many of the same men continue to organize the largest events in the scene calendar, act as tastemakers and authenticators of “new sounds,” and reiterate the dominant history of northern soul—as emcees behind the decks, and as the official historians of the scene in their own book publications and blogs. Through this activity, the role of men is manifest and available for emulation, from audiotapes of DJs on the mic at Wigan Casino in the 1970s (see Raine 2020: 184) to high-kicks captured in Tony Palmer’s The Wigan Casino (1977), a television documentary for Granada (analyzed in Duffett, Raine and Wall 2019: 287). For incoming women, however, a scene-authenticated role

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is much less visible and uncovering female role models requires significant immersion within the scene. Through common stories told in the queue for the bar, on the edge of the dance floor and online, individuals craft their own journey into and through the scene, aligning their own experience as closely as possible to the dominant northern soul story. These narratives are powerfully used by older northern soulies during everyday encounters with other soul fans, particularly those who cannot claim to have “been there” during the scene’s 1970s “heyday.” By unfavorably comparing the contemporary scene with the historic, discourses of authenticity are reiterated, and a hierarchy of participation is clearly set out. As Raine (2020) details in her ethnography, the lack of an authenticated and valued role for women translates into a reduced claim to space. From being told by an older male dancer that there were “too many women on the dance floor,” to queried ownership of records, young women are disenfranchised in their claim to belong. Furthermore, key opportunities offered to young male newcomers by older male “experts” and gatekeepers—in the role of DJ, record collector, and event organizer—are not equally extended to young women, many of whom struggle to establish themselves without the support of the scene’s informal mentoring system. This absence of the historical role of women is not only felt keenly by newcomers searching for their place but also in the continued silencing of younger participants in the DJ lineups of the scene calendar: the sidelining of their engagement as inauthentic and peripheral by the dominant traditionalist elements of the scene. Although one version of the northern soul history has come to dominate the majority of media texts that celebrate and document the scene, many other versions of this history exist and play an active role in scene practices. These multiple histories, and the dominant discourses that run through them, only become apparent when researchers ask “how do people experience the past?,” “how are these histories created and shared?,” and “what do these histories do for claims to belong, and for whom?” Equally, the seemingly simple messages offered by media texts can be nuanced by considering their usage within current popular music scenes and the ways in which texts may be partially used, reinterpreted or placed within longer narratives in the construction of multiple histories. However, inclusions and absences in media texts do have an impact on the ways that individuals engage within continuing music scenes, and how such claims to belong are evaluated by other members of their musical community.

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The foregrounding of male voice and experience in popular music histories— such as northern soul—has real-life implications for women who attempt to forge a valued place. Faced with external and internal narratives about the past of the scene, a younger generation actively and creatively engages with the past as a living, malleable story. However, younger members do not actively reject this dominant history that attempts to devalue their own experiences, but rather respond in a more creative way that allows for their continued participation within an insider community. Through a transformation of the central historicizing practices of contemporary participants, younger members expand the oft-told 1970s chapter of the scene’s history to include an imagined African American experience of vinyl creation in the 1960s, and a more recent chapter of political disenfranchisement and the rollercoaster experience of youth in the twenty-first century. By expanding this history of authentic engagement to include a chapter of music production and consumption that all British northern soul fans must imagine, younger members of the scene attempt to disrupt the generational power dynamics of the scene. They also tell a different story of northern soul that embraces the “grit and grime” of the 1970s experience, gleaned from conversations with those who “where there,” and from media texts and personal materials posted online by members of the original generation (see Raine 2019, 2020). Among themselves, they too construct, share, and retell northern soul histories that act to authenticate their own experiences as “true” and dedicated soulies. Within this expanded understanding of authentic time, young people on the northern soul scene talk of a “return” to core principles: a focus on the music, the discovery of new records, and valuing collective experience over individual ego. Through the nuanced scene roles of the “cool dancer,” the organizer of the “proper nighter” and the “knowledgeable DJ” (Raine 2020), women and men alike can aspire to make their mark. In this alternative system of valuing, young people not only move away from generational power dynamics but also disrupt the gender politics of the scene. However, while women are now apparent within these roles on the scene today, they continue to be less visible (particularly to outsiders and newcomers), and the value of their engagement is still limited by authenticating discourses. Equally, as the following section demonstrates, these engagements remain tempered by one of the core principles of the scene: a focus on “the music” rather than lucrative entrepreneurial activity or, as it is commonly termed, “selling out.”

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The Political Economy of a DIY Culture While the 1975 Casino photographs were predominantly focused on dancers, one does portray the club’s DJ, Russ Winstanley, behind his mobile disco desks proffering a release on the PYE Disco Demand label. This one image captures the key elements of the do-it-yourself political economy through which the northern soul scene was established and on which it survives today. Winstanley was one of a number of DJ promoters who ran mobile discos, opened up under-used dance floors to promote soul events, sold rare and imported records, and acted as “frontmen” for the emerging scene. Winstanley’s entrepreneurial activities up to the moment this photograph was taken can be traced in the pages of Blues & Soul magazine, and it is to the way that specialist magazines evidence the early 1970s scene that we now turn. In doing so, we show the ways in which the dominant stories of the scene have obscured (for members of the contemporary scene and for popular music academics) what was actually at play. The role of the DJ as tastemaker and “frontman” is, as we have already noted, a prominent trope within the dominant story of northern soul: he is both narrator and (therefore) hero of his-(own)-story. Academic accounts of the scene, at best, index the role of the DJ as promoter and entrepreneur, and self-documenting histories almost always discuss such individuals as exploiting and debasing the scene. However, by moving beyond the “special” nature of specific clubs, we can reveal the importance of DIY enterprises in the networked nature of venues, record shops, and DJs that created the scene, particularly in the contribution of mobile discos and youth clubs. It is in these networks that record companies exploited a new avenue for record promotion and a new market for records, although the vernacular histories almost only addressed this in terms of authenticity and ownership. The term “DIY culture” is seldom used on the northern soul scene, yet its culture and economy are very much under the control of its participants and certainly exhibits the characteristics of music cultures discussed within this term (for examples of this work, see McKay 1998; Triggs 2006; Spencer 2008; Grimes and Wall 2014). And self-documenting histories, as processes of historiography and as products circulated in a fan economy, are as important a part of this culture as the DJs, promoters, and record sellers of the scene’s dancefloors. Participants certainly see themselves as part of an underground scene, and mainstream media coverage like the Daily Mirror photographs (recirculated by The Liverpool Echo)

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were treated with suspicion at best. Even today, its members see the scene as a total culture, where a shared sense of insider identity is pronounced. Blues & Soul has an ambiguous position here: sitting on the border between “insider” house journal and “outsider” chronicler of northern soul. It holds a special place in the scene histories, as it is here in 1970 (it is widely claimed) that journalist Dave Godin used his column in the magazine to coin the phrase “northern soul.” The fact that this is not actually the case has not stopped the story from being given prominence in most published accounts of the scene’s origins. This emphasis on the origins of northern soul has overshadowed what Blues & Soul was actually chronicling and its equivocal place in the scene. Reading northern soul history through the selective accounts of a few Godin columns merely reproduces the dominant history constructed by the “self-documenting” scene historians. Most 1970s issues of Blues & Soul are devoted to reviewing new soul records and interviewing their singers, elements brought together by an editorial line from magazine owner, John E. Abbey, to articulate an inclusive sense of a “British soul fan” who sat outside mainstream music youth culture. Advertising content is dominated by full-page adverts placed by major record companies for new American soul records, alongside smaller adverts for regional clubs and DJs. The letters page hosted debates about competing definitions of soul as a music but a shared indignation about mainstream pop and media. Blues & Soul engaged with the soul scene of the provinces from the perspectives of its London-based journalists, privileging cultural difference over economic empowerment. These discourses of “geographic and temporal exceptionalism” have been readily incorporated into self-documenting histories and then into academic studies of the contemporary scene. This neglects the place of the scene within a longer history of trans-European, record-based, dance-orientated culture rooted in African American music. In addressing this neglect, we reassess the role usually assigned to Blues & Soul in the dominant stories, drawing out, instead, evidence of the entrepreneurial processes and networks on which the political economy of 1970s northern soul was built and continues. Abbey, Godin, and Blues & Soul had (as the title of the magazine suggests) emerged from a London-based group of rhythm and blues aficionados, who championed early 1960s R&B and, later, soul. Rather than coin the term “northern soul,” Dave Godin (then a London-based record shop owner as well as journalist) did something more significant. He used his Blues & Soul columns between 1970 and 1972 to share his discovery of an established music culture

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outside London with a readership of soul fans who were mostly unaware of its existence. The emphasis on a foundational myth in which a London-based, “outsider” journalist names a scene beyond the capital, using his own frames of left-libertarian reference, is an interesting one. Joe Street (2019: 120) argues that “in forging the British soul community and in attempting to define the purpose of this community” Godin was “finely attuned to the political subtext that accompanied soul music and to the political economy in which most soul artists worked.” Godin would return again and again in his columns to condemning the practice of UK repressing of rare American-produced records because it deprived the original artists of any economic return (Croasdell 2019: 85; Street 2019: 130–2). Nevertheless, he does not explore the political economy of the northern soul scene itself, instead focusing on the cultural distinctiveness of the scene, which he locates in its “northern-ness.” Godin’s widely cited, but infrequently re-read, column is important in constructing a set of foundational myths about northern soul well before its name crystallized into the now widely used term (Raine and Wall 2019). While these columns are mostly lists of records interspersed with homilies on the fraternity of soul fans, Godin’s column in issues 36 and 37 (published in 1970) focuses on what he terms “the up-North soul groove,” and in issue 50’s “Land of a Thousand Dances,” Godin provides an ethnographic, but celebratory account of his visit to Manchester’s Twisted Wheel soul club. He champions the scene through a mythologized English northern-ness; a place free of the “social standoffishness” of the south. In spite of his enthusiasm, it is eight months before he returns to the soul dance scene outside the capital, and he reverts to discussions of selected records, none particularly characteristic of the discs played in clubs north of London. He does venture out again for a 1971 column in issue 67, using the term “the northern soul scene” when recounting his visit to the celebrated Blackpool Mecca soul club. Nevertheless, the term (rather than the idea of a scene) is still not consolidated into Godin’s vocabulary in 1972, when he refers in passing to the “Northern circuit” and “Northern Sound” in Blues & Soul issues 89 and 90, respectively. The latter column was also Godin’s last for the magazine, and it contained his announcement that he was “putting away my typewriter and putting on my dancing shoes and getting back to the Soul flow.” For Blues & Soul owner-editor, and record retailer and record companyowner, John Abbey, Godin’s recognition of a provincial soul scene did index the burgeoning new market of soul fans who would buy the magazine if its contents appealed to their specialist interests. The first consistent references

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to northern soul only appear in Blues & Soul in 1973, but there were lots of synonyms. “Northern Disco-Soul” appears in Abbey’s issue 88 editorial (July 1972), and it is no coincidence that in seeking words to describe what was going on, Abbey’s construction combined the music with both the geo-location and the cultural-economic institution of the disco. In doing so, Abbey utilizes the then-established idea that discotheques, as record-based dance venues, were an important new promotion channel for record sales, a notion widely represented by full-page adverts from major record companies in Blues & Soul. To a group of London-based entrepreneurs and record company men (Godin included), the provincial soul scene represented a distinct market for products and services.2 Revealing that the concept of northern soul was clearly in wide circulation by 1972, London-based reader J. Finlay makes a distinction between “Northern Soul” and “Southern Soul” in a letter to Blues & Soul. Finlay contends that the former was “for people who want to release inhibitions in dancing or for those who wish to show to the admiration of others, Olympic qualification standards in dancing, fortified incidentally by the encouragement of synthetics” (issue 88). Through 1972, the pages of Blues & Soul trace a string of venues that have been in the supporting cast to the Wigan Casino in the northern soul story; none include the term “northern soul,” yet the idea of all-night disco culture is consistently used long before the term was applied in the United States to indicate a similar alignment of music types with record-based venues and consumer groups. The Catacombs in Wolverhampton claimed to be the “country’s leading R&B and SOUL Discotheque” and the Torch soul club in Stoke on Trent proclaimed itself “THE COUNTRY’S NO.1 ALL-NIGHTER.” There are similar adverts for events in Whitchurch in Shropshire, Keighley in Yorkshire, and in Manchester, Warwick, Leeds, and Bolton, as well as equivalents in Camberley in Surrey and Guildford in Kent. Only one of the other advertisers from the north and midlands makes mention of northern soul. The Keighley event does declare that they play “all the best Northern Disco Sounds,” but Samantha’s in Camberley (in southern England) advertises that they play “NORTHERN DANCE SOUL” along with “FUNKY SOUL,” “RARE SOUL,” and “SWEET SOUL.” Beyond their hyperbole, each club presents itself to the reader through lists of the records they play and the DJs who play them. These advertised clubs were intimately connected to a

2

It is worth noting that the alternative origin myth for the naming of the scene is that Godin curated a section of records in his London-based Soul City Record shop to meet the tastes of visiting soul fans from the north of England (see, for instance, Rushton 2009: 15).

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whole plethora of suburban dance venues, served by lesser-known DJs who ran mobile discos and modeled their own playlists on the larger, crowd-pulling clubs. Established and promoted by the DJs themselves in the function rooms of pubs and workingmen’s clubs, they, along with the “mobile DJs” they influenced, also plied their wares in youth clubs, church halls, and specialist council facilities. It is this network of soul events that constituted the growing market for “northern soul” records but is neglected in both self-documenting and academic accounts.3 The provincial nature of the northern soul scene was more a product of this venue infrastructure than any particular attempt to create a regional culture opposed to metropolitan London mores. Abbey quickly recognized an opportunity to attract advertising from the new independent mobile discos. As early as July 1972, issue 89 contained adverts for a “mobile disco” for hire, and by issue 102, Blues & Soul was enticing potential advertisers: “FOR ONLY TWO POUNDS THIS SPACE COULD ADVERTISE YOUR DISCO OR DJ SHOW” (page 6). The same page had an advert for “Twin-Deck DISCO UNITS from £49” that DJs purchased to take their music to venues within driving distance. It is possible to trace Casino DJ, Russ Winstanley’s entrepreneurial efforts through these avenues, and to match these against his own later account (Winstanley and Nowell 1996). In April 1973, in Blues & Soul issue 106, a quarterpage advert sells the proposition that “YOUR CLUB NEEDS EVERYSOUND DISCO” and gives details of weekly events at Wigan Rugby League Club and Newtown British Legion. A month later (issue 108), Winstanley’s blossoming self-promotion skills were apparent in his advert for “RUSS’ EVERYSOUND DISCO,” and his claim to play the “TOP NORTHERN SOUNDS IN THE NORTH.” The advert also announces Russ’ import shop (on the same street as the Casino club) and his record stall on Wigan market, where tickets for his events and copies of the featured records could be purchased. Winstanley is in many ways a controversial figure in northern soul histories. Constantine and Sweeney (2013: 110) contend that “the fact that Wigan Casino front man Russ Winstanley seemed to give the novelty records tacit approval as a kind of spokesman for the movement caused widespread disquiet. This was bandwagon-jumping, commercialism of rank amateur quality.” The release of the seven-inch single Winstanley holds in his hand in the 1975 photo represents one of his perceived crimes. The fourteenth release on the Disco Demand series 3

It is worth noting that Elaine Constantine captures these relationships well in her fictional feature film, Northern Soul (2014).

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produced by the small British independent label, Pye Records, the 7-inch vinyl B-Side was fairly typical of the records featured in the club adverts in terms of musical style and origins. “7 Days Too Long” by a little-known soul singer Chuck Wood, was originally released in 1967 on New York label, Roulette, was later an “in-demand” dance record, re-released in the UK in 1971 on the MOJO label, a specialist imprint of UK Polydor, where John Abbey acted as a consultant (Billboard 1971). The A-side—Wigan’s Chosen Few “Footsee”—was an edited version of a bootlegged instrumental B-side by an obscure Canadian pop band promoting a fad toy. The record was transformed into a symbol of the emerging northern soul sound by prefixing the name of Winstanley’s hometown to the group’s name and adding the “Keep The Faith—Casino Club” logo to the paper sleeve. The Disco Demand series was advertised extensively in Blues & Soul from June 1974 issue 137, with full-page adverts taking their place alongside those from major companies and John Abbey’s own Contempo records. By this date, the scene had its own four-page review every issue in the form of Frank Elson’s “Checkin’ It Out” column, and the final two to three pages of each issue became a section for small and full-page adverts for “clubs/discos/events/gear” called “Where It’s At.”4 Pye’s Disco Demand label represented the continuation of a British tradition and an important innovation. Such record labels had a long history of serving specialist music tastes for black American music that signaled their intended market. In the late-1920s and 1930s, British Parlophone established its “RhythmStyle” series and HMV the “Hot Rhythm Series” promoting jazz from black American artists (see Davies 2014), and independent and major companies served specialist audiences for early and modern jazz and later blues through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The relationship between record collectors and specialist journalists, record companies, and record buyers continued across generations and genre. Pye’s Dave McAleer, a dedicated R&B record collector and wordsmith promoter of soul in the UK in the late 1960s, was assisted by Ian Levine—DJ at another big 1970s northern soul venue, Blackpool’s Mecca Highland Room— to identify recordings for which the company owned the distribution rights, and that would play well on northern dancefloors. They established a label that responded to the burgeoning market for up-tempo proto-soul records and used the network of DJs who wanted to play these records for dancing, as a promotion 4

All of this late 1960s mod language probably made more sense to Abbey and Elson than the magazine’s readers, and “gear” seems to refer to clothes rather than drugs.

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tool for sales. Ritson and Russell (1999: 215) denounce the Disco Demand label name as “unimaginatively titled” and are unimpressed by the status of the records. However, the appellation effectively (but somewhat disingenuously) communicated to the growing number of mobile disco DJs who wanted to play rare records but could not afford to buy them, that they provided what they sought at a reasonable price. An endorsement from Winstanley would have been significant for this group of intermediaries. Like all DJ/promoter entrepreneurs on the scene, Winstanley balanced keeping credibility with the subcultural club attendees and record buyers from whom he earnt a living, with the opportunities to exploit the value of his subcultural capital for the mainstream pop culture and music industry of the time.

Conclusion It is commonplace in the histories of northern soul to assume that the nearly fiftyyear-old scene is itself a hidden history. This very commitment to the notion of an underground culture has marginalized aspects of that history that illuminate much of its culture and the way it is mediated by both “outsiders” and “insiders.” These interconnected internal processes of authenticity and marginalization hide the role played by women in the historic scene, a silencing that continues to be keenly felt by female newcomers. Alongside and intertwined with gender, intergenerational experiences are also hidden in the various texts that attempt to document or analyze the contemporary northern soul scene. Equally, essential components of the historic scene’s event circuit, and the activities of now wellknown individuals, have been sidelined (and, indeed, much maligned) in favor of heroic mythologized tales of a pure passion for the music. In discussing these two examples, we have also shown that these hidden histories are as much the product of “insider” self-documenting processes as “outsider” representations. Our approach to examining this suppressed history highlights the far-reaching implications of the absence of the historic role of women for contemporary participant engagement through an immersive ethnography; and shows how the archives of scene-related magazines can lay bare the way British geo-cultural politics has trumped political economy as a way to explain the 1970s scene. This development of a dominant history, and the silencing of certain aspects, is not specific to the northern soul scene, and can be found in many “insider” DIY processes through which the boundaries of music scenes are drawn and redrawn.

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These aspects of the northern soul scene have been relegated to fleeting moments as they contradict and complicate the linear and mythologized narratives of the scene’s “golden era” and, by extension, the authentic “northern soulie.” The dominant history is replicated by outsider mediators as evidence of their knowledge and expertise, and by insiders as a claim to speak authoritatively for the scene itself. As scholars, we are not immune from the temptation to recount an oft-told story as a means to an introductory shortcut: the nuances of messy and contradictory voices helpfully trimmed down through years of being told and retold, a history confirmed by insider experts as “the way it was.” However, as this edited collection demonstrates, the work of academics dealing with the history of popular music lies in analyzing and contextualizing sources, taking into consideration their mediated nature, and asking how these mediations are used by their creators and other members of music scene communities. Furthermore, the silencing of these histories continues to impact powerfully upon contemporary music scene experience, complicating and devaluing the engagements of women, leaving them without a scene-authenticated means of participation.

References Attrep, Kara. 2018. “From Juke Joints to Jazz Jams: The Political Economy of Female Club Owners.” IASPM@ Journal 8 (1): 9–23. Billboard. 1971. “Roker Rec, Polydor Tie.” Billboard, no. 83 (March 1971): 56. Catterall, Stephen and Keith Gildart. 2020. Keeping the Faith: A History of Northern Soul. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cohen, Sara. 1997. “Men Making a Scene: Rock Music and the Production of Gender.” In Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, edited by Sheila Whiteley, 17–36. London: Routledge. Constantine, Elaine and Gareth Sweeney. 2013. Northern Soul: An Illustrated History. New York: Random House. Cosgrove, Stuart. 2016. Young Soul Rebels: A Personal History of Northern Soul. Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd. Croasdell, Ady. 2019. “Acquiring Rights and Righting Wrongs?” In The Northern Soul Scene, edited by Sarah Raine, Tim Wall and Nicola Watchman-Smith, 82–98. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing. Davies, Lawrence. 2014. “1930s ‘Hot Rhythm’ Series and the Birth of ‘Traditional’ Jazz in Britain.” The Discographer Magazine 1 (6): 11–18. Doyle, Barry M. 2005. “More Than a Dance Hall, More a Way of Life: Northern Soul, Masculinity and Working Class Culture in 1970s Britain.” In Between Marx and

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Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies 1960–1980, edited by Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried, 313–28. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Duffett, Mark, Sarah Raine and Tim Wall. 2019. “The Voice of Participants on the Scene.” In The Northern Soul Scene, edited by Sarah Raine, Tim Wall and Nicola Watchman-Smith, 268–87. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing. Grimes, Matt and Tim Wall. 2014. “Anarcho-Punk Webzines: Transferring Symbols of Defiance from the Print to the Digital Age?” In Fight Back: Punk, Politics and Resistance, edited by The Subcultures Network, 287–303. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jones, Gethro. 2016. They Danced All Night. Scotts Valley, SC: CreateSpace. Leonard, Marion. 2007. Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse, and Girl Power. Aldershot: Ashgate. Martin, Sharon. 2019. “South West England Open Mics: Gender Politics and Pints?” In Towards Gender Equality in the Music Industry: Education, Practice and Strategies for Change, edited by Catherine Strong and Sarah Raine, 103–16. London: Bloomsbury Academic. McDonald, Paul. 2008. Do I Love You? Birmingham: Tindal Street. McGee, Kristin A. 2009. Some Liked It Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television, 1928–1959. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. McKay, George. 1998. DIY Culture: Party & Protest in Nineties Britain. London and New York: Verso. McKenna, Pete and Ian Snowball. 2013. Night Shift. All Souled Out. Surrey: Countdown. Milestone, Katie. 2019. “Soul Boy, Soul Girl: Reflections on Gender and Northern Soul.” In The Northern Soul Scene, edited by Sarah Raine, Tim Wall and Nicola WatchmanSmith, 197–214. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing. Northern Soul. 2014. [Film] Dir. Elaine Constantine, UK: Stubborn Heart Films, Baby Cow Productions, Universal Pictures UK. Nowell, David. 1999. Too Darn Soulful: The Story of Northern Soul. London: Robson. Raine, Sarah. 2019. “‘In the Pitch Black Dark’: Searching for a ‘Proper All-nighter’ in the Current Northern Soul Scene.” In Nocturnes: Popular Music and the Night, edited by Geoff Stahl and Giacomo Bottà, 21–34. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Raine, Sarah. 2020. Authenticity and Belonging in the Northern Soul Scene: The Role of History and Identity in a Multigenerational Music Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Raine, Sarah and Tim Wall. 2017. “Participation and Role in the Northern Soul Scene.” In Keep It Simple, Make It Fast!: An Approach to Underground Music Scenes (Vol. 3), edited by Paula Guerra and Tânia N. Moreira, 75–86. Porto: Faculdade de Letras Universidade do Porto. Raine, Sarah and Tim Wall. 2019. “Myths on/of the Northern Soul Scene.” In The Northern Soul Scene, edited by Sarah Raine, Tim Wall and Nicola Watchman-Smith, 142–63. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing.

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Reddington, Helen. 2012. The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing. Reddington, Helen. 2021. She’s at the Controls: Sound Engineering, Production and Gender Ventriloquism in the 21st Century. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing. Ritson, Mike and Stuart Russell. 1999. The In Crowd: The Story of the Northern & Rare Soul Scene. London: Bee Cool. Rushton, Neil Charles. 2009. Northern Soul Stories: Angst and Acetates. UK: Soulvation. Shennan, Paddy. “Stunning Pictures Show Clubbers and Dance Offs at a Wigan Casino All Nighter.” Liverpool Echo, November 1, 2019. https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/ news/liverpool-news/gallery/stunning-pictures-show-clubbers-dance-17185284. Smith, Nicola. 2006. “‘Time Will Pass You By’: A Conflict of Age: Identity within the Northern Soul Scene.” In Perspectives on Conflict, edited by Caroline Baker, Edward Granter, Rebecca Guy, Katherine Harrison, Armin Krishnan and Joseph Maslen, 176–95. Manchester: University of Salford. Soul Boy. 2010. [Film] Dir. Shimmy Marcus, UK: Soda Pictures, Moviehouse Entertainment. Soul Boy. 2020. [TV program] Our Lives series. BBC, May 27. Spencer, Amy. 2008. DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture. London: Marion Boyars Publishers. Street, Joe. 2019. “Dave Godin and the Politics of the British Soul Community.” In The Northern Soul Scene, edited by Sarah Raine, Tim Wall and Nicola Watchman-Smith, 120–41. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing. The Wigan Casino. 1977. [TV program] Dir. Tony Palmer. This England series, Granada. Triggs, Teal. 2006. “Scissors and Glue: Punk Fanzines and the Creation of a DIY Aesthetic.” Journal of Design History 19 (1): 69–83. Waterhouse, Brian. 2011. Going Back—Memories of a Soul Boy. UK: self-published. Winstanley, Russ and David Nowell. 1996. Soul Survivors: The Wigan Casino Story. London: Robson. Wolfe, Paula. 2019. Women in the Studio: Creativity, Control and Gender in Popular Music Sound Production. London: Routledge.

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Paid My Dues: Key Debates in the 1970s Feminist Music Press Ann-Marie Hanlon

There is now, in the women’s movement, a growing awareness of women’s culture. Women are beginning to realize how important our music is to our culture. […] Now is the time to redefine ourselves, establish new identities, realize our potentials, and choose our own values. Our music will reflect the changes we are making in other areas of our lives, as well as expressing what we want. (St. Charles 1974: 10) In 1968, radical feminism emerged as an offshoot of the women’s liberation movement in the United States (Crow 2000: 2). In contrast with mainstream feminism that sought equality for women within existing social and institutional structures, radical feminists felt that the only way to liberate women was to withdraw from the patriarchal systems that sustained male privilege and to create a female counterculture. These women viewed themselves as revolutionaries, and they wanted to “reconceive public life and private life entirely” (Finlayson 2016: 90). This branch of feminism is associated with “woman-identified” or lesbian women, and it is often understood in terms of Ti-Grace Atkinson’s dictum “feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice” (cited in Crow 2000: 5).1 Separatism emerged as a political action and radical feminists began to consciously forge their own women’s culture, a lesbian nation, “uncontaminated by the patriarchy” (Echols 1989: 245).2 For a number of lesbian feminists, this political and cultural revolution was interpreted as a call to create an alternative 1

2

Hence, the terms “lesbian feminism” and “radical feminism” became interchangeable. Echols (1989: 217) relates that the term “woman-identified” “redefined lesbian as the quintessential act of political solidarity with other women.” The concept and call for the formation of a Lesbian or Amazon Nation appears in a number of lesbian feminist texts from the time including Johnston (1973) and in the pages of the journal Lavender Woman, run by the Amazon National Collective in Chicago.

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music industry run by women, one that espoused lesbian feminist values, promoted women’s creativity, and countered the sexism that many feminists felt was intrinsic to popular music. The women’s music movement emerged in 1973 with the establishment of the first lesbian-feminist record labels: Wax Works Records in New York, and Lima Bean Records and Olivia Records in Washington, DC.3 These labels, and many others that would soon follow, were dedicated to the production of a distinct new category of feminist popular music simply labeled “women’s music.” Women in this movement applied radical feminist philosophy to the business of music and called for a reassessment of the values propagated by the mainstream music industry. Furthermore, they began to actively contemplate and debate the political importance of music in everyday life and to question assumptions inherent in value judgments about music at that time. Importantly, the genre created opportunities for the expression of lesbian-feminist subjectivity within popular music and acted as a fulcrum around which lesbians could gather and find their tribe. Lesbian identity up to that point was mostly invisible in popular songs and the discourses that accompanied them, as it was in wider society also. In many ways the women’s music movement supported women who identified as lesbians in a period of legal, political, and social exclusion and persecution. In the movement’s early years, a dedicated radical feminist press emerged to support and promote the development of women’s culture. Throughout the 1970s, Paid My Dues: A Journal of Women and Music (1974–80) was the solitary dedicated feminist music magazine in the United States, and consequently, it is largely responsible for writing women’s music into history in this period.4 Its title implied that it was time women were afforded equal consideration as musicians and songwriters. Paid My Dues (PMD) is a rich source of information about the women’s music movement, as it documents many of its key figures, events, enterprises, sites of performance, audiences, and repertoire, in addition to highlighting the core debates that concerned the movement in its nascent years.5 3

4

5

Olivia’s co-founder Judy Dlugacz revealed in a speech to the American Music Association in 2018 that Olivia Records was responsible for the sale of “several million records” of women’s music (Dlugacz 2018). Fifteen issues of the magazine were published in total over four volumes. Initially a production of Women’s Soul Publications in Milwaukee, it was revived by Calliope Publishing in Chicago in the fall of 1977. The final edition appeared in spring of 1980. The newsletter Musica (1974–77) also played a role in documenting the early days of the movement and in promoting its expansion. Throughout the 1970s, several regional women’s music newsletters sprung up, in addition to newsletters dedicated to activities such as music distribution and research on women in music.

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PMD also functioned as a form of music community noticeboard that women involved in professional or amateur music making could utilize free of charge. It facilitated communication and networking between community members that were dispersed across the United States and further afield. Importantly, it also informed women about which artists belonged to “our” culture and when they would be playing in their locality. Like many feminist-run enterprises at this time, PMD was run as a nonprofit, nonhierarchical collective, without the traditional emphasis on the importance of an editor-in-chief. Its primary founder, Dorothy Dean, is only explicitly introduced to readers upon her departure from the magazine, when tribute is paid by the new editors in fall of 1977. In the 1970s, feminist music journalism was not initially regarded as a profession; it was unpaid volunteer work or was rewarded with a token minimal sum. The adherence to a nonprofit model meant that money was often in short supply, and the sustainability of the press was a persistent issue and source of frustration for those involved. However, money did not appear to be a primary motivator, with those involved driven instead by a fundamental need to participate in the contemporary feminist revolution represented by women’s culture. In the introduction to its first edition in spring of 1974 readers are informed of the rationale behind this publication: “We need to share our music and our perceptions as we re-discover and build our culture” (Dean 1974a: 1). Lesbian feminist cultural work was often constrained by the inflexible dogma that accompanied the practice of this philosophy. For many lesbian feminists, “the desire for a Lesbian Nation was founded on so intense an idealism and required such heroic measures that fanaticism became all but inevitable,” as many women “believed they had discovered not just a path but the only path” (Faderman 1992: 230). There were expectations for women to resist patriarchal influence in all aspects of their lives including diet, dress, sexual behavior, and in how they organized politically, practiced religion, and conducted business. Lesbian feminist culture was woman oriented, nonhierarchical, nonexploitative economically or socially, and stood against racism, ageism, and classism (Faderman 1992: 216). The language used by women within the movement is often characterized by its incendiary or polemical nature: it was the language of revolutionaries, unafraid to be confrontational, especially in discussions concerning political correctness (Finlayson 2016: 88). In theory, participants in building women’s culture wished to correct the wrongs they perceived in the world that man had created.

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The content of PMD reflects the language and values of its community, and concerns of political correctness pervade every aspect of its operations. Its remit diverges significantly from that of conventional music magazines, which focus primarily on commercial music and on the work of professional musicians. PMD was first and foremost a community magazine, a vehicle for the promotion and policing of lesbian feminist ideology. The needs of its community were key, and feedback was consistently sought and welcomed from women. Cheryl Helm (1974: 15, emphasis in original) relays the idealism that underpinned this cultural work and the desire for it to be an inclusive movement: “To build a women’s culture which is truly supportive of all women, it takes all of us, encouraging and supporting every woman artist. For every artist who loses, by surrendering to terms that degrade her humanity and her art, our culture and our movement also lose.” Despite lofty aims and ideals of inclusion, many artists expressed in interviews that they felt a great deal of pressure to meet their audience’s political expectations. The duo Betsy Rose and Cathy Winters explain in the Fall 1978 issue that they “had some hard experiences with all-women audiences where we felt a lot of heavy judgments going on” (quoted by Corti 1978a: 16). The weight of expectation placed upon musical artists in the women’s movement was considerable. Holly Near attempts to explain perhaps why this is the case in women’s music: People who are straight … don’t understand the paranoia, the fear, the protectiveness we feel about that which is our oppression. It’s not light-weight. And that’s hard. The other time that it’s hard … is in an all-women concert, and that’s because there is something so intimate between women that happens at women’s concerts in the lesbian community. Maybe because of the nature of our dependency upon each other’s support, maybe because of the kind of powerful love that can happen between women, whether they’re lovers or just love each other in sisterhood, or whatever, the singing of a lesbian love song in front of a thousand women—maybe just in one moment, maybe just in that song, maybe just in that concert, permission is given for us to be very close. (Quoted by Corti 1979: 42)

Debates concerning the politically correct performance of lesbian feminist values in a musical context are prominent in each issue of PMD, especially in discussions on the topics of political consciousness, professionalism, and separatism. The language used in these debates is that of political idealists and

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is divorced from the quotidian practices and beliefs about music. In discourses surrounding these four issues, the striking differences between women’s music and mainstream popular music are revealed. Furthermore, these debates convey the centrality of ideology and identity politics within women’s musical culture. Through an exploration of these topics, we can gain an insight into some of the most prominent sociocultural concerns of lesbian feminists in the 1970s and importantly, an understanding of the profound role music played for them in culture and community building. Furthermore, it reveals a largely hidden narrative within popular music history.

Political Consciousness and Effect [Cris Williamson] changed the lives of so many, which is the gift most artists yearn to attain. Her music has been both spirit healing and revolutionary, and simply the anodyne hundreds and hundreds of thousands needed to survive during a time when being out meant you might lose your children, your family and your job. (Dlugacz 2018)6

The radical feminist politics that underpin women’s music made it resistant to crossover to the mainstream in the 1970s. In fact, it was promoted as an antidote to the music of the “sick” and “oppressive” music industry. An umbrella term for musical works composed in a range of diverse genres and styles, women’s music is women-oriented in nature and promotes lesbian feminist values. It is not music for casual listening; its value is appraised according to its political and emotional effect. It is a form of cultural expression that raises feminist consciousness and can be nurturing, healing, transformative, and self-affirming for women. The value of women’s music is intrinsically linked to its political potency. Highly valued women’s music is politically potent in nature. Tucker (1975: 34) describes a discussion that took place at the first National Women’s Music Festival (NWMF) in 1974 between Cris Williamson and Meg Christian about music’s potential “to awaken the political awareness of women.” The writer draws a parallel between the importance of women’s music for feminism and

6

In the same speech Dlugacz explains that Williamson’s 1975 album The Changer and the Changed sold over half a million copies and “if we had any idea how you would get a gold record in those days, she would have one right now, but we didn’t.”

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soul music for the black civil rights movement, as “it emphasizes the need for cultural action through positive self-definition. Women, on hearing this music, are experiencing more pride and greater consciousness” (Tucker 1975: 35). The potential of music for use as a political tool for protest and feminist consciousness raising is frequently reiterated in the pages of PMD. In a piece about the recently deceased Malvina Reynolds, Adam (1978: 2) describes her friend as “a conscious woman artist.” She lauds Reynolds’ artistic output as cultural work, which possesses the “power to move people to listen to confrontive [sic] and controversial ideas which they might not otherwise allow in.” Similarly, the artist Holly Near is promoted as an artist with a strong political consciousness. In a review of her album Hang in There in May 1974 Near’s authenticity or “realness” as a women’s music artist is commended, as she prioritizes the political message of her music above concerns of entertainment: With her voice, she could have produced a nice album of popular songs, maybe ballads. Instead she has chosen songs that are not nice or pretty, but real. It’s an exciting album and an equally exciting beginning for a woman whose talent and consciousness is bound to lead her on to better and better work. (Dean and Kanter 1974: 33)

The politics of the work are the primary concern of music reviewers, who typically concentrate on the quality of the message, rather than on the medium through which it is communicated. Consequently, flaws in recordings and live performances, especially in the early years of the women’s music movement, were often overlooked or excused. In its first issue, the reviewer of the record The Working Girl is nonplussed by the quality of the sound and the record’s basic production values: “It is the words that are important. There is no phony, sophisticated gloss” (Dean 1974b: 34). The review elaborates that “these songs weren’t written for entertainment. They are a commentary, a living herstory […]” (Dean 1974b: 34). Two years later Dean (1976: 55) writes about Mountain Moving Day, a record co-created four years previously by the Chicago and New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Bands, and how it attracted her to the women’s music movement. She explains: “Neither band was really ready to cut an album, but the exuberance, the politics, the ‘message’ were—are important enough to mitigate the technical flaws.” Women’s artists and their reviewers frequently reiterate that political effects could only be achieved through music that was considered woman-identified, life-affirming, and confidencebuilding.

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In the Winter 1977 issue Alix Dobkin reveals that she was motivated to make the record Lavender Jane Loves Women to create “something for lesbians, support for lesbians” (quoted by Corti and Schroder 1977: 23).7 In the same interview Dobkin talks about the social, political, and emotional nourishment women’s music provides its audiences: Another thing I want to say about politics and music is that when women put out money and go to a concert, they go to be nourished, and I feel that it is as important for lesbians to be nourished in their minds, as well as in their hearts, and I try to do both. I think it’s important for women to have to think about things and not just be blissed-out passive consumers of women’s culture. (Quoted by Corti and Schroder 1977: 38)

The nourishing effect of women’s music concerts and festivals is often highlighted in PMD. A review of the fifth NWMF in winter of 1977 describes the effect of the event on the women who attend: “Each year we leave with our energy high and our commitment to building a women’s culture renewed” (Judd 1977: 6). These musical gatherings were also the catalyst for further political activity. In an interview in March 1976, Adam explains that she understands women’s music concerts as political events, where there is an energy stimulated which then goes someplace, whether it’s raising money for Inez, educating people around rape, putting people in touch with their feelings, their sense of being with other people in an audience, mixed or closed, whether it’s communicating a concrete piece of information or an intellectual idea, teaching them about music. (Quoted by Glickman 1976: 32)

The primacy of the political message had a direct impact upon what women’s music was considered “good.” However, not all artists agreed with the emphasis on conferring value in this manner. The duo Barbie Hartsman and Joanie Sloane expressed their annoyance in the first issue of PMD that their music was not considered political enough for the movement: “I thought, well, maybe, somehow in the women’s movement they would recognize music as some sort of talent. But no, that wasn’t a talent. What was considered a talent was something like a doctorate in political science” (Hartsman, quoted by Dean, Valenti and Becker 1974: 21). In reality, those artists that managed to strike a balance between good

7

Recorded and released in 1973, Lavender Jane Loves Women (Women’s Wax Works) was the first long-playing album of women’s music that was produced, engineered, and performed entirely by women.

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songwriting, adept performance, and political practice became the figureheads of the movement.

Professionalism We need to re-examine the criteria for “good” music and probably write new definitions. We also need to re-define “musician” to include people who perform privately, who sing for themselves, who play wooden blocks, who are not “professional.” It’s not the money you make but the spirit you have. (Dean 1974a: 1)

In many respects it is somewhat misleading to label the women’s music movement as a music industry as its political goals were more central to its organization and operations than any commercial concerns. The concept of professionalism proved a contentious issue in the movement’s early years and further distanced women’s music from the mainstream music industry. Liz Dannenbaum (1978: 43) questions if there is perhaps “too much emphasis on ‘professionalism,’” particularly in relation to how music is valued in society. She highlights that the values inherent within the concept of professionalism often present significant obstacles to women achieving their creative potential, finding the confidence to perform in public and overcoming the “imposter syndrome” so commonly felt by women musicians. Furthermore, she challenges the notion that a person’s value should be “measured by her earning power” (1978: 43). The values of virtuosity and artistic accomplishment were subject to scrutiny, and the concept of stardom, upon which the commercial industry heavily relied, was also challenged. In keeping with the dogma of there being no hierarchy in women’s culture, the traditional star/fan structure was deemed to be anti-feminist: in theory there would be no stars and no groupies. Artists who were thought to engage in “star-tripping” or women who placed artists on a pedestal would be admonished by their peers within the community. There are no rock gods or pop queens in this musical world and the language in reviews reflects this. In the March 1975 issue, Janet Ruth relates that the artists that she saw perform that year at Womansphere festival in Washington, DC, were not “immortal goddesses,” but “very mortal and wonderful women” (1975: 30). There was a clear anxiety within the movement that virtuosity or being “too good” could be construed as anti-feminist, creating the possibility that the medium would supersede the work’s political message and effect.

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Consequently, hearing the lyrics was considered more fundamental than hearing the accompaniment, and poor sound could be forgiven provided the message was successfully related. Furthermore, virtuosity was considered to have the power to alienate the audience and demoralize struggling artists. In relaying a discussion between the artists Margie Adam and Cris Williamson at Womansphere festival, Tucker (1975: 35) notes that “as women, they very much recognize the resentment the audience can sometimes feel when the performer is ‘too good.’ The members of the audience are threatened rather than seeing it as a validation for their own creativity, whatever their medium.” She praises Williamson and Adam for “constantly supporting their listening sisters (and fellow performers) to start from where you are, not reflect on where you haven’t been yet” (1975: 35). This form of praise indicates the desire to be politically correct and inclusive onstage, yet, it also sends out a contradictory message that women need to self-censor their art if they are inclined toward virtuosity or they may not be welcome within the movement. Not surprisingly some artists rallied against this position and complained about the acceptance of low standards of musicianship and sound quality at live events and in recordings. In December 1979, the reviewers complain that this year’s selection of performers at the NWMF was hit and miss: “sometimes they were terrific and sometimes they were inappropriate to a national stage. We think that at a national festival the performers must be of national caliber” (Boykin and Edell 1979: 20). The same year Holly Near explains that eschewing the values of professionalism does not mean that she is willing to “accept mediocrity” out of a desire to be “sisterly”: I feel like sometimes in the women’s community that out of a desire to be supportive, out of a desire for sisterhood, feminism, non-competitiveness, all that sort of thing, that we tend to give each other a lot of support and haven’t learned to hear or give really good criticism. Consequently, the incentive of survival, the incentive of fame and fortune, all those kinds of things aren’t there and so we don’t push ourselves and we’re not reaching our most brilliant potential selves. (Quoted by Corti 1979: 42–3)

Despite the anti-professionalism rhetoric in its initial years, as the movement matures, this position relaxes significantly, especially in respect to musicianship and recording standards. Ronni L. Scheier (1977: 14) observes that “women’s music is maturing, becoming increasingly professional as it becomes a more organized genre on a national level, and that standards of musicianship are improving significantly.” In the following edition, a reviewer of Linda Tillery's eponymous debut claims that it represents

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Media Narratives in Popular Music a realization of Olivia’s commitment to make “high-quality women’s music available to the public.” Not only is it excellently written and performed, but the recording, mixing, and graphics are up to an equally high standard. Being nonsexist, high-quality commercial music, Linda Tillery is the perfect alternative to the sexist elements of commercial music, an answer to the charge the feminists are lousy musicians. (Bottum 1977: 41)

This review is followed by an assessment of Meg Christian’s album Face the Music, also released by Olivia Records, which is described as “a blend of highenergy womanpower and exceptional musicianship” (Walowitz 1977: 41). The avoidance of mainstream professional practices also had consequences for the ways in which artists made their living. Few in the movement could survive from their music-related income, and career sustainability was a real problem. Women who had self-financed albums relate repeatedly that doing so has placed them under significant financial pressure and prevents them from recording further albums. Therese Edell explains in an interview that “making a record is a very serious undertaking; I’m in debt up to my ass for the next I don’t know how many years—that’s real serious” (quoted by Corti 1978b: 20). Most women’s music bands and artists in this era did not proceed to making a second album. In May 1974, a letter from the musician Casse Culver requests assistance for artists who consider themselves music professionals: “As a service to those of us who are trying to earn a living with our art, I would like to see Paid My Dues devote a section to ‘professionals’ for the purpose of trading information about gigs; i.e. what clubs welcome feminists performers; decent paying clubs, etc.” (1974: 41). Even those musicians working full time within the movement struggled with maintaining a balance between being a good sister who often did cultural work for free and making a living. While the women’s music movement disavowed stardom, a select number of figures emerge as being very popular with women’s music audiences throughout the United States in the 1970s. These included Meg Christian, Cris Williamson, Margie Adam, Kay Gardner, and Holly Near. Readers of the Fall 1978 issue are informed that “a major difference between women’s music and commercial music is the accessibility of the musicians; sincere attempts are made at eliminating ‘star tripping’” (Armstrong and Newbury 1978: 34). The traditional barriers between performers and their audience were consciously removed by women’s artists. In the words of Margie Adam in the March 1976 issue, there was an expectation that the concert experience should be “an accessible exchange rather than an alienated artist on stage, audience down there, passive kind of thing” (quoted by

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Glickman 1976: 32). In September 1979, Holly Near explains the importance of being accessible to her audiences: I feel like in a lot of events that are presented by “the industry” you walk out feeling smaller than the performer, and I would like people to walk out feeling bigger than me, or as big as—that we all walk out very big together. And at the end of the concert usually, […] we come down off the front of the stage and talk with people out front, so that we demystify ourselves—we become life-size. (Quoted by Corti 1979: 14)

Several artists admit in PMD how they briefly succumbed to the allure of fan worship and relate their regret and self-disgust for allowing themselves to engage in such indulgent anti-feminist behavior. Susan Abod, bassist with the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band, recalls in May 1979 that when she first experienced fan worship, she “really got off on it” and “let it happen, and then the band got down on me” (quoted by Corti and Gohl 1979: 37). In the same issue, Kay Gardner reveals that following the release of Lavender Jane Loves Women she accepted the worship because she was in an “arrogant and superior” place at that time and had lost perspective. She advocates the rejection of fandom as it divides the community: The division among performers is reflected in a division among the audience members who favor specific performers. It’s not a good situation and will have to change if our women’s culture is to be strong. Our diversity is our strength. Mutual support and respect, resulting in unity, is necessary. (Gardner 1979: 42)

Festivals could be criticized for promoting only famous names on their programs and applauded for promoting lesser known or amateur artists. In the early days of the movement, music festivals were frequently reprimanded for not being inclusive enough of amateur musicians. A review of the first NWMF describes a protest that took place at that event when a group of festival attendees decided to stage a “takeover” of the main stage in order to air their grievances about how the festival was organized. In addition to their concern at the lack of “feminist consciousness expressed in the songs being performed,” the protestors were perturbed that amateurs were not being given enough space at the festival: “Up till then, the stage had been used only by professionals and now everyone was sharing it, and for a while everyone sang” (Marigold 1974: 16). On account of the community’s demand for inclusivity, amateurs were given opportunities to perform at festivals in settings such as round robins, open mic sessions and workshops, and these gatherings were also documented by music critics.

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Carol Damkoehler’s (1976: 28) review of the first Boston Women’s Music Festival complements the festival’s organization: “The music collective planned well in not placing ‘star’ emphasis on any single aspect of the weekend. We were all there to learn, to share, to listen, to sing, to make contacts, to enjoy ourselves.” Another account of the festival in the same issue describes how there was also a conscious effort by the performers to “cut that ‘untouchable star’ myth” by going into the audience after their sets (PMD 1976: 26). However, this review expresses concern that “there is still some visible swooning in the audience” and then proceeds to detail how fan behavior could be detrimental to a woman. The reviewer’s fanaticism becomes apparent in her scathing and somewhat over the top account of a woman taking the artist Margie Adam’s hand to guide her to a less busy bathroom line: I see the woman’s eyes shining, holding her hand like some trophy, saying she’ll never wash it. It disturbs me. I think of her in six months with a grimy hand beginning to atrophy from lack of use. She no longer plays her guitar because who can play a guitar one-handed? … she has one decaying hand and the certainty that successful women, expressive and creative women are a breed apart from her. And she remains dependent on her “stars” to be creative for her while her hand withers and falls from her body, unnoticed and unmourned. (PMD 1976: 26–7)

At the first NWMF, amateur performers are listed alongside professional performers in the advertised line up, eschewing normative mainstream practices of promoting stars as headline acts. Despite these intentions to avoid the star system, a review in the October 1974 issue relates significant issues with the perceived literal and figurative distance between the performers and the audience: As time passed, it became clear that an artificial division between performers and non-performers created by the stage, equipment and lighting was keeping us apart and causing bad feelings. Also, some women felt that highly-trained and star-groomed performers dominated a scene where other musicians wanted representation. (Marigold 1974: 14–15)

The fact that the organizers had failed to deliver some promised “big names” in the festival line-up, including Roberta Flack and Yoko Ono, did not seem to bother reviewers who were more concerned by the presence of men in attendance at the festival. Later in the same issue, Dorothy Dean (1974c: 19) relates that “several women here have said that they’re glad that the big names aren’t here.” These kinds of opinions run contrary to traditional discourses

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concerning musical stars, and their importance in attracting crowds to festivals. Clearly, more is at stake here than musical gratification; and it centers primarily around the importance of being with your community.

Separatism The issue of separatism consistently divided the movement. While some highprofile performers such as Alix Dobkin and Linda Shear chose to perform for women-only audiences, many artists felt that music’s potential as a political tool for raising feminist consciousness should be used to reach nonfeminist and nonfemale audiences too. Some of the most high-profile festivals, such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, were for women only, but many women’s music concerts were open to more diverse audiences. However, the sense of ownership expressed by concert and festival reviewers of “our” music often resulted in comments that betrayed a desire that this music should be kept exclusively for the consumption of the women’s community rather than shared with the wider world. Reviewers frequently comment upon the presence of men at various musical events. While some wished men were not present in any capacity, others simply note their disappointment that the bands could not always be composed solely of women. In the Spring 1978 issue, the reviewer complains that in a concert of Toshiko Akiyoshi at the Kansas City Jazzwomen Festival “it was a drag to see her big band composed entirely of men, but once I persuaded myself to get over that, I began to listen carefully to her fine compositions and talented arranging style” (Abod 1978: 23). In the following issue the festival organizers assert that this was never intended to be a separatist event: This particular women’s festival was unique in that it welcomed all women, even those who find men’s presence either unthreatening or desirable, instead of being limited to separatists. In my opinion, this shows a greater, rather than a lacking “pro-woman consciousness,” because separatists are (and by their very nature will remain) a small fraction of all women. (Lee 1978: 2)

In the March 1976 issue, the artist Vera Johnson complains about the exclusivity and female chauvinism inherent in separatism: “some of them talk as if women are a separate race and should be superior to men and have all the superior positions and power and everything, and I don’t feel like that at all” (quoted by Scheel 1976: 11). For many, separatism was not about feeling superior, but rather it was about being liberated from the control of the patriarchy, which had historically

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hindered the artistic development of women, particularly in the public domain. Moreover, women-only concerts were less risky for lesbian-identified artists, spaces where they could come out of the closet and onto the stage without fear of physical, verbal, or sexual abuse. Contributors who had suffered personal attacks during or following performances shared their experiences on occasion in the pages of PMD. Helm’s (1974: 14) article describes her experience of a constant threat of violence while on the road with her band Pride of Women: “Verbal and physical harassment became commonplace and it was unusual if, during an evening’s performance, the women weren’t propositioned.” An article on the artist Bev Grant recalls a gig at a small coffeehouse in New York City where Grant sung a song about the objectification of women and “a man in the room ran up and knocked her over” during her set (Brady 1975: 38). The artists who chose to perform for women only were unapologetic in their stance. Perhaps the most famous separatist artist of the movement, Alix Dobkin, explains in an interview with PMD that her primary focus was to create a women-only space in which women are “able to be together to figure out what (and) who we are, what our culture is” (quoted by Corti and Schroeder 1977: 23). She explains that separatism is “as much an essential ingredient of my music as chords A, D, and E” (38). Separatism for Dobkin meant prioritizing women and making a “commitment” to them in terms of where “our money” and “our energy” was going (38). In an interview in the Fall 1977 issue, women’s music pioneer Maxine Feldman explains how her music speaks to diverse audiences, but she adapts her set list according to who will be in the audience. She will only sing certain works, such as her “separatist song,” for women: “I think that would be disrespectful to my sisters who are separatist” (quoted by Corti and Armstrong 1977: 39). Feldman fearlessly proposes that women’s music should be utilized as a political tool in breaking down sexist and homophobic barriers in society, even if there is a personal risk involved for the artist: We may be out of the closet, but if we’re not out there, where are we? I don’t know. I’ve never copped out. I’ve never been booked anywhere without being booked as a lesbian-feminist. So, I certainly have not tried to hide who I am at any time on any stage. If I get trashed for playing someplace—well that’s the way it goes. (Quoted by Corti and Armstrong 1977: 39)

Many artists agree that playing to nonfeminist audiences is part of their feminist cultural work. Betsy Rose relates in an interview in the fall of 1978:

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There’s a kind of ‘satisfaction’ in ‘facing an audience that is not yet the initiated ones, and seeing twenty percent of the faces light up, and you know that they wouldn’t light up any other way. That they’re not going to come to a women’s concert yet, but maybe because you’ve come to them, they’re gonna go to a women’s concert next time. It’s that twenty percent that is so thrilling because you’ve brought something to them that might not have come any other way. (Quoted by Corti 1978b: 15)

Similarly, Margie Adam feels that engaging with mainstream audiences through feminist music is a form of “psychic guerrilla warfare” that will advance the cause of feminism. In an interview in the March 1976 issue, she advocates for a future with “women-controlled audiences,” rather than “women-only audiences” (quoted by Glickmann 1976: 33). Despite the desire of some artists for crossover to more mainstream performing contexts, music that was heavily focused on promoting lesbian feminist content was not commercially appealing to mainstream labels or publishers. Furthermore, the label “women’s music” could act as a deterrent to potential audiences. Rose explains that one of the cons of being labeled a feminist artist or women’s music artist is that “our audience sometimes narrows,” as many assume that this music is exclusively for women or for feminists (quoted by Corti 1978b: 15).

Conclusion The pages of PMD reveal that the lesbian-feminist work of building women’s culture was politically charged at its core. The dictum that “the personal is political” was held dear by these women, and lesbian-feminist ideology permeated the activities and debates of their culture. However, this cultural work entailed struggle: judgments could be harsh, and disappointments and disagreements were common. In her 2017 work Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed’s characterization of the feminist activist figure as a “killjoy” can be used to understand the activities of those engaged in the women’s music press in the 1970s. A killjoy must call out political incorrectness, no matter what the social context or the personal consequences for doing so. Despite the many struggles, the application of lesbian feminist-ideology to the process of building a women’s music movement resulted in the creation of a musical counterculture that had a profoundly positive impact on the women who took part in it and this is revealed in the pages of PMD. The women’s music movement helped

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countless thousands through the process of coming out and along the path to self-acceptance. For the first time in popular music history, women had access to a significant body of music that represented lesbian subjectivity; songs about women loving women, and songs that related everyday lesbian experiences. Furthermore, there was now a mass audience and a movement organized around this music throughout the United States, and it was beginning to have an impact in the women’s communities of other countries also. Correspondence from all over the world appears in the pages of PMD. In March 1976, communications from women engaged in making women’s music in Sydney and Tokyo relate that they are “drawing much inspiration from women in America” (Evans 1976: 2). The power of being part of a like-minded community, hearing love songs where the pronoun “she” was used without fear or shame cannot be underestimated. Ironically, while there are numerous studies concerning the role of music in various American countercultures, the historical significance of the women’s music movement has been mostly overlooked in popular music narratives. Women’s music artists rarely get a mention in histories of women in popular music, while studies on the intersection of feminism and popular music tend to concentrate on the 1990s (the third wave) onward. To date the movement has been documented almost exclusively by insiders, those who have taken part in it.8 There are many reasons for this sidelining of women’s music, including those that touch upon commercial and aesthetic concerns, but it is most likely due to its association with radical feminism. Radical feminism is the type of feminism that many feminists tend to distance themselves from due to its “valorization” of lesbians (Echols 1989: 239). bell hooks (1994: 92) argues that during second-wave feminism, it “served the interest of the patriarchal status quo for men to represent the feminist woman as anti-sex and anti-male.” Radical feminists made it easy for this to happen due to the ways in which they conducted their cultural work and the fact that the content and ideological bias of women’s music offended conservative audiences and excluded large segments of the population. Nevertheless, the movement continues to operate in 2020, although its following has reduced significantly due to its aging community base. The fortieth anniversary of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in 2015 drew an international audience of approximately 8,000 women, who collectively 8

For example, Anderson (2019) and Berson (2020). With the notable exception of Hayes (2010), little has been published on women’s music by the academic press.

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mourned the closing of the movement’s flagship festival. Subsequent generations of feminist artists and audiences have gravitated toward forms of cultural production and community building that reflects their generation’s political concerns. However, the need for women-oriented, nurturing, “woke” feminist music remains strong in the United States, and many of the lessons, sentiments, and values of 1970s women’s music documented in PMD continue to find expression in new generations of contemporary artists such as Bitch, Medusa the Gangster Goddess. and BETTY.

References Abod, Susan. 1978. “K.C. Jazzwomen.” Paid My Dues 2 (3): 22–3. Adam, Margie. 1978. “Malvina Reynolds—Mama Lion.” Paid My Dues 2 (3): 2. Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Anderson, Jamie. 2019. An Army of Lovers. Tallahassee: Bella Books. Armstrong, Toni L. and Sally G. Newbury. 1978. “Women’s Songbooks: An Introduction and Survey.” Paid My Dues 3 (1): 34–6. Berson, Ginny. 2020. Olivia on the Record. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Bottum, Carolyn Lee. 1977. “Linda Tillery, by Linda Tillery.” Paid My Dues 2 (2): 41. Boykin, Teresa and Therese Edell. 1979. “Shampoo-Banana.” Paid My Dues 3 (4): 20–1, 42. Brady, Susan Lee. 1975. “Bev Grant.” Paid My Dues 1 (4): 38–9. Corti, Karen. 1978a. “Kathy Winter and Betsy Rose: An Interview with Karen Corti.” Paid My Dues 3 (1): 14–16, 39. Corti, Karen. 1978b. “An Interview with Therese Edell: Her Own Clear Woman’s Voice.” Paid My Dues 2 (3): 18–21. Corti, Karen. 1979. “Holly Near on Performing: An Interview.” Paid My Dues 3 (3): 12–15, 41–4. Corti, Karen and Kathryn Gohl. 1979. “Touring with Susan Abod and Willie Tyson.” Paid My Dues 3 (3): 19, 36–7. Corti, Karen and Lori Schroeder. 1977. “Hearts & Struggles. An Interview with Alix Dobkin.” Paid My Dues 2 (2): 22–3, 25, 38–9. Corti, Karen and Toni L. Armstrong. 1977. “A Sometimes Serious Person: An Interview with Maxine Feldman.” Paid My Dues 2 (1): 26–7, 39. Crow, Barbara A., ed. 2000. Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader. New York: New York University Press. Culver, Casse. 1974. “Professionals.” Paid My Dues 1 (2): 41. Damkoehler, Carol. 1976. “Boston Women’s Music Weekend: Nov 14–16.” Paid My Dues 1 (6): 28.

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Dannenbaum, Liz. 1978. “Forum: Susan at Play.” Paid My Dues 2 (4): 43. Dean, Dorothy. 1974a. “Untitled Letter.” Paid My Dues 1 (1): 1. Dean, Dorothy. 1974b. “The Working Girl. Kathy Kahn.” Paid My Dues 1 (1): 34. Dean, Dorothy. 1974c. “Festival Interviews.” Paid My Dues 1 (3): 18–19, 21. Dean, Dorothy. 1976. “This is It!” Paid My Dues 1 (6): 55–6. Dean, Dorothy and L. Kanter. 1974. “Hang in There: Holly Near.” Paid My Dues 1 (2): 28, 33. Dean, Dorothy, Mary Valenti and Pam Becker. 1974. “Interview with Barbie and Joanie.” Paid My Dues 1 (1): 18–23. Dlugacz, Judy. 2018. “Judy & Cris Receive 2018 AMA Lifetime Achievement Award.” YouTube. September 12. Accessed May 8, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Lzu_-dWlbEk&feature=youtu.be. Echols, Alice. 1989. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Evans, Jane. 1976. “Letter to PMD.” Paid My Dues 1 (6): 2. Faderman, Lillian. 1992. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Penguin. Finlayson, Lorna. 2016. An Introduction to Feminism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gardner, Kay. 1979. “Colla Sinistra.” Paid My Dues 3 (2): 42, 44. Glickman, Donna. 1976. “Interview: Margaret Adam.” Paid My Dues 1 (6): 32–4. Hayes Eileen. 2010. Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics and Women’s Music. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Helm, Cheryl. 1974. “No One Cries for the Losers.” Paid My Dues 1 (1): 12–15. hooks, bell. 1994. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. London and New York: Routledge. Johnston, Jill. 1973. A Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution. New York: Simon & Schuster. Judd, Kathryn. 1977. “Events: National Women’s Music Festival.” Paid My Dues 2 (2): 6. Lee, Cathy. 1978. “Letter to PMD.” Paid My Dues 2 (4): 2. Marigold, Margaret. 1974. “National Women’s Music Festival.” Paid My Dues 1 (3): 14–16. PMD. 1976. “Boston Women’s Music Weekend.” Paid My Dues 1 (6): 24–7. Ruth, Janet. 1975. “Interview: Willie Tyson.” Paid My Dues 1 (4): 30–1. Scheel, Marti. 1976. “Vera Johnson: An Interview & Photographs.” Paid My Dues 1 (6): 9–12. Scheier, Ronni L. 1977. “Fourth National Women’s Music Festival.” Paid My Dues 2 (1): 14. St. Charles, Debbie. 1974. “Revolution Now!: Alternatives in Music.” Paid My Dues 1 (3): 10–11. Tucker, Barbara S. 1975. “Womansphere Coverage.” Paid My Dues 1 (4): 34–5. Walowitz, Paula. 1977. “Meg Christian, Face the Music.” Paid My Dues 2 (2): 41.

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“They’re Not in It Like the Man Dem”: How Gendered Narratives Contradict Patriarchal Discourse in Electronic Dance Music Julia Toppin

This chapter highlights issues and factors that have an impact on the representation of women in the genres of Jungle and Drum and Bass (JDB), each of which resides within the Electronic Dance Music (EDM) industries. Though recent initiatives are once more attempting to establish some kind of equity for women in an industry that is dominated by men (Bain 2019; Smith et al. 2020), an exploration of past and present music literature suggests that patriarchal media narratives contribute to the marginalization of professional women in JDB through omission, erasure, objectification, and condescension exemplified by the quote in the title from a prominent DJ in the JDB scene about the gender imbalance. These narratives are combined with a discourse that essentializes the gender imbalance in terms of a preference for sonic aesthetics (of speed and weight) and environment (both spatial and emotional). Patriarchal media narratives are critiqued through recent work from Christabel Stirling (2016) and Tami Gadir (2016) who outline how these discourses coalesce to exclude women from unfettered access to professional careers in EDM. Furthermore, Freida Abtan (2016) and Rebekah Farrugia (2004) describe how women have used the digitalization of music, social media, and the disruption of traditional economies in the music industry to produce modes of equality for themselves. In this chapter, I first discuss the media narratives of JDB with a focus on the representation of women’s contribution to JDB in printed media and in documentary film. I then explore the spatial and sonic environments of JDB with a focus on the gender imbalance evident in club spaces that are considered “unsafe” for women and how this subsequently defines women’s roles within JDB. This work leads onto a consideration of the paucity of women working

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within the professional industries associated with the JDB scene before a brief investigation of emerging networks of female mentorship. The chapter concludes by suggesting that though some gains have been made in terms of representation, potential gatekeeping still occurs in music journalism, performance, production, and music business management.

Media Narratives What I have learnt through engaging with the women and popular music literature is that patriarchy functions not only as the dominant structure and discourse but also as the subordinating enclosure inside which women are forced to navigate. (Shadrack 2017: ii)

In the above quote, Jasmine Shadrack summarizes her experience of the discourses that women in the music industries encounter while trying to navigate professional networks, such as those of JDB. Toby Bennett goes further, describing the music industry as a “reflexive institutional environment” for women (2018: 35) that discursively (though of course not explicitly) has resisted and continues to resist any attempt at establishing gender parity against its current male hegemony. One way in which this is achieved is by marginalizing women in both the music press, and in published music histories. For instance, Helen Davies asserted in the early 2000s that the British music press and its largely male body of journalists maintains an ideal of credibility for a music artist that is “almost completely unattainable” for women (2001: 301). For Davies, this is perpetuated by a range of tactics that work to obscure and denigrate the work of female artists, the primary method of which is simply to pretend that they do not exist: “Perhaps the most common way in which music journalists treat female performers is to ignore them completely” (2001: 302). By analyzing the idioms and practices of the British music press with regard to writing about female artists, Davies reveals a self-perpetuating set of conforming practices that seem to endure even in those cases when the journalist is a woman. When artists who are women are not being ignored, they are primarily framed as sexual objects, brainless groupies, or demanding harpies who have ideas above their status. Sexist remarks are, for Davies, not the by-product of individual music journalistic prejudice but a factor in what is seen as the “only appropriate discourse for pop music writing” (2001: 304). Simone Kruger Bridge argues that while the neoliberal conditions of post1990s capitalism seem to have led to a general loosening of “gender and racial

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constraints” in the music industry (2019: 6), music industry professionals claim to acquiesce their free will to marketing and the consumer demands of popular culture. These are, conveniently, rooted in a visual aesthetic that places the youth, beauty, and sexuality of a woman artist above any artistic skill she may possess. Bennett concurs with this sentiment, stating that the music industry professionals he interviewed believe they were being dictated to by “market forces” (2018: 30). So, what is being described here is a music industry that appears to have shed its traditional modes of misogyny when in reality it has merely found alternate modes of operation that reinforce the hegemonic status quo of the “white patriarchy” (Kruger Bridge 2019: 8).

Narratives of the Music Press Unsurprisingly, a turn to the published music histories of JDB finds a media narrative where the role of women has been significantly marginalized or completely excluded. Despite a significant number of female journalists actively covering the scene from early on—for example, Helen Mead, who edited the JDB focused Breakbeat Science CD magazine series (1996–97), Veena Verdi, who wrote about JDB in Melody Maker from 1995 and edited the JDB reviews section in Muzik from the following year, and Bethan Cole who wrote extensively about JDB for Mixmag, i-D, and NME from 1995—the few JDB-focused journalistic books have been told from the almost exclusively male perspective of writers Brian Belle-Fortune (2004) and Martin James (2020 [1997]). A forthcoming book Renegade Snares (Unbound) is written by male-only team of Carl Loben, editor-in-chief of DJ Magazine who covered JDB in Melody Maker as early as 1994 and former DJ Magazine editor Ben Murphy. There has been one book that narrativizes JDB history through the compilation of key record releases (Terzulli and Otchere 2021), and another that is a compilation of biographies of key figures in the early development of the JDB scene (Shapiro 1999). These books were again authored, or edited by men. A collection of old articles from JDB fanzine Knowledge,1 along with newly commissioned articles edited by Colin Steven (2020a), features only two female writers, Layla Marino and Sarah Marshall, among a list of eighteen men. Books looking at the broad histories of UK club culture that include chapters about JDB 1

Knowledge Magazine (later K-Mag) was a fanzine dedicated to JDB that was co-founded in 1994 by Rachel Patey and Colin Steven.

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are also predominantly written by men. Best known are Simon Reynolds (2013 [1998]) and Matthew Collin (1997), although a notable exception is Adventures in Wonderland: a Decade of Club Culture (1998), written by Sheryl Garratt. There have also been two books authored by men that consider JDB as an aspect of the wider context of London’s music cultures. Lloyd Bradley (2013) presents a journalistic overview, while the account by Casper Melville (2019) is a peerreviewed academic text. Even within academic research the majority of work has been by men—including Chris Christodoulou (2011, 2013, 2015), Benjamin Noys (1995), and Jason A. Hockman, Matthew E.P. Davies, and Ichiro Fujinaga (2012)—although there have also been significant female contributions, most notably Jo Hall’s (2018) Boys, Bass and Bother. To escape being scribed with the scarlet letter of misogynist exclusion, a few “chosen” women are given a modicum of prominence—DJ Rap, and DJ duo Kemistry and Storm. A case could also be made for DJ Flight whose career started in 1997 at Trix Trax/Unique Muzik record shop; the same year as her first DJ performance. DJ Flight became a Metalheadz resident in summer 1999 2; yet, one could argue that DJ Flight has had to continually battle against her own erasure, including more recently the right to her artist name of almost twenty years.3 A closer look at the history of JDB uncovers the names of several female artists from DJ Dazee and MC Chikaboo to Dark Phoenix and Diane Charlemagne, who each gained varying degrees of media coverage, but never to the extent of male artists in the scene. Indeed, in the case of Charlemagne, media interest invariably came through her work with male artists such as JDB star Goldie and techno/rock artist Moby, which poses the question “How have these talented artists missed their place in drum & bass history?” (Toppin 2020). The representation of professional women of JDB in the music press is as scant as it is in published books. Analysis of featured JDB DJs in Music Week, Billboard, New Musical Express (NME), and Melody Maker reveals a paucity of features about women DJs in JDB. Although this is largely due to the album artist’s focus of these titles (they universally covered JDB artists Goldie and Roni Size in support of their breakthrough albums), what is more surprising is the

2

3

It should be noted that the book State of Bass by Martin James was published before DJ Flight started her career. In April 2020 a debate began around the US Drum and Bass DJ Justin Hawkes using the name DJ Flite. Though the DJ relinquished the name it was not before some rather ugly, misogynistic, and at times, racist comments from Hawkes’ predominantly male DJ peers and fans. See https://twitter. com/DJFlight/status/1286662023460409344.

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limited coverage in dance music magazine Mixmag. DJ Rap receives the most coverage and is described as “tantalizing” by Billboard (Taylor 1999: 24) and labeled as “d’n’b’s original pinup” by Mixmag (Cook 2013: 110). These examples of patriarchal discourse situate DJ Rap not as the talented DJ, producer, and artist that she is, but as someone who should be objectified. In an ironic turn Mixmag responded to a letter from Jodie from Leeds lamenting the lack of female DJs in Drum and Bass by telling Jodie that if she was “clued up” (Mixmag 2011: 145), she would know DJ Storm, DJ Rap, DJ Shortee, B-Traits, and DJ Tasha. What is interesting here is that a search of their issues reveals that Mixmag have never covered DJ Shortee, B-Traits, or DJ Tasha, so how would Jodie learn about them?

Narratives of Films and Documentaries Documentaries on JDB are as limited in number as dedicated books: with the exception of those profiling Goldie and Roni Size, or one-off episodes in a broader series, mainstream broadcasters have typically ignored the genre. In both mainstream and grassroots films—many of which were created by participants of the scene—women are seldom featured outside of the passive role of raver or dancer. That male participants within the scene were closely involved with media managing many of the early representations4 of JDB points to a patriarchal structure within JDB in its earlier days. Indeed, James (2020) uncovers the existence of the all-male “Committee” (2020: 109–19) that tried to control the emerging narratives of jungle. DJ Rap talks of her career facing an early demise as a result of the actions of this male powerbase within the scene (James 2020: 111–12). Through investigation of a selection of JDB documentaries, we can note the representation of women as passive participants despite their key roles in the scene. Six-episode documentary strand All Black produced the episode Jungle Soundclash for the BBC2 in 1994. Women featured in professional roles were DJ Rap, DJ Elayne (then A&R Manager at EMI Records), and two female dancers Zeonie and Harriet. All Junglists—A London Somet’ing Dis produced by 24H Canal + in 1994 features several unnamed female ravers, and Tracy and

4

See also Brian Belle-Fortune’s BBC Radio 1 One in the Jungle series in 1995, which was subsequently produced by former Kiss FM jungle content producer and self-proclaimed junglist Wilber Wilberforce until 1997.

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Ruth from Overdose Promotions, who we are left to presume are promoters. Talkin’ Headz—The Metalheadz Documentary produced by Palm Pictures in 1998 briefly features two women, who work on the label, Jo and Sarah, while completely leaving out label cofounders and resident DJs Kemistry and Storm. 20 Years of Jungle Mania directed by Ikon for Creative Wrkz in 2013 features interviews with a series of male DJs, then bookends the documentary with three unnamed female ravers. Peter Costigan’s 2019 documentary about the early days of JDB titled The Rest Is History also fails to feature women from the scene in any prominent way. Drum & Bass: The Movement produced by AEI in 2020 features just two women, Flight and Riya, in its ninety minutes plus history of the genre. It then manages to completely leave Flight out of the ending credits. Finally, Flare Films’ United Nation: Three Decades of Drum& Bass (released in 2020) features only one woman, DJ Charlotte Devaney. It would appear that the representation of women in JDB on television and in video content replicates the same patriarchal discourse of marginalization, tokenism, and erasure as in publishing. It is clear that women’s presence as professionals in JDB has been neglected in the documenting of the JDB scene. A predominantly male, patriarchal, narrative seems to have been naturalized as an “appropriate discourse” (Davies 2001: 304) in music journalism and documentary film making resulting in both “intergenerational” and “epistemic injustices” (Bennett 2018: 36). The repercussions of these are felt by women DJs in the professional sphere and manifested in significantly imbalanced formations in terms of gender. These imbalances are justified in patriarchal discourse as a gendered preference for specific aesthetic and sonic environments.

Spatial and Sonic Environments The spatial and sonic environments of JDB events have been attributed as reasons for the gender imbalance in JDB. The spatial environment has been described as dark and unsafe for women. For Chris Christodoulou (2011), this darkness is attributed to the cultural production of the music within a patriarchal discourse that fetishes the female body and space. The low-frequency sounds in dark spaces stimulate memories of being safe in the womb. Male participants project these feelings in dark spaces to recover a lost sense of unity and deny “castration anxiety” imposed by the modern world (Christodoulou 2011: 45–7). It is claimed

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that as women do not like dark things, the visceral, hard, and dark aspects of the music will not be attractive to them (Fraser and Ettlinger 2008; Christodoulou 2011). These claims are curious as most night clubs are dark spaces. Moreover, nighttime economy music events that feature low-frequency sounds like Reggae and RnB (Rhythm and Blues) do not feature the gender imbalance that JDB has created over time. This suggests that there is another reason for it. While these contributions are valuable, assumptions that lack supporting narratives from women make the factors behind this gender imbalance difficult to ascertain. Tami Gadir’s reading of the gendered dynamics of DJ performances and dance music spaces elucidates an assertion from male DJs that women prefer more melodic music with vocals and “soft or ‘fluffy’ timbres” that they can dance to. These men claim that vocals in music are connected to expressing aspects of emotional and physical feelings, characteristics considered as feminine (Gadir 2016: 121). Thus, it is assumed that a lack of vocals drives female audiences away from JDB (Fraser and Ettlinger 2008; Gadir 2016). The emphasis on vocals as a feminine trait in JDB is intriguing as myriad tracks feature vocals, and this music appears not to have ever been referred to as feminine. This again suggests that there is an alternate reason for the gender imbalance in JDB that male narratives are not considering. Christabel Stirling (2016) importantly notes that music genres and accompanying spaces accumulate gendered associations that become fixed over time and are difficult to alter. Subsequently, a naturalization of these genres and spaces occurs as a discourse in which there is “something ‘natural’ about the extreme volume, sonic complexity and heavy bass, or the ‘femaleness’ of vocals and danceable tempos” (Stirling 2016: 131), which leads to the continued lack of participation from women in particular music scenes. Stirling disputes the notion that women are being excluded from or deterred by particular music genres because of their dislike of the way some of the music sounds and concludes that the lack of women in EDM scenes such as Dubstep and JDB is more to do with their discomfort or displeasure with these spaces. This discomfort and displeasure, Stirling (2016) argues, can be attributed to women encountering a male-dominated space filled with different types of “masculine energy” that can at times be misogynistic. For Jo Hall (2009) this could be attributed to the male participants’ regular use of movements that suggest strength, power, and aggression, such as punching the air, shouting vulgarities, and roaring. Alistair Fraser and Nancy Ettlinger (2008, 23) utilize verbs such as “smash,” “jump,” and “compete” to describe dynamics between DJs and male ravers to demonstrate

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this masculine energy. Christodoulou (2013, 2015) draws on Paul Virilio’s concept of Dromology to position this masculine energy as a male workingclass control response to the dramatic reduction of traditional manual labor and uncontrollable acceleration in the rate of technological change in postindustrial cities (particularly London). He highlights Andy C’s Double Drop technique, where two records drop their basslines at the same time, as an example of the DJ as a creative performer responding to rapidity (Christodoulou 2013: 212). Jo Hall (2009, 2018), Chantelle Fiddy (2015), and Tracy Wise (2015) all suggest that these masculinized spaces can make women feel uncomfortable because of unwanted sexual advances on the dance floor where they are often groped and harassed by men, and thus feel unsafe. Studies on women’s experiences in UK EDM festivals that usually include JDB reported that not only were women worried about harassment, particularly physical violence, but 40 percent of women under forty had already experienced sexual harassment or assault in these spaces (Petter 2018; Prescott Smith 2018).

Working in the Business Although early examples of JDB companies featured female directors and a large number of female employees, within a decade all aspects of the business of JDB were dominated by men. Rebekah Farrugia (2004) asserts that women attempting to work professionally in EDM industries like JDB are punished with exclusionary practices because they deviate from their traditional and passive role as ravers. In addition to the exclusion and marginalization of representation seen in the media, it could be suggested that this exclusion also comes in the form of sexism and misogyny that women experience from male professionals and participants on and off the dance floor as well as behind the DJ decks, and in the studio. Amy Phillips (2019) concurs indicating that much of the lost female talent in the music industries is due to women being deterred by unwanted sexual advances and abuse. Many women working in EDM have experienced or witnessed sexual harassment and/or assault. Music journalists Annabel Ross (2020, 2021) and Ellie Flynn (2020) published extensive research into accusations of sexual abuse and rape that spanned over two decades against DJ Erick Morillo and DJ Derrick May, suggesting that when women research and write their own narratives other aspects of women’s experiences that have previously been silenced or erased by men become foregrounded. It seems as

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if the long-term protection that such celebrity DJs were previously afforded has lessened in the climate created by the #MeToo movement where alleged victims feel more comfortable coming forward to female music journalists so that their narratives can be told: narratives that provide a potentially significant explanation for the absence of women in JDB, as does sexual objectification. Both Hall (2009) and Gadir (2016) find that women who are working as DJs often get attention drawn to their bodies rather than their skills, as well as encountering sexual harassment and discrimination. The stereotypically perceived role of women in EDM genres like JDB relegates them to either a girlfriend of an authentic (naturalized as male) participant, or as a female DJ lacking in skill, only employed via a sexual or social association. This is because the DJ role is often thought of as a specifically male occupation (Hall 2009; Gadir 2016). Female DJs must, therefore, continually negotiate matters relating to their looks and bodies. This can be seen to directly correlate with the representation of women DJs in the media. This objectification even occurs during the process of being booked for events, as female DJs are often questioned about their looks and informed that attractive women are required for performances (Gadir 2016). Furthermore, it has been asserted that women DJs are denigrated because they are often perceived as being less technically competent than male DJs (Gadir 2016). Female DJs’ abilities are often questioned, and in some cases, they are offered support when performing at live events, such as premixed CDs, as it is assumed that technical competency is unlikely or unusual. This impedes women’s abilities to be both represented and successful as DJs and producers, and further perpetuates gendered prejudices about their abilities and authenticity within EDM cultures like JDB (Bradby 1993; Gavanas and Reitsamer 2013; Gadir, 2016). Farrugia (2012: 44) outlines the three images that female DJs are typically confined to: the “Sex Kitten,” the “T-shirt,” and the “Dyke.” The “Sex Kitten,” which Farrugia asserts is popular with male promoters, refers to DJs whose image conforms to heterosexist beauty standards outlined as being thin, having long hair, wearing tight and/or revealing clothing: “the characteristics the mass media teaches women to embrace and men to desire” (Gadir 2016: 46). It can be argued that DJ Rap,5 who appears to fit the representation, is exemplified as embodying the “Sex Kitten” image. The “T-shirt” DJs adopt the standard male attire for DJs, which is a loose hanging T-Shirt and Jeans as they do not want to 5

https://djrap.com/.

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be objectified (Farrugia 2012: 50). It could be suggested that Mollie Collins6 fits this image as she is often seen wearing this type of attire. Lastly, Farrugia claims that “Dyke” DJs are “lesbian” with “short haircuts” and non-gendered clothing. Farrugia states that these DJs are perceived as non-threatening as they do not use their sexuality to acquire bookings (2012: 56). Although much of Farrugia’s work is very valuable, the three aforementioned categories require interrogation. They are problematic because they implicitly suggest a white Eurocentric standard of beauty, and the rigidity of her categories implies that female DJs are not complicated and can be easily classified. Moreover, Farrugia asserts that white women and black women are sexually objectified and states that “sexist, denigrating labelling and other strategies that maintain male power are not contained to a particular race or class” (Farrugia 2012: 59). Black women’s negative representations are rooted in discourses of colonization and can be very distinct from negative representations of white women. Farrugia’s assertion does not recognize that Black women are often hypersexualized, fetishized, and dehumanized: negative representations that are rooted in discourses of slavery (Collins 1991, 2004). That said, the patriarchal reduction of female DJs to visual physical attributes concurs with Laura Mulvey’s (1975) theory of the male gaze critique, where women are represented as sexual objects of pleasure for the heterosexual male viewer. We return to Simone Kruger Bridge (2019: 7) who asserts that these attitudes are still prevalent having traced the sexual representation of the female artist from the 1950s to the present-day music industry where: “Female artists are still expected to be both beautiful and sexy, and are marketed by their female attractiveness and sexuality, regardless of their musical capabilities.” Vick Bain’s (2019) research into the representation of women in the music industry and music (including music industry education) asserts that female representation in record labels specializing in Jungle, DnB, and Grime is just 5 percent. Men are located in positions of power that manage the “discourse and classification systems that structure these scenes” at the levels of production, promotion, and artistry (McLeod 2001: 73). A vital aspect of participating in the JDB industry is having an extensive knowledge of the current scene such as the new releases, sub-genres, record companies, and music professionals. Due to men being predominantly in positions of power, women often find it difficult to

6

https://ukf.com/words/rise-mollie-collins/18385.

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access JDB social networks and fully participate in the scene. These women are considered as being outside of JDB’s “gated communities,” as it is assumed that they do not have the required subcultural capital to gain entry, and “fences” are “erected through practices of discourses,” which keep them out (McLeod 2001: 73). For women to gain access, they need to obtain the required cultural capital through being fluent in the type of language used in these communities as well developing knowledge of “particular aesthetic hierarchies” (2001: 73). Thus, the formation of JDB communities can be linked to the wider social and economic institutions of the male-dominated mainstream music industry. In the JDB scene, males are often invited into these communities without having acquired the necessary skills, while women need to “barter” their entry with some “form of social [girlfriend] or technical [knowledge] currency” (Abtan 2016: 55). JDB communities are based on social networks in terms of production, performance, and marketing, and in this context, the requisite skills are transferred mainly between men in often closed, male-dominated, friendship networks. As women seldom have access to and find it difficult to acquire these skills, they are prevented from progressing in their careers; consequently, women must find their own access into the JDB community (Abtan 2016). Abtan advocates for a culture of sharing knowledge and friends among women to aid their career progression, and it is notable that the digitalization of the music industries and social media has provided tools that have enabled women to make change regarding their status and representation in the JDB music industries. Compared to their male peers, very few women DJs and producers are signed to the rosters of the key JDB recorded music labels in the UK. Women producers have found alternative ways to navigate the male-dominated industry by self-distributing their music through digital distribution portals such as Beatport, Bandcamp, and Juno (Farrugia 2012). Digitalization can, therefore, be viewed as a democratizing force for freeing women DJs from the masculine gatekeepers who identify them as “trespassers” (Gavanas and Reitsamer 2013; Puwar 2004). Conversely, the internet can also be viewed as a space where dominant patriarchal and white supremacist ideologies are reproduced, creating a dichotomy for women in general, and Black women in particular, where tools of emancipation can also be tools of oppression. Online event promoter Boiler Room decided to add moderators to their chat rooms and ban specific individuals from viewing their Facebook Live broadcasts due to the abusive, sexist comments being posted when female DJs performed

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(Renshaw 2016). Despite this, digital networks not only provide crucial information for women but can be used as spaces for socializing with others and for providing useful critiques of the discourses of EDM practice. Some female DJs, once established in their careers, felt that their public membership of such groups was a hindrance because they were concerned about the consequences from the male community due to their participation in womenled digital networks, and they did not want to encounter further exclusionary practices (Gavanas and Reitsamer 2013, Farrugia 2004). Although femaleonly forums were useful, some female DJs felt that access to male networks was essential for career progression because of men’s gatekeeping positions (Gavanas and Reitsamer 2013). Furthermore, many websites supporting women are often underfunded and run by volunteers, suggesting that these are only temporary measures put place to stem the patriarchal discourse. Long-term planning and investment into both online and offline support structures for women are needed to address issues of access in the JDB industries. Intriguingly, both websites profiled by Farrugia (2012)—Sisterdjs7 and Sistersf8—no longer exist, raising questions of sustainability. Even recent projects like Smirnoff ’s Equalising Music, a three-year initiative launched in 2017 to improve the representation of women in the music industry, seems to have run out of steam9 after only two years and a plethora of media coverage and partner announcements.

Mentoring and Support for Women It is important to note that when women finally get into positions of power in JDB, they instigate opportunities for other women to develop and access the resources that they need to progress in these scenes. For example, the launching of a Facebook group by Hospital Records—the world’s largest independent JDB label—to facilitate the networking of women DJs and producers (Hospital Records 2019). This was quickly followed by a monthly showcase of music produced by women, culminating in the label announcing a special mentorship scheme for female producers and DJs. Former mentee, Stay-C, had development

7 8 9

http://www.sisterdjs.com/. http://www.sistersf.com/. http://smirnoffequalisingmusic.com/; https://rinse.fm/equalisingmusic/.

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and mentoring sessions with every department within the label over a period of a year. Stay-C has now released a track with Hospital Records and is being booked to play at some of the label’s live events. Hospital Records have already entered into a second mentorship with an artist called Viridity. A final example of inclusive practices for women by women is exemplified by the work of EQ50. EQ50 was established in 2018 by female DJs Mantra, Flight, and Sweetpea on the social media site Facebook.10 EQ50 provides a platform where female DJs can connect, support, nurture, and train each other. They collaborate with DJs, producers, and venues to deliver virtual and physical workshops for women who provide them with the knowledge and understanding to access the JDB scenes. In 2020 EQ50 collaborated with prominent JDB labels and stakeholders to create six industry mentorships for women (Stevens 2020b). They have managed to convince men in positions of power in the JDB scene to share their knowledge, networks, and practices with women, thus opening up a previously exclusive community and encouraging inclusivity. With the creation of their own website and of merchandising products aimed at raising funds to continue their much-needed work to increase gender parity in DnB, EQ50 appears to have planned for ongoing sustainability. It could be suggested that these initiatives have created more spaces where women can gain recognition and prominence within the JDB scene. Gadir (2016) is positive about such discursive shifts while JDB pioneer Fabio (cited in Considine 2018) acknowledges that although the JDB scene should have changed after twenty years, it is still a male-dominated industry. In 2021, there are more known female DJs and MCs in the scene such as from veterans like Flight, Rap, and Storm to newcomers Sherelle, Tina Irie, and Katalyst. Moreover, Mollie Collins hosts the prolific Drum and Bass show on Kiss FM. It is one of the only two national JDB shows on UK mainstream radio. The other being Rene La Vice on BBC Radio 1. Mollie Collins and Sherelle have both launched their own record labels, Right Good Records and Hooversounds. Female JDB DJs are now sometimes featured in line ups for major events and festivals in the UK. Online show, Conscious Lyrics, on Repeater Radio (Toppin 2021) interviews and promotes women, and some men from the JDB scene that deserve more attention. However, there is still a long way to go to achieve parity and a need to break free from the patriarchal discourses of the past.

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https://www.facebook.com/eq50dnb.

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Conclusion I have discussed the consequences of having histories of JDB told from a predominantly male perspective, and explored how patriarchal media narratives have obscured the contributions that a multitude of women have made and continue to make in the JDB music industries and scene. I have outlined narratives that purport that women do not favor dark spaces and dark sounds, which is why their presence in JDB is marginal. These narratives have been critiqued and challenged by women academics in EDM of which JDB is a subgenre. These gendered narratives from women have revealed discourses based on patriarchal conjecture, which have obscured layers of erasure, objectification, condescension, harassment, and abuse that women have been and continue to be subjected to in JBD and EDM. Women in these scenes subvert this patriarchal discourse in a number of ways. First, they ensure that their technical proficiency is beyond reproach, often leaving them with a higher order of skill than many of their male contemporaries. Second, women make conscious and calculated decisions regarding their physical appearance and the nature of their relationships with their male peers. Finally, women in JDB and EDM have additionally countered this patriarchal discourse by forming digital networks that enable them to educate, support, and promote each other in an attempt to penetrate and thrive beyond the gated and male-dominated networked communities of JDB and EDM. I have shown that women who manage to overcome the obstacles created by patriarchal discourses in JDB and EDM construct paths for their peers to follow. Finally, I have shown that although it may appear that the male hegemony of the JDB and EDM music industries is in clear and present danger, it is important to note how proficient JDB in particular and the music industry in general have been at resisting gender parity for the past thirty years. The music industry’s “reflexive institutional environment” (Bennett 2018: 35) presently full of Diversity and Inclusion initiatives excels at performative moves toward equity. This chapter has demonstrated the importance of listening to a multitude of voices from different perspectives in order to provide a more holistic narrative of the histories of JDB in particular, and EDM in general. A lack of diversity in narrative voices creates holes in the rich tapestry of the history of popular music history, which ultimately leads to misrepresentations about the contributions of different members of society to our culture—representations that can have real effects on real lives.

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Farrugia, Rebekah. 2004. “Sisterdjs in the House: Electronic/dance Music and Womencentred Spaces on the Net.” Women’s Studies in Communication 27 (2): 236–62. Farrugia, Rebekah. 2012. Beyond the Dance Floor: Female DJs, Technology and Electronic Dance Music Culture. Bristol: Intellect. Fiddy, Chantelle and Mixmag Staff. 2015. “We Need To Talk about Sexual Harassment In Nightclubs.” Mixmag [online]. April 13, 2015. https://mixmag.net/read/we-needto-talk-about-sexual-harassment-in-nightclubs-blog. Flynn, Ellie. 2020. “Multiple Women Accuse Derrick May of Sexual Assault.” DJ Magazine [online]. November 12, 2020. https://djmag.com/longreads/multiplewomen-report-sexual-assault-and-harassment-derrick-may. Fraser, Alistair and Nancy Ettlinger. 2008. “Fragile Empowerment: The Cultural Economy of British Drum & Bass Music.” Geoforum 39 (5): 1647–56. Gadir, Tami. 2016. “Resistance or Reiteration? Rethinking Gender in DJ Cultures.” Contemporary Music Review 35 (1): 115–29. Gavanas, Anna and Rosa Reitsamer. 2013. “DJ Technologies, Social Networks and Gendered Trajectories in European DJ Cultures.” In DJ Culture in the Mix: Power, Technology, and Social Change in Electronic Dance Music, edited by Bernardo Attais, Anna Gavanas and Hillegonda C. Rietveld, 51–78. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Hall, Jo. 2009. Heterocorporealities: Popular Dance and Cultural Hybridity in UK Drum ‘n’ Bass Club Culture. PhD thesis, University of Surrey. Hall, Jo. 2018. Boys, Bass and Bother: Popular Dance and Identity in UK Drum ’n’ Bass Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hockman, Jason A., Matthew E.P. Davies and Ichiro Fujinaga. 2012. “One in the Jungle: Downbeat Detection in Hardcore, Jungle and Drum and Bass.” In Proceedings of the 13th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMR 2012), October 8–12, 2012, edited by Fabien Guoyon, Perfecto Herrera, Luis Gustavo Martins and Meinard Müeller, 169–74. Porto: FEUP Edições. https://archives.ismir. net/ismir2012/paper/000169.pdf. Hospital Records. 2019. “International Women’s Day: The Hospital Records Pledge.” Hospital Records. March 8, 2019. https://www.hospitalrecords.com/news/ international-womens-day-the-hospital-records-pledge/. James, Martin. 2020 [1997]. State of Bass: The Origins Of Jungle/Drum & Bass. London: Velocity Press. [originally issued as State of Bass: Jungle—The Story So Far on Boxtree/Macmillan]. Kruger Bridge, Simone. 2019. “Gendering Music in Popular Culture.” In The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, Volume 3, [online] edited by Karen Ross. Hoboken, NH: Wiley and Sons. DOI: 10.1002/9781119429128.iegmc158. Loben, Carl and Ben Murphy. 2021. Renegade Snares: The Resistance And Resilience Of Drum & Bass. London: Jawbone Press. McLeod, Kembrew. 2001. “Genre, Subgenres, Sub-Subgenres and More: Musical and Social Differentiation Within Electronic/Dance Music Communities.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 13 (1): 59–75.

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Martin, Lauren. 2019. “Kemistry & Storm—the Tragic Story of the Drum ‘n’ bass Originals.” The Guardian [UK]. April 4, 2019. https://www.theguardian. com/music/2019/apr/04/kemistry-storm-the-tragic-story-of-the-drumnbassoriginals. Melville, Casper. 2019. It’s A London Thing: How Rare Grove, Acid House and Jungle Remapped The City. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mixmag. 2011. INBOX, Mixmag [print] 241: 144–45. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Noys, Benjamin. 1995. “Into the ‘Jungle.’” Popular Music 4 (3): 321–32. Petter, Olivia. 2018. “Two-Thirds Of Women Concerned about Sexual Harassment At Festival, Study Finds.” Independent [UK]. August 20, 2018. https://www. independent.co.uk/life-style/festivals-sexual-harassment-women-concern-studydurham-university-a8499106.html. Phillips, Amy. 2019. “Why Are Women Underrepresented in Music? Look to the Ryan Adams Story.” Pitchfork. February 15, 2019. https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/why-arewomen-underrepresented-in-music-look-to-the-ryan-adams-story/. Prescott Smith, Sarah. 2018. “Two in Five Young Female Festival Goers Have Been Subjected to Unwanted Sexual Behaviour.” YouGov. June 21, 2018. https://yougov. co.uk/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2018/06/21/two-five-young-female-festivalgoers-have-been-sub. Puwar, Nirmal. 2004. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Renshaw, David. 2016. “How Do We Get the Sexist Trolls Out of Electronic Music?” The Fader. July 11, 2016. https://www.thefader.com/2016/07/11/boiler-room-nightwavesexism-interview. Reynolds, Simon. 2013 [1998]. Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. London: Picador. Riches, Gabby. 2014. “Brothers of Metal! Heavy Metal Masculinities, Moshpit Practices and Homosociality.” In Debating Modern Masculinities: Change, Continuity, Crisis?, edited by Steven Roberts, 88–105. London: Palgrave Pivot. Ross, Annabel. 2020. “The Erick Morillo Accusers Share Their Stories of Rape and Sexual Assault.” Mixmag [online]. September 15, 2020. https://mixmag.net/feature/ erick-morillo-accusers-stories-arrested-death-dj. Ross, Annabel. 2021. “Seven More People Allege Sexual Assault and Harassment Against Derrick May.” Mixmag [online]. January 29, 2021. https://mixmag.net/read/ derrick-may-sexual-assault-harrassment-news. Shadrack, Jasmine Hazel. 2017. Denigrata Cervorum: Interpretive Performance Autoethnography and Female Black Metal Performance. PhD thesis, University of Northampton. Shapiro, Peter. 1999. The Rough Guide to Drum’n’Bass. London: Rough Guides. Smith, Stacy L., Katherine Pieper, Hannah Clark, Ariana Case and Marc Choueiti. 2020. Inclusion in the Recording Studio? Gender and Race/Ethnicity of Artists, Songwriters

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& Producers across 800 Popular Songs from 2012–2019. USC Annenberg. https:// assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/aii-inclusion-recording-studio-20200117.pdf. Stevens, Colin ed. 2020a. Knowledge Magazine 25th Anniversary Book. Kent: Velocity Press. Stevens, Colin. 2020b. “EQ50 Launch Mentorship Programme.” Kmag. July 15, 2020. https://kmag.co.uk/eq50-mentorship-programme/. Stirling, Christabel. 2016. “Beyond The Dance Floor? Gendered Publics and Creative Practices in Electronic Dance Music.” Contemporary Music Review 35 (1): 130–49. Talkin Headz—The Metalheadz Documentary. 1998. [Film]. Dir. John Klein, Palm Pictures. Taylor, Chuck. 1999. “DJ Rap: Good To Be Alive.” Billboard 111 (46): 24. Terzulli, Paul and Eddie Otchere. 2021. Who Say Reload: The Stories Behind the Classic Drum & Bass Records of the 90s. Kent: Velocity Press. The Rest Is History. The Early Days of Drum & Bass. 2019. [Film]. Dir. Peter Costigan. Toppin, Julia. 2020. “Where Are The Women In Drum and Bass?” Beatportal. June 24, 2020. https://www.beatportal.com/features/where-are-the-women-in-drum-bass/. Toppin, Julia. 2021. “Conscious Lyrics Episodes.” Repeater Radio. https://www.repeaterradio.com/consciouslyrics. United Nation: Three Decades of Drum & Bass. 2020. [Film] Dir. Terry Stone and Richard Turner, Flare Films. Wise, Tracy. 2015. “Safe Gigs for Women—How Do We Get There?” Huffington Post. August 28, 2015. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/tracey-wise/safe-gigs-forwomen_b_8053330.html.

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“Who Controls the Present Controls the Past. Who Controls the Past Controls the Future”: Washing Islam from the Media Narratives of Hip-Hop Martin James

The emergence of hip-hop in the early 1980s was informed by the convergence of Black Nationalism and American Islam with the relationships between Islam and hip-hop so deeply entrenched that journalist Harry Allen once described it as “hip hop’s unofficial religion” (Mohaiemen 2008: 313). Islam was an influential presence from hip-hop’s formative period, and retained a high profile for many years through its associations with black separatist Islamic sects, such as the Nation of Islam (NOI) and the Five Percent Nation (5percenters), as well as the non-separatist teachings of Sufi and Sunni Islam. The language and philosophy of hip-hop are thus infused with Islamic iconography and ideologies. Indeed, many of the words and phrases associated with hip-hop, which have become genre signposts in frequent use by non-Muslims, are drawn directly from the teaching of groups associated with Islam. The presence of Islam at the core of an American music genre and lifestyle posed problems for a media preoccupied with the notion of Muslims as an incoming immigrant population. Muslims and Islam are continually at the crux of censure and debate within US media and political discussions, with perceptions of Islam as anti-democratic, and a menace to the West, having persisted since the late 1970s (Esposito 1995; Said 1997). The relationship between Western nations and Muslims has been interpreted as a divide between the Christian West and the world of traditional Islam (Ibrahim 2010), with heightened divisions in the Afrika Bambaataa introduced live performances of “Planet Rock” with this quote, as depicted in the BBC documentary Beat This: A hip hop history (1984).

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United States in the post-9/11 world. Orientalist discourse has presented as a Western media antagonism toward Muslims and Islam, predominantly focused on economic and terrorist threats. The generalizing lens of the media defines “the West” and “Islam” as opposites, which in turn propagates the idea of confrontation (Poole 2002). Edward Said argues that the mainstream Western media portrays Islam as populated by “an undifferentiated mob of scimitar-waving oil suppliers” (Said 1980: 19), or as a religion of irrational violence that subordinates its women. A number of geopolitical issues further amplified the tone and volume of the East versus West discourse. These included: the 1967 Arab–Israeli conflict (known as the Six-Day War), in which the United States supported Israel; the 1973 OPEC (Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil embargo (a protest against US support of Israel); and perhaps most significantly, the 1979 Iranian Revolution—a populist uprising led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which overthrew the US-backed Shah of Iran and led to the creation of a Shia Islamic theocratic regime. The periodic crises over Libya and the Middle East in the 1980s, the gulf war in Kuwait and Iraq in the 1990s, and the consequent events of 9/11 in 2001 further cemented the discourse (Ahmed 2012). In this chapter, I begin by exploring the history of Islam in the United States, and the symbiotic relationship between aspects of American Islam and Black Nationalism, and the subsequent role that Islam played in the origin story and ideological structures of hip-hop. I then investigate the washing of both Islam and Black Nationalism from mainstream media histories of hip-hop as depicted in documentary films released prior to the 9/11 attacks and those following them.

Islam in the United States One of the dominant discourses surrounding American Muslims is that Islam is the religion of an incoming immigrant population of Arabs and South Asians. However, the Pew Research Center reports that of the estimated 3.45 million Muslims living in the United States in 2017, at least 50 percent had been born in the United States (PRC 2018). American Muslims are one of the most racially diverse religious groups in the United States (Younis 2009) with no dominant racial background, though 25 percent of the total native-born American Muslim population is also African American. Such statistics present a contradictory narrative that places Islam as a significant domestic religion in America.

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Islam’s roots in the United States extend as far back as the founding fathers, who looked to the inclusion of Islam when establishing the principles of religious liberty. Thomas Jefferson’s ideological position was inspired by John Locke’s “A Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689), which argued that “neither Pagan nor Mahometan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion.” Jefferson drew on Locke in proposing his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1786, noting in his autobiography that “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan” were to be included under its protection (Hutson 2002). Moreover, historian Timothy Marr (2006) notes that a “larger-than-life representation of the Prophet Muhammad” can be viewed as part of a bas-relief on the north wall of the US Supreme Court. The Prophet Muhammad is situated “between Charlemagne and Justinian as one of eighteen great law givers of history.” In the early years of America’s founding, up to 40 percent of the Atlantic slave trade followed the Muslim faith (Mohaiemen 2008: 31). By the time of the Industrial Revolution, these numbers had grown significantly due to immigration from Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, South and Central Asia, and Eastern Europe (GhaneaBassiri 2010: 228). Among the incoming population of Muslims were missionaries sent by the Ahmadiya Muslim sect. They immediately faced a bar on preaching in white areas and churches and instead looked to the black ghettoes (Mohaiemen 2008: 315). Muslim immigrant communities in America subsequently established small, local organizations across the country and especially within inner city ghettoes. Islam’s role in the Civil Rights Movement, and in Black Nationalism post– Second World War, saw considerable overlap as both African Americans and Muslim Americans demanded equal rights in recognition of their wartime contributions. Post–Second World War African American and Muslim communities experienced the huge chasm between America’s self-identified democratic ideals and the realities of racial and religious discrimination. GhaneaBassiri notes that the critique of Christianity as a “white man’s religion” by Black Nationalist Muslim movements, and their appropriation of Islam as a religion of liberation that offered a national religion of African America proved very appealing to many who were subsequently “Islamicised” (GhaneaBassiri 2010: 228). Particularly significant was Noble Drew Ali’s establishment of the Moorish Science Temple of America in the mid-1920s. Felicia Miyakawa notes that central to Ali’s teachings was the claim that “modern blacks are the descendants of the

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Biblical prophetess Ruth, whose progeny settled the area known as Moab … [T]he Moorish civilization at its height (around 1500 BC) extended from the area today known as Morocco to North, South and Central America, encompassing even mythical Atlantis” (2005: 11). This was significant because it places Black people in the Americas in pre-Columbian days, giving them primacy over later colonists and slaveholders and justifying their demands for full civil rights in American society. These teachings subsequently became a focal point of the NOI, established by Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930 in reaction to Ali’s tolerance of Christianity. Fard taught that “Christianity [and other “white religions”] is a tool in the hands of the White slave masters to control the minds of black people”, and also “introduced the doctrine that whites are devils” (Miyakawa 2005: 13, 14). Under Fard’s leadership, black American Islam moved toward a position of black supremacy. The NOI moved closer to orthodox Islamic teachings following the induction of Elijah Muhammad as its leader in 1934, yet it retained a militant approach to separatism that became exemplified by NOI National Representative Malcolm X’s most famous quote that its aims should be achieved “by any means necessary.” Among the NOI’s core beliefs was that “the Creator is a Blackman” and that white (pale) people are devils. These ideologies lay at the core of the NOI splinter group 5percenters, which was founded in 1965 by Clarence 13X. 5percenter theology is a mix of “black nationalist rhetoric, Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) symbolism, Gnosticism, Masonic mysticism, and esoteric numerology” (Miyakawa 2005: 23). At the core of their beliefs was the NOI doctrine presented in their “LostFound Muslim Lesson N. 2” that 10 percent of the people in the world are the white, rich “slave makers of the poor,” who know the truth of existence but choose to keep 85 percent of the world suppressed in a state of compliant ignorance. The remaining 5 percent are those Black men who are the “poor, righteous teachers” that know the truth and have determined to enlighten the 85 percent. The 5percenters believe that their “faith” is not a religion but a science, or way of life, with the core concept of Black men as Allah incarnate being provable through their “Supreme Mathematics” and their “Supreme Alphabet.” Using these tools to “show and prove,” the 5percenters claim that the word “‘Man” is an acronym for My Almighty Name (placing God in mortal form), the word “Islam” means “I Self Lord Am Master” (placing God within the individual), and the word Allah means “Arm Leg Leg Arm Head” (thus providing Allah with human form). This position presents a clear separation from orthodox Islam. In Arabic, “Islam” literally means “submission” (Miyakawa 2005: 30), but for

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the 5percenters submission to Allah has no meaning because each Black man is Allah incarnate. Hence, Islam is not regarded “as a set of practices intended to give reverence to a Supreme Being … [but, for the Five Percenters] … as a flexible way of life, a mode of encountering the world in their own self-deified orbit” (Miyakawa 2005: 30). Both NOI and 5percenters helped to lay the groundwork for the emergence of Islam as an influential element of the Black Power movement in the 1950s and 1960s. These links also resonated powerfully with many of the estimated 1.1 million Muslims who arrived in the United States following the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act (Curtis 2006: 35–65). The experiences of the new Muslim communities chimed closely with those of domestic Muslims as they faced increased levels of media prejudice through negative representations of those nations mediated as Islamic. Furthermore, throughout this period, African American and incoming Muslim communities in the inner city areas of Detroit, Chicago, and New York faced increased levels of deprivation through unemployment, poverty, and slum housing, often at the hands of city developers. For example, the New York, Harlem area of the Bronx underwent disastrous structural change, thanks initially to the creation of the Cross-Bronx Expressway that left up to 60,000 residents destitute, forcibly removed, or left in condemned buildings without power, water, or sanitation (Chang 2005: 12). As work continued on the Expressway, white business-owning American families in Harlem relocated to the safer, cleaner suburbs that the Expressway served, taking much of the Bronx’s means of employment and their churches with them. This fueled significant distrust of the Christian church and created space for the NOI and the 5percenters.

Hip-hop and Islam By the early 1970s, the alliance between Black Nationalist organizations like the Black Panthers and both NOI and 5percenters had presented a defiant focus for many African Americans suffering high levels of deprivation. It was in the midst of urban deprivation that the social and cultural expressions of innercity youth shifted, and hip-hop was born as a source of alternative identity formation and social status for young people. Hodge (2013) argues that hiphop’s emergence was within a “theological vacuum”; however, as has been noted, the departure of mainstream Christian churches from urban areas populated by

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African Americans enabled space for Black Nationalist Islamist sects to fill the “theological vacuum” with a message that spoke of the “realities of life within the ’hood and within a system that had abandoned them” (Rose 1994: 32). As hip-hop emerged, it was the 5percenters’ version of Black Nationalist Islam that was embraced. The hip-hop generation is defined as “those young African Americans born between 1965 and 1984 who came of age in the eighties and nineties and … share a specific set of values and attitudes” (Kitwana 2004: 4). In mainstream media, these attitudes are often presented as a hybrid cultural expression, bringing together a range of crafts through the typology of “hip-hop tenets.” These include breakdancing, graffiti, DJing, and MCing, which collectively inform the fifth tenet of Knowledge. This final tenet is embodied by a cultural knowing, historical awareness, and self-growth as offered through the teachings of Black separatist Islamic groups. Through Black Nationalist rhetoric, the tenets of hiphop link directly to their own ideologies and doctrines. Breakdancing is the fight of slaves; graffiti, a form that originated among the often north African enslaved people of the Roman empire, is the writing of slaves; rapping is the oratory of the enslaved passing on heritage knowledge through slang undecipherable by the white slaver; and DJing is the misuse of the technology of the enslaver to create a black form of music consumption that excludes white people. Together these four tenets speak of subversion of white dominance and subsequent black empowerment, the reclamation of written and oral language, and a celebration of African heritage. Each is informed by the fifth tenet of “knowledge,” provided primarily by the 5percenters. The central role of Islam—as an identity marker—in the birth and subsequent global growth of hip-hop is relatively undocumented in the media. Indeed, the media representation of Islam in early hip-hop was largely one of passive intrigue, with the roles played by Islamic teachings largely hidden. Media reference to Islam in hip-hop was, instead, subsumed by the concepts of Black Nationalism and the superseding ideologies of Afrocentric rap. The problematic aspects of Islam as an identity marker for the hip-hop generation were thus sidestepped in favor of the more easily framed domestic racial conflict. Saeed (2009) has noted that although orthodox Muslims may not have been able to see the links between Islam and hip-hop, the hip-hop generation placed them at the core of their lyrical delivery. As Saeed notes: “The Holy Koran (which many scholars see as a collection of poems) was revealed to Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) orally in large sections through almost rhymed prose”

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(Saeed 2009: 399). Connections can be made here to the Muslim spoken word collectives of the late 1960s, such as The Last Poets and the Watts Prophets, who commentators point to as antecedents of hip-hop (see Chang 2005; Toop 2000). The spoken word movement provided a platform for these artists and activists to fuse Islamic teachings with Black Nationalist rhetoric. Perhaps more significant to the popularization of Islam in the United States and of huge impact to the ferment from which hip-hop would emerge was world champion boxer Muhammad Ali. He embraced Islam in 1961 and, following his association with the NOI, renounced his “slave name” Cassius Clay in 1964. Public Enemy’s Chuck D argues: Of course the great Muhammad Ali influenced hip-hop. He had that from the rhyming aspect that everyone heard immediately. Kids was doing Ali rhymes in the schoolyards. But he was more than rhymes. He’d be using them to challenge, to predict what was going to go down … That was the battle right there. Backing it up. That was totally hip-hop. (Unpublished interview with author, 1999)

Although NOI dominated the narrative of African American Muslims in the 1960s and early 1970s the early hip-hop generation more closely aligned themselves to the 5percenters through a “focus on wordplay, numerology, and race theory” (Mohaiemen 2008: 321). The use of rhetoric and wordplay was especially significant, with Clarence 13X noted for his “eloquent and spellbinding usage of African American inner-city slang” (Mohaiemen 2008: 319). When hip-hop’s earlier block parties took place, there was a strong 5percenter presence with its followers acting as the “peace guards,” maintaining a peaceful space for the events while providing protection to the DJ and martialing the different gangs that were present. These self-proclaimed peacekeepers also used the parties to share 5percenter doctrines, and their membership grew in line with the spread of hip-hop. As a result, the earliest block parties were a marriage of youth creativity informed by links to both black separatism and Islam.

Washing Islam from American Hip-hop The historical significance of music makers and genres in the creation of “popular” histories can be defined through the use of four criteria: media coverage, biographical interest, critical acclaim, and sales figures (Thornton 1990).

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All four approaches to the construction of histories create simple timelines of events with a selection of key moments and personalities deemed to drive change. Each of these criteria has led to popular histories that initially sought to reduce hip-hop’s meaning to a one-dimensional interpretation with a heroic and celebratory master narrative. The ideas and representations of the earliest moments are inevitably presented through a teleological progression from great creative visionaries (e.g., DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa) to great events (e.g., block parties). This progression was represented in a hip-hop narrative that quickly became a modernist meta-narrative in which gestation, birth, death, and after were asserted. Between these key moments, the complex chronologies of hip-hop are reduced to a clear line associated with the biographies of key DJs and rappers presented as engineering a heroic style via the centralized cultural and geographical location of the Bronx in New York. The official timeline has subsequently become refined as a series of master narratives of key moments for the interconnected rap, DJ, graffiti, and breakdancing elements of hip-hop, framed by conditions of poverty, and of defiance against urban regeneration programs and disinterested police and politicians. It becomes a simple margins-to-mainstream story, emphasizing a narrative of creativity from poverty and deprivation; one that develops from hip-hop as a secret society to hip-hop as a global success. In this simplified narrative, any uncomfortable cultural edges become smoothed down in order to emphasize the rags to riches trajectory. Studies have found that Islam is represented in the media as a monolithic, homogenized, or sexist religion (Mishra 2007; Korteweg 2008), with Muslims framed as heartless, brutal, uncivilized, religious fanatics, and militants and terrorists (Shaheen 2009; Ibrahim 2010; Powell 2011). Islam is presented from the perspective of a “white man’s world” with Muslims categorized as “them” and presented as a threat to “us” (Osuri and Banerjee 2004: 167). In many ways hip-hop has undergone similar processes of representation, with mainstream media “othering” it through an overt emphasis on narratives of poverty and deprivation, black on black gang violence, lawlessness, militant behavior, sexism, misogyny, and homophobia. That hip-hop’s emergence as a youth culture brought together diverse influences from Arab, Islamic, African American, and Hispanic cultures, both local and diasporic, is rarely represented (Saeed 2009: 395). As was noted earlier, media representation of hip-hop subsumed any links to Islam within narratives of Black Nationalism. When gangsta rap arrived in

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1988 with N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton, the US media was able to shift its attention to well-used narratives of lawlessness, drug culture, gang warfare, and black on black violence, as well as sexism, homophobia, and commoditized misogyny. Thus, African American youth were increasingly depicted through the frames of suspicion and hysteria that echoed tropes used in the framing of Muslims. Rather than emphasizing the similarities, however, this framing had the effect of washing Islam from the popular history of hip-hop with mainstream television documentaries making no attempt to acknowledge either Black Nationalism, NOI, 5percenter, or political rap, even though many of the biggest artists in hip-hop continued to follow one of the Islamic sects (especially the 5percenters), and rap lyrics continued to be informed by Islamic wordplay. These documentaries chose instead to skip the era of KRS1, Public Enemy, and other notable Islamic crews. For example, The Hip Hop Years (1999) produced in the UK by Channel 4, scripted hip-hop’s history within a mainstreamed white pop lineage that ignores all reference to the difficult ideas of Black Nationalism and American Islam by jumping directly from Blondie’s celebration of the early days of hip-hop in “Rapture” (1981) to the commercially successful genre of gangsta rap in the late 1980s. An accompanying book makes some attempt to address the era in more detail but without discussion of the foundational role of Islam (Ogg and Upshal 1999). US documentary Rap: Looking for the Perfect Beat (1994) was a rarity among early hip-hop films as it noted the roles of figures from the Black Nationalist and Civil Rights movements and opened with Malcolm X’s “This is a white man’s country” speech before cutting to footage of his funeral clearly depicting Muslims praying for the former NOI spokesman.1 Direct links between hiphop and Malcolm X are further shown through specific reference to the cover of Boogie Down Productions’ By All Means Necessary (1988) in which KRS1 is depicted in homage to an iconic Malcolm X photo, peering through a window while holding a gun. The album title itself echoed Malcolm X’s demand that NOI’s civil rights aims should be achieved “by any means necessary.” There is no direct reference to NOI, or indeed to 5percenters, in the documentary; yet, while the role of religious doctrine in hip-hop’s formation may not be overt, there are still clear connotations within the narrative. Christianity is, however,

1

Malcolm X had turned to Sunni Islam before his assassination in 1965.

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foregrounded through the insertion of controversial anti-gangsta rap activist Pastor Calvin Butts of the Harlem-based Abyssinian Baptist Church in the City of New York, who had fashioned himself as a spokesperson for inner-city black neighborhoods and was used in the documentary as a key commentator.2 In an act of narrative subversion that would become commonplace in mainstream hip-hop documentaries, Afrika Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation is referred to in the documentary as being “almost like a religion.” More dominant, however, is the story of the Zulu Nation’s emergence from a youth in gangs. This would become narrativized as a process of enlightenment, or epiphany. Bambaataa (and others) thus become depicted as reaching beyond the constraints of gang culture toward a more meaningful, or spiritual, life. Despite being loosely arranged around the hip-hop biography of Bambaataa, BBC Television documentary Beat This: A Hip-hop History (1984) similarly focuses on his enlightenment from gangs and violence, rather than covering the theological guidance that inspired the formation of the Zulu Nation. Despite an establishing shot of Bambaataa’s call for black people to reclaim their histories through the opening lyrics to his track “Planet Rock” and a short snippet of Malcolm X giving his “by any means necessary” speech (sampled on the Keith LaBlanc track “No Sell Out”), no context for this inclusion was offered. Instead, a “road to Damascus” narrative was employed, thus aligning hip-hop with Christian theological rhetoric over any Islamic influences. Yet Bambaataa’s creation of Zulu Nation was largely informed by nonChristian ideologies and, in an act of strategic cohesion, it was formed from the New York gang the Black Spades alongside members of rival gangs Savage Nomads, Seven Immortals, and Savage Skulls. Together they focused on urban survival through cultural empowerment (Mohaiemen 2008: 320) via a doctrine that fused 5percenter theology with orthodox Sunni teachings, and the Afrocentric Nubianism of Dr. Malachi York (Imam Isa), founder and leader of the Brooklyn-based 1960s Black separatist group United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors (or Nuwabians). York drew clear lines between Black American Islam and white (pale) Christianity. By the 1980s this division was exploited by the NOI who, under the leadership of Louis Farrakhan, adopted highly visible support

2

Although a self-proclaimed fan of hip-hop, Butts used his position to attack gangsta rap in public campaigns. On one occasion, he brought together a few hundred of his followers in an attempt to steamroll over boxes of offending gangsta rap cassettes and CDs but found himself blocked by hiphop fans. Instead, he and his followers boarded a bus to midtown Manhattan where they dumped the boxes outside the Madison Avenue headquarters of the Sony Corporation.

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for hip-hop at a time when Christian churches took an antagonistic approach to the youth movement. As Mohaiemen (2008) notes, while Reverend Calvin Butts was driving steamrollers over gangsta rap cassettes and CDs, Farrakhan could be seen engaging with some of the leading rappers of the time, and in turn connecting with hip-hop youth (Mohaiemen 2008: 322). Although it should be noted that both Beat This: A Hip-hop History (1984) and The Hip-Hop Years (1999) were British productions and therefore aimed at a market that would be less concerned with issues of American civil rights— while also pointing to a media blindness to Islam in the UK—their approaches typified how the mainstream media had dealt with hip-hop prior to the Taliban’s September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Centre Towers in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington.

Hip-hop Documentaries Post-9/11 Post-9/11, the media adopted an acute focus on anti-Islamic rhetoric through President Bush’s “War on Terror.” Muslim religious leaders and organizations in the United States and around the world denounced the attacks as un-Islamic, yet the United States saw a huge rise in Islamophobic activities, with the FBI reporting a 1,600 percent increase in Muslim hate crime in the period following the attacks (Ser 2016). It is useful to briefly explore how, in December 2001, a post-9/11, anti-Islamic media narrative became closely linked to hip-hop after American intelligence officers captured Jonathan Walker Lindh, who was fighting with the Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Lindh was an American youth who had converted to Islam as a teenager. An initial narrative of “us” the United States versus “them,” “the Muslim terrorists,” became re-interrogated through a narrative of “the enemy within.” Media outlets in the United States started to investigate why Lindh might have turned his back on his own country and joined forces with a terrorist group fighting against US forces. A cursory investigation into Lindh’s formative years revealed him to be a fan of hip-hop, and this proved enough for Newsweek to run the headline: “How did John Walker Lindh go from hip hop to holy war?” The article revealed that he had been introduced to Islam through hip-hop lyrics, especially those by 5percent rapper Nas. Hip-hop’s associations with Islam came under an overtly negative media spotlight, with NOI and 5percenters gaining close attention. That spotlight

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intensified in October 2002, when the suburbs of Washington, DC, became terrorized by the “Beltway Sniper,” who killed ten people and wounded a further three. Messages left by the sniper drew on phrases associated with 5percenter theology. US news outlets such as USA Today started to make explicit links between the sniper and both the NOI and the 5percenters. Artists such as Busta Rhymes, the Wu-Tang Clan, Rakim Allah (of Eric B and Rakim), and Brand Nubian were drawn into the spotlight as forces that represented Islam through their lyrics. The narrative shifted from “the enemy within” to “the enemy that talks directly to our teenagers.” When the Beltway Sniper was discovered to be two people—John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo—much was made of Muhammad’s links to the NOI, and a media war began to be waged against hip-hop’s supposedly destructive influence. This raised two key problems for both US government agenda-setting and the industry of hip-hop. First of all, it shifted attention from the image of the terrorist that was then being promoted by the Bush administration: of middle-eastern Muslims, rather than white American or African American youth lacking in unifying religious associations. The “War on Terror” required a clearly defined “foreign” target, and in this model American kids could not be implicated. Second, from a business perspective, the negative focus on hip-hop had the potential to cause irreparable damage to an industry which, by this stage, barely recognized its Muslim roots, and increasingly denied any alignment with Black Nationalism. This was thanks to the domination and success of gangsta rap, which had already shifted focus from the tropes of Black Nationalism and African American Islam, and instead offered up the spectacle of Black youth and a Black underclass ensnared in a world of immanent and self-destructive violence. This could be argued to be a position that opposed Black Nationalist intentions to move beyond the economic and social constraints of inner-city deprivation and to teach across the borders of ghetto and suburb. Gangsta rap exemplified what Cornel West has defined as the “new cultural politics of difference” (West 1993): one which places emphasis on class and space rather than political ideology. It was a shift that had proved immensely popular with global youth markets, with hip-hop becoming the best-selling form of music at the turn of the millennium. Gangsta rap was at the vanguard of these sales and had subsequently become a powerful industry that stood to lose its market share should its product become associated with terrorism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, British TV documentary makers exemplified this post-9/11 narrative of hip-hop. For example, in Grab the Mic: 20 Years of

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Hip-Hop on MTV (2001), it is possible to see the machinations of the hip-hop industry prioritizing a popular history that avoided all reference to politics or religion, inevitably focusing on hip-hop’s consumer identity. The gold chains that were once rejected following NOI leader Louis Farrakhan’s claim that they represented the chains of slavery returned with a vengeance as rappers adopted them as an outward display of wealth. Using the talking head format, a host of well-known rappers spoke initially about the power of the entertainer and about the music video as a celebration of the performance aspects of the tenets of hiphop. This focus enabled MTV to place itself as the primary delivery platform for the message of hip-hop. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the documentary is the validation of MTV News as an authentic, unbiased news source for hiphop. Detail in the documentary was reduced to sentiment, with interviewees placing MTV as a “friend” of hip-hop due to its highly supportive representation of the controversial aspects of rap’s gangland associations, such as NOI rapper Snoop Dogg’s trial for first and second-degree murder in 1996. A common trope was the declaration that MTV was “brave” in the way it reflected the emotional response of the hip-hop community without the use of sensationalism. However, MTV was also celebrated for delivering its own sense of sensationalism through its coverage of Biggie Smalls’s funeral. The film cuts from the MTV reporter in the middle of a huge crowd as the funeral procession of cars passes, to Sean “Puffy” Combs explaining that although being in that procession was emotional, MTV’s coverage with aerial cameras was even more moving. The spectacle of the event thus became imbued with the authenticity of emotion. Grab the Mic: 20 Years of Hip-Hop on MTV (2001) reflected the hip-hop industry attempting to remove itself from issues that might damage further commercial success by presenting the history of hip-hop as a series of televisual events—from high budget live performances to iconic videos and on to courtroom drama—while sidestepping any foundational links to Black Nationalist rhetoric or the teachings of Islamic sects. The inclusion of renowned 5percenters Busta Rhymes, Eve, and Rza (from Wu Tang Clan) discussing hip-hop through ground-breaking videos and MTV events emphasized the sublimation of hiphop’s militant beginnings. In the documentary hip-hop became a simulacrum of itself. The mediation of hip-hop post-9/11, however, had huge political and economic implications. The “war on terror” required a continuation of the notion of the externalized enemy while the business needed distance from the popular media representation of the Islamic terrorist. Inevitably, the difficult

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issues of religion and Black Nationalism became side-stepped in favor of highly marketable public battles. Among the storytelling hooks popularized by the media is the simplistic oppositional “battle” narrative that has been employed throughout the history of popular music as a marker of authenticity (WisemanTrowse 2008). The 2003 documentary Beef, which takes a chronological look at the culture of the rap battle dating back to the early 1980s, explores the notion of gang war as self-aggrandizement without indicating its ideological links to 5percenter rap’s doctrine of “selfhood,” or of the Black man as Allah incarnate as outlined earlier. Perhaps more surprising for its lack of direct reference to NOI is the Public Enemy documentary Architects of Rap (2001), in which Chuck D., bandleader and once very public supporter of NOI leader Louis Farrakhan, takes the viewer on a tour of the key spaces of Public Enemy’s Long Island foundations. Furthermore, the film avoids any investigation into issues of Black Nationalism, or the many controversies that surrounded the band’s support for Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic views. These would not be dealt with in documentary form until the Public Enemy: Prophets of Rage (2011) film on BBC television in which Chuck D. blamed original member Professor Griff for being the band’s only advocate for the anti-Semitic teaching of the NOI. Despite the 5percenter claim that theirs was not a religion but “a way of life,” the common themes of the majority of post-9/11 hip-hop documentaries are located in the concept of the gang life. It was seemingly devoid of the teachings of the 5percenters, or indeed of the NOI. If their message had been about the pursuit of freedom through the acquisition of knowledge, then the post-9/11 hip-hop message was centered on the acquisition of power through consumer wealth. It would, however, be far too simplistic to claim that the documentaries of this era were simply responding to the increased materialism of gangsta hiphop. Indeed, as discussed earlier, many artists associated with this era of hip-hop still followed the teachings of Islam, but the media chose to ignore that aspect of the lyrics and instead focus on the more marketable aspects of the guns, drugs, women, and the beef.

Conclusion—the Hidden Hip-hop Ummah Islam has been a substantial aspect of American identity since the days of the founding fathers, but with the expression of Black Nationalism through Islamic

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sects NOI and 5percenters, Islamism and Black separatism became deeply conflated. Hip-hop emerged as a reflection of the faiths of inner-city African American populations while also representing the political demands of the era. The Orientalist narrative of East versus West that the mainstream media used to frame the global conflicts between America and Muslim nations posed a problem for the representation of hip-hop as it recognized the Muslim “enemy within.” The mainstream media initially exploited the practice of hiding Islam behind the political activities of Black separatism, but quickly embraced the narratives of gangsta rap’s black on black violence, gang activities, misogyny, drugs, and consumerism. As shown through the small selection of documentaries investigated, Islam has remained deeply hidden from mainstream media representation, and yet Islam has remained a significant aspect of hip-hop culture. Indeed, as with those documentaries focusing on Afrika Bambaataa, the featured artist’s personal religious beliefs are removed in favor of the more simplistic narratives of Christian epiphany from gang life. Similarly, artists such as Public Enemy who have been open in their religious and political beliefs have become silenced in favor of a “road to success” story. In the period since 9/11, Muslims have been highly visible in events such as the Arab Spring, as well as through open condemnation and subsequent retaliations to anti-Islamic media events such as the Charlie Hebdo caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. These events, coupled with growing fear of immigration, have sparked a worldwide backlash against young Muslims in particular who find themselves increasingly depicted as armed and dangerous (Nasir 2015). Islamic hip-hop has continued to grow in media darkness, following what Samy Alim has called the “transglobal hip hop Ummah” (2005: 254). Dedicated to the memory of friend and colleague Dr. Amir Saeed.

References Ahmed, Saifuddin. 2012. “Media Portrayals of Muslims and Islam and Their Influence on Adolescent Attitude: An Empirical Study from India.” Journal of Arab and Muslim Media Research 5 (3): 279–306. Alim, H. Samy. 2005. “A New Research Agenda: Exploring the Transglobal Hip-hop Ummah.’ In Muslim Networks, from Hajj to Hip-Hop, edited by Miriam Cooke and Bruce B. Lawrence, 264–74. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Architects of Rap. 2001. [TV series], House of Blues. Beat This: A Hip Hop History. 1984. [TV program], BBC, July 12. Beef. 2003. [Film], Dir. Peter Spirer, Aslan Productions, Open Road Films, QD3 Entertainment. Chang, Jeff. 2005. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-hop Generation. London: Ebury Press. Curtis, Edward E. IV. 2006. Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960–1975. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Esposito, John. 1995. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? Revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. GhaneaBassiri, Kambiz. 2010. A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grab the Mic: 20 Years of Hip-Hop on MTV. 2001. [TV program], MTV, May 5. Hodge, Daniel White. 2013. “No Church in the Wild: Hip Hop Theology and Mission.” Missiology: An International Review 41 (1): 97–109. Hutson, James H. 2002. “The Founding Fathers and Islam Library Papers Show Early Tolerance for Muslim Faith.” Library of Congress Information Bulletin, May 2002. https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0205/tolerance.html. Ibrahim, Dina. 2010. “The Framing of Islam on Network News Following the September 11th attacks.” International Communication Gazette 72 (1): 111–25. Kitwana, Bakara. 2004. “The Challenge of Rap Music from Cultural Movement to Political Power.” In That’s the Joint: the Hip-hop Studies Reader, edited by Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, 451–61. London: Routledge. Korteweg, Anna. 2008. “The Sharia Debate in Ontario: Gender, Islam, and Representations of Muslim Women’s Agency.” Gender & Society 22 (4): 434–54. Locke, John. 1689. A Letter Concerning Toleration, translated by William Popple. https:// socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/locke/toleration.pdf. Marr, Timothy. 2006. The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mishra, Smeeta. 2007. “Liberation vs Purity: Representations of Saudi Women in the American Press and American Women in the Saudi Press.” The Howard Journal of Communications 18 (3): 259–76. Miyakawa, Felicia. 2005. Five Percenter Rap: God Hop’s Music, Message, and Black Muslim Mission. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Mohaiemen, Naeem. 2008. “Fear of a Muslim Planet: Hip-hop’s Hidden History.” In Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, edited by Paul D. Miller, 313–36. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nasir, Kamaludeen Mohamed. 2015. “The September 11 Generation, Hip-hop and Human Rights.” Journal of Sociology 51 (4): 1030–51. Ogg, Alex and David Upshal. 1999. The Hip-Hop Years: A History of Rap. London: Channel 4 Books/Macmillan.

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Osuri, Goldie and Bobby Banerjee. 2004. “White Diasporas: Media Representations of September 11 and the Unbearable Whiteness of Being in Australia.” Social Semiotics 14 (2): 151–71. Poole, Elizabeth. 2002. Reporting Islam: Media Representations of British Muslims. London: I.B. Tauris. Powell Kimberly A. 2011. “Framing Islam: An Analysis of US Media Coverage of Terrorism Since 9/11.” Communication Studies 62 (1): 90–112. PRC. 2015. “Religious Composition by Country, 2010–2050.” Pew Research Center, April 2, 2015. https://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projectiontable/2010/number/all/. Public Enemy: Prophets of Rage. 2011. [TV program], BBC, December 9. Rap: Looking for the Perfect Beat. 1995. Dir. 1. Susan Shaw, LWT Production. Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Saeed, Amir. 2006. “Musical Jihad.” In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 4th edition, edited by John Storey, 63–74. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited. Said, Edward. 1980. “Islam Through Western Eyes.” The Nation 26: 14–18. Said, Edward. 1997. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, updated edition. New York: Random House. Ser, Kuang Keng Kuek. 2016. “Data: Hate Crimes Against Muslims Increased after 9/11.” The World, September 12, 2016. https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-09-12/data-hatecrimes-against-muslims-increased-after-911. Shaheen, Jack G. 2009. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Brooklyn, NY: Olive Branch Press. The Hip Hop Years. 1999. [TV series], Channel 4. Thornton, Sarah. 1990. “Strategies for Reconstructing the Popular Past.” Popular Music 9 (1): 87–95. Toop, David. 2000. Rap Attack #3: African Rap to Global Hip Hop. London: Serpents Tail. West, Cornel. 1993. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press. Wiseman-Trowse, Nathan. 2008. Performing Class in British Popular Music. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Younis, Mohamed. 2009. “Muslim Americans Exemplify Diversity.” https://news.gallup. com/poll/116260/Muslim-Americans-Exemplify-Diversity-Potential.aspx.

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Section Two

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5

“Exiles in Madison Square Garden”: Critical Reception and Journalistic Narratives of Progressive Rock in Melody Maker Magazine, 1971–1976 Chris Anderton

[Rock fans] feel deserted. Millionaire rock stars are no longer part of the brotherly rock fraternity which helped create them in the first place. Rock was meant to be a joyous celebration; the inability to see the stars, or to play the music of those you can see is making a whole generation of rock fans feel depressingly inadequate. … The Pistols are playing the music they want to hear. They are the tip of an iceberg. (Coon 1976a: 24) It has been argued that punk bands … are to be admired and congratulated for the rebellious stance they are assuming against the increasing and prevalent technological sophistication of the cosmic wonders like E.L.P, Yes and the Pink Floyd, and those once illustrious figures of the Sixties like the Stones, Who, Elton John and Rod Stewart … Honestly, if either Patti Smith or Johnny Rotten represents the future of rock—and I don’t think they do—then I’m off with the old lady to the air raid shelter until it all blows over. (Jones 1976: 25) These quotes come from the British music paper Melody Maker, regarded as a standard-bearer for progressive rock music from the late 1960s through to the mid1970s, and demonstrate a polarization of views regarding punk rock in its “Year Zero” (MacDonald 2003: 200) of 1976—a polarization that is at the heart of this chapter. In the early 1970s, the paper, launched in 1926 and initially aimed at jazz The opening quote of this chapter is taken from Waters (1975: 18).

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and dance band performers, was targeting the late teens/early twenties market, including college and university students and both amateur and professional musicians (Jasper 1972: 45). It was widely regarded as both a “thinking fans paper” (Anderton and Atton 2020: 12) and a “musician’s paper” (Barnes 2020: 364), and would include discussions about a broad range of musical styles, together with gig listings, instrument reviews, artist interviews, opinion pieces, features, and reviews of singles, albums, and concerts. It built “a community of fans” (and artists) for progressive music and established “a critical framework within which all subsequent discussion” would occur (Atton 2001: 31). This discussion tended to emphasize “musicianship” and “the idea of artistry linked to LPs” (Whiteley 1992: 38), hence promoted the notion that rock music could have artistic worth (Dowd et al. 2019: 5). Progressive rock music was also featured in two other weekly music papers, Sounds (launched in 1970) and New Musical Express (launched in 1946), though to a lesser extent than Melody Maker (Anderton and Atton 2020: 15–16). Across these three papers in the early 1970s, but most especially in Melody Maker, we see the valorization of rock musicians who seek to “develop and improve their playing technique” and to increase the “complexity of the music (whether musicological, technological, or ideological),” while audiences are characterized as embracing “the pleasures of listening rather than dancing” (Anderton and Atton 2020: 11). In this chapter, I will focus specifically on Melody Maker as an archival source to provide direct evidence from the time (feature articles, artist interviews, and readers’ letters), since such evidence has only rarely been examined and quoted in artist memoirs and academic or journalistic texts in the past.1 Where archival evidence has previously been examined, the authors have typically focused on the reception and critique found in the American underground press of Rolling Stone, Creem, or Zig Zag (Scott 2016: 56), or the coverage of specific artists in those magazines (Macan 1997, 2006; Sheinbaum 2002). Where British magazine coverage is discussed (Macan 1997; Stump 2010; Barnes 2020), it is, with the exception of Anderton and Atton (2020), rather partial in nature, or once again focused on specific artists. However, by tracking the fortunes of progressive rock in a single, highly influential publication, we are able to trace the development of journalistic and fan narratives regarding progressive rock music in greater detail. This also allows us to look beyond the historical stereotyping that developed in the late 1970s, and in the context of a publication that, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, typically offered positive coverage of the bands we would today 1

This is also the case for punk rock (see Street et al. 2018).

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classify as progressive rock. For instance, throughout the early 1970s members of bands such as E.L.P. and Yes regularly topped the annual readers’ polls for best musicians (Welch 2007: 173). In undertaking this analysis, a more nuanced understanding of this part of British music history may be offered; one that investigates a range of factors raised within Melody Maker for the apparent decline in progressive rock’s fortunes, hence setting the scene for punk rock’s Year Zero and the ongoing perception that “punk killed prog.” Derek Scott refers to a “new breed of pop journalists” that emerged in the UK in the mid-1970s (influenced by the theorists of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) who acted as a “popular art police” and who described progressive rock music “as a pretentious and elitist betrayal of popular music values” (2016: 58). This is similar to John Sheinbaum’s research into US criticism, where he argues that progressive rock was lambasted for its lack of authenticity (a divergence from rock’s natural and simplistic R’n’B roots), its self-conscious virtuosity and technicality, and its tendency to merge different stylistic elements (2002: 21–8). Punk’s emergence in 1976 is regarded as a return to rock’s roots, as a death knell for progressive rock—its “other”—and as a musical form that “changed everything … [and following which] basic musical articulacy became thin on the ground” (MacDonald 2003: 201). Yet, as Hegarty and Halliwell note, “What now looks like part of standard rock history has had very grand claims made of it” (2011: 165), and the punk explosion of 1976 didn’t immediately have an impact on the major progressive rock acts of the era. For instance, as Chris Squire of Yes has stated: “By the time punk rock was happening … we were playing to 130,000 people in stadiums” (quoted by Robinson 2011: 63). This has, of course, been identified as one of the problems with progressive rock—the gigantism of their live shows making them seem distant from their audience— yet it is by no means relevant to all progressive rock acts during the early 1970s, as will be explored below. In sum, an evaluation based on archival evidence is long overdue, both in the run up to 1976 (as discussed in this chapter) and in the years which followed, as examined by Andy Bennett in this book. The remainder of the chapter is rooted in a close reading of Melody Maker from 1970 to 1976, with attention paid both to journalistic commentary and reviews, and to the views of readers whose letters were published by the paper. Two main narratives are identified, which lead to different understandings regarding the problems that progressive rock faced in the early 1970s. There is a narrative, most closely related to the notion of “punk killed prog” that focuses on the major bands of the era: those that sold millions of albums, toured the

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world, and have become synonymous with the term progressive rock. These are the bands of the “symphonic orthodoxy” (Anderton 2010), including Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Genesis, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, and King Crimson. A second narrative relates to the bands that operated at a national level within the UK during the same era but did not attain the album sales success of the first league bands noted above. I will argue that this is, in part, due to structural issues within the music industry of the time—issues that the premier groups were able to sidestep. I will discuss this two-tier market, and the two broad narratives that relate to them, through three sections that outline arguments appearing in the pages of Melody Maker in the early 1970s. First, that the existing rock bands were becoming bland and unimaginative at a time when no new bands of quality or interest were coming through. Second, that the grassroots live sector and BBC radio coverage that had previously supported the development of new rock artists was under threat, with youthful audiences increasingly seeking something other than progressive sounds and styles. And finally, that the rock music industry as a whole had entered an era of stagnation due to a global recession, inflationary pressures, and high income tax rates. Punk’s Year Zero may be presented as a sudden and sharp rupture with the past, but in this analysis I will show how the conditions for punk rock’s emergence had been building for several years beforehand, and how these conditions affected the top tier and grassroots artists of the early 1970s in divergent ways.

“I hope something will come along very soon”2 Arguments about the moribund “state of rock” appeared in Melody Maker as early as 1971 when Roy Hollingworth’s think piece argued that rock had become “too respectable” and was “now an establishment” (1971: 11). His article, together with others that criticize the “rock establishment” (Melody Maker 1973: 32–3) over the next four years, refers not to progressive rock as it has become canonized but to rock music across the board. The blame is laid on the “trendy critic, or personality [who] became the Establishment intellectual groupie, holding back tears, and producing penned dramatics to the noise of Velvet Underground” (Hollingworth 1971: 11). These are the critics who gave

2

William Mann (critic of The Times [London]) quoted by Roy Hollingworth (1971: 11).

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validation to “double-decked words, and nauseating musical vocabulary” (Hollingworth 1971). In the article he interviews television producer Jack Good (famous for series such as Six-Five Special, Oh Boy! and Shindig) who suggests that “the music now produced is done with half an eye to what will be said about it in influential quarters. Musicians began to pretend, to write things that were too long, and downright dismal.” This critique extends beyond Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Jethro Tull, and so on, to include critics who philosophize about The Who and Van Morrison (Hollingworth 1971: 11). William Mann, the Times critic who had praised the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album in 1967, argued that “some rock is for entertaining and some is for listening … I don’t agree that it spoils the whole image if you have to take certain aspects seriously,” yet he also notes that: “There’s an awful lot to rebel about, and rock certainly isn’t doing it” before concluding that he hoped that: “Something will come along very soon. It’s about time something outrageous happened … But something else will come along, I’m sure of it” (quoted by Hollingworth 1971: 11). Hollingworth concurred: “For God’s sake, somebody please put two fingers up to Society [sic], stick a tongue out—and just be dirty” (1971: 11). His call seems to have gone largely unheeded (at least within the pages of Melody Maker), yet he persisted with his theme the following year in a feature article on the thenunsigned New York Dolls: These are young New Yorkers, seemingly unimpressed with the switches and swatches of progressive music—as is their growing audience. Not for them any boring, endless singer-songwriter, not for them any polite sobering up in the quality of rock. (Hollingworth 1972: 17)

Hollingworth argued further that the New York Dolls and bands like them in New York offered “the rebellion needed to crush the languid cloud of nothingness that rolls out from the rock establishment” (Hollingworth 1972). By 1973, it would seem that the staff writers at Melody Maker were coming around to this opinion, with features praising the grassroots glam rock and pub rock bands that were emerging in the UK at that time, while also offering negative reviews of new albums and concerts by the rock establishment—and not just from progressive groups such as Yes, E.L.P., and Jethro Tull. Indeed Melody Maker’s 1973 “Rock Report” also includes: Humble Pie, Uriah Heep, Wishbone Ash, T. Rex, Led Zeppelin, The Who, the Rolling Stones, Ten Years After, Black Sabbath, Slade, Traffic, Strawbs, Faces, Free, Soft Machine, and the Moody Blues (1973: 32–3). All of these bands receive criticism, either for

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performing well in the US and neglecting their British fans (such as Humble Pie, Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath, The Who, Traffic, and Wishbone Ash), or for losing their musical direction. Yet, they are also given grudging respect for their sales success. Examples include these entries for Jethro Tull and E.L.P.: Opinions on albums like “Thick As A Brick” [by Jethro Tull] range from claims for outstanding genius to dismissals for being tediously unimaginative. The available evidence is mostly on the side of the latter … [yet they remain] a money-making machine which shows no signs of slowing down. (Melody Maker 1973: 33) It’s probably too late for them [E.L.P.] to develop a sense of taste or any emotional depth, but as kings of flashy superficiality (of the best kind) they’ll take a lot of beating. (Melody Maker 1973: 32)

The Moody Blues are described as “repetitive and hollow,” while Soft Machine are lauded for having three excellent composers in the band but criticized for having a poor image and suffering from “joylessness” (Melody Maker 1973: 33). Even Pink Floyd, whose recently released Dark Side of the Moon album would stay in the album chart for years to come, was not immune to criticism: “It’s hard to believe that their hearts are entirely in the Music of the Spheres, and their major enemy may prove to be boredom” (Melody Maker 1973). There is an acknowledgment that “breaking America” is key to significant success, with T. Rex criticized for their failure to do so, and both Strawbs and Slade described as needing to do so in order to move on to the next level. The readers’ letters that appeared in response to the 1973 “Rock Report” confirm a growing sense of dissatisfaction among British fans, though again this is not solely directed at those bands we now classify as progressive rock. For instance, one reader argues that the top acts are “bored, uninspired and lazy” with specific reference to Rod Stewart (Faces), Pete Townshend (The Who), and Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) (Hotwell 1973: 64). Another letter refers to “the lack of enthusiasm and inventiveness shown by these bands. No new and original groups seem to be emerging either, with the possible exception of Roxy Music” (Warner 1973: 64). For this reader, the problem is that the existing stars are “retiring to a life of stagnation in the country estate or immigration to foreign parts, only producing an annual uninspired LP and making the occasional live appearance” (Warner 1973). Similarly, a third letter bemoans that “British progressive groups are growing up and being lured by big money. Everyone says ‘the potential is there.’ Not to progress music though—that’s unimportant now—

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but to make the cash” (Kestral 1973: 64). Later that year, journalist Michael Watts argues that the contemporary scene is “the establishment and big business. Half the bands in Christendom are now backed by merchant banks. That’s not pop’s fault3; it was only trying to grow up” (1973: 13). As with Roy Hollingworth in 1972, Watts highlights the New York Dolls as a “great kick in the ass to the corpus of rock and roll … they’re provocative and divide an audience so sharply” (Watts 1973: 13). The division is demonstrated by a reader’s letter included on the same page which refers to the band’s performance on the Old Grey Whistle Test4: “I have never, at any level, seen such an amateurish performance or heard such an unmoving, meaningless row” (Moxon 1973: 13). Six months later, in June 1974, journalist Allan Jones wrote a think piece about the stagnation of the album chart (discussed further below) in which he referred to: “Redundant music for redundant love children” (1974a: 23)5. For Jones, “Rock’s inherent aggression has been sucked into a state of impotency” (1974a), thus extending the line of argument that had begun to grow over the previous three years, though the “progressive” bands are now specifically targeted. Pink Floyd, the Moody Blues, and Yes are named, though E.L.P. and the Mahavishnu Orchestra are also alluded to. Of Yes (who had released the critically reviled Tales from Topographic Oceans double album in December 1973) he said: “however sincere Anderson’s belief in God and Love as a divine healer of our problems, he’s just unable to transpose those higher thoughts to a convincing rock ‘n’ roll concept” (1974a). Furthermore, he regards Yes and similar bands as “just the tip of an iceberg threatening to freeze rock to death in some wasteland of sterility … with one foot in heaven and both hands around a suitcase full of used dollar bills” (1974a). Jones’s deliberately provocative journalism sparked rebuttals from Melody Maker’s readership. For instance, Phil Harding wrote that:

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In Melody Maker, during the late 1960s and early 1970s it was not unusual to find the terms “rock” and “pop” used synonymously, hence there are references to “progressive pop,” the “pop scene,” and so on, which in context are clearly referring to the album-focused bands that we now classify as rock (see also Anderton and Atton 2020). The Old Grey Whistle Test was a long-running BBC television show (1971–1988) that focused on albums rather than singles. Jones was hired by Melody Maker editor Ray Coleman in April 1974 after the latter had advertised in Time Out magazine for new, young writers that were “highly opinionated” (Jones 2017: 1). It appeared to be a response to the paper’s main rival NME, which had recruited writers from the “underground” press such as Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray in 1972. Their irreverent and acerbic style made Melody Maker appear “regrettably stuffy, sober and staid” in comparison (Jones 2017: 2).

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Media Narratives in Popular Music I didn’t pay £3 odd for an album like “Topographic Oceans” because it’s so “meaningful.” I bought it and listen to it because I like the way it sounds. And I think this applies to most other people too …6 What’s wrong with rock musicians being openly intelligent, intellectual even, about their music? Are they any less important or relevant to rock because they take care in the composition and presentation of their music, exploit the full range of instrumental sounds and textures available to them and don’t bellow obscenities at the audience when they get on the stage? (Harding 1974: 19)

The latter was a dig at Allan Jones’s validation of Iggy Pop as the way forward for rock—another American back-to-basics rock performer. As another letter states, “Jones’ type of thinking could only result in a total uniformity of the music scene in which everyone would sound like Iggy” (White and Holoway 1974: 19). Two years later, the development of British punk rock would, of course, push things in that very direction. However, at this stage, the paper is still treading the fine line between catering to the record companies that provide the advertising revenue it relies on (and who are pushing the top tier artists of the time), and a readership that seems to be fracturing between those fans who continue to support the work of those artists (consistently voting for them in annual polls run by the paper), and those who are craving something new. As I will explore later, this reflects a peri-generational split between fans who had grown up with the rock music of the late 1960s and were now in their mid- to late twenties (as were many of the band members), and fans in their mid- to late teens who had not.7

“All that Woodstock bit is over … Audiences are younger now”8 In the late 1960s, there was a vibrant live music scene in the UK, made up of city-based clubs, the Students Union (“college”) circuit, and a large number of cinemas and halls, yet few large-scale venues capable of hosting the top tier artists

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Tales from Topographic Oceans was Yes’ first #1 album in the UK chart, with Close to the Edge (1972) and Relayer (1974) both achieving #4 position. The only other Yes album to top the UK album chart was Going for the One, released in 1977. The prefix peri- is used to denote this closeness in age in contrast to the usual definition of a generation, which is typically a gap of around twenty years. Eric Faulkner of the Bay City Rollers, quoted by Jones (1974b: 3).

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that had emerged at this time (Frith et al. 2019: 51–5). As in the United States, one solution had been to host outdoor festivals, but high-profile failures in both the United States and the UK in the early 1970s made both promoters and local authorities wary, with the festival circuit largely collapsing in the United States and fragmenting in the UK (Arnold 2018; Anderton 2019). In the United States, the ballroom circuit that had sustained the development of rock was replaced by an arena circuit that successful British bands soon became accustomed to. As touring was principally aimed at promoting record sales (with the latter often subsidizing loss-making tours), the United States became an especially important market due to its size, hence the potential to sell large numbers of albums. By 1968, Melody Maker journalist Chris Welch was lamenting that “our progressive groups have deserted these shores for the US” (1968: 11). This was to continue in the early 1970s, with fellow Melody Maker journalist Dave Hewson referring to it as “Atlantic Syndrome” (1970: 20). During 1970 and 1971, the paper reports that live music clubs have closed down because the top tier bands (or their representatives) are asking for too much money. The college circuit was initially able to afford the top bands of the time as they could operate as a relatively “low-risk business” due to financial subsidies from other Union activities (Long 2011: 130), but the increasing success and technical requirements of bands in the early 1970s posed insurmountable problems. It also made it difficult for newly launched bands to meet the higher production values that audiences for existing bands had become used to, making it hard for them to compete. As Rod Argent noted in 1974, a band “needs five or six grand before it can start. If they haven’t got the same sound as the big groups, then the kids won’t listen” (Melody Maker 1974a: 49). Nevertheless, the college circuit remained important for upand-coming bands, particularly the “progressive” groups, due to the musical preferences of the Students Union social secretaries of the time (Jasper 1972: 38). The emphasis on progressive groups—those for listening, not dancing (Anderton and Atton 2020: 11)—was not universally welcomed, and during 1970 and 1971 reports appeared in Melody Maker that the college circuit was booking artists such as Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsets, and the Wild Angels, whose music was mainstream rock ‘n’ roll. In addition, there was a rise in the provision of discotheques (in both college and club venues) that provided cheaper entertainment and a chance to hear “the hits” rather than the original music of the rock bands. Universities and colleges with a disproportionate ratio of males to females (such as Aston University in Birmingham and Strathclyde University in Glasgow) also reported that it was difficult to persuade “students

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to accept music that involves listening and not athleticism on the dance floor” and that progressive music was not attracting enough women to the concerts—a major reason for attending such social events (Watts 1971: 20). As the growth of the static and mobile discotheques sector grew9, so did the polarization of the live music market between the top tier bands who played only occasionally in the UK and the up-and-coming bands of the club circuit who found opportunities to play becoming increasingly restricted and little better paid than they had been ten years earlier (Henshaw 1974: 63). Roy Williams, a booker working for Sound Entertainment, is quoted in the paper arguing that: The demand for mobile discos increases as that for groups decreases! And most public venues now operate discos. The only work for groups is at private dances—rugger, soccer, cricket functions, etc.—and the colleges. During the summer vacation, when the colleges are closed, you are dead. (quoted by Henshaw 1974: 63)

Barry Dickins of MAM concurred, stating that: Five years ago there were hundreds of clubs; now there’s nothing like that … This is the only thing you’ve got left—the colleges. And you’ve got a million groups trying to get into the colleges. (quoted by Henshaw 1974: 63)

As the potential live circuit for lower-tier rock bands contracted in the early 1970s, so did the promotional opportunities for them to gain national radio airplay. BBC Radio 1 had been created in 1967 to meet the growing demand for “underground” rock music,10 and to compete with the pirate radio stations of the time which had a more liberal programming regime (Pirenne 2005). In the early 1970s, Radio 1’s Sounds of the Seventies programs became particularly important, as these daily shows featured album-based rock music and were broadcast in stereo (Wall and Dubber 2009: 34). In order to meet the stringent “needle time” requirements placed on the BBC by the Musicians’ Union (Barnes 2020: 372), these shows featured the broadcast of not only album tracks but also many instudio live recordings by up-and-coming bands, thus giving many artists muchneeded promotion in the early stages of their careers. By 1974, the BBC’s support had waned, with severe financial cuts leading to reduced programming for

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By 1974 there were an estimated “7,000 regular set ups and about 20,000—25,000 mobile” discotheques in the UK (Henshaw 1974: 63). In the late 1960s press, terms such as “underground,” “progressive,” and “heavy” were used interchangeably (Anderton and Atton 2020).

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Sounds of the Seventies (Melody Maker 1974b: 4). According to Melody Maker, this was to “pull Radio One towards the pop and easy listening format” (Melody Maker 1974b). It was a move heavily criticized by the paper at the time and by those working in the rock music field. For instance, concert promoter Harvey Goldsmith lamented that “the music Radio One is playing has no relation to the current live trends. Absolutely zero” (quoted by Partridge 1974a: 8). Yet it did reflect changes in the singles market and in particular the emergence of the “New Pop” as Robert Partridge called it (1974b: 30). In his article, Partridge noted how singles had often been used merely as trailers for upcoming albums, but by 1973 had become a profitable market in their own right, with record label Bell releasing 64 singles in 1973 with a “hit ratio” of one in three (1974b). The artists listed included glam rock performers such as Gary Glitter, Slade, and the Sweet alongside the bubblegum pop of the Osmonds, Dawn, and David Cassidy. A couple of months later, Allan Jones, in an article about groups such as Suzi Quatro, Mud and the Rubettes, interviewed Eric Faulkner of the Bay City Rollers: All that Woodstock bit is over … Audiences are younger now. And that’s where we come in. We’re about the same age as the kids who come to see us. We know how to entertain them. So many of the people written about in the music papers are nearly thirty. They’ve grown away from the kids. (Quoted by Jones 1974b: 3)

The suggestion that rock had grown up and left a younger audience behind had been raised in the paper since at least 1972 when Roy Hollingworth’s article on the New York Dolls argued that “rock music must be young,” and that the Dolls were both “very young” and “crawling out of the shadows cast by their elders” (1972: 17). By 1974 the perception of a youth market no longer interested in rock has become commonplace, with Greg Lake (of E.L.P.) arguing that “the 12, 13, 14 year olds are not so deeply into music as we were. There’s no commitment to a revolutionary thing … Just being in a rock and roll band won’t make it anymore. Those days are over” (quoted by Melody Maker 1974a: 8). Similarly, concert promoter Harvey Goldsmith, musing on the lack of young talent coming through the rock field, stated that the “age where everybody rushed and bought a guitar or whatever instead of a record player seems to be over” (quoted by Henshaw 1974: 63). There is a growing sense by 1974 that rock music is the music of the late 1960s, made by musicians from that era, and that its time was coming to an end as younger fans sought new sounds. This cannot be classed as an

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inter-generational issue, since there is only ten years or so difference in age; as a result, I refer to this as a peri-generational conflict, with younger siblings (too young to have seen the major bands performing on the club circuit, and too young to attend college shows11) looking for music that they could call their own, and a social movement that was not connected to the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s. Glam rock, pub rock, US punk rock, and the New Pop were all championed in the pages of the Melody Maker as potential routes forward, but none caught on as significantly as punk rock was to do. In 1975, the perigenerational conflict turns to criticism of older musicians and their lack of understanding of the youth of the day. In Idris Walters’ think piece from April 1975, he writes: Who are the record-breaking globetrotters, the earthsphere electric ambassadors that the critics like to knock, the exiles in Madison Square Garden?12 [They are the] “rock ‘n’ roll gentry … the talented over-30s … [who] threaten the concept of live music by putting on shows grand enough to match the music on their million selling albums. (1975: 18)

By 1976 Caroline Coon, whose articles for the Melody Maker crystallized and promoted the emergent punk rock scene of the time, would argue that the “trouble is, in the last five years, the rock stars have become ‘adults,’ they have forgotten that crucial to their appeal was their rebellious stance” (1976a: 24). Of particular interest here is the list of acts that she criticizes, because it has returned once more to rock music in general, not just to those artists we now identify as progressive rock. For instance, Mick Jagger, The Who, and the Byrds are all mentioned as are the Beatles who she refers to as “the fastest expanding nostalgia industry yet conceived” (1976a). In the article she separates out the “psychedelic bands” such as Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Soft Machine, and Pink Floyd from “Progressive Rock,” which includes Queen and Roxy Music alongside E.L.P., Jethro Tull, Yes, Rick Wakeman, and Genesis. All of these bands, psychedelic or progressive, are referred to as “middle-class, affluent or university academics”—they are “gentleman rockers and their music can only be played by

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College shows were limited to students with NUS (National Union of Students) identification, so younger fans would be unable to attend. The general public would also be unable to attend (unless they knew a student who could get them in as a guest), so the audience for up-and-coming rock (progressive or otherwise) was constricted yet further. The most successful touring bands of the era would regularly sell out the Madison Square Garden venue in New York for several nights in a row.

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people with similar academic temperaments” (1976a).13 The article is notable, therefore, not only for being one of the first on UK punk rock in a national music paper, but for delineating, canonizing, and stereotyping psychedelic and progressive rock along both musical and class lines: stereotypes that would cling to progressive rock and be extended upon for many years to come.

“We’ve already got Yes, why should we want another?”14 In 1974 Melody Maker asked a range of rock musicians and business people the following question: “British rock: are we facing disaster?” (1974a: 8). In addition to the already discussed views about rock music losing steam and becoming creatively moribund, the contributors discussed the economics of the music business, and the problems facing Britain in relation to the ongoing economic recession, though musician Rory Gallagher noted that the recession was not yet hitting the United States to the same extent. This no doubt contributed to the top-tier bands focusing their attention on the United States at this time, to the detriment of the UK audience. Alongside this article was another written by journalist Robert Partridge who analyzed the album chart and found that it had become largely static, with the same albums (from Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, Mike Oldfield, and the Carpenters) remaining in the Top Ten for months on end. While recognizing that album sales had continued to rise during 1973 and into the first half of 1974, he warned that vinyl was now in short supply and paper costs were rising.15 This, he says, had led the record companies to talk of “cutting their artist rosters and release schedules to accommodate demand for their big selling records” (Partridge 1974: 8). While most of those interviewed blamed the “lack of new talent” coming through or the failure of the BBC to promote quality bands rather than pop, Dave Dee (A&R for Atlantic) argued that the bands that were coming through sounded too much like existing ones: “We’ve already got

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Hegarty and Halliwell (2011: 166) note that many bands outside of the top tier were by no means wealthy, while Barnes (2020), Walker (2008), and others have countered the assertion that progressive rock’s musicians were predominantly middle-class. Furthermore, the bands of the “symphonic orthodoxy” typically showed excellent technical skills as performers, but many other bands within the broader “progressive rock” category did not rely on this for their success (Anderton 2010). Dave Dee (A&R for Atlantic Records) quoted by Robert Partridge (1974b: 9). This was due, in part, to the effects of an OPEC oil embargo, which led to the imposition of a threeday working week and severe restrictions on the use of electricity in the UK.

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Yes, why should we want another?” (quoted by Partridge 1974: 9). In an era of economic recession, it was clearly better to promote successful artists with a consistent track record than to invest in new and untried artists—particularly at a time when journalists and industry personnel were concerned about the future of rock. Any new and progressive bands hoping to emulate the success achieved by the top tier groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s faced difficulties across the board in the mid-1970s, with opportunities to play live and build a following more restricted than ever before and the promotional outlet of national radio shrinking in significance. Add to that the financial issues faced by the record companies and a press nervous about what would or would not sell in the future, and it is little wonder that the grassroots of progressive rock dwindled during this era. Robert Fripp (of King Crimson) (1992) has argued that the “amateurism surrounding the rock business had professionalized by about 1974,” and this can be related not only to the record companies but to the top tier bands of the time for whom global success was seemingly assured. For instance, in 1975, Idris Walters suggested that such artists were now “executives of their own label[s],” and gave examples such as Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song Records and Deep Purple’s Purple Records, though he might also have added E.L.P.’s Manticore Records and many more (1975: 18). It is a theme revisited by Caroline Coon in 1976 when she referred to Led Zeppelin and Bad Company as having “become multi-national corporations, casualties of the business ethic” (1976a: 25). She extends this to a neo-Marxist critique by arguing that rock music of the 1960s was “anti-elitist,” a voice “from and of the people,” hence rock’s maturity in the mid-1970s was a betrayal of the true meaning of rock. Such sentiments resonated with some, though not all, readers. One argued that “there are no social pressures on these superstars. They can escape; they have their money,” before lamenting that the rock stars of the day were complaining about UK tax laws: “Robert Plant doesn’t have to scrounge for fags on a Tuesday after getting paid before the weekend” (Greenwood 1976: 48)16. Others were less convinced by Coon’s analysis: “Vitality and energy are, of course, the foundations of rock music, but what’s wrong with intelligence and skill?” (Burns 1976: 48). As many other authors have noted, it is the neo-Marxist critique that continued to grow during 1976 and 1977 as the distinction between the top tier artists and those at the grassroots continued 16

The top rate of income tax was raised to 83 percent in 1974, leading many rock and pop musicians to go into “tax exile” by moving abroad, thereby avoiding the need to pay it (Stump 2010: 166–7).

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to extend, and the Do-It-Yourself movement took hold. As one fan attending the Punk Rock Festival at the 100 Club in London said to Coon: “We’ve got another underground at last … I’ve waited seven years for this” (1976b: 27)— a comment which reinforces the peri-generational split discussed earlier. A number of articles published by the Melody Maker had, since 1971, been calling for something new to arrive in the world of rock music, but it took the perigenerational conflict of the mid-1970s before it would reach fruition. And even then, as Andy Bennett’s chapter in this book shows, it wasn’t a complete victory over the progressive musicians that had achieved success in the 1970s—at least, not over those in the top tier of the business.

Conclusion This chapter has used Melody Maker as an archival source to gain a more nuanced understanding of the factors that led to the decline of the grassroots progressive rock scene of the early 1970s, while the top-tier groups found global success in the album charts and on world tours. Punk rock’s Year Zero may be regarded as the culmination of economic, business, and cultural factors that had been developing since at least 1971, including a peri-generational split that saw younger music fans seeking a new music and scene to call their own. The paper shows this conflict through the divergent views expressed by journalists and readers of the time, views that were centered on rock music as a whole, not just on those bands that Caroline Coon would later canonize as progressive rock. A detailed examination of the other music papers of the time might demonstrate an alternative narrative; yet, by focusing on Melody Maker in particular, we can see that the dissatisfaction felt by some journalists and readers dates back to before the height of the progressive rock bands’ commercial success. This is evidenced through the growth of the discotheque sector, the revival of the singles charts, and the failure of the underground live music clubs and college circuit. At the same time, economic conditions led the record companies to focus on the top tier of acts to the detriment of supporting up-and-coming acts. Thus, we see two narratives emerging. The first focuses on the well-rehearsed “punk vs. prog” argument that the top tier acts (actually, rock bands in general, not just those we now call “progressive”) had lost direction and were out of touch with the interests of the fans (even though many went on to find continued success in a changing musical and business landscape—see Andy Bennett’s chapter in this book).

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The second focuses on the grassroots of music making, where bands who sought to follow in the footsteps of the top tier “progressive” groups found their opportunities for promotion, live performance, and record company support fading away.

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Hewson, Dave. 1970. “Caught in the Act: If.” Melody Maker, October 24, 1970: 20. Hollingworth, Roy. 1971. “The State of Rock. Is Rock too Respectable?” Melody Maker, October 9, 1971: 11. Hollingworth, Roy. 1972. “You Wanna Play House with the Dolls?” Melody Maker, July 22, 1972: 17. Hotwell, R.S. 1973. “The Medium is the Message” [reader’s letter]. Melody Maker, May 5, 1973: 64. Jasper, Tony. 1972. Understanding Pop. London: SCM Press Ltd. Jones, Allan. 1974a. “Think Piece: Moodies, Floyd ~ a Bore!” Melody Maker, June 22, 1974: 23. Jones, Allan. 1974b. “The Old Days are Coming Back!” Melody Maker, August 10, 1974: 3. Jones, Allan. 1976. “But Does Nihilism Constitute Revolt?” Melody Maker, August 7: 24–5. Jones, Allan. 2017. Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down: Rock ‘n’ Roll War Stories. London: Bloomsbury. Kestral. 1973. “No Kick” [reader’s letter]. Melody Maker, May 5, 1973: 64. Long, Paul. 2011. “Student Music.” Arts Marketing. An International Journal 1 (2): 121–35. Macan, Edward. 1997. Rocking the Classics. English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macan, Edward. 2006. Endless Enigma. A Musical Biography of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Illinois: Open Court Publishing. MacDonald, Ian. 2003. The People’s Music. London: Pimlico. Melody Maker. 1973. “The Rock Report. A 1973 Re-assessment of Britain’s Rock Establishment.” Melody Maker, April 21, 1973: 32–3. Melody Maker. 1974a. “British Rock: Are we Facing Disaster?” Melody Maker, September 21, 1974: 8–9, 49. Melody Maker. 1974b. “Savage Cuts Maim Rock on the Beeb.” Melody Maker, December 21, 1974: 4. Moxon, Peter. 1973. “Untitled” [reader’s letter]. Melody Maker, December 8, 1973: 13. Partridge, Robert. 1974a. “Business—We’re Heading for a Slump … ” Melody Maker, September 21, 1974: 8–9. Partridge, Robert. 1974b. “Bell: Ringing in the New Pop.” Melody Maker, June 1, 1974: 30, 67. Pirenne, Christoph. 2005. “The Role of Radio, 33 Records and Technologies in the Growth of Progressive Rock.” Proceedings of the International Conference Composition and Experimentation in British Rock 1968–1976. http://www-3.unipv.it/ Britishrock1966-1976/pdf/pirenneeng.pdf. Robinson, John. 2011. “Yes is More!” Uncut, September: 60–4. Scott, Derek B. 2016. “Policing the Boundaries of Art and Entertainment.” In Kulturkritik und das Populäre in der Musik, edited by Fernand Hörner, 53–64. Münster & New York: Waxmann Verlag GmbH.

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Sheinbaum, John J. 2002. “Progressive Rock and the Inversion of Musical Values.” In Progressive Rock Reconsidered, edited by Kevin Holm-Hudson, 21–42. New York and London: Routledge. Street, John, Matthew Worley and David Wilkinson. 2018. “‘Does It Threaten the Status Quo?’ Elite Responses to British Punk, 1976–1978.” Popular Music 37 (2): 271–89. Stump, Paul. 2010. The Music’s All That Matters, revised edition. Chelmsford: Harbour Books (East) Ltd. Walker, Greg. 2008. “Grand Masters of Vinyl.” Times Higher Education, September 11, 2008. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storyco de=403455. Wall, Tim and Andrew Dubber. 2009. “Specialist Music, Public Service and the BBC in the Internet Age.” The Radio Journal—International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media 7 (1): 27–47. Walters, Idris. 1975. “God Gave Rock ’n’ Roll to You.” Melody Maker, April 26, 1975: 18, 71. Warner, Paul. 1973. “Dismal Outlook” [reader’s letter]. Melody Maker, May 5, 1973: 64. Watts, Michael. 1971. “Student Statement: When They go to a Dance, They Must Get a Female or They’ll Crack up … ” Melody Maker, January 2, 1971: 20. Watts, Michael. 1973. “Bands They Love to Hate.” Melody Maker, December 8, 1973: 13. Welch, Chris. 1968. “Pop Scene '68—Freaking Out.” Melody Maker, June 1, 1968: 11. Welch, Chris. 2007. Close to the Edge. The Story of Yes, updated edition. London: Omnibus Press. White, Tom and Pete Holoway. 1974. “Untitled” [readers’ letter]. Melody Maker, July 6, 1974: 19. Whiteley, Sheila. 1992. The Space between the Notes. Rock and the Counter-Culture. London and New York: Routledge.

6

Alternative before Alternative: The Pre-Punk History of a ’90s Rock Genre Theo Cateforis

Alternative music dominated the North American popular music industry in the 1990s, when it moved from the margins into the mainstream, shaking up the establishment with artists that were a little odd or different, while also having, as one writer at the time put it, a “broad appeal … [that] wasn’t just for weird people out on the fringes” (Cross 1997: xviii–xix).1 Alternative’s success early in the decade partly hinged on the term’s wide applicability, as it encompassed a dizzying array of musical styles and/or subcultures—ranging from shoegazing and industrial to post-punk and goth—each with its own sizeable audience. By the mid-1990s, however, following the breakthrough success of numerous American guitar-oriented bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a narrower “alternative rock” style had emerged in popularity propelled by a proliferation of new American commercial alternative radio stations with tightened playlists, and MTV’s adoption of alternative rock videos into its primetime rotations. Alternative subsequently became increasingly identified as an American musical style and music industry trend, one from which British groups like Blur vocally distanced themselves, decrying its “pre-packaged rebellion” (The Stud Brothers 1993: 28). By the late 1990s, alternative was both ubiquitous—its reach having extended into crossover genres like alt-country and alt-metal—and on the wane, as MTV publicly announced it was scaling back its alternative rock programming (Atwood 1996) and publications like Rolling Stone openly pondered alternative

1

The genesis of this chapter comes from a keynote presentation, “What’s in a Name? How Rock Became Alternative,” that I delivered for the symposium Embracing the Margins: CounterMainstream Sensibilities in Popular Music on March 27, 2015 at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. My thanks to the symposium organizers: David Blake, Joshua Busman, Brian Jones, and Mark Katz.

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rock’s death in the face of its flagging sales.2 While alternative never actually went away (it remains enmeshed in the music industry, where Billboard currently features half a dozen “alternative”-based charts), its strongest identity and history is still linked with the 1990s and the music’s triumphant underground assault, and problematic co-optation into, the mainstream. In the decades since alternative’s peak of notoriety, the music and culture have been the subject of various studies, documentaries, and retrospectives, with many of them focused on alternative’s most notable manifestation— that of grunge—and its most tragic practitioner, Kurt Cobain. Alternative has come to signify a certain essence of the 1990s where creative outsiders like Cobain found unexpected (and in his case, unwanted) success and attention, producing an irresolvable conflict between art and commerce that threw the very notion of what it meant to be “alternative” into question. As with any such prolific genre, over time a constructed history of its roots and development has emerged that traces the means through which alternative carved out an “other” space within the music industry. Many of these histories point to the mid-1970s punk movement, and the subsequent flowering of a prodigious 1980s American underground post-punk rock scene, as alternative’s fount of origin—when it acquired a sense of obscurity and purity that commercial compromise was doomed to sully. Alternative and punk in this sense have become inseparable. As I argue in this chapter, however, to privilege punk in this manner is to obscure a deeper history of alternative that was entrenched within popular music and the rock press in the late 1960s and early 1970s, well before the storied arrival of mid1970s punk. As this study contends, an examination of how rock and pop critics and journalists used the word and label alternative during that period reveals that it had already accrued the very meanings that would figure prominently into its discursive terrain in the 1990s. In short, I want to advocate for a different alternative origin story not strictly tethered to punk. While I strive in this chapter to historicize alternative’s pre-punk roots, this is not to discount the many tangible links between punk and alternative. Punk’s imperative to “break all rules!” (Henry 1989) provided a convenient stylistic shorthand in the 1990s for understanding alternative’s similar dissent against societal conformity and mainstream cultural values. The specter of punk made it 2

For instance, the March 20, 1997, issue of Rolling Stone featured the headline: “Is Electronic Music the Next Alternative?” As Steve Hochman observed in the accompanying article, “with record sales stagnant and the alternative-rock wave of the last half-dozen years perceived to be ebbing, the US music industry is desperate for a new movement to boost business” (20).

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easier to explain alternative as part of a constantly re-iterating history of rebellion within rock, as evident in the title of the 1992 alternative rock documentary 1991: The Year Punk Broke. This same repetitive history echoes throughout the 1995 documentary Time Life series, The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, where various iconic figures from an older rock generation, such as Robert Plant, situate alternative as part of a familiar regenerative form of rebellion. As Plant explains on disc 5: “What’s happened in America in 1991 in my view is that you finally got your own punk.” It is useful to remember in this context that alternative rock’s emergence in the 1990s coincided with a substantial wave of rock nostalgia and historical celebration. The year 1995 saw not only the Time Life series, but a second documentary series, Rock & Roll, that aired on PBS, and the grand opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame & Museum in Cleveland. A year later in 1996 the original members of the Sex Pistols would reform for a reunion tour on the twentieth anniversary of the British punk explosion. In short, at that time in the mid-1990s, it took little effort to conceptualize alternative as part of a larger and longer rock music history rooted in punk’s rebellion and dissent. This connection between punk and alternative has largely held strong ever since. The Wikipedia page on alternative rock flatly states in its opening paragraph that alternative refers “to a generation of musicians unified by their collective debt to either the musical style or simply the independent DIY ethos of punk rock” (“Alternative Rock” 2020). Likewise, in their rock history textbook What’s That Sound?, John Covach and Andrew Flory acknowledge alternative’s most immediate origins in the 1980s American hardcore and indie rock scenes, but then allow that “it was also in many ways reminiscent of the rise of punk in the 1970s” (2018: 474). As appealing as this historical narrative may be, it nonetheless needs to be questioned and complicated. To this end, in this chapter I use primary source journalistic materials from the late 1960s and early 1970s to track and analyze alternative’s various usages in the years leading up to the 1976 punk explosion.3 During this time, writers employed the word alternative as a descriptive means of separating rock music practices along stylistic, industrial, and cultural lines, foreshadowing its similar usage twenty years later. Essentially,

3

As a starting point to generate these primary sources, I conducted a keyword search for “alternative” on the rock and pop journalism database Rock’s Backpages that yielded 235 results from the 1960s through the end of 1976. While by no means comprehensive, this strategy provided a good foundation, which I then supplemented with examples from various other primary sources. For examples of other studies that have explicitly foregrounded their use of Rock’s Backpages keyword searches to support historical analyses, see Conner and Jones (2014) and Brown (2015).

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they helped establish a discourse around alternative that would eventually contribute to its solidification as a genre. As we will see, the pieces for a media narrative about alternative were essentially in place before the rise of punk, and long before alternative rock’s celebrated explosion in the 1990s.

Alternative and Its Origin(s) Some basic etymology dates the word “alternative” back to the mid-sixteenth century, when it was used to indicate something alternate, or the act of alternating between things (“Alternative” 2020). The definition assumes a more intriguing relevancy in the seventeenth century, when alternative expanded to indicate a choice between two or more things, and in some cases even more specifically that a choice implied a rejection of that which had not been chosen. In the succeeding centuries, this concept of alternative as a choice or option moved seamlessly into the consumerist logic of capitalism, and the competitive world of advertising where marketers could appeal to distinctions in consumer taste and values. Alternative’s true flowering emerged in the mid to late twentieth century, when it became attached to such things as the arts (alternative theater), lifestyle choices (alternative therapy), and economic policies (alternative energy) (Johnson 2005: 5). This language of choice and options became a crucial signature, as well, of the independent music press that accompanied alternative music’s rise from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Two early examples were the bi-monthly magazines Sound Choice and Option, which arose in 1984 and 1985 respectively out of the demise of the pioneering independent music publication OP. Option magazine in particular demonstrated its strong allegiance to the music on the margins by placing the subheading of “Music Alternatives” on its front cover. The usage of “choice” and “option” in the cases of Sound Choice and Option signified not only their specific alternative space in a marketplace but more importantly their conscious rejection of other music press sources, such as a mainstream rock publication like Rolling Stone. Numerous other music publications, such as Alternative Press, appeared in the 1980s that followed in a similar descriptive vein. Among the more notable of these were three publications [the New York City fanzine Non LP B Side, Australia’s B-Side, and the American B Side] that each took for their name the traditionally more obscure, or marginalized, B-side of the hit record, explicitly aligning themselves

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with the alternate choice to the more widely known and popular A-side. By the mid-1990s, the language of choice and consumer discretion had become so entrenched as part of alternative music that one of the newer independent music publications at that time, Magnet magazine, felt compelled in 1996 to add the subheading of “Real Music Alternatives” (emphasis mine). In doing so, Magnet distinguished itself not only from the Rolling Stone mainstream but presumably from other less credible alternative publications, who had co-opted and diminished alternative’s legitimacy. Magnet, in other words, presented itself as an “alternative to the alternatives.” But such practices were not new to the 1990s and the alternative rock era. They had already been established within the rock press in the early 1970s. Consider, for example, Rock Scene magazine, which debuted in 1973 with the front cover heading “The Alternative to the Alternatives!”—a slogan that would accompany the magazine through its first two years. As editor Richard Robinson noted in an opening statement to Rock Scene’s first issue, the magazine, which combined its reportage on rock culture with reviews of stereo equipment and musical instruments alongside dozens of rock musician photographs, was “sort of a grafting of Rolling Stone, Hit Parader, Popular Mechanics and Women’s Daily Wear” (1973: 4). There was nothing particularly unusual, however, about such a diversified approach, which equally described the contents of similar magazines like Creem and Rock. Nor were the artists, such as David Bowie and Alice Cooper, that featured on Rock Scene’s covers appreciably different than those who appeared on other 1973 rock magazines. Rather, Rock Scene’s claim to be “the alternative to the alternatives!” was simply a way of catching the reader’s eye, and of carving some space in a crowded marketplace that presumably had already suggested to its readership that engaging with rock culture in the first place was an alternative practice. Thus, we see that by 1973 alternative was already embedded within the journalistic rock discourse.

Alternative in the Pre-punk Context While this chapter examines the various appearances of alternative in the 1960s and early 1970s as they relate to an emergent discourse, it is worth acknowledging that this is a selective snapshot of how the word was used. Writers often deployed the descriptive “alternative” in relatively mundane contexts, simply reflecting the various creative, artistic, and business decisions—of finding alternate choices

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and options—that are an everyday part of the professional music industry. Over the course of the late 1960s, however, alternative began to take on more striking and significant associations, as it increasingly assumed an adjectival role in phrases like “alternative society” or “alternative lifestyle” or encompassed an “alternative to the system,” all of which reflected the contemporary context of the counterculture and hippie movement. For example, in her overview of the hippies in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district for the KRLA Beat rock music newspaper, Jacoba Atlas describes how “they have found the alternative to the nine-to-five jobs, to the cold war, to hatred” (1967: 7). Likewise, in a piece for Melody Maker entitled “Rock—Energy for Revolution,” Mick Farren writes that the key to the rock generation is finding “a real alternative to the life-long, mind-twisting routine of the office or factory” (1970). References to alternative society or culture in the early 1970s abounded in features on everyone from the Kinks and MC5 to Randy Newman and Hawkwind (Marsh 1971a; Marsh 1971b; Dennis 1971; Johnson 1972). As Keir Keightley explains in his essay “Reconsidering Rock” (2001), this manifestation of rock and alternative society in many ways grew out of an influential folk ethos and culture in the 1960s that viewed with great suspicion the superficiality and homogenization of mass society. Rock, in this sense, equated alternative with the authentic and the real, with an uncompromised form of musical expression. Over the course of the mid-1970s, however, that specific countercultural usage of alternative largely began to die out within rock writing, to the point where both journalists and musicians alike referred to it in the past tense. In a February 1976 interview with Creem magazine, David Crosby, one of the key musical architects of that 1960s ethos, reflected on the counterculture in precisely these terms: Back in 1969 we thought that the change in value systems would sweep much further than it did. We thought our lifestyle would pervade the whole country. It has, but much slower than we anticipated. Certain values that had been heavily pervasive before were no longer valid. People were offered an alternative. We were only one of the art forms that expressed that. (Quoted by Uhelszki 1976: 66)

Later in 1976, British punk rockers would throw down a gauntlet that largely declared this previous incarnation of alternative to be irrelevant and dead. In an oft-quoted interview with Caroline Coon for Melody Maker magazine, Joe Strummer of the Clash issued his blunt assessment of the counterculture’s accomplishments: “The hippy movement was a failure … All hippies around

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now just represent complete apathy. There’s a million good reasons why the thing failed, O.K. But the only thing we’ve got to live with is that it failed … I’ll jeer at hippies because that’s helpful. They’ll realise they’re stuck in a rut and maybe they’ll get out of it” (quoted by Coon 1976: 33). As Coon observed at the interview, Strummer had stenciled on the back of his outfit the slogan “Hate and War”—an inflammatory inversion of the hippie motto of love and peace—as if to drive home the point even further. “Never trust a hippie” would emerge as a common punk mantra, a gesture that effectively distanced punk’s violent anarchist rhetoric from the more optimistic (and presumably failed) visions of an alternative society espoused by the counterculture just a few years earlier. While punk sought to sever itself from the previous generation’s alternative idealism, there were other usages of alternative in the early 1970s that transferred less problematically into the latter half of the decade and beyond. One of the most prominent of these conceived of alternative as a marker of stylistic difference, specifically positioning artists or bands as a more authentic, raw, and unvarnished alternative to something needlessly elaborate or staged. Alternative in this sense emerged as a response to music that critics deemed to be too professionalized or that catered to mass consumption. Writing about a 1971 live Bill Withers performance for the New York Times, for example, Mike Jahn positioned the rising new artist as an alternative to the slickness of commercialized soul music. In his review, Jahn objects to soul’s “often overblown show-biz nature … with 17 musicians, wearing silver and gold uniforms and swinging their horns in unison, and dancers in white miniskirts doing the funky chicken … It just is too much.” Jahn commends Withers, on the other hand, for offering “a magnificent alternative, soul folk music, with [only] his guitar and voice” (1971: 20). Critics and musicians similarly invoked alternative to justify a schism between a new legion of discerning, active rock fans and those who passively consumed commercial pop. In a 1973 interview with the British weekly New Musical Express, Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott praised those fans who were not content “to be fed teeny bop material.” As he explained, “Alice Cooper is a positive sign that some young kids are into something other than the Osmonds, and we like to think that ourselves, Slade and groups like Brinsley [Schwarz] and Patto offer the alternative” (quoted by Altham 1973). Significantly, rarely does one find alternative applied in reverse—that is, to describe a pop group like the Osmonds as an alternative to the hard rock of a group like Thin Lizzy. By the early 1970s alternative had definitively emerged as a word connoting rock’s authentic presence in the face of a fabricated pop mainstream.

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Crucially, rock critics at the time applied alternative in the stylistic sense not only to the contemporary music scene of the early 1970s, but also retrospectively as a means of establishing rock’s past authenticities. Rock critics throughout the early 1970s were busily building a narrative history of rock by revisiting its past, as in the 1973 multiauthored essay “A California Saga” that appeared in Phonograph Record, which offered an assessment of early 1960s surf music as a genuine local phenomenon distinct from the east coast’s nationally syndicated, polished teen pop trends: For the first time in California, kids turned on radios and heard other kids who sounded just like them, singing about how great it was to be living on the West Coast. Now [there was] an alternative to the pomaded, thin-tie & sportcoat regalia pushed by Clark’s American Bandstand, no more the reedy accordion pipes of the Brooklyn Italians. Hell, KFWB’s playin’ this record and the guy’s singing about La Jolla, Manhattan Beach and Santa Cruz. Walk proud. (Sculatti, Shaw, Barnes 1973: 16–17)

The authors’ designation of alternative, in this instance, delves into much more than just the music, as they invoke striking aspects of regional identification, social class, and ethnicity that serve as boundaries between an authentic grass roots alternative and a professionalized world of pop. There were some instances, however, in which rock critics positioned pop as an alternative element within rock. Increasingly in the 1970s, they began drawing attention to those rock groups who embraced a nostalgic 1960s pop aesthetic as part of their sound, thus providing an alternative to rock’s growing tendency toward excess, evidenced through the sprawling displays of progressive rock or the overwrought masculine hardness of metal. This was especially conspicuous in the “power pop” revival of groups like Badfinger and Big Star that drew their influences from the mid-1960s British Invasion movement that by the close of that decade had become largely unfashionable. Critics pointed to the concise craftsmanship and melodic sensibilities of these power pop groups as a rejuvenating alternative. As Ken Barnes put it in his Rolling Stone review of Blue Ash’s debut album, while acknowledging that the group was derivative, they represented for him “a reaction [that] was inevitable because many groups [had] dead-ended in monolithic metal monotony or endless boogie jams. Lately, the new alternative has emerged: bands playing three-minute songs, stressing melody, powerful rhythm chords, harmonies and communicating enthusiasm and contagious high spirits” (1973). Writing in Phonograph Record in 1972,

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Mike Saunders likewise praised, albeit in muted terms, the efforts of power pop group the Raspberries: The sort of innocence common to the air of Beatles rock groups is hardly a substantial alternative to the punk-ish or otherwise commandeeringly authoritative swagger common to almost every great hard rock group, but its’ [sic] a proposition I would hate to see lost. You’d have to be a total jade to disapprove of the idea of joyousness in rock, and the same goes for the irresistible melodies Beatles-influenced groups have specialized in over the years. (Saunders 1972: 11)

In the decades since the rise of 1970s power pop, a host of other styles ranging from the late 1990s neo-swing revival to the late 2000s chill wave movement, with its repurposing of 1980s synth pop, have shown that the unabashedly commercial styles of previous eras can be resuscitated and reimagined as viable alternatives. And indeed, power pop itself would enjoy a nostalgic renaissance in the 1990s as part of the larger alternative rock movement. As much as rock critics and journalists employed the label of alternative at the turn of the 1970s to recognize various stratifications and divisions of musical style, alternative circulated just as frequently as a term describing facets of the music industry itself. Specifically, it was ascribed to a host of alternative formations, practices, and technologies that were emerging on the periphery, primed to break corporate strangleholds and concentrations of power. Perhaps the most notable of these in the United Kingdom was the rise of unlicensed pirate radio stations, which drew attention in the 1960s as alternatives to the BBC and the limitations of its conservative programming. Likewise, there were numerous alternative musicians’ organizations in northern England that sought to counter the industry’s dominant center of power in London. Let It Rock magazine ran a feature in 1973 on two of these organizations— Liverpool’s Music Liberation Front and Manchester’s Music Force—under the article heading “alternative music in Britain,” highlighting how each of them provided opportunities for local bands by working with venues, organizing publicity and securing deals for musical instruments and gear (Hoyland). Alternative thus increasingly signaled a new dynamism within the music industry infrastructure, and a realm of new grass roots and regional possibilities. In the United States, the recognition of alternative forces within and around the music industry was strong enough that in the summer of 1970 Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, hosted a four-day Alternative Media conference

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that drew between 1,500 and 2,000 participants. The conference was initially conceived to bring together people in the college and progressive FM radio world for a series of panels and events, with additional live performances from new groups like the J. Geils Blues Band and Cactus. The conference’s stated goal was to promote radio “as an effective catalyst for awareness rather than to its traditional role as an anesthetic” (Faber and Hochheimer 2016: 204). Or, as a write-up of the conference in the countercultural magazine Fusion put it: “[the conference attracted] people connected with radio broadcasting who share some inclinations and experiences such as a predominance of Heavy Rock programming (as opposed to say Wallpaper Music or AM Pimple Rock or AllNews or Ethnic) … people who eschew homogenized mediocrity and who are in a number of cases under siege from Uncle Pig” (Pilati 1970: 32).4 As word spread about the plans for the conference, however, it soon mushroomed to include representatives from underground newspapers like the Boston Phoenix and East Village Other, rock publications like Rolling Stone, independent filmmakers and television producers, underground comic artists, political activists, and various interested onlookers from major record companies. One of the participants, Danny Goldberg, a writer for Billboard magazine, would later go on to become one of the most prominent forces behind alternative rock in the 1990s as the manager for Nirvana, Hole, Sonic Youth, and others. As Goldberg has described (2008: 38–43), the 1970 Alternative Media conference ultimately was a pivotal touchstone of inspiration for a rising generation—one that by the 1990s would wield considerable influence in the music industry. At a time in the early 1970s when phrases like alternative press and alternative energy proliferated, the Goddard College Alternative Media conference tapped into a zeitgeist that valued the unconventional, that encouraged active dissension while offering hope for change. This landmark event is little known in the annals of rock history, largely because it featured only a handful of music acts, and it fell in the shadow of the Woodstock Arts and Crafts Festival, which had taken place just the previous summer. Still, it is not much of a leap to see this 1970 conference as a crucial predecessor to two similar events that emerged in New York City a decade later, each of whose annual meetings would help to establish alternative music within the industry: the New Music Seminar (which debuted 4

Many American writers invoked “Uncle Pig” in the late 1960s as derogatory slang for the reigning political powers and authorities whose continued expansion of the Vietnam conflict and opposition to the counterculture put them in direct conflict with the younger generation’s progressive societal aims.

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in 1980) and the College Radio Brainstorm (which first convened in 1981 before changing its name two years later to the CMJ Music Marathon). The inaugural keynote speaker for the New Music Seminar, Kate Ingram of Boston radio station WCOZ FM, explicitly drew the connection between the alternative music of the late 1960s and the new wave artists at the end of the 1970s that were currently challenging industry conventions through their own set of cultural and musical alternatives. As she noted in her speech: We have a new counterculture … Last time in the ‘60s when there was a flowering of new music, there was also an untapped media vehicle for the music. It was the FM dial. Some FM stations played the alternative music, and now in most major markets the FM audience is greater than AM. But now there is no other band to expand to. So commercial radio will have to either make room for this new music, or it will fall on its face. (Kozak 1980: 15)

Despite Ingram’s prognostications, commercial radio stations ultimately did not “make room” for this new music in the 1980s. Rather, with few exceptions, commercial programmers were content to relegate alternative music to the domain of college radio—the logical heir to the alternative media celebrated at the Goddard College conference a decade earlier. Alternative music took root in this collegiate environment throughout the 1980s, eventually accumulating enough influence through these stations that by the end of the decade it had acquired the label of “college rock” and helped propel groups like the Replacements and R.E.M. to major label contracts, thus proving its potential earning power (Wall 2007). Its merger with the mainstream was, in many respects, inevitable. It should come as little surprise, however, that this union would be tense and combative. To many, the institution of college radio and its corresponding genre of college rock provided alternative with a stamp of grass roots authenticity, one that was anathema to the mainstream music industry’s focus on commercialized, manufactured product. Within the alternative music universe, the mainstream was suspect. In this regard, the laments around alternative music’s popularization in the early 1990s echoed similar concerns from the turn of the 1970s, especially the fear of co-optation and the lingering suspicion that corporations and major record labels—or “the man”—was always one step away from stealing and selling as their own the counterculture’s rebellious essence and ethos. Michael Lydon’s 1969 article “Rock for Sale” for the radical magazine Ramparts captures the mood at that time in vivid detail.

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Discussing the impact of rock’s emergence, he acknowledges that from the start “rock had an undeniably liberating effect; driving and sensual, it implicitly and explicitly presented an alternative to bourgeois insipidity … Rock was a way to beat the system, to gull grown-ups into paying you while you made faces behind their backs.” But at the same time, Lydon held no illusions about the parameters within which rock operated: “[It’s] sad but true, however, the grown-ups are having the last laugh. Rock & roll is a lovely playground, and within it kids have more power than they have anywhere else in society, but the playground’s walls are carefully maintained and guarded by the corporate elite that set them up in the first place” (Lydon 1970: 54). This fear of, and anger and cynicism toward, the major labels would re-emerge in full force in the 1990s, when articles and essays railing against the corporate and mainstream incorporation of alternative music and culture were a regular occurrence. Among the most noteworthy of these was Thomas Frank’s polemical piece, “Alternative to What?,” which appeared in a 1993 issue of The Baffler.5 Through this question, Frank drew attention to the corporate exploitation of alternative’s rebellion, pointing out, for example, the numerous ways in which marketers had tapped alternative for its potent purchasing potential. Among the most notorious of these was an MTV print ad aimed at the business sector, which featured an image of a generic young white male, attired in alternative style fashion, and “sprawled insouciantly in an armchair” accompanied by the caption: “Buy this 24-Year-Old and Get All His Friends Absolutely Free” (Frank 1993: 11–12). Elsewhere in his essay, Frank makes explicit the connection between the selling of alternative and the commodification of the counterculture: “what we are seeing is just another overhaul of the rebel ideology that has fueled business culture ever since the 1960s” (9). As Frank’s dire assessment makes clear, no matter how one views alternative’s meaning—whether as an alternative lifestyle, an authentic alternative to pop, or an alternative media practice—its code of rebellion is always in danger of being co-opted for dubious means. Seen in this light, the rise of alternative rock in the 1990s was simply the fateful recognition and monetization of a long-winding countercultural narrative, of which punk was just one small part, and not the genesis.

5

The 1993 issue of The Baffler in which Frank’s article appears devoted much of its content to a critique of alternative culture and music in the mainstream marketplace. One of the issue’s most notable pieces was producer/engineer Steve Albini’s acidic screed against the major labels, “The Problem with Music.”

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Conclusion There are many compelling cultural, stylistic, aesthetic, and ideological reasons why the 1970s punk explosion and the 1990s alternative rock movement have been historically linked. They both connote a deep sense of rebellion against, and dissatisfaction with, conventional mainstream music and society, and both of their narratives hinge around an iconic group (the Sex Pistols and Nirvana) that has been relentlessly analyzed and mythologized. As this chapter has argued, however, the label of alternative, and the particular meanings ascribed to it, was well-established within popular music discourse long before the mid-1970s media frenzy surrounding punk. The concept of “an alternative” was associated with the oppositional politics and lifestyle of the counterculture and corresponding rock revolution of the late 1960s; it circulated as a descriptive word to signify a more authentic, generally rock-oriented, option to the polished, professional world of pop; and the rise of alternative media, encompassing everything from progressive FM and college radio to regional musician organizations, pointed to alternate pathways within the music industry. Alternative was applied with such frequency throughout the early 1970s that by the middle of the decade its general meanings were firmly in place. Just how ensconced in the discourse was alternative by this point? I conclude with two examples from 1975, on the precipice of punk’s eruption, that show the extent to which alternative had already been normalized as a label within the music industry. In the summer of that year, Bonneville Broadcasting Consultants, a Mormon-owned firm best known for their automated “beautiful music” programming—which by the mid-1970s was being serviced to approximately 80 radio stations (Esplin 1977: 42)—announced a new format for their prospective clients: “alternative rock.” While their print advertisements provided no examples of what artists one might encounter on this format, it was presumably offered as an alternative, and perhaps more edgy, menu option to their standard sellers of “beautiful music” and “classic M.O.R.” A couple months later in October 1975, on the other side of the Atlantic, the British music weekly newspaper Sounds began publishing an “Alternative 30” album chart listed alongside the British albums/singles and US albums/singles charts. Rather than sales rankings, these alternative charts, compiled informally from independent and specialty record stores, generally featured styles—country, oldies, northern soul—aimed at discrete audiences and tastes residing outside the current mainstream pop charts (Fonarow 2006: 32). As these two examples

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show, whether cast as a provocative radio format, or as an intriguing “other” chart list, the label of alternative signaled something tangible within the music industry by the middle of the 1970s. Over the course of the late 1970s and 1980s, the rise of punk, post-punk, indie, college rock, modern rock, and more, would further these meanings, eventually leading to alternative’s ascension in the 1990s as a widespread genre, where it would take its place as a marketable, and endlessly exploitable, presence in the music industry. As undeniably important as punk was to this process, this chapter has argued for a pre-punk history of alternative that re-establishes the legacy of the counterculture and late 1960s rock revolution to the eventual triumph of alternative rock in the 1990s.

References Albini, Steve. 1993. “The Problem with Music.” The Baffler 5: 31–8. “Alternative.” Oxford English Dictionary, March 20, 2020. https://www-oed-com. libezproxy2.syr.edu/view/Entry/5803?redirectedFrom=alternative#eid. “Alternative Rock.” Wikipedia, December 1, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Alternative_rock. Altham, Keith. 1973. “Thin Lizzy: And Now a Drop of the Real Hard Stuff.” New Musical Express, March 10, 1973. http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ thin-lizzy-and-now-a-drop-of-the-real-hard-stuff. Atlas, Jacoba. 1967. “Hippies: How? Why? What Does it Mean?” KRLA Beat, 26 August: 6–7. Atwood, Brett. 1996. “MTV Shifting Its Approach to Programming.” Billboard, 16 November: 1+. Barnes, Ken. 1973. “Blue Ash: No More, No Less.” Rolling Stone, 19 July. http://www. rocksbackpages.com /Library/Article/blue-ash-no-more-no-less. Brown, Andy R. 2015. “Explaining the Naming of Heavy Metal from Rock’s ‘Back Pages’: A Dialogue with Deena Weinstein.” Metal Music Studies 1 (2): 233–61. Conner, Thomas and Steve Jones. 2014. “Art to Commerce: The Trajectory of Popular Music Criticism.” IASPM@Journal—Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music 4 (2): 7–23. Coon, Caroline. 1976. “Clash: Down and Out and Proud.” Melody Maker, November 13, 1976: 33. Covach, John and Andrew Flory. 2018. What’s That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and Its History, 5th edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Cross, Alan. 1997. Over the Edge: The Revolution and Evolution of New Rock. Scarborough, ON: Prentice Hall Canada.

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Dennis, Felix. 1971. “Randy Newman: Randy Newman Live.” Ink, November 16, 1971. https://www-rocksbackpages-com/Library/Article/randy-newman-randy-newmanlive. Esplin, Fred C. 1977. “The Church as Broadcaster.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 10 (3): 25–45. Faber, Liz W. and John L. Hochheimer. 2016. “Networking the Counterculture: The 1970 Alternative Media Conference at Goddard College.” Journal of Radio & Audio Media 23 (2): 200–12. Farren, Mick. 1970. “Rock—Energy for Revolution.” Melody Maker, October 3, 1970. http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/rock–energy-for-revolution. Fonarow, Wendy. 2006. Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Frank, Thomas. 1993. “Alternative to What?” The Baffler 5: 5–14, 119–28. Goldberg, Danny. 2008. Bumping into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business. New York: Gotham Books. Henry, Tricia. 1989. Break All Rules! Punk Rock and the Making of Style. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Hochman, Steve. 1997. “Rock & Roll Hype or Hope?” Rolling Stone, March 20, 1997: 20–1. Hoyland, John. 1973. “Up Against the Business: Alternative Music in Britain, Part One.” Let It Rock, May 27. Jahn, Mike. 1971. “Bill Withers Plays in Soul-Folk Style.” New York Times, July 30, 1971: 20. Johnson, James. 1972. “The Truth about Hawkwind.” New Musical Express, February 5, 1972. https://www-rocksbackpages-com/Library/Article/the-truth-about-hawkwind. Johnson, Richard. 2005. “Alternative.” In New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris, 3–5. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Keightley, Keir. 2001. “Reconsidering Rock.” In The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street, 109–42. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kozak, Roman. 1980. “Seminar Examines New Wave’s Future.” Billboard, July 26, 1980: 15. Lydon, Michael. 1970. “Rock for Sale.” In The Age of Rock 2: Sights and Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution, edited by Jonathan Eisen, 51–62. New York: Vintage Books. Marsh, Dave. 1971a. “The Kinks: Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround—Part One.” Creem, March: 82. Marsh, Dave. 1971b. “MC5: Back on Shakin’ Street.” Creem, October: 37–46. Pilati, Joe. 1970. “Politics: A Walk in the Vermont Woods.” Fusion, July 24, 1970: 32–3. Robinson, Richard. 1973. “Media Exploitations.” Rock Scene, March: 4. Saunders, Mike. 1972. “The Story of the Raspberries.” Phonograph Record, October: 10–11.

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Sculatti, Gene, Ken Barnes and Greg Shaw. 1973. “A California Saga.” Phonograph Record, May: 15–20+. The Stud Brothers. 1993. “‘Our Culture is Under Siege’: The Empire Strikes Back.” Melody Maker, September 25, 1993: 28–9. Time Life History of Rock’n’Roll, disc 5—“Punk, New Wave and Hip Hop.” 2004. [DVD] Dirs. Ted Haimes and Andrew Solt, Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video. Uhelszki, Jaan. 1976. “Crosby and Nash: Rocky & Bullwinkle in Marin County.” Creem, February: 50–1+. Wall, Tim. 2007. “Finding an Alternative: Music Programming in US College Radio.” The Radio Journal—International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media 5 (1): 35–54.

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Never Mind the B …, Here’s Three Minutes of Prog: Rethinking Punk’s Impact on Progressive Rock in Britain During the Late 1970s Andy Bennett

The years 1977 to 1978 are generally considered to be the high point of British punk and a period that saw the demise in profile and popularity of many of those progressive rock bands that punk so despised (at least according to British music newspapers such as the New Musical Express). In point of fact, however, a cursory look at the UK singles charts during these years tells a somewhat different story. While punk is certainly highly evident in the charts at this time, the charts were dominated by easy listening and mainstream pop. However, a more surprising development is also apparent: the years 1977 and 1978 saw a larger number of the more staunchly album-oriented progressive rock bands appearing in the British singles charts than ever before. In some cases, such mainstream chart success marked a debut in careers that in some instances dated back to the late 1960s. This sudden and unprecedented influx of progressive rock bands into the British singles chart problematizes the often taken-for-granted notion that punk and new wave “revolutionized” the understanding and appreciation of popular music in Britain during the late 1970s. Indeed, during the mid-1970s, the BBC and record companies increasingly shifted their attention to singles acts, and radio became more important as a marketing and promotion device for singles. In order to survive, progressive rock bands, who had throughout the early 1970s dominated the album charts, began to release singles as a means of remaining relevant in addition to promoting their albums. Some progressive rock artists were more successful than others in this respect. A notable example is the band Genesis who, following their UK top 10 chart success in early 1978 with the

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song “Follow You, Follow Me,” went on to become one of the most successful acts of the 1980s with a string of chart-topping singles and albums (see, for example, Macan 1997). Indeed, as this chapter illustrates, rather than being dramatically stamped out of existence by punk in the late 1970s, progressive rock managed to survive during these turbulent years and even achieved status as part of the national pop soundtrack in Britain during this time. It could also be argued that this upsurge in more chart-friendly progressive rock provided the basis for the emergence of a new breed of progressive rock-influenced British pop artists at the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, including Kate Bush, Marillion, and It Bites.1

Down with the Dinosaurs The conventional story told in British popular music history suggests that by the mid-1970s the record-buying public, together with many young aspirant musicians, were becoming tired of “rock excess” and yearned for something more fresh, direct, and “in-touch.” This hegemonic tussle with rock, and particularly progressive rock, took a celebrated stance with the London pub rock scene, where artists such as Kilburn and the Highroads, Ducks Deluxe, and Brinsley Schwartz spearheaded a movement that emphasized shorter, less musically complex music that drew on R&B and soul influences from the 1960s. For these artists and their audiences, the performance space of the pub was also a crucial ingredient, offering an intimacy that the pub rock scene judged to be missing from the larger concert hall and stadium venues that were a mainstay of the trans-Atlantic rock scene (see Laing 1985). The anti-stadium stance of pub rock is largely believed to have provided a strong basis for British punk. But the existence of a clear-cut relationship between pub rock and punk is debatable. While some musicians, notably Joe Strummer, did transition from pub rock to punk (Friedlander 1996), in reality many of those artists who would find notoriety as members of punk bands had little substantive association with the pub rock scene and in many cases were younger and less musically experienced

1

It is of course equally true to say that a number of British progressive rock bands, among them Camel, Gentle Giant, and Caravan failed to thrive in this changed environment given their failure or lack of interest in transitioning to the singles market.

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than pub rock artists.2 Nevertheless, punk’s seemingly ready-made association with pub rock did provide a basis through which punk could be characterized as the nemesis of rock—a new “angry” generation of artists whose music, it was argued, connected with a youth audience as stadium rock increasingly lost touch with that audience (Laing 1985).3 The above summary offers a distillation of how British punk was depicted at the time of its emergence and how this discourse has hardened over the years to become a dominant means of understanding punk’s cultural significance in late 1970s Britain. In essence, this interpretation of punk has now been in a dominant mode of mediated circulation for over four decades. As such, it has significantly influenced the collective cultural memory of punk as a watershed and game-changing moment in British popular music. As van Dijck (2006) notes, a critical basis of cultural memory are those representations that flow down from the dominant institutions of cultural production to be appropriated by audiences. Importantly, in presenting this interpretation of cultural memory, van Dijck does not replicate the traditional mass communication model of subservience and control (see MacDonald 1957) but rather concedes the agentic characteristics of the audience and the impact of local experience on their reception of mediated information. As a rendering of punk in a specifically British context reveals, however, such a reflexive engagement with punk’s musical and broader cultural characteristics appears to have been simultaneously incorporated into the circuits of punk’s representation. Cohen (1987) has observed how, during the mid-1960s, the antagonism that erupted between mods and rockers coincided with the press’s identification and distinguishing of them as stylistically distinct. In the case of punk, its arrival was curated from the “inside” by young music journalists whose educated backgrounds provided them with the critical skills to both sketch in the political language of punk (see Laing 1994) and identify its musical enemies—of which progressive rock became enemy number one.

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3

This became evident with the emergence into the charts of bands such as Dr Feelgood, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and Nick Lowe. Although punk undoubtedly created a space for the commercial chart success of such artists, all of whom had roots in the London pub rock scene, their song writing, musical proficiency, and the production quality of their records was of a different order to that of their punk counterparts. Where punk did arguably have an immediately discernible negative effect on progressive rock was in the case of new progressive rock bands. They found it difficult to find places to play and to attract record company interest as the emphasis in both the live and recorded music industry switched to punk as a new and untapped market with fresh appeal among a young audience.

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Undoubtedly, some of the critical threads running through this debate had a basis of truth. If rock had begun life as a genre that expressed, at least at some level, an anti-hegemonic stance, most notably at the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival (see Bennett 2004a), by the early 1970s it had become more squarely incorporated by the music industry with “progressive rock” being very much a staple of the new “mega” performance standards judged necessary by major recording labels at this time to drive up record sales (although in truth pre-tour sales of new album releases by major rock and progressive rock bands were in themselves significant). Against this backdrop of rock’s corporatization and alleged artistic stagnation, young British music journalists acted quickly to represent punk as a clean slate—something on which a new, re-politicized youth culture could draw for ideological inspiration. Nowhere was this sentiment more keenly observed than in the British music press where publications such as Sounds and the New Musical Express championed punk (see Laing 1994) while at the same time propagating antagonistic antirock discourses that aimed to marginalize hard rock and progressive rock as antiquated styles that had no place in a rapidly changing socioeconomic landscape. That Britain’s socioeconomic fortunes were shifting for the worse was also in little doubt, and in the context of youth, a sense of betrayal and political disenfranchisement laid the foundations for an appropriation of punk style and rhetoric (see Hebdige 1979). It is at this point that the cultural memory of punk as a musical and cultural game changer in the UK essentially places itself on hold, replaying and thus reinforcing the myth of 1976 as British punk’s year zero (see Street et al. 2018). Popular retrospectives, such as BBC televisions “I Love the ‘70s,” play out this version of history as indeed do written accounts, academic and otherwise, of punk’s emergence in Britain (see, for example, Chambers 1985). A popular slant here is the “teenage” fascination with punk and a resulting moral panic in Britain, a sentiment that is often supported by the replaying of the now legendary television appearance of the Sex Pistols (and an entourage that also included a pre-famous Siouxsie Sioux) on the Today Show. As Laing (1985) states, it is undoubtedly the case that in the short and provocative interview held with the Sex Pistols by Today Show host Bill Grundy, the punk phenomenon and its attendant stereotypes were crystallized for the British public. With this came the notion that punk was somehow “infiltrating” and corrupting the nation’s youth. But to assume that all or even the majority of British youth were smitten by punk is to whitewash out of history the other youth cultural styles present in

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Britain at this time, together with the omnipresent existence in any generation of “ordinary” youth (Clarke 1990; Bennett 2015). A broadly similar argument can be made in relation to popular music at this time. Although popular cultural histories of the UK are apt to recall a musical landslide of punk into the British charts during 1977, the reality is somewhat different. During the 1970s, radio and television chart shows were still the primary way that the British public were given access to new music. Within this context, BBC1’s weekly television show Top of the Pops (TOTP) served as a critical tastemaker, particularly among youth audiences (Fryer 1997). Launched in January 1964, TOTP was to introduce scores of new artists and their music to youth audiences in Britain over the ensuing decades. During the 1970s, the increasing availability of color television brought a new dimension to the appeal of TOTP, beginning with the emergence of glam, whose artists’ flamboyant costumes and makeup were undoubtedly afforded a more critical resonance with young viewers via the equally novel spectacle of color television broadcast. As I have observed elsewhere: For those young Britons living in a time before access to digital media technology, TOTP was in many cases their tangible ‘introduction’ to new music artists. While they may in some cases have initially heard new artists on the radio, TOTP was more typically the place where young fans actually ‘saw’ these artists in the ‘televisual’ flesh for the first time and thus formed a closer bond with them. (2020: 89)

A further important ingredient of TOTP was its relatively liberal embrace of musical genres. A wide range of artists appeared on TOTP throughout its history and often found their initial appeal and audience through the primetime exposure that the show afforded them. As punk emerged into the UK charts in early 1977, punk artists too gained early critical exposure to British audiences through TOTP. In that context punk artists fitted into, rather than displaced, a varied roster of acts whose common denominator was the placing of their current single release in the Top 100. In striving to connect with a wider British youth audience, punk used the same limited media channels as other artists and were often forced to make similar compromises—including miming to their latest single rather than performing it live as per the dictate of TOTP and other televised popular music shows of the time (Frith 2002). An aspect of TOTP that did play neatly into the punk narrative, however, was an emphasis on singles artists. Indeed, throughout the early 1970s,

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progressive rock and other album-orientated artists, were absent from the show because these artists tended not to release singles for the UK market. Such a stance was also frequently held up in the British music press as an indication of progressive rock’s aloofness and pretentious aspirations to “high art”—qualities that were judged by the music press to make progressive rock wholly inaccessible to a mainstream music audience. Indeed, such an interpretation also extended to academic work where, in one of the few contemporaneous academic analyses of progressive rock, Willis (1978) assigned it a label of intellectual music, arguing that its musical complexity was unfathomable to all but an elite, middle-class student (and hippie) audience. However, this prog-pop binary, while evident, was not exclusive. Indeed, throughout the early 1970s British audiences had occasionally been exposed to and demonstrated an appreciation of progressive rock elements in the weekly diets of pop served up by TOTP and its imitators, as well as UK chart radio shows. Lewis (1992) has contested the claim, one popular among (sub)cultural theorists such as Willis (1978) and Hebdige (1979), that musical taste is delimited by class, education, and the forms of social capital that these are held to bestow. Rather, contends Lewis, through a range of factors, including exposure to common mediascapes, individuals acquire tastes in music and other aspects of popular culture that transcend other, more structurally grounded, aspects of their existence. As has already been noted, in the context of 1970s Britain, access to new music was via a limited number of media outlets. And although progressive rock was by no means a mainstay of the limited mainstream music broadcasting, there were some notable exceptions. Thus, in 1973, English progressive rock group Genesis, then in their most “progressive” phase, achieved a Top 20 single with the song “I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)” from the album Selling England by the Pound. In the same year, Dutch progressive rock band Focus had a number 4 hit in the UK with the instrumental “Sylvia.” Two years earlier in 1971 the band had also scored a UK Top 20 hit with the track “Hocus Pocus,” a piece that, despite its apparent novelty, was highly representative of Focus’s extended and experimental album-based music. Then, in late 1975, Queen, a band not typically associated with progressive rock today but certainly displaying an influence from it on their early albums, released the song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” At almost six minutes in length, Queen’s record label EMI had initially refused to release the track on the basis that it deviated significantly from the then accepted maxim that a “radio-friendly” single should not exceed three minutes. Following airplay for the song by radio DJ Kenny Everett, and with mounting inquiries from the

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public as to the song’s availability, EMI took the decision to release “Bohemian Rhapsody” as a single, upon which it attained the number 1 position in the UK charts and remained there for nine weeks, becoming the Christmas number 1 in 1975. It was not simply the length of “Bohemian Rhapsody” but also its musical construction that cast it as an unusual song both to enter the charts and to assume the number 1 position. Although not a progressive rock song as such, “Bohemian Rhapsody” took some of the key ingredients of the progressive rock formula. These included changing time signatures, and various sections ranging from a ballad-style opening, to an operatic passage, and a hard rock section. Blending these elements into an extended “progressive pop” piece (Bennett 2020), the success of “Bohemian Rhapsody” both pushed the boundaries of the pop song (including a highly distinctive promotional video) and demonstrated the British record-buying public’s appetite for music that went beyond the conventional parameters of pop. When punk arrived in the UK in 1976, Queen and “Bohemian Rhapsody” were often suggested as a critical trigger for punk’s emergence by the British media. Punk, it was suggested, would provide a short sharp shock to such “pretentiousness,” and reverse this trend back toward an appreciation of more musically straightforward and accessible music. The reality, however, was to be somewhat different. Thus, instead of being abruptly forced off the British musical radar by punk, during the years 1977 and 1978, the profile of progressive rock increased with many of the genre’s associated artists making bigger inroads into the British singles charts than ever before.

Less Is More This trend began in December 1976 when Jethro Tull, who had formed in 1968 and were by the mid-1970s one of the most commercially successful British progressive rock acts, scored a top 30 hit with “Ring Out, Solstice Bells.” This was the band’s first British top 30 single for five years, following “Life’s a Long Song,” which reached number 11 in 1971 and, with the possible exception of Greg Lake’s (of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer) solo hit “I Believe in Father Christmas” (1975), is the only successful progressive rock Christmas single to date. Ian Anderson, Jethro Tull’s lead singer, flautist, and songwriter, explained how he wanted to come up with something with a catchy chorus that audiences could sing along to. “Ring Out, Solstice Bells” peaked at number 28. However, this was a high enough position to secure Jethro Tull an appearance on Top of the Pops

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(TOTP).4 The name Jethro Tull was taken from a seventeenth-century English agricultural pioneer and inspired the band’s image as historical rustic characters. Anderson himself took this to a theatrical level including an eccentric posture that included perching on one leg while playing his trademark flute solos and embellishments. Such carnival antics translated well to TOTP where even a more restrained appearance set Jethro Tull in marked contrast to many of the other artists appearing on the show during this period, including Showaddywaddy (whose stock in trade was highly polished covers of rock and roll hits from the 1950s), balladeer Johnny Mathis, and disco artist Tina Charles. Earlier in 1976 Jethro Tull had recorded a television special for London Weekend Television. The show featured the band miming to a specially re-recorded version of their then-current album release Too Old to Rock and Roll: Too Young to Die. Designed to cater to a mainstream music audience, other acts planned for the series included The Electric Light Orchestra, The Hollies, Charles Aznavour, and Lynsey De Paul. More surprising still was the debut appearance on TOTP the following year of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (ELP). Formed in 1970, ELP were regarded as something of a progressive rock supergroup. Keith Emerson (keyboards) had previously played with The Nice, Greg Lake (bass, guitar, and vocals) had been a member of King Crimson, and Carl Palmer (drums) had risen to prominence with Atomic Rooster. The trio garnered a reputation for indulgence during the early 1970s for their lavish stage sets, which resulted in them going on the road with three juggernauts full of equipment, each trailer being emblazoned on its roof with the name of an individual band member. As such, ELP quickly became one of the most reviled of the British progressive rock bands in punk circles. Indeed, with their blend of progressive rock and classical music, ELP perhaps more than any other progressive rock band consolidated the discourse of “prog” as a music homologically interwoven with the elitism and intellectual snobbery of a middle-class student audience (see, for example, Willis 1978) whose disdain of chart music was measured through their embrace of the “high-end” AOR music endorsed by British musical tastemakers such as Bob Harris and his latenight AOR music offering the Old Grey Whistle Test (Mills 2010). And yet, at precisely the same time in 1977 that the Sex Pistol’s “God Save the Queen” was banned from British radio and television due to its anti-monarchist sentiment 4

Although it was sometimes assumed that Jethro Tull referred solely to Anderson and was either his real name or a stage name, it encompassed the whole band.

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on the very eve of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee (see Laing 1985), ELP took a rock version of American contemporary composer Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” to number 2 in the UK charts. Just as Laing (1985) points out that by no means all those who bought the Sex Pistols records were punks, in all likelihood most of those who bought “Fanfare for the Common Man” were not ELP fans, nor indeed fans of progressive rock per se. Far less interested in the genre distinctions (and divisions) being rehearsed by the music press, pop fans were seemingly drawn to the novelty of ELP’s reworking of Copland’s composition in the same way that they had been drawn to Queen’s reworking of opera in “Bohemian Rhapsody” two and a half years earlier. A further point of commonality with “Bohemian Rhapsody” was ELP’s decision to make a promotional video for “Fanfare for the Common Man” rather than appearing in the TOTP studio. Still in its infancy at this point in a time prior to the establishment of MTV (see Kaplan 1987), video could add instant novelty and appeal to a pop single release. In this particular case, the grandiose scale of the music was matched by the visual spectacle of the video which, like the “Bohemian Rhapsody” video, assumed an inter-textual quality that contributed to the aura and spectacle of ELP as they reached out to a chart audience. As a setting for the video, the snowbound Winter Olympic Stadium in Montreal was chosen. Ostensibly packaging up the musical and visual bombast of progressive rock in ways that had by then become a customary spectacle, there is arguably another way of reading the scene depicted in the “Fanfare for the Common Man” video. Thus, the choice of setting for the video could also be seen as a pushback against the negativity the band had endured from punk due to its alleged selfindulgence. By then, a prime example of a stadium rock act, Emerson, Lake and Palmer are portrayed in the video performing in a stadium-sized venue devoid of people and in freezing cold conditions. The possible sentiment being implied through such imagery is that the band’s music speaks for itself irrespective of the size, or even presence, of an audience. Two months later, Yes, another progressive rock band who had attracted the contempt of punk, scored a number 7 hit with “Wondrous Stories.” At 3.45 seconds this was one of Yes’s shortest songs and only 25 seconds longer than the Sex Pistols’ “Holidays in the Sun.” It was taken from the album Going for the One, Yes’s first album release in three years and one that saw them reunited with keyboard player Rick Wakeman (to resume what many consider to be Yes’s classic line up of Jon Anderson (vocals), Chris Squire (bass), Steve Howe (guitar), Alan White (drums), and Rick Wakeman (keyboards). Wakeman had

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left Yes after their 1974 tour, which had promoted the double album Tales from Topographic Oceans, on the grounds that he was uncomfortable with the new direction that the band seemed to be heading in. Challenging the myth that all progressive rock musicians in the 1970s were increasingly obsessed with longer, more experimental and abstract musical pieces, Wakeman posited a proto-punk discourse when he desisted his fellow band member’s urge to develop side-long epics, claiming instead to prefer the band’s earlier material (including from the time before he joined the band in 1972) (Greene 2019). Following a further foray into lengthier conceptual pieces with “The Gates of Delirium” from their 1974 album Relayer, featuring Swiss keyboard player Patrick Moraz, Going for the One saw Yes coming round to Wakeman’s way of thinking and marked a return to the shorter, self-contained songs featured on earlier albums such as The Yes Album and Fragile. “Wondrous Stories” was in essence an illustrative example of the band’s ability to write shorter, more accessible, and radio-friendly material, something that would be consolidated in the early 1980s with the track “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” Although neither Wakeman nor Howe featured in Yes during this later period,5 “Owner of a Lonely Heart” and the accompanying album 90125 are illustrative of the fact that punk and new wave did not in fact erase progressive rock from the British popular music landscape. Rather, aspects of the genre were able to circumvent the inflexibility that had impacted it during the mid-1970s, with the rush of progressive rock singles in the late 1970s providing a segue to the 1980s as the album band era ended and was overtaken by MTV and the emphasis on pop video. This pattern of progressive rock band turned singles artist continued in February 1978 when Genesis, reduced to a trio following the departure of original vocalist Peter Gabriel in 1975 and subsequently lead guitarist Steve Hackett in 1977, had a worldwide hit with the song “Follow You, Follow Me.” In the case of Genesis, the success of this one particular song was to have a transforming influence on the band’s overall musical direction. Between 1980 and 1991 the three remaining members of Genesis, Phil Collins (drums and vocals), Mike Rutherford (guitars and bass), and Tony Banks (keyboards), enjoyed significant commercial success as one of the few original British progressive rock bands to make a successful and sustained transition from AOR to mainstream pop. At the 5

Indeed, after Yes disbanded in 1981, Howe went on to form Asia, an MOR rock supergroup that also featured Carl Palmer (ELP), Jon Wetton (King Crimson and Roxy Music), and Geoff Downes (Buggles and Yes). Focused on the US market, Asia scored considerable commercial success on an arena circuit established by progressive rock-influenced US artists such as Styx, Kansas, and Journey.

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point of releasing “Follow You, Follow Me,” however, Genesis was still very much considered to be a progressive rock band, with the single itself possessing several prog hallmarks, notably Tony Bank’s trademark keyboard style. The success of “Follow You, Follow Me” came after several months of aggressive anti-rock posturing by punk and its supporters in the UK music press. This, along with the other progressive rock chart successes already discussed above, suggests that despite the efforts being made by the music press to displace rock, and particularly progressive rock, in Britain during the late 1970s, television shows such as TOTP and chart radio still functioned more as critical tastemakers than the music press in terms of shaping the nation’s musical preferences. Indeed, and as noted earlier in this chapter, while a perception may have grown in the intervening years that punk (and latterly new wave) came to dominate the British music charts during the latter half of the 1970s, in truth punk was just one of a range of genres featured on British television and radio music shows during this period, with genres such as disco and MOR equally, if not more, prominent as punk at this time. The rush of progressive rock singles in the late 1970s also demonstrated something of a more localized flavor in progressive rock. Much of the academic scholarship on progressive rock focuses on its trans-Atlantic or European presence (Bennett 2020). Indeed, it was in the United States where each of the above-named progressive rock artists found their greatest success, and where the equation of progressive rock with stadium and arena-sized venues assumed its critical gravitas. However, as Stump (1997), Anderton (2010), and others have illustrated, the trans-Atlantic history of progressive rock has served to eclipse a much larger cluster of artists, many of whom pursued more low key and localized careers, including a number of UK-based artists. Several of these artists also found short-lived commercial success during the late 1970s. In February 1978, guitarist Gordon Giltrap, an artist not typically documented in accounts of progressive rock, academic or otherwise, but associated with the genre nevertheless, reached number 21 in the UK charts with his instrumental track “Heartsong.” This track gained increasing popularity when it was adopted as the theme tune for the popular BBC tourism program Holiday. Prior to the release of “Heartsong” and following its success, Giltrap has enjoyed a reputation as a versatile guitarist proficient in a number of styles. In many ways, his position as an experimental progressive rock musician whose primary success has been found in Britain and other parts of Europe aligns him with other more localized progressive rock acts, notably artists such as Caravan, Gong, and others associated with what has become known as the Canterbury Sound (see Bennett 2002, 2004b; Draganova

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et al. 2020). A further example of brief commercial success enjoyed by a British progressive rock band whose reputation was primarily localized came in August 1978 when Renaissance, one of the very few progressive rock bands at that time to be fronted by a female lead vocalist, Annie Haslam, had a top 10 hit with “Northern Lights.” In the case of both Giltrap and Renaissance, their appearance in the UK singles charts during this period is again at odds with a more generic historical reading of late 1970s British popular music as having been dominated by punk and, latterly, new wave. Further evidence of the evolving commercial appeal of progressive rock-influenced music at this time is seen in the success of artists such as Mike Oldfield, the Alan Parsons Project, and rock-classical fusion band Sky. Similarly, Jeff Wayne’s musical adaptation of the H.G. Wells (1898) novel “War of the Worlds,” released in 1978, drew much inspiration from progressive rock in terms of musical arrangements and scale of production. Another important contributor to the mainstreaming of progressive rock during the late 1970s was the BBC’s Sight & Sound in Concert series. Broadcast simultaneously on BBC television and FM radio, the show ran between 1977 and 1984. In 1977 and 1978 featured artists on the show included British progressive rock acts Renaissance, Jethro Tull, Procol Harum, Camel, Gentle Giant, and Gordon Giltrap. Importantly, however, in these same years the show also featured punk and new wave acts including XTC, the Tom Robinson Band, and Dr Feelgood (the latter having initially emerged from the London pub rock scene but finding a new audience among punk and new wave fans and scoring a top ten hit in January 1979 with the song “Milk and Alcohol”). Much in the vein of TOTP, Sight & Sound in Concert provided its regular viewers with a mix of artists across a broad musical spectrum and thus also serves to dispel the myth that punk brought an end to music fans’ interest in rock and progressive rock artists at this time and effectively forced such artists out of the musical frame in a British context.

Genre Bending and a New Age of Prog-Influenced Pop By the early to mid-1980s the British popular music landscape had again undergone a significant transformation with some observers, such as Rimmer (1985), suggesting that the dominance of artists such as Culture Club gave the impression that punk had never happened. Within this new era of British pop, however, there were clear signs of a progressive rock legacy, one that apparently fused the virtuosity of prog with the new technologies and production standards

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of 1980s pop. Key examples of this were seen in the re-emergence of former Genesis vocalist Peter Gabriel with a brand of “progressive pop” (Bennett 2020) that increasingly pushed the limits of popular music through its use of nonwestern musical influences. Similarly, the spectacular arrival of Kate Bush into the British music charts in 1978 with “Wuthering Heights” (a song that remains Bush’s only number 1 hit) demonstrated an ongoing interest in music with a progressive flavor among British chart audiences. During the early 1980s, a new generation of British artists, including Marillion and It Bites, also drew on progressive influences. While the early Marillion albums clearly demonstrated the influence of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, lyrically their songs often reflected a punk aesthetic, notably in the debut single “Market Square Heroes” (1983), which relates themes of civil unrest in an era of growing youth unemployment (see Anderton 2016). It Bites also took inspiration from progressive rock, blending this with contemporary 1980s pop to produce a style that many critics consider unique. The band’s second album “Once Around the World” released in 1988, contained a fourteen-minute multi-sectioned title track clearly indebted to the progressive rock of the 1970s. The 1980s also saw the reformation of stalwart progressive rock band King Crimson, featuring founder Robert Fripp and drummer Bill Bruford with two new musicians, bassist, and stick player Tony Levin, who was also a member of Peter Gabriel’s band, and Adrian Belew who had previously toured with both Frank Zappa and the Talking Heads. Although traces of progressive rock remained integral to the band’s sound, these had been fused with more recent punk and post-punk influences to the extent that the 1980s incarnation of King Crimson sat more comfortably with artists such as Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, and Japan than with 1970s progressive rock. The point remains, however, that beginning in 1977, it is possible to chart an unbroken lineage of progressive rock and prog influenced music that ultimately provided an alternative voice in British popular music to that offered by punk and new wave and was also instrumental in providing new pathways for British popular music following the demise of punk and new wave music.

Punk versus Prog—a Very British Problem? Considering progressive rock music’s transition from album to chart music in the late 1970s is interesting, not least of all because it seems to present as a “very British problem” (to quote from the popular TV series of the

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same name). Elsewhere in the world, and particularly in the United States, the idea of progressive rock music crossing over into the singles charts had never been an issue (as a perusal of the Billboard charts from the early 1970s quickly illustrates). Part of the issue here may have been the very restricted pop mediascape of the 1970s, with only a handful of television shows being dedicated to popular music in the UK. Similarly British radio at this time was very much orientated toward chart music with only a small number of radio 1 DJs, including John Peel and Alan “Fluff ” Freeman, featuring rock and progressive rock music on their weekly programs (Garner 1993). But the skewed representation of the British music press, and its absorption of the British obsession with class, may have been another contributing factor to the way progressive rock was pigeon-holed in the mid- to late 1970s. In his 2016 book The Living Years, Mike Rutherford of Genesis notes how in interviews with the band the British music press seemed as interested in the band’s middle class, public school background as they did in their music. Such bias may also have played a role in how progressive rock bands were often excluded from television and radio airplay, even as their album sales frequently outstripped those of their singles chart-topping peers. In that sense, the unraveling of album-orientated-rock in the late 1970s when punk re-emphasized the value of the three-minute song was possibly one of the reasons why the flurry of prog singles appeared in the charts. But this in itself cannot explain the success of this music. Artists have frequently contested the categorization of their music into specific styles and genres. Indeed, Lena and Peterson (2008) have emphasized that genre classification is largely driven, at least initially, by the music industry and associated bodies including the music press. At the level of the audience, it could be argued that the connection between taste and genre is often far less exact—something accentuated by the eclecticism of much popular music. If progressive rock had been positioned in some quarters as a more elite music during the 1970s, then elements of this music had certainly crossed over into the British charts even during the early years of the decade. Thus, while the music press of the era often worked to label progressive rock as “dinosaur” music and history typically relates the “success” of such efforts, the subtext of this story relates a somewhat different evolution of progressive rock as an element that both shaped the tastes of a wider mainstream popular music audience during the late 1970s and continued to have importance for the trajectory of British popular music in the 1980s and beyond.

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References Anderton, Chris. 2010. “A Many-headed Beast: Progressive Rock as European Metagenre.” Popular Music 29 (3): 417–35. Anderton, Chris. 2016. “Fire in Harmony: the 1980s UK British progressive rock revival.” In Prog Rock in Europe. Overview of a Persistent Musical Style, edited by Philippe Gonin, 151–64. Dijon: Editions Universitaires de Dijon. Bennett, Andy. 2002. “Music, Media and Urban Mythscapes: A Study of the Canterbury Sound.” Media, Culture and Society 24 (1): 107–20. Bennett, Andy. ed. 2004a. Remembering Woodstock. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bennett, Andy. 2004b. “New Tales from Canterbury: The Making of a Virtual Music Scene.” In Music Scenes: Local, Trans-Local and Virtual, edited by Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson, 205–20. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Bennett, Andy. 2015. “‘Speaking of Youth Culture’: A Critical Analysis of (Post)Youth Culture in the New Century.” In Youth Cultures, Transitions and Generations: Bridging the Gap in Youth Research, edited by Dan Woodman and Andy Bennett, 42–55. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bennett, Andy. 2020. British Progressive Pop 1970–1980. New York: Bloomsbury. Chambers, Iain. 1985. Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture. London: Macmillan. Clarke, Gary. 1990. “Defending Ski-Jumpers: A Critique of Theories of Youth Subcultures.” In On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 81–96. London: Routledge. Cohen, Stanley. 1987. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, 3rd edition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Draganova, Asya, Shane Blackman and Andy Bennett. eds. 2020. The Canterbury Sound in Popular Music: Scene, Identity and Myth. Oxford: Emerald. Friedlander, Paul. 1996. Rock and Roll: A Social History. Boulder, CO: Westview. Frith, Simon. 2002. “Look! Hear! The Uneasy Relationship of Music and Television.” Popular Music 21 (3): 277–90. Fryer, Paul. 1997. “‘Everybody’s on Top of the Pops’: Popular Music on British Television 1960–1985.” Popular Music & Society 21 (3): 153–71. Garner, Ken. 1993. In Session Tonight. London: BBC Books. Greene, Andy. 2019. “Rick Wakeman on His Tumultuous History with Yes, Playing on Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity.’” Rolling Stone, October 11, 2019. https://www.rollingstone. com/music/music-features/rick-wakeman-interview-yes-david-bowie-896090/. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Kaplan, E. Ann. 1987. Rocking around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture. London: Methuen. Laing, Dave. 1985. One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

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Laing, Dave. 1994. “Scrutiny to Subcultures: Notes on Literary Criticism and Popular Music.” Popular Music 13 (2): 179–90. Lena, Jennifer C. and Richard A. Peterson. 2008. “Classification as Culture: Types and Trajectories of Music Genres.” American Sociological Review 73: 697–718. Lewis, George H. 1992. “Who Do You Love? The Dimensions of Musical Taste.” In Popular Music and Communication, 2nd edition, edited by James Lull, 134–51. London: Sage. Macan, Edward. 1997. Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacDonald, Dwight. 1957. “A Theory of Mass Culture.” In Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David White, 59–4. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Mills, Peter. 2010. “Stone Fox Chase: The Old Grey Whistle Test and the Rise of High Pop Television.” In Popular Music and Television in Britain, edited by Ian Inglis, 55–67. Farnham: Ashgate. Rimmer, Dave. 1985. Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop. London: Faber and Faber. Street, John, Matthew Worley and David Wilkinson. 2018. “‘Does It Threaten the Status Quo?’ Elite Responses to British Punk, 1976–78.” Popular Music 37 (2): 271–89. Stump, Paul. 1997. The Music’s All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock. London: Quartet Books. van Dijck, José. 2006. “Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23 (5): 357–74. Wells, H.G. 1898. The War of the Worlds. London: William Heinemann. Willis, Paul. 1978. Profane Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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“There’s a Crack in the Union Jack.” Questioning National Identity in the 1990s: The Britpop Counter-Narrative Johnny Hopkins

In early 1991 The Sun newspaper ran a full-color Union Jack cover, with a soldier’s face (one of “our” boys) in the center, in support of the American-led Gulf War, and encouraged their readers to display it prominently in their front windows (Billig 1995: 2). Many did so. This was not unusual as the UK tabloids regularly featured the national flag as a way of bringing their readers together as a nation, particularly at times of royal weddings, international sporting events and, of course, war. Yet, this “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) simultaneously included some people while excluding others, at a time when the Union Jack was very much the realm of the tabloids, the more right-wing broadsheets, and far-right politics. By 1993, a significant shift had occurred, with the Union Jack again becoming a key symbol in the visual language of popular music and the music press, where it contributed to an emerging narrative of “Britpop” and, more widely, what the cultural theorist Stuart Hall has called “the narrative of the nation” (1992: 293). The dominant narrative of Britpop established by the media at that time has since been reinforced through nostalgic anniversary pieces in which the Union Jack is a convenient, if inaccurate and exclusionary, symbol of national confidence and social cohesion. Yet, hidden beneath this parade of what I refer to as “pop nationalism” were three images that, in different ways, actively questioned the standard ideas of English/British national identity. The first was the artwork of the 1993 Live Demonstration demo tape by the Mancunian-Irish band Oasis, which featured a Union Jack disappearing down a plughole. The second and The chapter title is based on the Suede song “Crack in The Union Jack” (2002). In this chapter I will refer to both the Union Jack and the Union Flag which the Flag Institute acknowledge as the same.

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third were Union Jack t-shirts adapted by the Anglo-Indian singer and lyricist Sonya Aurora Madan (of the band Echobelly) to read, respectively, “My Home Too!” and “My Country Too” (both 1994). In examining these performative uses of the flag from the pivotal period 1993– 94, I reveal previously unexplored counter-narratives of Britpop that question notions of English/British national identity at a time when the pop nationalism of Britpop was first emerging. These counter-narratives have remained relatively hidden despite, or perhaps because, they do not fit the dominant Britpop narrative as subsequently presented through popular media and academic work. I draw on exclusive interviews with key participants of the time and argue that the three images outlined above represent creative acts of resistance that reflect the musicians’ first- and second-generation migrant experiences. In doing so, I extend Sean Campbell’s concept of “in-betweenness”1—which he describes as “a flexible, fluctuating and (sometimes) fractious identification” with both a person’s place of birth and the place of their parents’ birth or, indeed, as a sense of not belonging in either place (Campbell 2011: 9)—to include not only secondgeneration Irish musicians such as Oasis, Morrissey, and John Lydon, but also those from a South Asian background such as Madan, who moved to the UK aged two. First and second-generation people tend to occupy liminal spaces and transitional positions. Their diasporic experience is a constant dialogue between identities, generations, countries, and “homes,” presenting both internal and external dilemmas. Where do I belong? Where are my loyalties? What is my identity? This can lead to confusion, ambivalence, split loyalties, or passionate identification with one side. Despite the long history of flags and their role in shaping nations, there is a comparative lack of academic work on flags, even in studies of nationalism (Eriksen 2007: 2). This chapter suggests that the music industries’ use of flags is worthy of attention.

“Pop nationalism” and the Roots of the Britpop Narrative My concept of pop nationalism is situated firmly in popular music contexts, though it connects with social scientist Michael Billig’s (1995) notion of “banal 1

“In-betweenness” shares some common ground with “double consciousness” (Du Bois 2007; Fanon 1986; Gilroy 1993).

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nationalism.” Pop nationalism describes how the Union Jack flag was used in the marketing and media coverage of the Britpop (1992–97) and Cool Britannia eras (1996–98), and against which the interventions of Oasis and Echobelly stand. Pop nationalism is “pop” as in popular, pop music, pop art, and it can be apparently ironic, trashy, casual, flippant, knowing, unconscious, or ambiguous. The aesthetic or commercial use of the Union Jack within pop nationalism is presumed harmless by many and seemingly devoid of ideology because it emerges from the popular music industries bubble. However, as Bruno Latour (2005) has argued, objects have agency, so flags such as the Union Jack may operate in powerful and dangerous ways without the viewer, and indeed sometimes the musician, necessarily realizing it. Indeed, its associations with monarchy, empire, and nation are suggestive of nationalism by stealth, if not intention. Use of the flag serves to subtly reinforce dominant ideologies and create environments that normalize nationalism, thus paving the way for more extreme forms. We can recognize this in the origins of the Britpop narrative. The April 1993 issue of Select magazine featured on its cover the lead singer of Suede, Brett Anderson, superimposed on a Union Jack, and accompanied by the words “The Battle for Britain”—a reference to the Second World War. Within this same issue were further references to the war, including a tongue-in-cheek Dad’s Army-referencing2 headline, “Who do you think you are kidding, Mr. Cobain?,” that introduced a themed article on new(ish) British bands—Suede, Pulp, Denim, St. Etienne, and The Auteurs—presented as a scene. In bringing together key Britpop artists with ideas, reference points, and signifiers of Britishness, this issue proved crucial in the formation of what became known as Britpop as well as crystallizing its narrative. Furthermore, this narrative was predicated on, to borrow Eric Hobsbawm’s (1983) phrase “invented tradition,” here, of an imaginary 1960s, and mediated as a triumphant revival of the English music, film, fashion, football, art, and politics of that decade. Like the narration of national histories, the Britpop narrative performed the nation through origin stories, landmark events, symbols, and key actors, all of which linked it to the past. Thus, Britpop artists were framed within a continuous lineage of “great” British acts, from the Beatles and the Kinks through to the Sex Pistols, the Jam, and the Smiths in order

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Dad’s Army was a British television comedy (1968–77) revolving around a hapless platoon of volunteer Home Guard soldiers during the Second World War. Select’s intention was playful but it did hark back not only to a “golden” age of British comedy but also the military triumph of 1945 and the “plucky” British spirit. The article was illustrated by a war map based on the program’s opening credits.

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to emphasize a shared history. That the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, and the Smiths were largely of second-generation Irish descent was glossed over. Britpop’s pop nationalism also resonated with broader social and political trends of the time. For instance, the British Prime Minister John Major delivered a speech to the Conservative Group for Europe in 1993 in which he invoked an idyllic, mythical, vision of an essentially pre-war imperial Britain that included a quote from George Orwell derived from the Second World War: Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers, and—as George Orwell said—old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist. (Major 1993)

His speech portrays an atmosphere of what the theorist Paul Gilroy has identified as “postcolonial melancholia” (2005) and represents a reassertion of national identity at a time of insecurity about the nation, due to perceived internal and external threats: in the early 1990s, there were Irish Republican attacks on mainland Britain in reaction to British colonialism in Ireland, as well as fears of devolution, Americanization, globalization, and a perceived increase in power of the European Union. David Hesmondhalgh sees Britpop as a discourse characterized by an “implicit anxiety and conservatism about British national identity” (2001: 276). Indeed, like Major’s speech, the Britpop narrative built on the idyllic, mythical imagery of England’s green and pleasant land, yet 1990s Britain was not pleasant for everyone. The brutal murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 is well known, but the prevalence of racist violence and murder in the country during the 1990s is not as openly acknowledged. Between 1991 and 1999, there were thirty-nine racist murders (Athwal 2002), as well as many racist attacks and deaths in police custody3 (Athwal and Bourne 2015). In 1993, the Asylum and Immigration Act came into force, designed, in part, to curb immigration, while media discussions in the build-up to the Act increased the climate of division and fear. During this period, the British National Party (BNP) ran an aggressive “Rights for Whites”

3

For instance, in 1993 in London: Fiaz Mirza was abducted in Docklands, beaten to death, and thrown in the Thames (Athwal 2002); seventeen-year-old Quddus Ali was beaten unconscious in a racist attack by a gang of eight white youths, allegedly members of the BNP, in Stepney and left brain-damaged (Younge 1999); forty-year-old Joy Gardner died in North London, after a police and immigration officials raid at her home where she was restrained, shackled, gagged, and had her head and face wrapped in thirteen feet of adhesive tape, in front of her five-year old son (Athwal and Bourne 2015: 31).

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campaign in East London (1990–1993), which secured them their first-ever council seat in 1993 in Isle of Dogs (Copsey 2004: 58–61), while the British white supremacist organization Combat 18 was formed in 1992. This hostile environment is indicative of a “multi-racist Britain” (Sharma et al. 1996; Cohen and Bains 1988). At this time then, “national identity [had] emerged as a crucial issue in British politics” (Hall, C. 1992: 205), and in wider society. As Kobena Mercer has stated, “identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis” (quoted in Hall, S. 1992: 275). This was reflected, too, in the music industries. When Morrissey, one of Britpop’s progenitors, entwined himself in a Union Jack and its brutal histories, onstage at Finsbury Park (August 8, 1992) in front of a photographic backdrop of two skinheads, in a blatant flirtation with nationalism, he was adding to this discourse on national identity. He was rightly condemned in the indie music press. However, Morrissey’s provocation, and NME’s mostly critical cover story about it (Fadele 1992; Kelly et al. 1992), put the Union Jack and national identity on the agenda in the music industries, breaking an indie taboo.4 With this came a realization that such controversy could increase readership. Indeed, when Select ran their Union Jack/Suede cover several months later they gained much attention, as well as criticism from the NME, Chumbawamba, and Suede themselves. Around the time of Select’s Suede/Union Jack cover, Blur’s Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993) album campaign was launched with a set of publicity photographs5 that demonstrate the pop nationalism and postcolonial melancholia noted above. The pictures, used widely in the press of the era, show Damon Albarn posing aggressively in a white Fred Perry polo shirt with jeans rolled up to reveal high burgundy Dr. Martens boots—common items of Skinhead subcultural style—and holding a Great Dane on a leash. Behind him are the band and the slogan “British Image 1” written on the wall. In the context of the time and given (many) Skinheads’ reputation for racist/nationalist violence, this visual and verbal messaging was provocative, going beyond Albarn’s antagonism toward American cultural imperialism. As Lloyd and Rambarran note, “there’s no recognition that reducing the painful lived experiences of British minorities to props from a dressing up box might be problematic … ” (2017: 165).

4

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Up to that point, the independent scene (bands, labels, media) had avoided the flag due to its toxicity and their own, usually, left-leaning, feminist, and non-nationalist politics. By Paul Spencer.

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Britpop was a dangerous and corrupt concept that served as a response to perceived threats, and a forum for debating and defining the cultural politics and national identity of England/Britain. But how much were the bands invested in it? Indeed, there is more to what was perceived as Britpop than its dominant narrative suggests. What is fascinating about Select’s original formation of Britpop was that it gave space for different views and asked some serious questions of the participating artists. Their responses tell a very different story to the narrative of the cover and main feature, and offer counter-narratives of Britpop at the very point that the foundations of the dominant narrative were being forged. Sounding out artist opinions on the national flag, Stuart Maconie asked, “What does the Union Jack mean to you and did Morrissey do it a disservice … ?” For Luke Haines (The Auteurs): “The Union Jack doesn’t mean anything to me. But I definitely didn’t approve of Morrissey’s actions … He has young and impressionable fans, and to play around with that kind of imagery in times like these is dangerous in the extreme” (quoted in Maconie 1993: 66). In answer to the question “What’s wrong with being patriotic?,” Haines replied: “Quite a lot really. There’s not a lot to be patriotic about in a country that’s put up with the Tories for fourteen years. I haven’t seen much to be proud of in my lifetime” (66). Maconie’s question, “What makes you ashamed to be British?” drew some passionate answers. Sarah Cracknell (St. Etienne) said: “The monarchy, the House of Lords, the Conservative Party and the aristocracy” (63), while her band-mate Bob Stanley cited the curbs on Yugoslavian refugees. Jarvis Cocker (Pulp) identified: “Hooligans, leftovers from the days of the Empire. People who believe that we really do still rule the world or ought to” (65). Haines answered: “Racism … Our tendency to keep harking back to VE Day” (66). These responses reveal a dissident Englishness/Britishness that was subsequently erased from the Britpop narrative, but was crucial in establishing Britpop’s counter-narrative.

Oasis and the “Routes”6 of the Second-Generation Irish Experience Every member of Oasis who performed on the band’s debut album Definitely Maybe (1994) is second-generation Irish—though Guigsy’s father was Northern

6

Gilroy’s differentiation between “roots” and “routes” (1993) is instructive here.

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Irish Protestant. As children, they were engaged in Irish cultural activities within the large network of migrant Irish communities of South Manchester. These activities, each markers of difference, included traditional music, Irish dancing, Gaelic football, and attending mass—a cultural world based on a shared history, ethnicity, and experience. Noel Gallagher recalls that: “The first music I was ever exposed to was the rebel songs the bands used to sing in the Irish club in Manchester … I think that’s where Oasis songs get their punch-the-air quality— from me being exposed to those rousing rebel songs” (Boyd 2008). Each member spent long family holidays in Ireland that were fondly remembered, yet these regular journeys between two “homes” would probably have accentuated the dislocation and “in-betweenness” of their second-generation position. Geographical closeness, along with historical and cultural ties, means that for second-generation Irish-Mancunians, “Ireland is a centrifugal force as powerful, if not more powerful, than London” (Savage 1996: 393). This helps to form a distinctly Mancunian-Irish, rather than Anglo-Irish, identity. On a cultural level, there was another problematic aspect to the secondgeneration Irish experience in England. Historically, colonial racism othered the Irish in England (Mac An Ghaill 2000: 137), establishing stereotypes and enforcing British presumed superiority. (Anti-)Irish jokes with stereotypes of “thick” or “drunk” Irish men, even jokes about the potato famine, were common on television and in books. Paul Mulreany (drummer of The Blue Aeroplanes and Primal Scream), who was often called “bombthrower” and “spud,” discussed, in a 2020 interview with the author, how his Irish Catholic school in England taught only British history—a common situation for those like Oasis growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, the second generation was subject to a process of acculturation when it came to their history; a similar problem faced by South Asian-British children with the brutalities of empire ignored. Irish history was, however, communicated informally by parents and other adults in the community, thus giving two contradictory perspectives on Ireland and “the bloody British” as Mulreany’s elders would say; a situation that heightened the sense of confusion around national identity. At this time, there was a rise in anti-Irish feeling compounded by IRA bombing campaigns in England and the ensuing media-fueled moral panics. Anti-Irish graffiti was common in England, and the “No Irish, no blacks, no dogs” mentality, noted by John Lydon in his autobiography (1994), was very much in evidence. In 1974 the Prevention of Terrorism Act was introduced to enable the UK government to restrict Irish people moving between Ireland

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and the UK, and to evict those already resident in the UK (Campbell 2011: 89). This had a significant impact on the young second-generation Irish mindset, particularly when the London-Irish teenagers Vincent and Patrick Maguire were arrested and convicted, erroneously, in 1976 for the Guildford pub bombings of 1974 (89). This continued criminalization of the Irish created a climate of fear and led many second-generation Irish to hide or reject their Irish identity. While Oasis were open about their Irishness, the British media would rarely discuss it in detail. As there were IRA, INLA, and Real IRA7 bombings in Ireland and the UK throughout 1993 and 1994, it was perhaps easier for the media and music industries to co-opt the band and their success as British rather than complicate the Britpop narrative. In contrast, the Irish press probed more deeply into the band’s Irish roots. Noel Gallagher told the Irish Times how his secondgeneration position was made clear when he was growing up. His mother told him: “You’re only English because you were born here,” implying that in every other aspect he was Irish. He continued: “ … with a mother from Mayo and a father from Co Meath, there’s not a drop of English blood in me … I feel as Irish as the next person” (Boyd 2008). This illustrates how he views national identity as determined by blood and family rather than place of birth. The cover artwork for Oasis’ demo tape Live Demonstration featured a Union Jack, which dispensed with the sharp angles and lines of the original; instead, offering a distorted, swirling image of the Union Jack that looked as if it was going down a plughole. The first time I saw it I interpreted the image as a comment on the state of the country under the Tory government, one that matched the tone of the lyrics and the snarling rage of the vocals on “Bring It On Down,” a key song on the tape. In his positive reappraisal of Definitely Maybe, the academic Alex Niven describes “Bring It On Down” as a “statement of instinctive political defiance,” noting its “insurrectionary fervour” (2014: 78, 79). Analyzing the lyrics (“You’re the outcast/You’re the underclass/But you don’t care/ Because you’re living fast”) it is easy to see them as an expression of the second-generation Irish experience in England: the sense of frustration, restriction, “No Future.” Yet, instead of the Sex Pistols’ nihilism, Noel Gallagher imbued his songs not only with anger but with the positivity of acid house by which he had been partly inspired, creating his own future and firing Oasis to success.

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IRA (Irish Republican Army), INLA (Irish National Liberation Army), and Real IRA (Real Irish Republican Army).

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For Creation Records boss Alan McGee, the Union Jack going down the plughole signified that “British rock’n’roll was going down the toilet” (personal interview, 2013). However, mindful of the controversy around Morrissey’s flag display at Finsbury Park and the mixed reaction to Select’s Suede/Union Jack cover, McGee was understandably wary and made inquiries to confirm that the band were not fascists. They were not. Noel Gallagher says that: “We liked it because of its pop-art connections to the music we almost exclusively listened to at the time: The Beatles, The Jam, Sex Pistols and The Stone Roses” (personal interview, 2013). The artwork was designed by an old friend, Tony French, who relates that he initially wrapped a traditional Union Jack design around the cassette, but then rejected his own work as “it looked like the Queen’s Jubilee mixtape” (personal interview, 2013). Therefore, he developed the “down-theplughole” design. Here, French gives further insights into his design rationale and the band: There was nothing to be proud about this country at the time … Oasis were … angry young men stamping social realism back into music. And there was a lot to get angry about under the Conservatives; they didn’t give a fuck about us in the North … So that’s pretty much the reason why the Union Jack was spiraling down the plughole. (Personal interview, 2013)8

Similarly, Niven states that “the underlying social causes that provoked punk had not subsided—had in fact got much worse … There is no doubt that in 1994 Oasis struck many people as being the heirs to punk, and, in particular, the Sex Pistols’ radical distillation of working-class anger on Never Mind The Bollocks” (2014: 75). There was also a debt to the Beatles, yet the only song that Oasis chose to cover was “I Am The Walrus”—a song regularly used to close their concerts between 1993 and 1996. Despite the lyrics sounding like psychedelic hippie doggerel, they are actually Lennon at his most acerbic, delivering, in the words of Beatles scholar Ian MacDonald, “a damn-you-England tirade that blasts education, culture, law, order, class, religion” (MacDonald 1995: 214). On stage, Liam Gallagher imbued Lennon’s lyrics with the punk venom of John Lydon, while journalist Jon Savage (1996: 394) states: “Oasis explicitly put themselves in this lineage” of the Beatles’ “ … Walrus,” the Pistols’ “God Save The Queen,” Dexys Midnight Runners’ “Dance Stance” and the Smiths’ “The Queen 8

Getting rid of the Tories was Noel Gallagher’s motivation for his initial support of Tony Blair. When he attended the subsequent celebration of Blair’s election victory at 10 Downing Street in 1997, he allegedly drew a Hitler moustache on a portrait of Margaret Thatcher.

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Is Dead”—all pop examples of second-generation Irish dissidence. Savage saw Oasis as “outsiders” among the acts described as Britpop, and this had much to do with their second-generation Irish position (1996: 392–4). In describing Oasis and the Smiths, Savage noted that they were both driven by “a fierce pride and anger about their background” (1996: 394). The “Union Jack going down the plughole” design is an articulation of this. As I have noted elsewhere, historically the Union Jack has been intrinsically linked to the politics of power, monarchy, empire, nation, and religion, reinforcing those structures (Hopkins 2017: 128). This makes any subversion of the flag powerful. French’s distorted design, tellingly, dissolves the three Christian crosses that usually provide the flag’s rigid structure and with it the religious ideology that underpins much of the history of the country. In the melting of the sharp lines of the traditional Union flag, it is also possible to discern a dissolving of the exclusionary barriers normally set up by ideas of national identity and the “systems of domination” (Ware 1996: 69) that support and feed off it. The importance of the distorted Union Jack design to the band is shown by how it remained a constant part of their visual image throughout 1993–1995, surviving beyond that in a more abstracted form. It featured on their live posters and t-shirts, and as the stage backdrop both on tour and for the performance of their debut single “Supersonic” on Top of the Pops (April 1994), as well as on the cover artwork for the “Don’t Look Back In Anger” single (1995). The design painted a very different picture to the brash, confident pop nationalism associated with dominant readings of Britpop and its use of the Union Jack. In campaign planning, there was a conscious effort to separate Oasis from the pop nationalism evident in Britpop. The word Britpop was never used to describe them in press releases or pitches while they were on Creation Records, and as their press officer I refused any interviews, even influential ones, that would place them in any “Best of British” feature. Similarly, a lucrative retail marketing campaign for Oasis’s debut album, Definitely Maybe (1994), was turned down, as it would have seen the album displayed prominently alongside Union Jacks and records by Britpop bands in Britpop-branded racks at the many Virgin and Our Price shops across the UK (Cavanagh 2000: 466). An appearance on the Britpop Now! TV program was also declined. Indeed, the band never saw themselves as Britpop. Their attitude was always typically direct: “Britpop? Shitpop!” The loyalty of second-generation people to the country of their birth is often tested by the question of what national sports team they support—for example, senior Conservative MP Norman Tebbit’s cricket test (Fisher 1990) that was

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designed to establish the loyalty of Asian-Britons. Noel Gallagher was asked to write a song for the England football team for Euro ‘96—an event often framed by the narrative of greatness around England’s World Cup victory in 1966. Noel’s response was: “Over my dead body. We’re Irish” (quoted in Campbell 2011: 3). Yet their Irish ethnicity was often obscured as it undermined the Britpop narrative. The shift from the Union Jack going down the plughole to Noel’s Union Jack guitar (1996)9 was surprising. While the guitar deserves exploration, that is beyond the remit of this chapter.

“My Country Too”: Echobelly—a South AsianBritish Perspective Catherine Hall (1992) notes that nationalism is gendered, and that gender is a useful lens through which to examine nationalism and, by extension, national identity. Joane Nagel argues that “the national state is essentially a masculine institution” (1998: 251) that reinforces the patriarchal structure of power relations between the genders, while Koen Slootmaeckers argues that “nationalism relies on masculine technologies of Othering to distinguish itself from other nations” (2019: 240). Clearly, there is intersectionality between issues of gender, race, and ethnicity. In this context, it seems significant that few female musicians have employed the Union Jack in comparison to their male counterparts, and that when they did most took a critical and questioning approach. One such musician is Echobelly’s Sonya Aurora Madan. During the 1970s and 1980s, when Madan was growing up, South AsianBritons were practically invisible in politics and the media beyond the stereotypes and brownface minstrelsy of television comedies like It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum10 (1974–81). In British music, attention revolves around the black-and-white binary, thus ignoring South Asian cultural production despite the significant presence and contribution of the South Asian community in the UK. While the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and other English artists culturally appropriated Indian instruments like the sitar in their late 1960s chart hits, until the early 1990s few South Asian-Britons reached the official and independent charts or

9 10

This guitar was used at the two Maine Road concerts 27 to 28 April 1996. Like Dad’s Army, this was also set in the Second World War.

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were embraced by the British music industry: a form of institutional racism achieved through exclusion and invisibility.11 Prior to the early 1990s many South Asian-British musicians existed, often very successfully, in “alternative economic systems that support[ed] the manufacture and distribution of Bhangra cassettes” (Huq 1996: 77). However, after success through this system, Apache Indian and Bally Sagoo were signed to major labels and made their mainstream debuts in 1993 and 1994, respectively. This marked a significant shift as South Asian-British artists operating in a variety of genres started to break through to a wider audience, in part aided by the music press. Amongst these artists were Talvin Singh, Aki Nawaz’s Fun^Da^Mental, Asian Dub Foundation (ADF), Echobelly, Cornershop, Voodoo Queens, Black Star Liner, the Kaliphz, and Joi. However, the more overtly political ADF, who formed to play a Quddus Ali benefit, spent much of their early career touring in France, Italy, and other parts of Europe rather than through the UK pub circuit as those venues were often, as ADF’s John Pandit states, “quite racist” (personal interview, 2020). Many of these artists were described in the press as the Asian Underground or Asian Kool. As Sharma et al. noted at the time “it appears that the ‘coolie’ has become cool” (1996: 1). However, despite this, the specter of the far-right was still very real, as “ … racial violence continues to soar as Fortress Europe further secures its borders” (1). Anjali Bhatia of the Riot Grrrl band, Voodoo Queens said: “I find it an insult, to be a fad. To be Asian is sort of a fashionable thing now whereas when I was growing up it wasn’t … I was being called Paki everyday” (quoted in Huq 1996: 73–4). As Rehan Hyder states in Brimful of Asia: “The music industry thrives on the novel; difference can be marketed like any other commodity … ” (2004: 92). For the industry, ADF’s John Pandit argues, the South Asian-British artists of the 1990s offered the opportunity to “open up new markets of potential consumers” (personal interview, 2020). At the time, Pandit noted: “The music industry is so important for British capitalism that they need to compartmentalize everything. They have their own markets like the gay market, the pink pound. Now there’s the rupee pound, a new Asian audience. It’s the history of Western imperialism. Let’s talk about exotic Asians” (Huq 1996: 77). For the media, it meant a new (exotic) story to tell and to sell.

11

Exceptions include Freddie Mercury (Queen), Jaz Coleman (Killing Joke), Sheila Chandra (Monsoon), Bid (the Monochrome Set), Sushil Dade (Soup Dragons), Aki Nawaz (Southern Death Cult), and Jagz Kooner (The Aloof).

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Sonya Aurora Madan had an “anglicized … upbringing” (Hyder 2004: 101). She rebelled against her Asian background and her parents’ high expectations of a good job and arranged marriage, as addressed in the songs “Give Her A Gun” (1994) and “Father Ruler King Computer” (1994). The latter song title was inspired, as Sheila Whiteley (2010: 66) noted, by Germaine Greer’s landmark book The Female Eunuch. As a teenager, Madan had, like many first and secondgeneration children, a strong sense of “not fitting into anything” (Madan, quoted in Mistiaen 1994), and she faced regular racist abuse from white children, as addressed in songs such as “Call Me Names” (1994).12 However, Madan not only faced rejection from her white peers: “Asian kids didn’t want to play with me. They thought I was too white” (1994). She identified herself as an “East-West casualty,” succinctly summing up the painful duality of her position, a double rejection common to many second-generation children: “I spent so long being an outcast, feeling I was no good. I want a place to belong” (1994). Her one trip back to India brought some kind of resolution, as she told Melody Maker: “I’d always thought, I’m Indian, I’m Indian, not even being able to speak very much of the language, but feeling that I should call myself Indian. But I went over there to visit and just thought … my God! I’m British! I’m British!” (Mueller 1994). Songs like “I Don’t Belong Here” address her childhood experiences as well as the rising far-right situation in England in the early to mid-1990s. In addition to tackling these issues in her lyrics, Madan also staged two interventions in which she adapted two Union Jack t-shirts with slogans to get her point across visually through print and video. Both t-shirts say strongly that she does belong here, on her own terms, and that she will not be bullied. In the video for Echobelly’s second single “Insomniac” (March 1994), Madan détourned Skinhead uniform subversively pairing high burgundy Dr. Marten’s boots and rolled-up camouflage trousers with a cheap-looking Union Jack t-shirt adapted with the slogan “My Country Too.” While the Dr. Martens boots and rolled-up trousers respond to the pop nationalism of Damon Albarn’s clothing in the “British Image 1” photos discussed earlier, the meaning and impact are totally different: a subversive critique. During the promotion of Echobelly’s debut album, Madan was interviewed by Vox magazine (September 1994). She used the opportunity to unveil a different t-shirt, one that provided a discussion point for the interview. Here, she defaced

12

The lines “I’ve been scrubbing at my skin you see/ but the colour remains on me” … capture the complex and brutal experience of first and second-generation South Asian-British children, and recall Frantz Fanon’s reaction to suffering verbal abuse because of his skin colour (1986: 112).

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an original Swinging ‘60s t-shirt emblazoned with a Union Jack and the phrase “England Swings” by striking out “Swings” and replacing it with “My Home Too.” The removal of “Swings” appears to critique Britpop’s (over-)reliance on the sound and visuals of the Swinging Sixties imaginary, thus, Britpop’s nostalgic 1960s narrative. Madan told Vox: This T-shirt is a reaction to the BNP. I wanted to make it clear that I won’t be put in a victim role. Nobody’s going to kick me out of this country … For an Asian girl to wear a Union Jack is going to spark discussion. I like to piss people off by taking something that is sacred to them and throwing back the true meaning in their face.

Clearly, she understood the power of a thought-provoking image to make a point and get a reaction. However, Tjinder Singh, lead singer of Cornershop, felt that her motives were suspect: “She was posturing and jumping on the Brit Cool bandwagon” (Rachel 2019: 66). Despite, or perhaps because of, the power of these images, Echobelly have largely been excluded from subsequent media discourse about Britpop, despite the band’s success. For instance, Echobelly were only given two brief mentions in journalist John Harris’ acclaimed popular history of Britpop, The Last Party (2003), and Madan’s Union Jack t-shirts were ignored. The band do not even feature in Kari Kallioniemi’s academic work Englishness, Pop and Post-War Britain (2016). Such omissions can be read as an extension of the enforced invisibility of South Asian-Britons, particularly women. That their guitarist, Debbie Smith, is a Black lesbian is further evidence of how Echobelly did not fit the white male Britpop narrative both then and now. Whiteley stated that: “[i]t is not insignificant that the challenge to white, super-lad supremacy was first confronted by … Sonya Aurora Madan” (2010: 58). She goes on to note that while Echobelly, and other female-fronted Britpop acts Elastica and Sleeper, achieved significant commercial success and media coverage, they were, as female musicians, often treated dismissively and “once again relegated to the status of dolly-birds, babes and sex objects” (2010: 56). The sexism inherent in media representations of Madan served to undermine the clarity of her feminist lyrics. To understand Echobelly’s interventions and their exclusion from the Britpop narrative, it is worth examining how South Asian artists were portrayed in the music press at the time. The lecturer and music journalist Neil Kulkarni provides useful insights, telling this author in 2020: They were dealt with in a tremendously UNSURE manner … Race was something white writers just felt tremendously uncomfortable/uneasy even mentioning so

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bands like this [Echobelly, Cornershop, Voodoo Queens] were mainly covered without mentioning the racism that they all encountered. And crucially, because they were indie guitar bands they got more coverage than the Asian [hip-hop] artists I favored like Fundamental, Hustlers HC etc.

In the press Madan was often treated as a novelty, with media interviews revolving around her Asianness (Hyder 2004: 101) and being an Asian woman in a band. While this secured Echobelly considerable press coverage at the time and helped build their successful career, it was often patronizing, a case of tokenism and exoticism. Thus, Madan was viewed through an Orientalist gaze (Said 1978), both objectified and eroticized13. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Madan cited a heated UK television debate on racism in which she had taken an active part. Despite her involvement, her contributions were cut so that all that remained was her sitting quietly (Mistiaen 1994). This effective silencing of Madan suggests that she was not allowed to be seen as an intelligent articulate feminist as, using Homi Bhabha’s (1994) theory of “mimicry,” this would have undermined colonialist stereotypes. As she told the Tribune: “if you are petite and Asian and categorized as sexy, it goes against the grain to be opinionated” (Mistiaen 1994). Bakrania argues that the response of the white media was “not surprising given the entrenchment of a colonial rescue discourse in Britain that sees Asian women as passive victims of an excessively sexist culture from which they need to be rescued by white men” (2013: 76). Madan also became frustrated by the Asian media asking about arranged marriages and being a role model for Asian values (Mistiaen 1994). Given the language of nation, war, and empire prevalent in Britpop’s media narrative, it should not be surprising that there would also be sexism and racism, since they are interlocking “systems of domination” (Ware 1996: 69). Shortly after Britpop, the academic Helen Davies (2001) noted that there were still significantly more male British music journalists than female ones. She continued: “The music press assumes that all its readers are male as well, so that the situation is often one of male journalists writing for male readers … It is therefore hardly surprising that much music writing tends either to ignore women entirely or to treat them in an extremely sexist way” (2001: 301–2). Similarly, it was often a case of white writers writing for white readers. Throughout the 1990s, the only non-white journalists contributing regularly to the weekly music press were

13

Of course, this was nothing new, such representation of Eastern and Asian women was embedded in the art and literature of the British Empire.

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Kulkarni (MM) and Dele Fadele (NME), with Angela Lewis and Bidisha used sparingly by NME. Nevertheless, Madan found ways to resist the colonialist discourse through her Union Jack interventions and lyrics.

Conclusion While some musicians responded to the perceived internal and external threats of the early 1990s and the subsequent crisis in English/British national identity by reproducing national symbols and past narratives of national glory, others actively questioned this. Like British colonialism, Britpop took place under the banner of the Union Jack, and Britpop’s use of the flag played a key role in the reproduction and rebranding of the nation and the social and cultural (re) construction of national identity. While some of the early examples may have been intended as tongue-in-cheek or as “reclaiming the flag from the fascists” (Harrison 1993), the increased ubiquity of the Union Jack in the Britpop narrative from 1994 onward rendered the flag banal by repetition. While a flag waved with “fervent passion” (Billig 1995: 8) may provoke revulsion, banal repetition, like “unnoticed” and “unwaved” flags that reproduce the nation in everyday life (38), may make us immune to properly seeing and scrutinizing the flag and its brutal histories, thus, nationalism by stealth. Like the Windrush scandal and the rhetoric of Brexit, an examination of Britpop’s pop nationalist narrative, and the subsequent exclusion of the first and second-generation Irish and South Asian counter-narratives discussed above, demonstrates that empire attitudes and institutional structures are still in place. It is revealing that, other than Jon Savage’s writings on Oasis, some of the most in-depth media explorations of the national identities and ethnicities of Echobelly and Oasis come from publications outside the UK (Mistiaen 1994; Boyd 2008). The UK media’s reluctance to tackle these issues meaningfully in part explains the exclusion of the images discussed here within more recent coverage of Britpop. Through their creative and questioning uses of the flag, both Echobelly and Oasis found a hybridized “place” to belong, a way to engage with the “in-betweenness” of their second-generation/diasporic positions. These uses, especially Madan’s, do not fit Britpop’s convenient white male English ideal and posed awkward questions about the hybrid nature of English/British national identity. Yet, it is important to remember that these thought-provoking acts of resistance did, at least for a while, constructively disrupt and critique

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the emergent Britpop narrative and provide an alternative “diaspora space” (Brah 1996) for second-generation people, though their nuances may have since become submerged. They also provide blueprints for using flags to question and critique national identity.

Interviews Tony French, original Oasis designer, personal communication, July 12, 2019. Noel Gallagher, Oasis, personal communication, May 19, 2013. Neil Kulkarni, former Melody Maker journalist, personal communication, July 15, 2020. Alan McGee, Creation label boss, personal communication, May 9, 2013. Paul Mulreany, Primal Scream, personal interview by phone, July 8, 2020. John Pandit, Asian Dub Foundation, personal interview by phone, July 15, 2020.

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Copsey, Nigel. 2004. Contemporary British Fascism: The British National Party and the Quest for Legitimacy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Davies, Helen. 2001. “All Rock and Roll is Homosocial: the Representation of Women in the British Rock Music Press.” Popular Music 20 (3): 301–19. Du Bois, W.E.B. 2007 [1903]. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2007. “Some Questions about Flags.” In Flag, Nation and Symbolism in Europe and America, edited by Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Richard Jenkins, 1–13. Abingdon: Routledge. Fadele, Dele. 1992. “Caucasian Rut.” NME, August 22, 1992: 12–13. Fanon, Frantz. 1986 [1952]. Black Skin, White Masks, translated by C. Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press. Fisher, Dan. 1990. “Split between Britain, U.S. Seen as ‘Inevitable’.” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1990. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-04-19-mn-2009story.html. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Gilroy, Paul. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Greer, Germaine. 1970. The Female Eunuch. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Hall, Catherine. 1992. White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hall, Stuart. 1992. “The Question of Cultural Identity.” In Modernity and Its Futures, edited by Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew, 273–326. Cambridge: Polity Press/Open University. Harris, John. 2003. The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock. UK: Harper Perennial. Harrison, Andrew. 1993. “We’d Rather Jack: Time to Reclaim the Union Jack.” Select, April 1993: 67. Hesmondhalgh, David. 2001. “British Popular Music and National Identity.” In British Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kevin Robins, 273–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hopkins, Johnny. 2017. “Flag of Convenience: The Union Jack as a Contested Symbol of Englishness in 1960s Popular Music or a Convenient Marketing Device?” In Mad Dogs & Englishness: Popular Music and English Identities, edited by Lee Brooks, Mark Donnelly and Richard Mills, 125–42. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Huq, Rupa. 1996. “Asian Kool? Bhangra and beyond.” In Dis-Orientating Rhythm: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music, edited by Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk and Ashwani Sharma, 61–80. London: Zed. Hyder, Rehan. 2004. Brimful of Asia: Negotiating Ethnicity on the UK Music Scene. Farnham: Ashgate.

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Whiteley, Sheila. 2010. “Trainspotting: The Gendered History of Britpop.” In Britpop and the English Music Tradition, edited by Andy Bennett and Jon Stratton, 55–70. Farnham: Ashgate. Younge, Gary. 1999. “Alabama Tactics.” The Guardian, February 25, 1999. https:// theguardian.co/uk/1999/feb/25/lawrence.ukcrime2.

Section Three

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Compromised Histories: The Impact of Production Pressures on the Construction of Historical Narratives in Popular Music Documentaries Lauren Istvandity, Sarah Baker, Zelmarie Cantillon, and Shane Homan

The music documentary has gained popularity since the 1970s as a medium through which not only to narrate the history of popular music but to allow fans to access “behind the scenes” information through the collation of new and archival footage and audio. Popular music has increasingly become the subject of historic revision via documentaries in recognition as something worth preserving, given its value to society across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century (Brandellero et al. 2014). Recognized now as “heritage,” popular music’s recent past is celebrated in a range of heritage institutions, including museums and galleries (Baker, Istvandity and Nowak 2019), and through a variety of formats, such as anniversary reissues/remasters (Bottomley 2016), reunion tours (Bennett 2009), and tribute bands (Homan 2006). The presentation of popular music heritage through music documentaries offers the viewer an intimate experience with artists through firsthand accounts and “never-before-seen” footage. The documentary format is often based around stories—those told by interviewees, and those present in the archive—and shared dominant discourses that have emerged over time. The idea that the retelling of heritage can often fall into patterns that prioritize, and place high value upon, the more common and pervasive stories is most notably described by Smith (2006) as the “authorized heritage discourse.” Roberts and Cohen (2014) use this concept in understanding the various forms of popular music heritage, noting the power of music and media industries to bestow a sense of “authorization” to texts they produce.

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Given its temporal context as “recent” history, the discourses of popular music heritage are still emerging, and are easily influenced by those who are in a position of power. In heritage terms, this often falls to the curators and creators of content, including heritage professionals, journalists, documentary makers, and academics. The resulting dominant discourses encouraged (purposefully or incidentally) by these influencers can prove problematic in a number of ways, most notably in how they may threaten or marginalize those voices and narratives currently on the periphery, including those relating to ethnicity, gender, and politics. However, in creating music documentaries, production teams are presented with a range of issues that can affect the kinds of narratives destined for the final product. While it may appear that producers or directors are in control of documentary content, this chapter draws on interviews carried out with thirteen documentary makers, which reveal a more complex situation. As Harbert (2018: 13) notes, what music documentary “films accomplish isn’t always what the directors aim to accomplish.” The stories that end up on screen are more often the result of convenience (what is present in existing archives and interviews), bias (on the part of the interviewer, director, or producer), and mis/fortune (did interviewees tell the story that was expected or desired?). This chapter provides insight into the challenges facing production team members of music documentaries from around the world, including such well-known series as Classic Albums (1997 to present), Long Way to the Top (2001), and Dancing in the Street (1996) and documentary films and series that are perhaps less well known to a global audience but have local or national significance, such as Something in the Water (2008) and End of the Orange Season (1998). Produced for a range of music-loving audiences, some of these documentaries were made commercially, while others were made for national broadcasters with government funding (Australian Broadcasting Commission and British Broadcasting Corporation), which mitigates slightly the need for the resulting films to be financially successful. This chapter uses four interrelated stages of documentary-making—the narrative, interviewing, archives, and editing—as a framework for understanding the tension that lies between the vision and the end result. Existing research on music documentaries has focused predominantly on analyzing their content. Specifically, the literature comments on the use of particular tropes, archival footage and interviews, narration, music and sound, sequence structure, and editorial techniques in order to analyze the

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narratives that are being produced (e.g., see Long and Wall 2010, 2013; Cohen 2011; Giuffre 2014; Huber 2011; Harbert 2018; Pramaggiore 2018; Wall and Pillai 2018). Much of this scholarly work also considers the broader context of music documentaries, such as the evolution of the genre and its place within film and television (see Chanan 2013; Cohen 2012; Niebling 2016) and how documentaries’ narratives connect to wider social, cultural, historical, and political discourses. For instance, Dibben (2009) discusses how Icelandic music documentaries articulate particular notions of national identity, while Stahl (2008) examines how “rockumentaries” depict creative work and cultural production in the contemporary neoliberal labor market. Moreover, the literature often reflects on the mediated nature of music documentaries. Despite what the term may imply, “documentation” is not a neutral retelling of the past (Wall and Pillai 2018). Rather, it works to construct, reinforce and/or disrupt the historical record of popular music’s past. Indeed, by virtue of their creation, music documentaries can function to “validate and confirm particular musical styles and historical moments in the history of popular music as somehow worthy of more ‘serious’ attention” (Shuker 2005: 85). As representations, music documentaries are partial accounts that selectively include and exclude certain people, stories, imagery, and perspectives. The final product is shaped to a large extent by the filmmakers’ and producers’ knowledges, biases, tastes, objectives, and the resources available to them (Cantillon et al. 2019). For example, Carr (2014) critiques amateur documentary The Occy: A Doco (2014)—focused on the closure of a prominent live music venue in Wollongong, Australia—for presenting a “narrow” perspective. Carr (2014: 117) notes that the documentary lacks contextualization in terms of broader social and political shifts in the city, such as the impacts of deindustrialization, which may have “been useful for explaining the Wollongong community’s desires for an outlet regarding the goings-on in the city” including “performing and writing rock music.” He also argues that The Occy’s filmmaker constructs a “heroes and villains” binary, privileging the perspectives of “insiders” (e.g., musicians, patrons, and booking agents) while neglecting the voices of “city planners, police, business owners” and local historians (Carr 2014: 124). Only some of this research, however, explicitly reflects on these issues of representation in relation to the inner workings of the documentary production process. Cantillon et al. (2019: 140) note that: “What is represented in music documentaries … is not necessarily what is most pervasive or historically

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significant, but rather reflects who is available to be interviewed, what material is readily accessible and cost-efficient to use,” and so on. Carr (2014), for instance, does acknowledge how The Occy’s content was shaped by certain production constraints—namely, budgetary and time limitations given it was made and funded entirely by the director, and issues with sources not wanting to be interviewed on the record. In his article on Australian television docuseries Long Way to the Top, Homan (2017: 431) offers a robust case study of the production pressures involved in creating music documentaries. Focusing on “the challenges in reconciling musicians’ and fans’ experiences with traditional television documentary practices” (432), Homan discusses how the production crew went about collecting source material, conducting interviews, deciding on “organising narrative principles” (434) and aesthetics, and editing the series for brevity. In our chapter, we build on Homan’s article to provide further insight into the production process from the perspective of those who make music documentaries. Using examples from thirteen music documentaries, this chapter encompasses some uncharted territory and provides an original perspective on the ways that such products come together.

Methodology This chapter draws on in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted between 2010 and 2012 as part of the Australian Research Council-funded project Popular Music and Cultural Memory (DP1092910). The project set out to identify and critique the ways in which local popular music histories are placed within broader national and international histories, including the role of documentaries in constructing popular music’s past. The project interviewed a range of professionals involved with collecting, preserving, curating, and narrating popular music’s past, including those with roles on the production teams of music history documentaries. Interviews focused on the process and practice of documentary production, with a view to understanding how heritagization occurs at the various stages of narrative creation. We draw on thirteen such interviews here with producers, directors, script writers, and researchers from Australia, the Netherlands, United States, United Kingdom, Iceland, and Israel. Interviews took place in production companies, broadcasters, and private homes. The interviews were recorded and transcribed prior to being thematically coded.

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Documentary Production: Working in “circles” The production processes for documentary making, like the making of any film, include recording material, fitting it alongside a narrative, and editing it down to both refine the product and create a suitable running time. Documentaries, however, often require a mix of old and new content: some archival content is usually mixed with recently conducted interviews or voiceovers from relevant talking heads. A comment from Paul Clarke, a member of the production team of Long Way to the Top, provides us with an effective framework through which to understand the documentary-making processes as our interviewees describe it. Clarke outlines the process of assembling this television series devoted to the history of Australian popular music: So we organize who we want to interview, we think who would be good, and we get that list together, then we order archive [material], and that’s a different sort of circle, and then there’s the story that you want to tell, so you start with where you want to start and where you want to get to the end of, and we always work [off] circles—so with the story, it starts in this place, and it finishes at this place … I found this sort of circular method of storytelling to just absolutely … [clarify] it so wonderfully for TV … But the three circles that we’ve got to integrate are the interview, the narrative of where you want the story to start, and the archive, and you’ve got to try and pull those three circles together as close [as possible] … but it’s just playing in the place where they intersect and making the most of that.

This extract provides a fitting metaphor for the documentary-making process, where each area of storytelling, interviewing, and searching for archival footage are all necessary parts of creating a cohesive historical narrative. Juggling all these aspects alongside each other to create a balanced end result can prove difficult, and there is sometimes a lot at stake. We add to Clarke’s framework a fourth aspect that is integral to filmmaking of any kind: editing. This step brings the circles of production together, potentially altering the outcome in dramatic ways.

Circle 1: The Narrative There are many ways to weave a powerful narrative. Documentaries often embody the basics of storytelling—a beginning, a middle, and an end, with elements that compel audiences to continue watching or listening (often, tension and resolution) (Bernard 2011). However, in documentary making,

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the characters (in this case, artists or producers) have their own stories to tell. Filmmakers have the complex job of producing a cohesive narrative that often begins with the story they have set out to tell, and is shaped by the materials and voices they are able to draw together throughout the process. A range of choices regarding the type of narrative—linear, thematic, and so on, as well as boundaries—single/multiple artists, time periods—are confronted early in the narrative-defining process. For example, the Classic Albums series is confined, by the series producers’ own definition, to single albums by one artist. On the other hand, Long Way to the Top was driven episodically by historical periods. Particular narratives will develop in these contrasting contexts, each with unique challenges. Our interviews with music documentary producers revealed some of the limitations, a number of which are self-imposed, that influence the final narrative. One of the predominant elements that influenced documentary narratives for our interviewees was the decision to include or exclude artists for the sake of the story. This can be for aesthetic or “visionary” reasons, such as discussed at length by a team member from Dancing in the Streets: But I think what was important to us in making this series is that every; [] a lot of people said “you didn’t have this band in it. You didn’t have Dire Straits in it.” [They’re a] massive, massive band, [they’ve] got a really unique sound, but the absolute criteria for anyone being in the series was they had to have changed the course of the music. So it wasn’t just they were great performers, they had to have changed the direction it went … “why didn’t you have U2 in it?,” a lot of people said. They are an amazing band, but they never changed the direction the music went. … they came in at a point when it was going great and they were great, but they didn’t bring something absolutely phenomenally new that created a whole new tangent of the way music went. So that was our thinking behind anyone who was in the film. They had to tick that box.

For this documentary, bands were chosen on the basis of their ability to signal shifts in creativity or as signifiers of wider social change. In other instances, such as linear, historically driven series (such as Long Way to the Top), the inclusion or exclusion of artists (or genres) can be motivated by time constraints, in addition to the need for some level of accurate representation of the times. The caliber of artists featured in music documentaries is a key consideration for most production teams. This was emphasized in relation to Classic Albums where the global cultural impact of an artist or album was a core concern. For the Classic Albums team, the decision to exclude an artist was based on a number

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of factors, including the way in which a story might unfold around that person or group: If a really majorly successful artist rang up, we’d know that a film was going to happen. On the contrary, if a less well-known musician called and asked to be in the series, I would have to very politely say “no, it’s not going to work.” I’ve had some famous people do that, and it’s always difficult to know what to say, because they’re very proud of what they’ve done, and I don’t want to minimize it—it’s an achievement to record and put out any album, big or small! Ultimately, though, I’ll know what will work and what won’t.

Perhaps too, there is an element of commercialism built into such decisions— what “will work and what won’t” is ultimately tied to the ability to engage and build audiences, potentially threatening the long-term funding for the series. While the information provided in artists’ historical reflections can be interesting in their own right, there are elements of ego, audacity, or indulgence associated with the rock narrative that consistently engage audiences. Documentaries highlighting and detailing the activities that may make up these elements—drug use, sexual deviancies/misconduct, criminal activity, and other public or private misdemeanors—run the risk of glorifying these artists, rather than holding them accountable (Strong and Rush 2018; Strong 2019). Such challenges were confronted by the BBC documentary team, as one member explains: So you do get this sense, you’re trying to tell the story of excess and you do tell it, but equally you get this slight sense of … a lot of the witnesses backing off, and also it can be a bit boring because it can be just salacious, and you don’t really want to make a salacious film.

Documentaries made for national broadcasters like the BBC would also come under scrutiny from a panel of censors, making it even more important for narratives to have substance, not just be tales of bad behavior. Such an approach to evaluating the need for “salacious” material also reflects a need to interpret and present the truth of matters, rather than perpetuating the rock ‘n’ roll myth. Though typical of preproduction activities, not all documentaries have straightforward storylines sketched out from the beginning. A team member who worked on the production of Something in the Water, a film charting Western Australia’s music scenes, describes the results of a lack of narrative direction:

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They didn’t [have a firm idea about the narrative]. That was probably a problem, because usually if you do a documentary … you need a kind of storyboard to follow, or at least have a hypothesis. He didn’t really have one. I guess he thought that more interesting surprises would come up; come through that. … I guess what they originally set up to do changed with my input as well. By the end of it, it didn’t have a very strong … thesis statement to make, because there was no real direction in that way. And of course, there was always going to be issues about bands that didn’t make it, or did make it, for … one reason or another.

Without a guiding principle to focus interview questions, the documentary seems to lose its drive and rationale. While this approach may work for some filmmakers, the outcome of such undertakings is heavily steered by the stories told by interviewees, leaving the production team to piece together narratives from the top down, rather than influence them from the bottom up.

Circle 2: Interviewing An essential feature of music documentaries is the inclusion of new, or recent, interview footage of relevant artists, producers, songwriters, promoters, friends and family members of musicians, fans, and experts. The interview is a “stock technique” of contemporary documentary making (Harbert 2018: 17). Some production teams “use interviews as a way of collecting statements that support a predetermined narrative,” but it is also the case that a narrative will emerge from a collection of interviews (Harbert 2018: 126). Either way, documentaries on popular music history have a tendency to present “a textual expository narrative,” which is stitched together from segments of interviews conducted with people relevant to the subject at hand (Harbert 2018: 216). In balance with archival materials, documentary producers must trust that firstly, the people they want to interview for the show are willing and available, and secondly, that they provide engaging and informative interviews. As Huber (2011: 3) notes, the music documentary “relies on the authentic performance of memory in the form of interviews with key figures.” This revival of memory is crucial to stories being told in the ways envisioned by their producers. In relation to the Classic Albums series, one team member said: I like to put it this way in my pitches: each program consists of stories told from the inside out. Our audiences get to hear the real stories behind the album in

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question, told by the people who really made it, and a lot of that is down to the interviews … So … we often emphasize interview over archive in our films.

This quote foregrounds the idea that only interviewees can provide the “real stories” that are key to the success of the storylines and of the series at large. For this particular series, the team member notes the significance of using interviews over archival footage. This avoidance of previously filmed or photographed material is shared by the makers of Dancing in the Street: When you hear it firsthand from these guys, you get the really personal journey and it really hits you … And when they talk about that passion, you can’t get that from a commentator. You can’t write that into commentary. You’ll never get the passion. So it was really important to try and get them first hand.

The acquisition of interviews is seen, then, as vital to the authenticity of the narrative. The idea of primary sources contained within the documentary carries more impact and may contribute to the ultimate success of the series or film. However, the process of choosing interviewees can be as fraught with contention and difficulty as selecting the artists or bands to include. The importance placed on interviews makes the process of interviewing the right people in the right ways a precarious task. Discussions with documentary team members revealed that this point in the development of the film could mean a minor change in direction. A member of the Israeli production Dancing with Tears in our Eyes noted the disappointment associated with key figures who did not interview well: People that are interesting when you talk to them face-to-face are not that interesting when you put them in front of a camera. So, you have to have characters. If you concentrate on characters, sometimes you can’t concentrate about [sic] the material. They don’t correlate necessarily. So, you have to have characters that are interesting television-wise. So that was a real problem.

This also brings to the fore the issue of having someone who interviews too well—a “character,” as this person describes it, could overpower or derail the kinds of stories a director originally set out to tell. An interviewee from the Long Way to the Top production team conceded that sometimes interviewees with a lesser role in the topic under consideration in an episode might actually have more engaging narratives to impart than more central figures: sometimes these questions—the questions you’re asking—are dictated by like, a) does a person do a good interview? So if someone who’s not that, you know,

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necessary … might have given a great interview, and that would make them … work [better]. And then sometimes they just might link to a little story you’ve built up, and a lot of those factors would dictate what was there. But there would be things you couldn’t not have in there, and then you kind of go backwards from there. There’s things you want in there, so there are a lot of personal choices. And there’s things like, you know, just people that you find personally likeable.

The kinds of histories that are highlighted often seem to be reliant on the information provided in an interview. Harking back to the idea of representing the realities of particular eras, especially in terms of excess or indulgence, can be particularly problematic when the activities cast shadows on the people describing them. As an interviewee from the BBC explains: Obviously they’re trying to give you a version of their history [in] which they’re quite central usually and also they quite often have things that they don’t want to talk about … most ’70s musicians are rather ashamed of the ’70s I think, because it was an era of excess … [that] seem[s] larger than it was and they don’t really want to talk about that, because I think they realize that’s quite destructive for their career because now people rather look down on that … So you do get a slightly reconstructed history a lot of the time … because they come out of the music industry interviews [which] for them are traditionally associated with PR, they’re selling their next album, so you’re trying to bring a kind of rigor to the interview process that is quite contradictory, necessarily, to what they’ve experienced.

The context of both the past and present comes into play in the above scenario. That an artist may still be actively making music or continuing their career will affect the kinds of interview responses they are willing to provide. This means that the degree to which a documentary can be “revealing” or “explosive” is dictated in many ways by the interview material producers can create or access.

Circle 3: Archival Material Though the previous extracts suggested that current interview footage was at the heart of a successful documentary, the use of archival footage should not be overlooked. Existing research on music documentaries points to archival material as central to documentary construction. Huber (2011: 3) proposes that older photos and film are used “to generate a feeling of ‘being there’ at important

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instances of production and consumption.” In describing Martin Scorsese’s treatment of a recent biopic on George Harrison, O’Meara and Stevens (2012: 175) note how the creative use of previously published material (such as scenes from the Anthology project) can create new interpretations of the past. Perhaps the use of well-known material can also relate to the audience as informed or knowledgeable fans. Contrasting with some of the above interviewees, one production team member from Something in the Water describes the positive effect of archival material: I really wanted watching the film to feel like standing around at a gig. I kind of in fact envisaged the screenings of the film to be in pubs, where people would go and get a beer, and maybe miss a couple of the interview subjects, but there’d be enough performance footage in it to keep you interested and keep it moving.

The suggestion is that performance footage, usually sourced from archives, can keep the viewer engaged in the story even if the “talking heads” are missable. In looking to make a documentary that has high audience impact, the discovery of previously unseen archival footage can be a particularly useful find. This was the case for the team working on Dancing in the Street: We were trying to find archive [footage] that had never been seen, private collector’s stuff. And so things like, for the punk show when we were filming in New York, that whole era, there were a lot of people who had Super 8 cameras, who would go down to these clubs in these really awful parts of town, but that’s where it was all happening. They would film Debbie Harry and they would film The Ramones and all of these people who were playing at nightclubs. And it had just sat in their archives. So we were able to dig up stuff that hadn’t been seen, which was really special.

The addition of amateur footage can make documentary narratives more accessible to audiences as it has the potential to temper “insider’s stories” with real fan perspectives. For the Dancing in the Street team, such footage boosted the documentary’s overall significance and contribution to popular music history. Archival material is seen as essential for creating documentaries in which key figures who require a presence in the narrative have already died. A notable example of this is the Anthology series on The Beatles, which drew on past interviews recorded with John Lennon to allow his opinion to sit alongside the remaining band members. One of our research participants described a similar scenario:

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An example of archive footage which really worked, I feel, was in a program … that I [was involved in] on Marvin Gaye [which was produced] for the BBC and the American channel PBS. We managed to find a great deal of archive of him in interview telling the story, talking about almost everything we covered—so it was as if he was in the film. We were very lucky to find that. It isn’t always so easy.

In these ways, archival material may be regarded as complementary to interviews, if not equally as important in bringing the past and present together. This is particularly the case when key figures for the documentary narrative are deceased or otherwise unavailable to record new “talking head” footage. In the instance of the Marvin Gaye film, the production team were able to secure past interview footage which spoke to “almost everything” they had intended to cover. But if that had not been the case, and the archival interviews were partial or limited in content, the final product would have been compromised in the historical narrative being created. Gaining access to and using archival footage can be problematic. The costs of access can be “prohibitively expensive” (Cantillon et al. 2019: 137). This was an issue repeatedly raised by many production team members, suggesting that cost may be one of the reasons documentary makers emphasize the inclusion of current interview footage rather than archival material. However, despite the cost, the ability to include particular footage is necessary to the narration of the story. When the owner of the material is aware of the value, the price soars, as several respondents described. One production team member from Classic Albums provided the example of an occasion in which they needed some archival footage of Elvis Presley: When we found out the price we were just stunned. It was astronomically expensive. That’s all down to how big a name Elvis continues to be. Archive is never cheap, but this particular footage was extremely costly. I’m still amazed we could afford it … That did test us to the limit, because the clips were so rare, and the owners were well aware of that. They knew the value of what they had.

Experiencing demands of “astronomical” payment for archival footage was not unusual for the production team. The respondent explained that on most occasions where that happens “we can normally decline to pay and choose to source our footage from elsewhere.” For this particular film, however, the most compelling footage was in one archive only, but for the producers was an imperative addition to the documentary. The filmmakers could not afford not to pay.

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Circle 4: Editing and the Finished Product With hours of interview and archival material potentially available at the hands of the documentary makers, perhaps one of the most difficult tasks is the selection of this material’s most significant sections while also aligning the finished narrative to reflect the initial storytelling aims of the project. As Harbert (2018: 14) observes, “editing becomes a way of thinking through the material” gathered during the production process. It is a time for “pragmatic responsiveness,” with the editing room being where “documentary filmmakers find their film—where they find their arguments about their subjects” (Harbert 2018: 14–15). As a production team member from Something in the Water explained, it is the core story that was the point of departure for the documentary project that set the boundaries of the edit: It’s [the question], “how long is a piece of string?” If you could drill down in so many ways and cover so many genres, then when you’re making a film it would go for 24 hours, so you just have to set your boundaries and remain true to the core of the story which [in our case] was about the rise of those bands and directly what led to that and what influenced them.

To create a seamless version of history in a one- or two-hour documentary presentation, the conversations, questions, and contexts of much of the material collected during earlier production stages must be removed. Excluding the contextual material risks creating a disjointed narrative, and so the editor’s role is significant in producing a version of history that is cohesive. MacDonald (2006: 331) reminds us that: It is rare for interviewees to be granted more than a maximum of one to two minutes of airtime before an edit diverts us towards some other source. Even in the process of narration, cutaway shots act as punctuators of the original rhythm of delivery. Interviewers’ questions and prompts are habitually removed, so that we gain no sense of the interaction underlying the formation of recollections.

The editor seeks to remove the interviewers’ questions and prompts and the surrounding context of an interviewee’s response without the viewer feeling a loss in the narrative or creating a version of the story at odds with the respondent’s experience. A production team member from Classic Albums believed that: It’s no secret that some of our interviewees can be really tedious and long winded in their answers, whether they’re key players in the band or not. That’s definitely a problem, and it’s only the skill of the editor which can fix it. It’s his job to cut

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out the padding and put together the useful parts of the interviewee’s response, whilst making sure not to take any comments out of context. It’s a fine line, but we walk it quite well, I feel.

In this sense, music documentary interviewees share problems encountered with other televisual forms (such as news programs) in trading context for visibility. In this instance, the wider events, thoughts, and artist histories influencing a “classic album” often become secondary to highlighting the more immediate challenges and innovations of production. The curation of interview and archival material during the editing process can be powerful. Editors “stitch together” fragments of interviews and select the most resonant still and moving images to “tell a particular story about music,” one that “offer[s] historical veracity” and which “might draw the interest of fans” (Harbert 2018: 3). What they choose to include, and what ends up on the cutting room floor, can change the way viewers may perceive aspects of history. The process itself is a remarkable one, often best described by participants’ metaphors for the work, as in this example from an individual working on Long Way to the Top: You’re sort of unpicking it from day one. Like … we put the grabs together, and then we put the archive bits in there, and we try music out, but it’s … sort of—in the first cut, you’re kind of trying to push the doona [quilt] into the scotch bottle and get all the bits in there that you want, and then from there, you’re kind of unpicking it and seeing how little doona you need … to make it [work] … the way we work I think frightens the shit out of most editors, because we just put the grabs and tell the story from each people’s heads, kind of—and then we drop in archives, and then we just use the script to oxy weld between those bits. And so the film kind of reveals itself to you gradually.

Documentary makers confront not just how to set agendas from often vast amounts of historical material and interviews, but the very subjective means by which sense is made for the viewer. What is interesting in the Long Way to the Top case is the acknowledged emphasis of the interviewees in driving the wider narrative.

Conclusion From the interview material presented in this chapter, it is clear that production pressures and processes can impact significantly on the construction of historical

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narratives in popular music documentary films and television series. It is often recognized that the tastes, biases, and subjectivities of filmmakers shape the kinds of narratives being produced, but it is also important to recognize less intentional factors at work: time constraints, funding, costs and budgets, availability of archival footage and interviewees, and pressures relating to commercialism (i.e., needing to create something engaging and/or lucrative) and brevity (i.e., editing to adhere to relatively short runtimes for film and television). Acknowledging the messiness of music documentaries is important because these are artifacts that influence the way popular music’s past is understood. Yet they are “historical documents” (Nichols 1991) whose narratives are necessarily partial, with disparate stories welded together to create a sense of music’s history as it should be remembered. As production teams seek to bring together initial story ideas, archival material, and new interviews—none of which necessarily intersect neatly—compromised histories end up being told. Such complexities matter because these documentaries become reference points for the public and researchers alike, informing memories and understandings of popular music scenes, artists, genres, and eras under the guise of fact and with the glow of authenticity.

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Roberts, Les and Sara Cohen. 2014. “Unauthorising Popular Music Heritage: Outline of a Critical Framework.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20 (3): 241–61. Shuker, Roy. 2005. Popular Music: The Key Concepts, 2nd edition. London: Routledge. Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge. Stahl, Matt. 2008. “Sex and Drugs and Bait the Switch: Rockumentary and the New Model Worker.” In The Media and Social Theory, edited by David Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee, 231–47. New York: Routledge. Strong, Catherine. 2019. “Towards a Feminist History of Popular Music: Re-examining Writing on Musicians and Domestic Violence in the Wake of #metoo.” In Remembering Popular Music’s Past: Memory–Heritage–History, edited by Lauren Istvandity, Sarah Baker and Zelmarie Cantillon, 217–32. London: Anthem Press. Strong, Catherine and Emma Rush. 2018. “Musical Genius and/or Nasty Piece of Work? Dealing with Violence and Sexual Assault in Accounts of Popular Music’s Past.” Continuum 32 (5): 569–80. Wall, Tim and Nicolas Pillai. 2018. “Screening Popular Music’s Past: Music Documentary and Biopics.” In The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage, edited by Sarah Baker, Catherine Strong, Lauren Istvandity and Zelmarie Cantillon, 97–107. London: Routledge.

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When a History of Gender Representation Meets the Nostalgic Storytelling of Hot Press Magazine Yvonne Kiely

In 2017 Ireland’s flagship music magazine Hot Press celebrated its fortieth anniversary by publishing a book of covers—a hardback literary tribute to their visual history. Covered in Glory was self-described as “a powerful record of 40 years of popular culture and music … a unique popular culture statement” (Hot Press 2017a). Covered in Glory is a narrative about a narrative—a retelling of history through the eyes of its creator. In 1977, Hot Press published its first issue, and in doing so immediately anchored its identity in the musical and political landscape of Ireland and the world, with a cover featuring a black and white collage of artists, politicians, religious figureheads, and a topline message of rock ‘n’ roll. In the minds of editor Niall Stokes and the Hot Press team at the time, the cover needed to capture “a flavour of the diverse strands that would be brought together” (Stokes 2017a: 38) in the editorial strategy of the magazine. The narrative of Covered in Glory makes it clear that to those involved, the arrival of the first issue of Hot Press represented the beginning of a monumental cultural shift in Ireland and in Irish society, something revolutionary and unprecedented. “The beginning of a new era—and we had to create a cover to match” (Stokes 2017a: 38). Hot Press set itself up as a commentator, reporter, and investigator of the nation’s culture, and its cover space was the battleground of the then present day. Within this space over the course of four decades, a narrative was continually created, added to, and redirected in the unpredictable worlds of music and politics. In 2017, a new narrative to officially give rhyme and reason to the old was carefully crafted and published, as a 344-page hardback Super De Luxe Platinum Edition, and a 280-page paperback Gold Edition.

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In this chapter, several narratives will be discussed and unpacked, all of which represent different perspectives on the same subject: the cover space of Hot Press magazine. The cover space of Hot Press has acted as a shop front for browsers and consumers for over forty years, with carefully selected cover stars communicating narratives to readers. First, there is the editorial narrative which is intentionally created by the production and editorial team and communicated within each cover space. It is a narrative that has been created chronologically, in time with each issue, and is made up of the choice of theme, choice of topic, the featured artist, and the textual messages purposely included within the cover. Second, we have the nostalgic narrative which has been created by Hot Press in retrospect of its cover history, for the purposes of revisiting the past and retelling stories. This is where the idea of “a narrative about a narrative” comes into play. The third and final narrative that this chapter will explore is the gender narrative within the cover space of Hot Press, revealed by a forty-year comparative analysis of artist representation1 and a gendered music media history which has, until now, remained hidden. This narrative is not one which the editorial team at Hot Press has ever commented on or highlighted in its own nostalgic storytelling. While this narrative has existed, hidden in plain sight since 1977, it is only now that it is being formally recognized and explored. Through the work of feminist researchers like Hatton and Trautner (2011), Davies (2001), Leonard (2007), and Lieb (2013), we know that gender matters in the music industries and in music culture. The relationship between branding, gender and women artists is one that has been discussed in detail by Lieb in her analysis of music industry strategies that aim to transform pop stars into “crosscapitalized empires who can generate vast amounts of revenue in a variety of entertainment verticals” (2013: 16). Feminist media research has a rich history of representational inquiry (Byerly 2016) with many researchers focusing their attention on how music videos since the late 1980s have communicated race, gender, and beauty (see Brown and Campbell 1986; Peterson-Lewis and Chennault 1986; Vincent, Davis, and Boruszkowski 1987; Englis, Solomon, and Ashmore 1994; Emerson 2002; Rich et al. 2005; Railton and Watson 2011) with Aubrey and Frisby (2011) analyzing links between genre and the sexual objectification of women in music videos. Regarding journalism and language,

1

This chapter draws on findings from Kiely, Y. (2020), “Music Magazines and Gendered Space: The Representation of Artists on the Covers of Hot Press and Rolling Stone,” Irish Communications Review, 17 (1).

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Helen Davies (2001) explores how the UK rock music press has framed women artists in this genre as separate from their “serious” counterparts. While great strides have been made in understanding the gender dynamics that underlie representations of artists in music media, scholarly investigation into music magazine covers has not kept pace which has resulted in a knowledge gap in feminist media research. Building on the pioneering work of Erin Hatton and Mary Nell Trautner and their study of gender on the cover of Rolling Stone (2011), this research is the first to apply a cross-cultural perspective to the representation of gender on music magazine covers. This research supports the finding from Hatton and Trautner’s research that the images of women on the cover of Rolling Stone have become hypersexualized, and in addition confirms that the images of women on the cover of Hot Press have also reached hypersexualization status. Analyses of gender representation rely on coding and categorization techniques, which in the context of image-based magazine research can be traced to Erving Goffman’s Gender Advertisements (1979) and the adaptations of his systems of measurement by subsequent researchers (see Kang 1997; Lindner 2004; Binns 2006; Johnson 2007; Hatton and Trautner 2011). The exploration of Hot Press’s gender narrative has been made possible by employing a unique system of coding and categorization that builds on these previous systems. Making sense of media messages within the cover spaces of music magazines provides us with another analytical tool to deconstruct dominant representations, and to understand the relationships between identity, space, images, and music culture in a complex global media system. As once popular print publications continue to face declines in sales and readership, it is more important now than ever before that we focus our attention on the former sweetheart of an imagehungry commercial music industry: the music magazine cover.

Serious Music Journalism Not from Around Here— the Editorial Narrative Quite honestly, I don’t have a lot of respect for journalistic standards, generally. I think the degree of compromise and sheer laziness involved is, on a lot of levels, it borders on unethical in my opinion. We’re out to produce a magazine which is honest. Above all I think we’ve got to break away from the tie to commercial considerations, which particularly in the magazine area dominates. We are also trying to break new ground on a journalistic, stylistic level. There

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are developments which are taking place outside Ireland which are specifically related to music which we feel we can incorporate. (Stokes 1977)

The editorial narrative of Hot Press in its beginnings was directed at the “broad spectrum of interests for the 18 to 30-year-old age group” (Stokes 1977), not just in relation to music but also to topical social and political issues in Ireland at the time. In an interview with Ireland’s state broadcaster RTÉ in 1977, Niall Stokes describes a gap in the market for music journalism that the team aims to fill. He elaborates, “There has been a great need for a music paper in Ireland which deals with music on a serious level. The magazines that have existed in the past have been considered by musicians for a start, and by presumably any thinking person to be little more than a joke” (Stokes 1977). Honest, undiluted reporting for a young, intelligent readership hungry for rock ‘n’ roll journalism was the ethos communicated to the public by the editorial team, and from interviews conducted with Stokes at the time it is evident that the early editorial approach taken for this new Irish music magazine was designed to be anything but Irish. The magazines which Stokes did hold in high esteem were across the Atlantic: Rolling Stone and Creem, with Hunter S. Thompson-esque reporting styles that he felt could be employed in Ireland (Stokes 1977). In a 1984 interview with RTÉ, Stokes identifies the adoption of high journalistic standards in Hot Press from the very start as a unique element of the magazine, which elevated their journalistic style to be on par with high-quality music magazines in the UK and the United States (Stokes 1984). From day one, the editorial narrative of Hot Press was purposely engineered to represent an opposing standpoint. Evidence of this can be found on the cover of their first issue, published June 9, 1977. A collage of faces, and among them two men kissing, placed directly behind an image of the current government cabinet of the time including the then Taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave. Directly in front of the cabinet is a large pig. The very existence of Hot Press as a music magazine in Ireland was itself viewed by Stokes as an act of rebellion, in a country that was culturally frozen in time, in “a medieval rut” (Stokes 2017a) and closed off from the international music scene because of civil war in the 1970s. With little national coverage being given to music, “something radical needed to be done” (Stokes 2017a). Throughout the late 1970s and the early 1980s, the cover of Hot Press is purely concerned with music and musical artists, with the image of the featured artist being the main event and snippets of copy giving readers a teaser of the interview(s) contained inside. Further into the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond, the

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featured artist remains the primary subject, but the net of the cover space broadens to include nonmusic-related individuals, such as politicians Margaret Thatcher and Gerry Adams, sportsman Kevin Moran, and broadcaster Gay Byrne. Until 1984 images of musical artists dominate the cover space, and similarly until 1983 the cover space does not regularly mention any topic outside of music, with the exceptions being four covers in 1977 and 1978, which mention elections, nuclear power, and radio journalism. In 1983 we can see a change in language and a sudden broadening of the editorial narrative, which makes room for politics, sex, drugs, sport, law, TV, film, and topical international conversations of the time. During the 1980s, photographs of pop stars such as Freddie Mercury, Madonna, Bob Geldof, Elton John, and Tina Turner are accompanied by headings that speak about Ireland’s divorce referendum, elections, the CIA, apartheid, homosexuality, drugs, soccer and sport, and occasionally prostitution and porn. It is interesting to note that “abortion” is only mentioned once on the cover during this decade despite a constitutional ban on abortion being introduced in 1983. The first issue of 1983 is when the editorial narrative of the Hot Press cover changes, from one focused purely on music to one which seeks to attract conversation about the entertainment industry and current affairs. We see the introduction of nonmusic-related cover stars with film and TV stars, sports people, and politicians placed center stage, and for the first time in 1987 the topic of sex and sexuality is the main event with an illustrated cover about the AIDS epidemic. There are some interesting pieces of coverage, for example, in 2013 the fluoride debate is mentioned on a dozen covers while abortion and the repeal movement are mentioned on eight covers across that entire decade. In 2005 the topic of mental health makes its cover debut, and in the 2000s the topic of sex is mentioned more often than any other topic combined after the introduction of a sex column in 2004. The editorial narrative of Hot Press from 1977 to 2017 curates a cover space for mediated images of the nationally and internationally famous pop stars of the day, and nonmusic-related personalities with notoriety and celebrity status. From 1983 onward, in orbit around these subjects are concisely written standpoints on topics and current issues, primarily reactionary in nature and tending towards an oppositional standpoint to the status quo, current laws, and dominant attitudes. In addition to these standpoints are commentaries which are not offering any alternate position or challenge to the current state of affairs, and occasionally guides or special issues providing readers with “Everything you need to need to know about drugs/sex/college.” Brands also

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have a strong presence within the cover space, with sponsorships, competitions, and giveaways from HMV, KitKat, Durex, Sony Ericson, Heineken, Guinness, Jameson, Smithwicks, Vodafone, Topman, Budweiser, Nokia, Eircom, Bacardi, Smirnoff, 7Up, Esso, Time Out, and Twix dotted across the cover history. The editorial narrative describes a magazine cover which positions itself as a space for conversations about music and pop stars, and topics of interest to young adults, people who in the minds of Stokes and the founding Hot Press team in the magazine’s early years were starving for serious, international music reporting. In the lead up to the 2017 commemorations of the Hot Press cover, the editorial narrative was itself made the subject of change and transformation by the magazine. It was retold to readers from a nostalgic perspective, thus creating a “narrative about a narrative,” and a new “history” of Hot Press.

The Nostalgic Narrative: A Story about Values and Revolution Media nostalgia in music magazine narratives is a topic of research that has yet to be awarded its time in the spotlight. Natterer’s (2014) investigation of how personal nostalgia and historical nostalgia function in media such as film, TV, and music describes how media content can be geared towards influencing consumer behavior by eliciting personal nostalgia, that is, reliving one’s own lived past by way of memories triggered, for instance, by a classic Hendrix song or a documentary on Fleetwood Mac. Music videos and music magazines are cultural artifacts that are representative of a point in time, of a moment in pop culture history. As creative works that are inextricably tied to our own personal experience and memory (Böhn 2007: 146), these kinds of music media are potentially powerful vehicles for nostalgic experience and nostalgic recollection. The act of looking back fondly on the past and expressing this act through media is a form of media nostalgia, “apparent in the way the media represent the media and in the way they let us see the world narrated by them” (Böhn 2007: 152). Through what Böhn labels “self-reference,” media outlets can position themselves as a cultural spokesperson, and as a mediator between the past and present through the nostalgic retelling of their own history. Hot Press’s fortieth anniversary celebrations were centered around nostalgic storytelling by way of self-reference. Across their social media channels, their website, their magazine, and through a covers exhibition at the National Library

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of Ireland’s National Photographic Archive, the official history of the Hot Press cover was communicated to the world. Crucially, this official history was given literary form, marketed, and sold under the title Covered in Glory: The Hot Press Covers Book, written by founder and editor Niall Stokes. The 2017 celebrations were not the first instance of nostalgic storytelling by Hot Press—in fact Hot Press has been marking its anniversaries via its cover space since its 100th issue in 1981. In 1987 ten years in print was the cover story, with the headline “The Bumper Birthday Blockbuster of the Decade” accompanying a massive figure “10” made from Hot Press magazines. The 900th issue was given the cover star treatment in March 2015, with a semi-nude image that is symbolic of, probably unintentionally, the gender narrative that will be explored in the following section. Four years later, in 2019, Hot Press made sure to mark its 1000th issue milestone with press fanfare and a series of commemorative covers. But it was the narrative of the fortieth anniversary that rewrote history, through selective recall of the past and the anchoring of the magazine to defining moments in time. Covered in Glory is a personal recollection, told through the first-person perspective of editor Niall Stokes. Chapter one begins by introducing the nostalgic narrative of the Hot Press cover history through a familiar storytelling trope: “I remember the run-in to the first issue of Hot Press almost as if it were yesterday” (Stokes 2017a: 36). From there, we are transported back in time to the 1970s where the team are “kicked by the wind,” “robbed by the sleet,” with their “heads stoved,” “chasing down interviews like there was no tomorrow,” “whacking out copy,” “banging pages into shape against the odds” (Stokes 2017a: 36) in order to produce the first issue. In total, just forty-nine pages, including the opening credits and acknowledgments, are given over either entirely or mostly to a written narrative, with the remainder occupied by cover images, some of which are accompanied by small font captions. The written narrative gives a broad history of the cover space in relation to the first issue of Hot Press, how the logo changed over time, old school methods of production, some key historical moments in each decade that Hot Press existed, nonmusic-related coverage, their move to digital, their views on equality, and finally tributes to musicians that have passed away. Over 350 covers are encompassed by the nostalgic written narrative, the thread that links together pop music, time, and the cover space of Hot Press within these few hundred pages. During this time, the nostalgic narrative championed by Stokes and Covered in Glory was picked up by other media outlets, and the narrative was given the opportunity to proliferate and consolidate itself through radio interviews and news articles.

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A Narrative Built on Values In a radio interview with RTÉ’s Cian McCormack in 2017, Stokes emphasized a central message of Covered in Glory; the primary importance of what he called “the equality agenda” to the Hot Press editorial mission from the very beginning (Stokes 2017b). He spoke about their interest in abortion debates in 1983, their belief in equal access for all genders and sexual orientations, and the revolutionary nature of the magazine itself. Several times, he talked of the significant role that Hot Press played in national conversations in Ireland since the 1970s; in fact, in “every single really important debate that has happened in Ireland since” through its unique positioning as a magazine which “devoted front covers to key social issues over the years” and “married this to passion for music, something which is not mirrored anywhere else in the world” (Stokes 2017b). On several occasions, Stokes describes the role of values in the editorial agenda of Hot Press—specifically, consistent values that center around an equality agenda and support their belief in sexual freedom. These values have “informed every aspect of what we’ve done at every stage throughout Hot Press” (Stokes 2017b). These values are so integral that the team would hesitate to feature anyone on the cover who clashed with them, and “could potentially encourage the shift away from the kind of values that we have” (Stokes 2017b). We are reminded throughout Covered in Glory of the intrinsic importance of the equality agenda to Hot Press. From the outset, the magazine had a mission centered on affecting a monumental change in how sex and sexuality were perceived in Ireland (Stokes 2017a: 39), and the cover space was the site of all their editorial intentions. With their “uninhibited attitude to sex” (Stokes 2017a: 162) and a deliberate detour to avoid the “Page 3 game of exploiting women for the titillation of readers”2 (Stokes 2017a: 159), Stokes and the team endeavored to stay true to their guiding principles and unwavering commitment to the equality agenda. Repeatedly, we are reminded of the very first cover in 1977, which featured two men kissing—a statement of how they meant to go on—and having “carefully and strategically” (Stokes 2017a: 214) included this message from day one, in their minds there was absolutely no doubt as to where they stood on the 2015 same-sex marriage referendum, for which they repeated this cover message with two men kissing, and another cover with two women kissing. An almost 2

Page 3 was a publishing tradition of British tabloid newspapers where images of topless models were published on the third page.

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forty-year-old message, transposed from the 1970s into the twenty-first century, symbolizing unchanged values: “It was like coming full circle. We had broken so many taboos” (Stokes 2017a: 214). The values that are explicitly extolled in the nostalgic narrative center around equality between sexes and broad ideas of freedom of sexual expression. The other values which play a minor role in the nostalgic retelling of history are the advertising values that Hot Press consciously considered when developing the cover of the magazine into a full-color advertiser-friendly space. It is made clear within the pages of Covered in Glory that equality values were not, and are not, the only ones playing a role in shaping the cover space of Hot Press. It was “pressure from advertisers to improve the quality of the print job” (Stokes 2017a: 106) which led to the decision in 1983 to abandon the paper cover and add a four-page glossy cover, which would ensure that the team could reap the financial benefits from full color ad revenue. Crucial to the cover story narrative, the production values were strengthened for advertisers; “essentially that was a business decision, but it was one that fed into the creative and the editorial area of the magazine” (Stokes 2017b). In 1983 the shopfront of the magazine became a space for commercial considerations as well as the equality agenda; a vehicle for influencing consumer choice and generating revenue while communicating a commitment to freedom. The tightening relationship between Hot Press and advertising values, perhaps inadvertently, “became an important indicator for content” (Kiely 2020: 90) on the cover, influencing contradictions between the nostalgic narrative and its equality agenda, and the gender narrative that has only recently been uncovered.

Musealization and Preserving a Curated History The mediated Hot Press cover history is not just a history of egalitarian values. There is more of what Böhn calls “musealization” at work (2007: 145), or the museum-like curation of Hot Press’s cultural memory and historical place. The language of the nostalgic narrative created by Hot Press that surrounds the official history of the cover space and its biography, Covered in Glory, can be itemized into three distinct categories: importance and uniqueness; historic nature and cultural value; and attractiveness. Covered in Glory is self-described by Hot Press as “a powerful record of popular culture and music since 1977” (Hot Press 2017b). We see words and

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phrases such as “historic” and “History in The Making” (Hot Press 2017b), which emphasize the cultural and historical importance of the cover space. As “one of the most remarkable books ever made,” a “hugely important,” “oncein-a-lifetime opportunity” (Hot Press 2017b), The Super De Luxe Platinum Edition costing €285 is marketed with substantial effort to communicate the uniqueness and importance of the book. Indeed, we are told that the book itself is “beautifully bound” and “gorgeously printed” (Hot Press 2017b). The cover space is described in a similar way to a piece of protected architecture, “a national institution” which contains everything in Irish society and offers a window into Ireland’s cultural past (Hot Press 2017c). The narrative displays extremes in language when describing the cover space: “a prized objective” for artists, “hugely influential magazine,” “extraordinary insight” (Hot Press 2017c), “iconic” (Hot Press 2019), a “fascinating piece of iconography of the journey of Ireland” (Hot Press 2018), a “unique popular culture statement,” the host of the “most important names in the history of music” (Hot Press: 2017a). This language extends to how the magazine describes itself as a publication, as “one of the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll magazines,” “one of the most highly regarded magazines,” “a piece of living history,” “blazed a trail which has been vital to the modernization of Ireland,” and “crucial to the success” of artists (Hot Press 2017a). At the epicenter of the nostalgic narrative is the language contained within Covered in Glory and the musealization of the Hot Press cover. Stokes combines Ireland’s history with the history of Hot Press, melding pivotal moments in the social and political landscape to the messages and agendas of the magazine. With the belief that Hot Press has contributed to every important debate in Ireland since the 1970s, we read about the role that Hot Press played in the Northern Ireland peace process, through its “hard-hitting interviews with politicians and activists on every side of the conflict” (Stokes 2017a: 117), and how the feature interview with Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams in 1987 was “the first crucial step that led to the Belfast Agreement in 1998—and the end of the long war” (Stokes 2017a: 117). Similarly, the cover space is anchored deeply to the outcome of the 2015 same-sex marriage referendum and gay rights, through repeated ideological positioning and the dedication of an entire chapter to their cover treatment of the equality agenda. Regarding the cover space, Stokes says, “All of these editorial pre-occupations were reflected in the front covers. If you examine them through the ages, you’ll see that there were regular headlines on gay rights. We wrote extensively about rape culture long before it was properly understood elsewhere.

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Feminism was never seen as a bad word. Black artists featured regularly on the cover” (2017a: 214). The cover space was further enshrined as a national institution, and as an integral part of Ireland’s heritage, through its public display at an exhibition to mark the magazine’s fortieth anniversary at the National Photographic Archive in Dublin. It offered a museum-like experience, where visitors could look at the “limited edition art prints” hung on the walls, which were printed on museum quality paper so as to last for hundreds of years (Hot Press 2017b). Not only was the Hot Press cover memorialized with a biography, published, and sold with rigorous strategy, it was for a time inserted into the architecture of Ireland and into an official space for historical remembrance. The nostalgic narrative that originated from the personal recollection of editor Niall Stokes, became an official history that has been told and retold by other narrators such as press, musicians, and former contributors to the magazine. It is, in fact, a carefully mediated history; a narrator narrating themselves in a story that must be preserved as is. But there are other untold narratives in the history of the Hot Press cover, one of which informs us of the role that gender has played in the messages communicated by the magazine for over forty years.

The Gender Narrative: A Tale of Two Bodies Forty years of artist representation on the covers of Hot Press (1977–2017) and fifty years of Rolling Stone (1967–2017) were analyzed, drawing from representative samples from each publication and excluding at the outset covers which do not feature people working in music. Nineteen categories of appearance were applied to 192 images of women and 287 images of men across 279 covers, resulting in 9,101 individual pieces of data. This data was mapped across time and what the graphs show is the gendered evolution of bodily representation of musical artists within these two cover spaces, and the ways in which the images of these artists’ bodies are both highly gendered according to narrow rules of visibility, and highly coordinated across time and across continents. It is through the data gathered from the cover space of Hot Press and the comparison of magazine media histories that the nostalgic narrative becomes problematic in its realism and trustworthiness. On its own, the data gathered from the cover space of Hot Press provides us with another piece of the puzzle in the form of the gender narrative, an important vantage point on the magazine’s cover history

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that has not been affected by processes of musealization or self-referential storytelling. This alone allows us to identify and investigate contradictions and inconsistencies in the narratives created by Hot Press regarding its equality agenda and the communication of its commitment to sexual freedom via the cover space. What the comparison with Rolling Stone’s data brings to the table is the ability to directly challenge an additional claim that Hot Press has made about  the uniqueness of the cover space within the nostalgic narrative; specifically that “the cover subject, their image and clothes, the design of the cover, the headlines, the typography, the style of the strap-lines and so on: taken together, all of these elements add up to a unique popular culture statement” (Hot Press 2017a).

Two Images of Success What the gender narrative of Hot Press amounts to is a historical account of gendered space and its evolution on the cover of the magazine. Gendered space is a theory that can be used to discuss the “imagined space of social relations” (Beebe et al. 2012), the spatial organization of bodies and perceptions (Löw 2006) and their role in the production of gender. Over time, the cover of Hot Press has communicated increasingly narrow representations of gender, femininity, and masculinity through the symbolic regulation of bodies and images of artists within this space, resulting from a broader, tightening relationship between branding, identity, and music media in a “marketized,” revenue-driven industry (Kiely 2020). A clear trend that was identified across both magazines was the intensifying preference for a certain kind of bodily representation for women and for men. This investigation of bodily coverage and bodily orientation of artists over a forty-year period provides us with insight into how images of successful male and female artists are constructed along gendered lines of visibility and representation—the makeup of the visual brand of the artist. Figure 10.1 illustrates how on the cover of Hot Press since 1977, women’s arm, chest, leg, and midriff exposure have all intensified, particularly arm and chest exposure, which until the 2000s were on a trajectory of uninterrupted intensification, and thereafter began to drop.3 A new theory called exposure norms is introduced by my research: Exposure norms are “trends of bodily 3

The drop in trends across all graphs can be attributed to the decade being incomplete, the fact that women appear on the cover less frequently than men, the reduction of body parts from 2000s onward as groups of cover stars fall out of fashion, and full-body shots become less frequent.

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Figure 10.1  Arm, chest, leg, and midriff exposure for women in Hot Press (HPW).

representation found within the cover spaces of music magazines and are identified by a sustained and divided preference for the coverage or exposure of particular body parts across time” (Kiely 2020) and are presented via these data sets. The reverse is true for images of men on the cover of Hot Press as Figure 10.2 outlines how a steady increase in the coverage of men’s bodies became a defining feature of the historical evolution of artist representation within this space. Within the gender narrative there is a divergence of experiences between images of male and female artists, and it centers around specific body parts. An image of an artist is an image of a body, and the crafting of the visual identity embodied by that image is a carefully constructed and calculated process (Negus 1992) where branding and gender interact in commercial media space. As we know from Lieb (2013), women tend to be branded along lines of sexuality and have shorter lifecycles than their male counterparts. On the cover of Hot Press, it manifests as sexual objectification by way of exposed body parts; trends of exposure which are the dominant form of representation for women here, creating a narrow space for expressions of feminine identity. The intensifying preference for this image communicates the message that this is what a successful woman artist looks like, and these are the terms of visibility. The representation of women’s bodies on these covers has, through this intensification, reached hypersexualization status as the data from this research falls in line with the trends identified by

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Figure 10.2  Arm, chest, leg, and midriff coverage for men in Hot Press (HPM).

Hatton and Trautner (2011). Images of men’s bodies undergo a different kind of objectification with trends of exposure that are aligned to the coverage of body parts. This pattern of body coverage embodies an image of controlled agency, where expressions of masculinity are tied to a less exposed and less sexualized presence with an additional sense of control over the moment by the presence of musical instruments or eye contact with the reader. In contrast, women’s agency is often further negated by lack of eye contact with the reader, lack of musical instruments, and the preference for open mouths, hanging at rest. Figure 10.3 illustrates how open and at rest mouths became an increasingly common mouth orientation for women on the cover of Hot Press with men more commonly photographed with their mouths closed and at rest, seen in Figure 10.4. The same trends of artist representation are found on the cover of Rolling Stone, and this comparison will help us to continue to analyze Hot Press’s gender narrative as a counterpoint to the nostalgic narrative, while at the same time building an understanding of why the claim that its cover space is a unique cultural statement has a caveat that can only now be explored. Women’s mouths are often eroticized in society, for example, in pornography, advertising, and film where a sexual quality is attributed to them, and emphasized over the individuals own subjective identity, and this sexualized doll-like quality is one of the characteristics of Hot Press’s gender narrative. In addition to its forty-year

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Figure 10.3  Mouth open and at rest for women and men in Hot Press (HPW, HPM), and women and men in Rolling Stone (RSW, RSM).

Figure 10.4  Mouth closed and at rest for women and men in Hot Press (HPW, HPM), and women and men in Rolling Stone (RSW, RSM).

existence, the gender narrative of Hot Press extends across the Atlantic to the cover space of Rolling Stone where the experiences of men, and the experiences of women in both magazines are closely tied to each other across time, shown in Figures 10.5 and 10.6.

Figure 10.5  Arm and chest coverage for men in Hot Press (HPM) and men in Rolling Stone (RSM).

Figure 10.6  Arm and chest exposure for women in Hot Press (HPW) and women in Rolling Stone (RSW).

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A Clash of Values The gender narrative within the cover space of Hot Press tells a story of limited expressions of gender and the dominance of certain images of masculine identity, of feminine identity, and the deliberate rejection of alternative expressions. Crucially, this narrative is symptomatic of a music culture that ascribes media visibility and commercial success to a calculated image of gender. What the gender narrative does is craft a certain imprint of artist experience in the music industry and attributes value to these narrow representations. One of the key messages communicated by Hot Press’s nostalgic narrative is that the values of the magazine—specifically the commitment to the equality agenda championed within the cover space—have remained unchanged from day one. The comparison of the nostalgic narrative and the gender narrative of Hot Press illustrates the extent to which music media nostalgia can be laden with simplifications, exaggerations, and selective recollections of time past. The official history of the Hot Press cover, as told by Hot Press, is a mediated history that tells a story of egalitarian values, social change, and revolution, but it does not account for the contradictory nature of the gender narrative that has existed alongside the equality agenda since 1977, a narrative which also calls into question the magazine’s claim to its cover space being a unique cultural statement. In celebration of its 900th issue in March 2015, Hot Press published on its cover a seminude female artist with only the first issue of Hot Press magazine covering her body, looking up at the reader as they lie on the floor amongst dozens of previous issues. This image is, as mentioned previously, symbolic of the magazine’s gender narrative and is a perfect embodiment of the tension between Hot Press’s nostalgia and its history of gender representation; a cover space filled with bodies subjected to limiting ideals of gender and expressions of gender, championing a forty-year history of revolution and egalitarian values as it wraps itself in its own story. While the team at Hot Press may not themselves decide how every artist is presented on the cover or what image to run, the message remains that their visibility within this coveted cover space is tightly interlinked with certain expressions of identity. The equality agenda is not the only one at work on the cover of Hot Press, and the outliers that defy these limiting ideals are too few to change the status quo of an image-hungry industry, which exploits the intimate relationship between the music press and celebrities (Negus 1992), and packages their images as successful brands in gendered space where ultimately “the visual embodiment

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of an artist’s identity in these media spaces is one of capitalist enterprise” (Kiely 2020). The degree of coordination within and between publications across time is demonstrative of what Hatton and Trautner describe as “a decisive narrowing or homogenization of media representations of women” (2011), which transcends geographical and cultural boundaries. It complicates the proclaimed uniqueness of the Hot Press cover space, calling for a more nuanced retelling of history and an acknowledgment of a “sameness” of expression that has permeated this space, and is mirrored by its counterpart in the United States. Adding another narrative to the story retold, the history of the Hot Press cover is a complex clash of values in gendered space, commercialized space, and space that does not exist in isolation from the multitude of others that carry the Page 3 qualities of media production in a music culture that fetishizes image.

References Aubrey Jennifer. S. and Cynthia. M. Frisby. 2011. “Sexual Objectification in Music Videos: A Content Analysis Comparing Gender and Genre.” Mass Communication and Society 14 (4): 475–501. Beebe, Kathryne, Angela Davis and Kathryn Gleadle. 2012. “Introduction: Space, Place and Gendered Identities: Feminist History and the Spatial Turn.” Women’s History Review 21 (4): 523–32. Binns, Rebecca K. 2006. “‘On the Cover of a Rolling Stone’: A Content Analysis of Gender Representation in Popular Culture between 1967–2004.” MA diss., College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Wichita State University, USA. Böhn, Andreas. 2007. “Nostalgia of the Media/in the Media.” In Self-Reference in the Media, edited by Winifred Nöth and Nina Bishara, 143–53, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter. Brown, Jane D. and Kenneth Campbell. 1986. “Race and Gender in Music Videos: The Same Beat but a Different Drummer.” Journal of Communication 36 (1): 94–106. Byerly, Carolyn M. 2016. “Stasis and Shifts in Feminist Media Scholarship.” In Gender in Focus: (New) Trends in Media, edited by Carla Cerqueira, Rosa Cabecinhas and Sara Isobel Magalhães, 15–27. Braga: CECS. Davies, Helen. 2001. “All Rock and Roll is Homosocial: The Representation of Women in the British Rock Music Press.” Popular Music 20 (3): 301–19. Emerson, Rana A. 2002. “‘WHERE MY GIRLS AT?’ Negotiating Black Womanhood in Music Videos.” Gender & Society 16 (1): 115–35. Englis, Basil G., Michael R. Solomon and Richard D. Ashmore. 1994. “Beauty before the Eyes of the Beholders: The Cultural Encoding of Beauty Types in Magazine Advertising and Music Television.” Journal of Advertising 23 (2): 49–64.

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Goffman, Erving. 1979. Gender Advertisements. New York: HarperCollins. Hatton, Erin and Mary N. Trautner. 2011. “Equal Opportunity Objectification? The Sexualisation of Men and Women on the Cover of Rolling Stone.” Sexuality and Culture 15: 256–78. Hot Press. 2017a. “Covered in Glory: The Hot Press Covers Book is Available to Preorder Now.” Hot Press, November 6, 2017. https://www.hotpress.com/music/icovered-inglory-the-hot-press-covers-booki-is-available-to-pre-order-now-21134522. Hot Press. 2017b. “Covered in Glory.” http://extra.hotpress.com/coversbook. Hot Press. 2017c. “The Cover of Hot Press: What It Means … ” http://extra.hotpress. com/coversexhibition/. Hot Press. 2018. “Hot Press Signed Covers.” https://shop.hotpress.com/collections/hotpress-covers-collection-signed-covers. Hot Press. 2019. “The Hot Press Covers Exhibition Returns for Culture Night.” Hot Press, September 3, 2019. https://www.hotpress.com/music/hot-press-covers-exhibitionreturns-culture-night-22787896. Johnson, Sammye. 2007. “Promoting Easy Sex without Genuine Intimacy: Maxim and Cosmopolitan Cover Lines and Cover Images.” In Critical Thinking about Sex, Love, and Romance in the Mass Media: Media Literacy Applications, edited by Mary-Lou Galician and Debra L. Merskin, 49–65. USA: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kang, Mee-Eun. 1997. “The Portrayal of Women’s Images in Magazine Advertisements: Goffman’s Gender Analysis Revisited.” Sex Roles 37: 979. Kiely, Yvonne. 2020. “Music Magazines and Gendered Space: The Representation of Artists on the Covers of Hot Press and Rolling Stone.” Irish Communications Review 17 (1). Article 5. Leonard, Marion. 2007. Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power. UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Lieb, Kristin. 2013. Gender, Branding, and the Modern Music Industry. New York: Routledge. Lindner, Katharina. 2004. “Images of Women in General Interest and Fashion Magazine Advertisements from 1955–2002.” Sex Roles 51: 409–21. Löw, Martina. 2006. “The Social Construction of Space and Gender.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 13 (2): 119–33. Natterer, Kathrin. 2014. “How and Why to Measure Personal and Historical Nostalgic Responses through Entertainment Media.” International Journal on Media Management 16 (3–4): 161–80. Negus, Keith. 1992. Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry. USA: Oxford University Press. Peterson-Lewis, Sonja and Shirley A. Chennault. 1986. “Black Artist’s Music Videos: Three Success Strategies.” Journal of Communication 36 (1): 107–14. Railton, Diane and Paul Watson. 2011. Music Video and the Politics of Representation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Rich, Michael, E. R. Woods, Elizabeth Goodman, S. Jean Emans and Robert H. DuRant. 2005. “Aggressors or Victims: Gender and Race in Music Video Violence.” Pediatrics 4: 669–74. Stokes, Niall. 1977. “The Alternative Press and Subculture 1977.” RTÉ Archives. https:// www.rte.ie/archives/2017/1120/921493-hot-press-magazine/. Stokes, Niall. 1984. “Hot Press Lights Up the Music Scene 1984.” RTÉ Archives. https:// www.rte.ie/archives/2017/0530/878918-hot-press-magazine/. Stokes, Niall. 2017a. Covered in Glory: The Hot Press Covers Book. Ireland: Hot Press Books. Stokes, Niall. 2017b. “Niall Stokes—Hot Press.” RTÉ. https://soundcloud.com/cianmccormack/niall-stokes-hot-press. Vincent, Richard, Dennis K. Davis and Lilly Ann Boruszkowski. 1987. “Sexism on MTV: The Portrayal of Women in Rock Videos.” Journalism Quarterly 64: 750–55.

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Punk Fanzines, Subcultural Consecration, and Hidden Female Histories in Early British Punk Karen Fournier

In 1978, the British music journalists Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons wrote an “obituary” for rock’s dominant male narrative when they asserted that “punk rock in 1976 was the first rock and roll phase ever not to insist that women should be picturesque topics and targets of songs” (Burchill and Parsons 1978: 79, emphasis in original). This optimism was a response to punk’s apparent gender parity, where spaces in popular culture that were traditionally occupied by men seemed to open to female participants, in many cases for the first time. In punk, women took up the guitar and drum-set, formed all-female bands, wrote and recorded songs that often explored female topics, contributed to punk’s iconic fashions and artwork, and captured the scene in photographs and female fanzines. Women were granted unprecedented access to the means of cultural production in punk because its DIY (“do it yourself ”) ethos allowed everyone to participate creatively and uniquely in the construction of the scene. In 1978, it must have seemed to these journalists that a seismic shift had taken place in popular culture, thanks largely to punk. Looking back at the music scene twenty-three years later, the popular music scholar Helen Davies argues that this optimism may have been premature. She points to British music magazines like New Musical Express (NME) and Melody Maker (MM), where she notes that, despite its alleged death, rock’s dominant male narrative continued (and continues) to thrive through well-established strategies of female containment or erasure in the mainstream music press. Her study of female representation in these two magazines demonstrates that “the most common way in which music journalists treat female performers is to ignore them completely,” to treat them as passing novelties, or to direct the reader’s attention toward their appearance and away from their creative work (Davies 2001: 302). Davies argues that each

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of these strategies serves to reinforce a dominant male version of popular music history—a version, I will demonstrate, that also informs the history of punk that has been passed down through the scene’s fanzine journalism, despite Burchill’s and Parson’s claims. Punk’s history has been written variously from within and outside the subculture by fans, scholars, music critics, and journalists who have constructed narratives about the scene from direct or mediated experiences with its participants, the cultural objects they created, and the events around which they coalesced. Among the many historical accounts that exist about punk, the histories provided by punk fanzines stand apart as first-person accounts of the scene as it unfolded in time. At the moment that Burchill and Parsons were composing their obituary for rock’s patriarchy, punks from across the scene were engaged in fanzine-writing that reflected a wide array of interests consistent with the diversity of their creators and authors. The implication is that one voice—the male voice—would not be privileged above all others in a DIY approach to recounting punk that was open to all. While that might have been true at the time, the “throwaway” nature of many of these punk publications has meant that only a small sampling of the scene’s vibrant fanzine culture has been preserved, often in the private collections of insiders who were members of the scene or in the libraries of outsiders with an interest in punk and its memorabilia. Many important primary sources, and the diversity of voices that they might have represented, remain largely unknown and inaccessible to those outside the scene. For those who hope to gain a general understanding of the British punk scene through its fanzines, the recently reissued anthologies of Sniffin’ Glue and Ripped & Torn are among the few primary sources that are widely available. While these anthologies provide a valuable snapshot of the nascent punk scene, the downside is that they reflect the perspectives of their (predominantly male) authors. The female punk experience, when it is represented at all in either source, has been filtered through a male lens in these two examples of punk fanzine journalism. The feminist music scholar Cazz Blase has argued that the absence of female-authored primary sources among anthologized punk fanzines has also had serious implications for punk histories that were subsequently written by scholars and music journalists outside the scene, where [It] has become a matter of record … that women’s cultural creative role within punk is frequently forgotten or misrepresented. This, in turn, has led to women

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in punk often being viewed through a cultural male gaze that casts them in a supporting role, as ‘punkettes’ and partners, girlfriends and lovers, rather than as cultural agents in their own right. (Blase 2018: 83)

Blase suggests that, despite the veneer of democratization that DIY brings to the creation of fanzines, what she describes as the historical “record” has filtered out narratives that challenge the dominant male version of popular music history. While I agree with her conclusion, I would add that this version of history had become so firmly entrenched in the popular music press by the mid-1970s that it became the lens through which punk fanzine authors unwittingly looked at their subculture. The media scholar Kembrew McLeod echoes this point when he suggests that “critics often unconsciously rely on descriptive devices that stand in for larger, more overarching concepts associated with traits traditionally ascribed to men. This makes sense, considering that the profession of rock criticism has been dominated by men since its origins” (McLeod 2002: 94). In its subconscious adoption of rock’s dominant narrative, punk reflects certain aspects of mainstream culture back at itself, so despite its foreignness to a consumer of popular culture in the mid-1970s, punk’s reproduction of gender norms provides a familiar point of entry into the scene for the mainstream consumer for whom “punk” subsequently came to be defined in terms of a small subset of now-famous male bands. By contrast, punk’s foreignness became a reason to exclude women from punk’s historical pantheon, since we shall see that female punks were characterized and dismissed as foreign even within their own scene in ways that find parallels in the mainstream marginalization of women in rock. As I will demonstrate through the consecration practices of the punk scene and its mainstream counterpart, male punks became revered and embraced as exotic social outcasts for mainstream viewers, while female punks were dismissed as aberrations in the punk scene and, consequently, as affronts to mainstream tastes and social norms.

Consecrating Punk In the introduction to Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), Pierre Bourdieu invokes the religious concept of “consecration” to characterize the mechanisms through which cultural artifacts come to be imbued with meaning and value for members of a field of cultural production.

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He explains that, in the same way that religious consecration elevates the status of certain participants or objects within a given spiritual practice, “cultural consecration … confer[s] on the objects, persons and situations it touches a sort of ontological promotion akin to transubstantiation” in a secular practice (Bourdieu 1984: 6). For Bourdieu, cultural consecration is determined in three possible social fields that he describes as the “specific,” the “bourgeois,” and the “popular,” each of which is differentiated in his theory according to its relative autonomy from economic considerations in granting value to candidates for consecration (Bourdieu 1994: 50–2). For our purposes here, discussion will be limited to the first and last of these fields and the characteristics of the punk histories that ensue from them. According to Bourdieu, the form of consecration that is most autonomous from the marketplace occurs in the “specific” field, where members of a given social group agree to elevate objects, individuals, or situations from within that group for special status independent of any consumer impact. In this field, artifacts become anointed through mechanisms determined entirely from within the field, such as peer review or acknowledgment, citation or quotation by others in the field, association with other anointed objects or individuals in the field, and so on. Once anointed, artifacts gain symbolic, rather than economic, value and circulate within the specific field as its cultural capital. To claim membership to a “specific” social group, individuals must understand what is valued as the cultural currency in which that group trades, and the status of individuals within the group will be determined according to their ability to accumulate capital in this symbolic system. Bourdieu’s concept of the “specific” field can be mapped onto the punk scene, where the value of cultural objects, determined from within the scene, was typically defined against the values of a perceived dominant culture: the status of an object in punk rises according to its devaluation in mainstream culture. Because punk venerated objects or individuals that defied or offended the tastes of the dominant mainstream culture, females who aspired to punk performance appeared, at least in theory, to have faced fewer obstacles in their quest to contribute to the scene than women who were constrained by mainstream gender norms (whether or not these contributions were ultimately recognized as valid by their male peers within the scene or by mainstream journalists). The punk fanzine plays an important role in the process of cultural consecration since decisions about what or who to feature in these publications can help to determine their value in punk’s “specific” field. As historian Matthew Worley has noted, “In fanzines, we find cultures recorded from the bottom-up

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rather than the top-down. A ‘truth,’ so the Clash’s Joe Strummer would have it, known only to guttersnipes” (Worley 2018: 56). The ways in which objects and individuals are characterized by fanzine writers also cues their comparative value, since candidates for consecration in punk’s “specific” field will be described in terms that reinforce their roles as markers of the field while the contributions of candidates who are denied consecration will be diminished or ignored on the pages of the scene’s fanzines. As we will see, despite female engagement in the field, their portrayal and characterization in punk fanzines erases any promise of equality and merely reinforces their outsider status in the punk scene (and, more broadly, in the field of rock). What Bourdieu’s conception of the “specific” field suggests is an insular, “insider” history that somehow shields itself from a broader cultural narrative that threatens to shape how history is recorded in that field. Taking punk as an example of a “specific” field, I would argue that the history of the scene presented in fanzines cannot stand alone, but exists on a historical continuum and is influenced, albeit subtly, by “descriptive devices” and “overarching concepts” that mark a dominant version of popular music that skews as male. This version of history originates in a dominant culture that bifurcates into two subfields in Bourdieu’s theory, known as the “bourgeois” and “popular” fields, whose cultural products correspond to “high” and “low” art, respectively. The version of popular music history that I seek to examine here, and the popular music journalism that perpetuates a male rock narrative, is associated with the latter field, and although the former also reinforces a gendered reading of punk, I will not pursue that aspect of Bourdieu’s theory here. Bourdieu’s “popular” field is important both as the theoretical antithesis of the “specific” field and as the locus of the prevailing male narrative associated with popular music history. Unlike its “specific” counterpart, cultural consecration in the “popular” field occurs when an object, individual, or event gains prestige from its mass appeal, or from what Bourdieu calls “the choice of ordinary customers” (Bourdieu 1994: 51). In this case, consumer interest in a potential candidate for consecration replaces the “insider” selection processes that mark the specific field, and the prestige accorded to an object correlates directly and exclusively with its success in the marketplace. Markers of success in the popular field can include press coverage and the conferral of celebrity status by the paparazzi, market sales numbers, position on record and singles charts, awards by the music industry, and so on. Like the cultural objects that they describe, mainstream music magazines are the products of a music industry that awards

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prestige (and authority) to those who are profitable, so magazine sales will determine not only the status of objects and individuals that they record but also the status of the publication itself. In all cases, consecrated objects within the “popular” field will not challenge or upset the mainstream status quo but, rather, will reinforce a dominant cultural narrative that locates cultural power in its male producers. Within punk’s “specific” field, consecration in the popular field was regarded as a mark of failure due to the association of popular consecration with the music industry and the loss of individual creative control that that represented. The cooption of punk by mainstream record labels illustrates the scene’s diametric opposition to the popular field, which is perhaps encapsulated most famously by Mark Perry’s claim, in Sniffin’ Glue, that “punk died the day the Clash signed to CBS” on January 25, 1977. The implication in this statement is that a punk artist or band who signs to a mainstream label will be forced to “sell out” to the music industry by broadening or tempering the themes explored in their music in order to appeal to consumers from outside the scene. As punk artists signed to major labels and were incorporated into mainstream popular culture, they became the focus of histories written about punk in the pages of mainstream music magazines. When two members of the Clash appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone on April 17, 1980, for example, their image would come to symbolize “punk” to those outside the scene. Their music, as it was described within the pages of the issue, would also represent punk to the mainstream consumer, for whom comparisons were drawn between the Clash and more familiar bands who had already established their place in rock history. The journalist James Henke placed the Clash among such canonized bands as “the Who [and] the Rolling Stones in their prime” when he suggested that, like “any other truly great rock & roll band, the Clash … takes on awesome proportions” (1980). Coverage in the popular press exposed the band to a wider audience, but at the expense of its stated resistance to consumer culture and capitalism (see Andersen and Heibutski 2018). In the popular field, the band was reduced to an object for consumption that was stripped of its original purpose, in the same way that many of punk’s iconic signifiers were emptied of their meanings when they were appropriated by mainstream culture. The appearance of punk’s iconic safety pin in mainstream fashion magazines serves as an example: used in punk images of a torn Union Jack or stuck through the lip of the Monarch in her defaced punk Jubilee portrait, the pin represented a failed attempt to hold the tattered remains of a once-powerful Empire together, while in mainstream culture, the item was reduced to an accessory for those who mimed punk in their fashion choices.

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Despite punk’s resistance to mainstream popularization, some aspects of the scene became incorporated into consumer culture, where they were stripped of their subversive meanings and reduced to the status of commodities. One example is punk’s appropriation of the Royal Stewart tartan, described by the fashion historian Jonathan Faiers as “expressive of revolt and opposition, its remarkable status as a cloth outlawed by the English and its association with Royalty make it the perfect textile for a range of clothing that aimed to make anarchy, alienation, and indeed sedition wearable” in punk (Faiers 2008: 98). Faiers explains that the tartan was historically used in Scotland as a “universal” tartan for those who had no clan affiliation, which made it the ideal statement of alienation for punks. For the mainstream consumer, who might have little knowledge of the history behind the tartan punk-wear that she purchased in a fashion boutique and for whom the term “alienation” was likely not wedded to a sense of economic deprivation, the tartan likely signifies “punk” as a fashion trend without the deeper meanings attached in punk to the signifier. Other aspects of punk did not make the transition into mainstream culture either because their foreignness made them too difficult to commodify or because they had already been erased from view in punk’s “specific” field. Some of punk’s more outrageous bondage wear (e.g., its leather masks) or tokens of punk alienation that carried other meanings for the outside viewer of the scene (e.g., Nazi symbols) found little or no space in the “popular” representation of punk that was marketed to the mainstream consumer. Kembrew McLeod (2002) cites the gendering of terms used in mainstream discussions of popular music as evidence of female exclusion in this history. He argues that terms that are coded as male (like “aggressive intensity,” “rawness,” and “violence”) valorize musical objects and individuals in the press while terms coded as female (like “soft,” “light,” and “bland”) are leveled as criticisms against women and unworthy men (McLeod 2002: 97–107). Translating these terms to punk, Cazz Blase notes that women are regularly described as appendages to their male counterparts in punk writing, where they are “punkettes” to the male punks or girlfriends/lovers whose identities are defined in relation to their male partners. To reinforce the sense that females were “strangers in the strange land” of punk and thereby erased within punk and, subsequently, in mainstream accounts of it, the following analysis of female representations in Sniffin’ Glue and Ripped & Torn proceeds through a series of analytical categories designed to examine how women are characterized in

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punk journalism. The assumption is that, if women are “othered” in a space where they are presumably welcome, as they are in the punk scene, then it would follow that they would subsequently be erased from the history of punk written in mainstream accounts of the scene.

Marginalizing Women in Punk Music scholars like Mary Ann Clawson (1999), Norma Coates (2003), and Lucy Green (1997, 2001) have argued that female underrepresentation in the mainstream media is a by-product of female socialization away from the tools of cultural production in rock. Clawson notes that boys have an early advantage over girls in their musical socialization because they form bands as part of their “natural” social interactions. She argues that “the band is the elemental unit in rock as an ensemble music. It is the critical institutional locus of learning and initiation; and significantly, the early band is, both socially and culturally, a formation of male adolescence” (Clawson 1999: 103). The exclusion of girls at the formative adolescent stage of music-making has meant that women have been hampered in their quest to insert themselves into rock’s pantheon of “rock gods.” Clawson’s research shows that, among the bands that appear on Rolling Stone’s “Top 100 Albums” from 1967 to 1987, only 6.6 percent had female instrumentalists of any kind. From a sociological perspective, the feminist theorist Camille Paglia suggests that rock fills a social void in the lives of young boys that is not experienced by girls. She argues that: For an adolescent boy, your guitar speaks for you, it says what you can’t say in real life, it’s the pain you can’t express, it’s rage, hormones pumping. Women can be strangers and all of a sudden have an intimate conversation. Boys can’t do that. The guitar speaks to an aggressive sexual impulse and suppressed emotionality, the things that boys can’t share, even with other members of the band. It’s a combination of rage and reserve and ego. (Quoted by Segal 2004)

Punk’s DIY ethos, and the “three chords” credo that it touted, seemed to eliminate the need for prior musical learning or initiation and therefore opened participation to anyone in any role within a band. In practice, however, women were late to join the ranks of punk performers, and female punk artists like Siouxsie Sioux, X-Ray Spex, The Slits, and Penetration fell far behind such groundbreaking male acts as The Damned, The Clash, the Sex Pistols,

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or the Vibrators both in joining the scene and, later, in securing recording contracts through which to distribute their work. The underrepresentation of women in the punk fanzine press should therefore come as no surprise since fanzines can only report on bands that exist. Taking this into account, female representation in fanzines is surprisingly high, with references in 7 out of 12 issues of Sniffin’ Glue and 6 out of 18 issues of Ripped & Torn. While women fare relatively well quantitatively in these fanzine samples, qualitative descriptions of female participation in the two fanzines point to various strategies of female containment or erasure in punk fanzine journalism, with each strategy itemized and described in the ensuing analysis.

Gender-coding of Rock’s Instruments Punk fanzines introduced their reader to the “latest” in punk through reviews of newly released recordings, live concert performances, and interviews with some of the scene’s artists or fans. Fanzines also provided information about influential acts or artists from outside the British scene, notably American artists such as Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, the Ramones, Blondie, and Patti Smith. While female acts on the British scene find documentation in reviews, they seldom serve as the subject of feature interviews in fanzines and are therefore denied the opportunity to speak about their music and their creative practice in the fanzine press. Sometimes, the interview raises the issue of gender, marking it as atypical and worthy of comment in the scene. An early interview with The Adverts in Sniffin’ Glue presents a discussion that ranges from their early musical influences to their opinions about the use of “punk” as a descriptor of the budding London scene. The band’s bassist, Gaye Advert, is singled out in the interview to speculate on the impact of her gender on the reception of her performance, to which she responded: “I’ve had someone accusing me of copying the bassist [Tina Weymouth] of the Talking Heads ‘cause I’m female. Just ‘cause I’m female!” (quoted by Perry 2000/1977: 5). It is taken for granted that male guitarists would emulate a favored performer as a way to learn his craft because “guitar gods are worshipped … fans emulate them during their performances; these gods are charismatic in the strict Weberian sense of the term, perceived as embodying a transcendent gift” (Weinstein 2013: 149). The “transcendent gift” to which Weinstein refers will model idealized male behaviors to those who aspire to fame and success on the rock stage, but this success is contingent upon a replication of

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all aspects of an idol’s “godliness,” including the “god’s” performance of gender. An aspiring male guitarist, either within punk’s “specific” field or in the broader “popular” field, is unlikely to be “accused” of mimicking a “guitar god” because mimicry represents a form of cultural consecration in popular music or, as the saying goes, it is the highest form of flattery. By contrast, Advert is censured for paying homage to a bassist who falls outside the category of the “guitar god” by virtue of her gender. Neither Advert nor Weymouth are embraced in the comment as “guitar goddesses” but, instead, are conflated into a single category of performer that is dismissed on the basis of its resistance to gender norms. The focus on gender as exceptional and non-normative merely reinforces rock’s dominant male history. The concert and record reviews that fill the pages of fanzines reveal different strategies of female marginalization. The first issue of Sniffin’ Glue, for example, provides a review of The Runaways eponymous debut, released on the Mercury label on June 1, 1976. Lead singer Joan Jett has spoken openly about the misogyny that she combatted in the mid-1970s. In a 2004 interview published in the Washington Post, for example, she recalled that: [She] and her band mates were called things that nice newspapers don’t print. And when [she] went solo in 1980, she was told by record executives that a girl with an electric guitar and an attitude would never make it. ‘I’ve heard a lot of: You’ve got to stop hiding behind the guitar, or you’ll never get signed’. (Quoted by Segal 2004: online)

Although The Runaways peaked at 194 on the 1976 US Billboard 200 chart and features the now-iconic song “Cherry Bomb,” Sniffin’ Glue’s author Mark Perry’s review of the single dismissed the band because he “always hated girl bands, singers, etc. Rock’n’Roll’s for blokes and I hope it stays that way. Girls are good for one thing and for one thing only—going shopping for glue. This album though is an exception” (Perry 2000/1976a: 1). While Perry’s statement reiterates the mainstream complaint that the Runaways’ incursion into male performance space was unwelcome, he begrudgingly accepts the album as an exception to the rule of male predominance in rock. Moreover, Jett’s musical talents are trivialized in Perry’s review by the juxtaposition of the term “girl” with the implied “guitar god” of “Rock’n’Roll,” and though he endorses the album in a final comment appended onto a series of sexist dismissals, the review accentuates the degree to which females are viewed as “exceptions” to a male norm in punk.

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Gendered Descriptors While Jett and Advert faced criticisms for their incursion into male space through their appropriation of the guitar, and female punk drummers (like The Slits’ Palmolive) were never referenced in these fanzines, female punks who embraced more conventional roles as singers did not escape criticism in punk journalism, either. These performers were often compared negatively to their male counterparts through gendered descriptors. A concert review by Tony Drayton in Ripped & Torn of The Slits in live performance at London’s Vortex club in August 1977 illustrates the male gaze. Drayton states that “I love those visual come-ons that draw me to the stage, lusting for the Slits and loving being manipulated so easily … Names of songs are irrelevant as they all sound the same. I call them fun” (Drayton 2018/1977: 6). Since Drayton provides no reference to a set-list of songs that were performed that night, we cannot be entirely sure of what sparked his reaction. What we do know, however, is that it was likely unwarranted, given the band’s reputation for feminist cultural critiques both in their early work and after the release of their first album, Cut, on Island Records in 1979. In 1977, the group’s repertoire would have been extremely relevant to the female listener, Drayton’s comment notwithstanding, who might have found their experience of class oppression chronicled in songs like “Typical Girls,” “Shoplifting,” or “Spend, Spend, Spend.” For those listeners, The Slits would represent more than just “fun,” and their “visual come-ons” would serve less as statements about sexual availability and vulnerability than as critiques of the male gaze embodied in the Ripped & Torn review. By contrast, in the same review, Drayton documents his reaction to the male performer Adam Ant, with whose stage presence he clearly identifies as an embodiment of male sexual power and control. Described by Drayton as topless and dressed in bondage wear, Ant is characterized as “menacing.” During the performance, Drayton recounts that “he beats up his bassist at every opportunity” with black plastic straps (Drayton 2018/1977: 6). Where no songs are referenced in the review of The Slits, Ant’s gendered aggression is contextualized in a specific lyric (“deprived of being depraved”), which is quoted in this review from the song “Hampstead” (released in 2000 on the album Antbox). The review provides a historical record of a live performance of the song and invites the reader to imagine how this performance might have been enacted on the stage. In the case of The Slits, however, the lack of explicit documentation about a playlist suggests that the writer deems their music to be more ephemeral and disposable

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than its male counterpart and not worthy of historical preservation and, by extension, cultural consecration. A similar strategy is invoked by Mark Perry to undermine the artistic contributions of the female lead singer of Stinky Toys, Elli Medeiros, who is identified in a Sniffin’ Glue review merely as “a big girl” and “a real screamer.” Perry writes that “No one could tell the words she was singing but [with] all those wincing screams she sounded as if she was saying something” (Perry 2000/1976b: 2). For readers who are unfamiliar with the band, Medeiros’ name is lost to history in this review, while disparaging comments about her size and voice reduce her to a body rather than a valued contributor to the musical scene. Where a screaming male might be characterized as “raw” or “angry,” Medeiros’ “wincing” screams show neither quality but, rather, are foregrounded in the review as foreign to the behavioral norms of her gender and suggestive of hysteria and lack of control. While the gendered language of these examples originates in male judgements on the female body, some reviewers turn their attention to the faces of female singers as a source of critique. In a review of a performance by the female-led band Penetration in support of their single “Don’t Dictate,” Ripped & Torn writer Tony Drayton claims that the lead singer “Pauline [Murray] has one of the most glamorously depraved faces of all the up’n’coming punkettes. How can it fail?” (Drayton 2018/1978: 11). This review can be understood to describe Murray’s resistance to the standards of beauty that mark mainstream culture; however, this political act against beauty is overshadowed by her dismissal as a “punkette” in this review. Murray’s subordinate gender status in the punk scene is therefore reinforced by the suffix attached to her assigned pronoun: she is the “-ette” to the normative male “punk.” In the reviews cited here, the content of songs written or performed by females is deemed to be of less importance than the embodiment of these songs as “come-ons” or their performance by “girls” or “punkettes.” In all cases, the gendered language that appears in these examples reinforces a long-established binarism between the valorized musical object and its devalued embodied performance (Cusick 1994). Gendered language aligns female punks with the latter, and focuses on their bodies and faces over the cultural products made by women in the punk scene. Within the scene, objects created by women appear to elicit little interest and are therefore unlikely candidates for cultural consecration in punk’s “specific” field. Because of their invisibility within the scene relative to their male counterparts, musical objects created by women are less likely to be known in the “popular” field and to be adopted as markers of the punk scene for cultural consumers within that field.

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Erasure In some cases, female participation in the punk scene is overshadowed by male participation or erased entirely in fanzines. Female punk performances can sometimes be positioned in the background as, for example, in Sniffin’ Glue’s review of the historic 100 Club Punk Festival which took place in London on September 20–21, 1976. It was here that Siouxsie Sioux launched her career with an impromptu rendition of “The Lord’s Prayer” accompanied by Sid Vicious, who marked this first appearance on the scene as a drummer (though he would later join the Sex Pistols on bass guitar). Now known primarily as a seminal goth performer, Sioux was one of the first female punks to secure a recording contract, releasing debut album, The Scream, on the Polydor label on November 13, 1978. (X -Ray Spex’s debut album Germ Free Adolescents was the first female punk release when it launched three days earlier on the EMI label). Despite the stature that Sioux would later achieve on the London punk (and goth) scene, this review of her debut appearance focuses entirely on Vicious who was gonna play drums with the next band up—Suzie and the Banshies [sic]. Everybody was excited and thought that Sid was gonna pull out his chain and madly lash out at the poor drums. When they finally made it on stage, Sid was terrific, he kept a real clear drum tempo going which really lifted the band a cut above a few other punks currently on the scene. … a few people spotted in the bar after Suzie’s [sic] set were, Paul Weller, the Jam’s guitarist and Mike Spencer, the New Yorker who used to front the Count Bishops. (Perry 2000/1976b: 1)

Sioux’s artistic contribution to the set goes unnoticed in the review, which focuses not only on the male performer in the duo but also on a selection of wellknown male punks in the audience. The seeming success of the performance is attributed solely to Vicious, whose drumming (and not her singing) was deemed noteworthy in the review. Moreover, while the female performer is erased from this historical record, her male counterpart is lauded not only for his infamous tendencies toward aggression but for his ability to separate the seeming urge toward violence from the task of keeping tempo. Sioux’s erasure from this important historical moment in punk finds a broader expression in female invisibility in punk fanzine photography and hand-drawn imagery, where male representations clearly predominate. Fanzine photography typically captures male punks in live performance, where they are pictured in their roles as guitarists and drummers. Less often, fanzines will feature group photographs of all-male bands or casual pictures of band members

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backstage, on a street corner, or in a squat. These photographs document male punk performance practices, where male punks can be seen to throw themselves into an audience, wield their guitars like weapons, or assume a cool disinterest in the scene that surrounds them. By contrast, the pages of Sniffin’ Glue and Ripped & Torn feature few photographs of female punk performers, and, when they occur, these photos focus exclusively on female singers (like Sioux, Blondie, Patti Smith, and Pauline Murray) with no representation of female guitarists and drummers. A reader who is unfamiliar with the scene would incorrectly conclude that women’s opportunities in punk were as prescribed as they were in mainstream culture. For those who know the scene, the sameness of female punk photographs cues the devaluation of transgressions into male performance spaces, where women might have been welcomed in theory but not in practice. In other fanzine photos, female artists are used as “advertising props” for creative objects produced by men. A Sniffin’ Glue “advertisement feature,” for example, depicts a cut-out of Gaye Advert as she clutches Damned’s debut album Damned, Damned, Damned (released on the Stiff label on February 18, 1977). In the fanzine advertisement, Advert promotes the album of an all-male band on which she does not perform so her only connection to the object would be through her fandom. While this may not seem particularly significant in isolation, neither fanzine provides a counterexample in which a male punk is seen to promote the work of an all-female band. What makes this image stand out is its caption, which pronounces that “This album turns men into girls!” (Perry 2000/1977: 2). This header carries multiple meanings, the most obvious of which is the conflation of “girl” and “fan,” with the diminished status that each term carries relative to the elevated status of the band. Alternately, the caption could also suggest (in irony) that the album represents a pinnacle of male musical achievement in the punk scene that can never be matched by competing men. Those who attempt to surpass the offerings of The Damned are destined to fall short and, by inference, will find themselves reduced to the status of “girls.” In both readings, women are used as a negative counterexample to the successful male, and this interpretation reinforces an image in which Advert is reduced to a prize model who holds a valued (male) possession in her hands. Female erasure also takes place in the production of the fanzine itself, whose male writers and editors I have referenced throughout this portion of the essay. Cazz Blase has argued that invisible work performed by women tends to go unnoticed in fanzines, where labor is often clearly divided along gender lines that place women in less glamorous roles like “backroom girls, laboring away

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on the more editorially rigorous fanzines, selling advertising, or else typing, Xeroxing and distributing fanzines. [Women] represented an army of unsung heroines, acknowledged only in the small print of the editorial sections of the fanzines in question” (Blase 2018: 85). What this has meant for histories of punk fanzines is that contributions of some participants have been undocumented while the contributions of others have been valorized. Sniffin’ Glue is typically understood as a product of its founder, Mark Perry, who launched it in July 1976 after seeing the Ramones at the Roundhouse in their London debut. The work of his staff writers Danny Baker (who later wrote for NME) and Steven Mick is also documented in the publication, while credited females served in no editorial roles and only contributed as photographers (these included Sheila Rock, Jill Furmanovsky, and Erica Schenberg). Uncredited contributions, like those listed by Blase, have been lost to history. Ripped & Torn is similarly dominated by its male founder and writer, Tony Drayton, who launched the fanzine allegedly after seeing The Damned perform at the Hope and Anchor in London in November 1976. As in Sniffin’ Glue, Sheila Rock and Jill Furmanovsky are credited as photographers but few other female contributions are noted. Presence and absence are important markers of value in the punk scene and help to distinguish objects or individuals who might be considered for cultural consecration from those deemed unimportant as representatives of the scene. For the mainstream consumer who views punk’s “specific” field from the outside, cultural artifacts that are absent from the history that punk writes about itself will necessarily remain absent from the history created about punk in mainstream “popular” journalism.

Conclusion The importance of cultural consecration in the “specific” and “popular” fields lies in its “granting cultural legitimacy to certain cultural producers and their products and, by implication, denying it to other producers and their products,” and this becomes particularly important as participants within fields write their own histories (Allen and Lincoln 2004: 874). The fact that some candidates are identified for potential elevation within a field means that others slide to the bottom of the reputational ladder, where they risk being forgotten over time. The way that punk history has been written in the “popular” field, for example, demonstrates the canonization of some bands and their works (e.g., the Sex

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Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”) and the de-emphasis of others that might or might not have been deemed important in the “specific” field (e.g., “Don’t Dictate” by Penetration). What this has meant in the long term is that “the Sex Pistols have undoubtedly gained ‘actor’ or ‘memory entrepreneur’ status, carrying the torch for what many seem to think punk ‘is’ or ‘was,’ even beyond British history” (Ward 2019: 382). By implication, Penetration and many other female punk bands have not secured a similar status in mainstream histories of popular music because their music speaks from a subordinate position about topics that are deemed important only to those whose experiences align with those of the female artists. What I have argued here is that, while the marginalization of these bands and artists in the “popular” field reflects social mores about gender that would hamper their acceptance by mainstream consumers, this marginalization begins at home, so to speak, in the “specific” field within which these bands and artists operated. Writing during the emergence of British punk in the 1970s, Burchill and Parsons are correct to note a seeming wealth of opportunities for women in punk thanks largely to DIY and the elimination of boundaries to participation that it suggests, but the documentation of female punks within the scene paints an entirely different picture and one that reinforces, rather than challenges, mainstream gender norms. If cultural consecration represents a “struggle for dominance … [where] the definition of art is at stake, or better, the right to formulate the legitimate definition of what is art” within a field of cultural production, then biases present in punk’s accounts of itself clearly demonstrate that this definition skews as male (van Maanen 2009: 69–71).

References Allen, Michael Patrick and Anne E. Lincoln. 2004. “Critical Discourse and the Cultural Consecration of Films.” Social Forces 82 (3): 871–93. Andersen, Mark and Ralph Heibutzki. 2018. We Are The Clash: Reagan, Thatcher, and the Last Stand of a Band That Mattered. Brooklyn, NY: Akashic Books. Blase, Cazz. 2018. “Invisible Women: The Role of Women in Punk Fanzine Creation.” In Ripped, Torn, and Cut: Pop, Politics and Punk Fanzines from 1976, edited by The Subcultures Network, 72–88. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1994. The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Burchill, Julie and Tony Parsons. 1978. The Boy Looked at Johnny: The Obituary of Rock and Roll. London: Faber & Faber. Clawson, Mary Ann. 1999. “Masculinity and Skill Acquisition in the Adolescent Rock Band.” Popular Music 18: 99–114. Coates, Norma. 2003. “Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques: Girls and Women and Rock Culture in the 1960s and Early 1970s.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 15 (1): 65–94. Cusick, Suzanne G. 1994. “Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind-Body Problem.” Perspectives of New Music 32 (1): 8–27. Davies, Helen. 2001. “All Rock and Roll is Homosocial: The Representation of Women in the British Music Press.” Popular Music 20 (3): 301–19. Drayton, Tom. 2018 [1977]. “Ripped & Torn Volume 7.” In Ripped & Torn: 1976–1979: The Loudest Punk Fanzine in the UK. London: Ecstatic Peace Library. Drayton, Tom. 2018 [1978]. “Ripped & Torn” Volume 10.” Ripped & Torn: 1976–1979: The Loudest Punk Fanzine in the UK. London: Ecstatic Peace Library. Faiers, Jonathan. 2008. Tartan: Textiles That Changes the World. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Green, Lucy. 1997. Music, Gender, Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Green, Lucy. 2001. How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education. London: Ashgate. Henke, James. 1980. “The Clash: Tough but Tender, They’re Taking America.” Rolling Stone 315. McLeod, Kembrew. 2002. “Between Rock and a Hard Place: Gender and Rock Criticism.” In Popular Music and the Press, edited by Steve Jones, 93–113. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Perry, Mark. 2000 [1976a]. “Sniffin’ Glue Volume 1.” Sniffin’ Glue (And Other Rock ‘n’ Roll Habits): The Essential Punk Accessory. London: Sanctuary Publishing. Perry, Mark. 2000 [1976b]. “Sniffin’ Glue Volume 3.” Sniffin’ Glue (And Other Rock ‘n’ Roll Habits): The Essential Punk Accessory. London: Sanctuary Publishing. Perry, Mark. 2000 [1977]. “Sniffin’ Glue” Volume 7.” Sniffin’ Glue (And Other Rock ‘n’ Roll Habits): The Essential Punk Accessory. London: Sanctuary Publishing. Segal, David. 2004. “No Girls Allowed?” The Washington Post, August 22, 2004. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/2004/08/22/no-girls-allowed/ c21fed16-fed6-4845-b6c7-d640b6728d3f/. van Maanen, Hans. 2009. How to Study Art Worlds. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Ward, Jessica Blaise. 2019. “Who Remembers Post-Punk Women?” Punk & Post-Punk 8 (3): 279–97. Weinstein, Deena. 2013. “Rock’s Guitar Gods: Avatars of the 60s.” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 10: 139–54. Worley, Matthew. 2018. “Whose Culture? Fanzines, Politics, and Agency.” In Ripped, Torn, and Cut: Pop, Politics and Punk Fanzines from 1976, edited by The Subcultures Network, 55–71. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Tales from the Turntables: “Narrating” and “Narrativizing” the “First Club DJ” Maren Hancock

Histories necessarily exclude, but academic histories are in a place to problematise what has been left out. To mark the difficulties of a particular construction, to highlight its sources and its omissions could, paradoxically, bring us closer to the popular past. (Thornton 1990: 94)

The present study explores western media narratives of the “first club DJ.”1 According to the authors of Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, the first club DJ is generally considered the first person to play records on two turntables, providing continuous music for a paid audience to dance to (1999, 2006, 2014). Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, journalists by trade, further claim that serial sexual predator and notorious pedophile Jimmy Savile was “the very first example of the club DJ” (2014: 52). Yet there is insufficient evidence to support this assertion, since it rests primarily upon Savile’s own claims made in his 1974 autobiography As It Happens. This declaration has proven to have had a considerable impact; arguably, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life exerts the greatest influence on public perception of the history of DJ culture. Continually in print for almost twenty years and acclaimed by The Observer (2006) as one of the fifty best music books ever written, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life is widely considered to be the definitive history of DJ culture. A main goal of this study is to challenge the popular perception, fostered by Brewster and Broughton, that Savile was the first club DJ, in order to question the concept of historical primacy, and to illustrate how DJ history has been canonized as male. I follow Greg Wilson (2012) by looking toward

1

This study is conducted from both my emic perspective informed by being a professional DJ for over twenty years and my academic perspective, having studied DJ culture for over ten years.

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other historical figures who may also have had a notable impact on DJ culture but have not yet been widely acknowledged in popular culture as progenitors. Specifically, I discuss how French cabaret singer and nightclub impresario Régine Zylberberg—known simply as “Régine”—was also an early innovator of DJing and holds significant historical influence within DJ culture (particularly if we reconceptualize the criteria defining primacy). This study also looks at how Savile’s primary position in DJ culture has been eroding since 2012, the year his heinous crimes were made fully public. Furthermore, I discuss how Régine has, with a few exceptions, been denied recognition of her historical importance until relatively recently, and how we are currently witnessing a public desire, manifested on social media, to transfer Savile’s legacy to Régine (who turned 91 on December 26, 2020, and resides in France). In examining Régine’s and Savile’s historical contributions to DJ culture, it is crucial to determine the criteria for declarations of cultural primacy. Therefore, another goal of this chapter is to question the viability of attempting to determine the first club DJ within a chronological and Eurocentric framework in the first place. Is it even possible, and/or useful, to declare that certain figures are chronological “firsts” within popular music histories (specifically, the history of DJ culture)? To address this question, the present study draws on Sarah Thornton’s research by way of informing a final analysis.

Strategies for Reconstructing the Popular Past In “Strategies For Reconstructing the Popular Past,” Thornton explores the history of western discotheques and club cultures from the late 1950s until approximately 1990, pondering key problems regarding documenting popular culture: “The first (often unspoken) difficulty encountered by historians of popular culture concerns its heterogeneous, informal and unofficial character: it is difficult to distinguish cause and effect and ascribe agency” (1990: 87). Thornton identifies competing narratives in DJ culture as filtered through music journalism, drawing on Hayden White to describe the difference(s) between “narrating” and “narrativizing,” and suggesting that there is an important difference between the histories provided by journalism and those by scholarship … Academic histories can include problems of method and evidence, source and structure while journalists’ histories are expected to be straightforwardly “true.” This can be framed as a distinction between “narrating”

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and “narrativizing,” between “a discourse that openly adopts a perspective that looks out on the world and reports it and a discourse that feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story.” (White 1980: 7; Thornton 1990: 94)

Thornton outlines four benchmarks often employed when considering a pop culture event’s historical importance: “sales figures, biographical interest, critical acclaim or amount of media coverage. These criteria, in turn, support four strategies of bringing historical order to the popular past: listing, personalising, canonising and mediating” (1990: 87). Personalizing entails revolving “history around an individual. Biographies which offer glimpses of the past through the lives of their protagonists and histories which are held together by the idiosyncratic voice of their authors exemplify this approach. In different ways, they personalise the past: they channel the multiple and varied through a single identity” (88). Both popular music scholarship and journalism have paid insufficient attention to the history of DJ and nightclub culture prior to the 1970s, to the degree where Savile’s narrative was accepted simply because few people questioned its validity or properly investigated his claims. Moreover, through their narrativization of Savile as a pivotal figure in the history of DJ culture, Brewster and Broughton further obscure and omit key historical subjects. Feminist popular music scholars have demonstrated how women are continually squeezed out of grand historical narratives of popular music (Bayton 1992; Rose 1994; Keenan 2015), even in genres that women have had a major role in creating, such as grunge (Strong 2011) and hip hop (My Mic Sounds Nice 2010). Researchers of DJ culture have established how women are frequently written out of its history (Rodgers 2010; Farrugia 2012; Gavanas and Reitsamer 2016; Farrugia and Olszanowski 2017; Gadir 2017).2 However, evidence suggests that women played crucial—if not foundational—roles in the development of DJing and its attendant culture, and that one reason they have been locked out of this history is due to the considerable influence of Last Night a DJ Saved My Life (1999, 2006, 2014) on the public’s perception of its history. In all three editions of this book (1999, 2006, 2014), Brewster and Broughton claim that women had virtually nothing to do with the development of DJing over the past century.3

2

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For a detailed explanation of the ways in which women’s historical contributions to DJ culture have been obscured or omitted, see Farruiga and Olszanoski (2017). As Farrugia and Olszanowski (2017: 2) have pointed out, this omission is a problem because “constantly focusing on a lack is an affront to women who form the scene and have developed it throughout its history.” Moreover, the conception that women did not participate in DJ culture historically impacts perceptions of women’s present and future participation in said culture.

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The authors limited their discussion of women DJs to two pages out of 400 in the first two editions (1999, 2006). Despite increasing their coverage of “Women DJs” to a disappointing four pages in the third edition (2014) (contrasted with six pages devoted solely to Savile, up from three pages in the second edition), Brewster and Broughton make a point of stating in no uncertain terms that women were categorically absent from DJ culture from its origins until approximately the turn of the twenty-first century: “Throughout this book the DJ is a ‘he’ and this is not just a matter of grammatical simplicity. In DJing’s 94 years, women have been largely frozen out of the picture, with precious few exceptions” (Brewster and Broughton 2014: 463). Such a statement may seem sympathetic at first but insisting that women are absent from DJ history works to re-inscribe this absence, in that it negates the possibility that some parts of DJ history are yet to be uncovered. By refusing even to use gender-neutral language (in 2014 no less), the authors reinforce a discursive construction of the DJ as resolutely male. Brewster and Broughton reinforce their position in The Record Players: DJ Revolutionaries (2012), a collection of interviews with forty-six men whom the authors deem to be the most important DJs in history. In the introduction, Brewster and Broughton declare: “There are no women here. That’s not our fault, that’s how history has dealt it so far” (5), once again discursively erasing even the possibility that there have been women innovators in DJ history. Brewster and Broughton omit any noteworthy female practitioners of DJ culture until the advent of acid house in the late 1980s and early 1990s.4 It was only then that women were more or less permitted to DJ, because—according to Brewster and Broughton at least—prior to the 1990s apparently the mere concept of women DJing was subject to ridicule: “One cultural side-effect of acid house was the freedom it gave to women to be DJs. In the rushing years at the end of the eighties, anything seemed possible, even the idea that a woman could enter this most male of professions and not be laughed out from behind the decks” [my emphasis] (Brewster and Broughton 2014: 463). Clearly, women have

4

Furthermore, the authors make no mention of Daphne Oram in the 2014 edition of Last Night A DJ Saved My Life, despite her central position as the Godmother of electronic music, having founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958 (Williams 2017). Scant attention is paid to Judy Weinstein, who “shaped the scene in the early days” (Tantum 2016) in New York City during the rise of disco and DJ culture during the 1970s. Key Black artists are also left out, for example, Kelli Hand, DJ Heather, Honey Dijon, and DJ Paulette. DJ Paulette is a UK progenitor: “Although the first woman DJ at the Hacienda and a leading figure in the Nineties dance scene, she has almost been ‘airbrushed’ out of history” (Howell 2018).

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historically experienced significant barriers to accessing DJ culture, but such barriers, as manifested in the behaviors of sexist and misogynist stakeholders, have been far more insidious, harmful, and violent than simply being mocked (Hancock 2020). Brewster and Broughton’s approach to women in DJ history works not only to discursively erase women; it diminishes the degree to which male gatekeepers fought to restrict access to DJ culture and the damage this has caused above and beyond women’s omission from their narrative. Despite my contention with Brewster and Broughton’s dismissal of women DJs’ foundational contributions to the culture, the authors are correct in stating that women did not participate in DJ culture to the degree that would put them on a par historically with men in terms of numbers and industry success; however, that should not be equated with women being virtually non-existent in DJ culture. Rather, this historic lack of numbers mimics the general popular music scene, which displays a lack of women instrumentalists. This sexist attitude is of course not limited to assumptions about women DJs but is present throughout the history of popular music and art. This argument foregrounds the vital role that women have played in DJ culture since its formative years of broadcast radio.

From Radio to Disco: Defining the DJ Radio’s development during the first few decades of the twentieth century produced the initial wave of DJs, referred to at the time as announcers or programmers.5 Sybil True was one of the first radio DJs to influence record sales as early as 1914, a fact that Brewster and Broughton acknowledge: “She borrowed records from a local music store and concentrated on young people’s music in an attempt to encourage youthful interest in the possibilities of radio. Even at this early stage, it was clear that it was a powerful force. Mrs. True noted with satisfaction that her program had a noticeable effect on the store’s record sales” (1999: 22). In a critique of 1930s radio and DJs in America, dance music scholar Kai Fikentscher argues that “the first concepts of the disc jockey and of music programming were formed during the early days of independently 5

The term DJ is short for “disc jockey,” and several sources affirm that the term was coined by Walter Winchell around the late 1930s or early 1940s, to refer to radio announcer Martin Block, who aired newly popular dance songs on his radio show The Make Believe Ballroom on WNEW in New York City (Lobley 2019).

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DJ-led radio shows” (2013: 134). Fikentscher cites Arnold Passman’s work documenting thousands of calls and letters from radio listeners in the 1930s, who described how they not only listened to—but danced to—the music on the radio. In the light of this history, Fikentscher argues that the idea of “mediated dance music programming” goes back several decades, and points to how, much like a club DJ, a radio DJs’ success with music programming was a key factor in growing a loyal and returning audience: “Both the radio jock and the disco or club DJ of yesteryear … [were] tastemakers and trendsetters, they tailored their music to a locally and/or regionally specific clientele” (Fikentscher 2013: 134–5). Fikentscher explains how 1930s radio DJs such as Halloween Martin broke with the convention of live musicians performing in the broadcast studio, instead playing recordings of musical performances and choosing the records to spin on their shows. Halloween Martin’s Chicago-based radio show “The Musical Clock” began in 1930, with Martin subsequently enjoying a long career (Keith 2008; Farrugia 2012). According to Fikentcher (2013), the format of Martin’s program made her one of the first modern DJs ever because it was based on presenting music from records, as a replacement for a live band. Despite the success of True, Martin, and other female announcers in the early days of radio, women were squeezed out of these positions as the salaries and stature associated with radio DJs increased as the century progressed (Halper 2001; Farrugia 2012). I draw attention to Martin and True to underscore their historical contributions to the formation of DJ culture, as well as the mediated practices that comprise the foundations of club DJing; namely, selecting and presenting music in a way to both educate and entertain an audience, thereby garnering a loyal following. As previously discussed, the first club DJ is considered to be the first person to play records on two turntables, providing continuous music for a paid audience to dance to. Until recently, based upon that criteria, most journalistic and academic sources claim that Jimmy Savile was the first club DJ. By way of example, Noel Lobley defines “DJ culture” as follows: “Jukeboxes, popular in Depression and Prohibition-era United States, existed since 1889, but the idea of dancing to records selected live, as opposed to live musicians, is credited to Leeds-born DJ Jimmy Saville in 1943 … said to be the first person to have used twin turntables to keep the music flowing at dances” (2019: 744). Notably, Lobley cites Brewster and Broughton (2014) as his only source to support this specific claim (Lobley 2019: 746). The DJ and blogger Greg Wilson (2012) asserts that Brewster and Broughton’s claim of Savile’s primacy is based on insufficient evidence gathered from Ulf Postchardt’s DJ Culture (1998), the first academic

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monograph on the subject: “In a short section outlining the development of DJs in Europe, Poschardt repeated [UK popular music journalist] Nik Cohn’s pronouncement that Jimmy Savile was a trailblazer … However, [Postchardt] never mentioned anything about [Savile’s] claim to be the first DJ to use 2 turntables” (Wilson 2012: para 29). Several popular music scholars (such as Butler 2006, and Brennan 2015) cite Brewster and Broughton and/or Postchardt when claiming Savile was the first DJ—and no other sources. Interestingly, although Lobley omits Régine from his discussion of “DJ culture,” she is hailed as a DJ innovator in the “Disco” entry in the same encyclopedia (The Sage International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture). According to Maristella Feustle, “the discotheque formally emerged at Paris’s Whisky à Gogo where Régine Zylberberg replaced the jukebox with a disc jockey controlling linked turntables to eliminate pauses between songs” (Feustle 2019: 738). While Feustle does not claim that Régine was the first DJ nor was responsible for begetting the first DJ, according to Régine herself, she was the “disc jockey” controlling the turntables and selecting the music at the Whisky à Gogo, as discussed in a later section of this study. Given this fact, astonishingly, the narratives of Régine and Savile compete for the title of the “first club DJ” within the same encyclopedia. Finally, Feustle does not mention Savile in her entry for “Disco,” nor does she cite Brewster and Broughton; rather, she cites Alice Echols (2010), Kai Fikentscher (2000), and Peter Shapiro (2005). The following two sections of this study focus on the cultural contributions of Régine and Savile in order to demonstrate how the former’s historical importance has been downplayed or omitted, and how the latter’s importance has been inflated and unduly celebrated in DJ culture/history.

Jimmy Savile Jimmy Savile was a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Radio 1 DJ and the host of Top of the Pops and other BBC television shows for decades. Savile was also a heinous serial sexual abuser whose predatory crimes spanned more than six decades. The extent and duration of his criminal activity were enabled by his access to UK national institutions including his employer the BBC and the focus of his “charity” work, the National Health Service (NHS). Shortly after Savile’s death in 2011 at age 84, it quickly emerged that “589 alleged victims [had] come forward during [police] investigation of offences committed by Savile and others

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… Of the alleged victims, 82 percent were female and 80 percent were children or young people” (BBC News 2012; see also Greer and McLachlin 2013). The public discovery of Savile’s crimes and how they were enabled and concealed by two major institutions primary to the fabric of public life in the UK rocked the country and resulted in the creation of several new laws, as well as old laws being changed (Boyle 2018). And herein lies the problem, namely that of assigning accolades to the worst serial sexual abuser in modern UK history who preyed upon the most vulnerable population, as Brewster and Broughton do in the following passage from Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: Jimmy Savile was the first superstar DJ … So, despite the revelations about his life-long exploitation of vulnerable youngsters, we must accept that Sir James Savile OBE (his list of honors shows how well he used his establishment connections as a smokescreen) was the wily showman who took us from dance bands to DJs, the innovator who conjured the notion of inviting people to pay to dance to records in a club. (2014: 55–6, my emphasis)

In a 2016 interview with Red Bull Music Academy, Brewster states that when he and co-author Broughton were interviewing “hundreds of people” for Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, they “asked everyone the question ‘Who influenced you?’—in order to get to the very root of the culture—nearly everyone said, ‘You’ve got to go talk to Jimmy Savile, because he was the pioneer.’ I mean, it’s a sad fact now, but obviously his contribution to DJing is contentious to talk about now” (quoted by Martin 2016). Brewster’s statement raises two questions. Indeed, how is it possible that neither he nor Broughton heard anything about the allegations against Savile after interviewing “hundreds” of people connected to DJ culture? Or, if Brewster and Broughton did hear talk of Savile’s crimes, why did they choose to pay no heed to the rumors about Savile that apparently had been percolating for decades? (Burrell 2016). Wilson points to how the various amendments made by Brewster and Broughton between the three editions of Last Night A DJ Saved My Life reveal the discrepancies in Savile’s self-narrative. Here, Wilson discusses how Savile’s stature again prevented him from being questioned with regards to his primacy in DJ culture, and cites two other UK contenders who may have used twinturntables to play records for a paid audience to dance. Wilson also points out how, unlike other UK DJs active in the 1940s, no photographic evidence exists to support Savile’s claims to be the “first club DJ” by way of being the first DJ to play on two turntables:

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[Y]ou didn’t question Jimmy Savile, if he told you that he was the inventor of twin-turntables, given the lack of evidence to the contrary who were we to dispute this? After all, this was a man who’d been honored by Queen and country (and Pope for good measure)—an upstanding citizen, let alone a living legend. Perhaps, as with his catalogue of abuse of underage girls, he pulled the wool over our eyes in positioning himself at the genesis of DJ culture, when really we should have been looking towards more marginal figures like Bertrand Thorpe and Ron Diggins, or similar pioneers in other countries [my emphasis]. It’s not unreasonable to imagine that, as with the invention of the steam engine, a number of people in different places came up with roughly the same idea around the same time. Even if we do believe that Savile was using 2 turntables before Diggins, or vice versa, can we be sure that either was aware of what the other was doing? (Wilson 2012: para 34)

In response to Wilson’s blog post, long-time DJ Magazine editor-in-chief Carl Loben wrote that he was now of the opinion that Savile wasn’t “the godfather of DJ culture,” as we have been led to believe over the past decade or so … For starters, the dates don’t add up as to when he supposedly first put two turntables together. When I interviewed him about it for DJ Magazine in 2002, he said that it was in 1941. But he would only have been 14 or 15 at this time, and other accounts online vary as to the dates too—as do how many people were at his first gig, which could be anywhere between 250 and 12 …. I think we should strip him of any reverence when it comes to being a DJ pioneer …. he wasn’t a music fan, he didn’t collect records, he was an egotistical megalomaniac & predatory paedophile. (in Wilson 2012, comments section)

Here, Loben also refers to the well-documented fact that Savile did not exhibit key traits typically associated with club DJs, namely a passion for music, and amassing a record collection (Mardles 2007). Speaking of the culture of denial surrounding sexual predators who are part of the fabric of everyday life—as was Savile in the UK for decades—Wilson states: “[i]n this environment of denial it’s likely that Jimmy Savile’s whole career was based on his intention to place himself in the proximity of young girls, not on a desire to be a DJ revolutionary” (2012). Given that scant data backs the claim that Savile was the first club DJ, how and why did media narratives of DJ history grant Savile primacy? Savile was often described as a “professional exaggerator” (Boyle 2018: 1567), so why did Postchardt, Brewster, and Broughton take Savile’s word? For this reason alone it is pertinent to question whether other forerunners remain unknown, having

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been overlooked in historical studies of DJing due to a myopic focus on Savile, and on the UK in general; to this end, the following section examines Régine’s foundational contributions to DJ culture. Unlike Savile, Régine was a dedicated audiophile who collected records from a young age and was passionate about music and dancing. She has also claimed to be the “first club DJ” (Weil 2009; Ortiz 2011), though she is not, as discussed earlier, regarded as such in the majority of academic work on DJ culture’s history.

Régine Long before Beyoncé, Madonna, or even Cher, Régine was hailed by her first name only. Although practically unknown in North America in the twentyfirst century, Régine remains famous in Europe as a singer, actor, and nightclub franchise owner, earning the nickname “Queen of the Night.” Part of her popularity stems from being a working-class heroine and a “woman of the people”; indeed, her autobiography Régine: Call Me By My First Name details her exceptional life. Born in Belgium in 1929 to Polish-Jewish parents, Régine had an unstable childhood; her mother abandoned Régine and her younger brother by moving to Argentina shortly after his birth (Zylberberg 1988). Régine grew up going back and forth from her father’s dwellings in working class Paris to boarding school, as well as spending her early teen years during the WWII occupation of France hiding from the Nazis (initially in a convent, and later in a senior citizens’ home in Lyon). Régine was married and divorced with a young son by the age of nineteen and as she declares in her autobiography, all she was interested in was going out dancing. Régine’s autobiography contains dozens of references to her passion for cutting edge music, dancing, and nighttime culture: “night people are a special breed, all a little lost, a little in need of human warmth, of intimacy, of the illusion of security” (1988: 174). She divulges a passion for dancing in the nightclubs of Paris as a young teenager, revealing her love of dance music by describing her heightened exposure to jazz when moving back to Paris. By the age of 20 in 1949, Régine was a barmaid at the Whisky à Gogo in Paris and by 1953 she was managing the bar (Zylberberg 1988). It is due to Régine’s tenure at the Whisky that she is credited with creating the modern day discotheque, or nightclub (Feustal 2019; Graves-Brown 2012). In a 2005 interview with the BBC, Régine describes how she introduced many fundamental aspects at the

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Whisky that are now standard in nightclubs, such as the use of two turntables to enable continuous music, specific flooring for a dancing area, and specific types of lighting: I laid down a linoleum dance-floor—like in a kitchen—put in coloured lights, and removed the juke-box. The trouble with the juke-box was that when the music stopped you could hear snogging in the corners. It killed the atmosphere … Instead I installed two turntables so there was no gap in the music. I was barmaid, doorman, bathroom attendant, hostess—and I also put on the records. It was the first ever discotheque and I was the first ever club disc-jockey. (Schofield 2005, my emphasis)

In a televised interview with Ados France posted to YouTube in 2010, Régine gives a similar account of transforming the Whisky into the first discotheque, and again asserts her primacy as a DJ, while going into more detail about controlling the lights as well as the music, and giving dance lessons. She remarks, “although DJing is seen as a man’s job, I succeeded at it because I was simple and cool, I had an ease of amusing people that only a few people know how to do.” Régine restates her claim of primacy in DJ history again in an interview with Women’s Wear Daily, wherein the interviewer states that “DJs have a lot to thank you for. You banished jukeboxes and replaced them with paired turntables for seamless music”; Régine replies, “Most DJs know that I invented mixing. I was the first to destroy the automatic system with the manual system” (Weil 2009). Régine opened her own club in 1957, Chez Régine, and she describes how she broke new types of music and dances at her clubs: “To launch the cha-cha, I opened a dance school at the club on Sunday afternoons … It was the first time couples had to separate, and this new departure proved most disorienting” (Zylberberg 1988: 130–1). Numerous media sources corroborate how Régine brought the “Twist” to France by obtaining the record and teaching her patrons the dance (Foreman 2009; West 2011). Indeed, the twist gets its own short chapter in Régine’s autobiography (Zylberberg 1988: 167–72) wherein she describes learning of the dance from American cast members of West Side Story, in France to perform the musical in the early 1960s. Upon seeing the cast members dance the twist while warming up, Régine inquired about the dance and, learning of its nature, said, “so there must be some records, mustn’t there?” (168) and ordered Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again” which she played for the patrons of Chez Régine to dance to. Régine was aware of her trendsetter status, and like any professional DJ, kept her ear to the ground to break new sounds: “I was one step ahead of the music,

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one step ahead of the twist” (173). Régine describes how she “put the records on … We danced the cha-cha, the meringue and of course rock ‘n’ roll. I’d bought some rock records before it became fashionable, and when people started talking about it I got them out and everyone went wild” (Zylberberg 1988: 130–1). By introducing the twist—a type of dance that one does solo, as opposed to a foxtrot or another dance requiring two bodies—Régine revolutionized popular dance in France and elsewhere in Europe, which in the late 1950s and early 1960s had not yet been as impacted by Black musical culture as America (Ortiz 2011). Régine originated other nightclub concepts such as “hype,” which Brewster and Broughton ultimately credit her for. When she was sent to rescue a new version of the Whisky à Gogo in Cannes that was faring poorly, Régine kept the club empty but cranked the music inside and hung a “disco full” sign on the door for two weeks. When Régine finally did open the door, there was a line up down the block (Zylberberg 1988). It was at the Whisky à Gogo where the practice of patrons purchasing a bottle of whisky—not a glass— and writing their name on the bottle began. By the time Régine opened Chez Régine, she had created the forerunner to what is presently known as “bottle service” in nightclubs. Régine also introduced theme nights, such as a “Jean Harlow” night wherein guests adorned themselves all in white, and with these “happenings” the “patrons were the performers” (Ortiz 2011: 3). All of these innovations position Régine as the prototype modern nightclub DJ who often acts as a promoter as well, for example, by curating the theme for a club night (a convention that endures to this day). Owing to the extensive evidence demonstrating that Régine was a DJ who played dance records at her club, how did Brewster and Broughton overlook her so-called DJ claims? In Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, the authors allude to an awareness of her autobiography, Régine: Call Me By My First Name, but they do not refer to it by its title, nor do they cite it or any sources on Régine in their bibliography (thus, it does not seem that they interviewed her). Given that Brewster and Broughton conducted over 200 personal interviews for their project, and Régine is a celebrity active in the public realm while residing in France, it strikes me as odd that they did not speak with her. Incredibly, Régine’s significant position as a cultural progenitor has yet to be widely acknowledged, despite being “considered the very first disc jockey, or DJ … [who] created an atmosphere of boundlessness” (Ortiz 2011: 3). Régine’s relative absence from DJ history is in keeping with the perception that women did not make foundational contributions to DJ culture (Brewster and Broughton 2014) and is

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a prominent example of how this history has been canonized as male (Faruggia and Olszanowski 2017; Rodgers 2010).

Conclusion: Mixing Narratives Brewster and Broughton’s claim that Savile was the first club DJ is significant, since the widespread popularity—and thereby influence—of Last Night a DJ Saved My Life grants it a definitive role in shaping public perception. To once again reference Thornton (1990), I argue that Brewster and Broughton “personalise” the history of DJ culture by focusing on Savile, and “canonise” that history by fixing it in the UK according to their own set of criteria, thus narrativizing the story of Savile as the “first club DJ” by presenting it as “straightforwardly ‘true’” (Thornton 1990: 94) despite significant evidence to the contrary. Since the present study pays close attention to both journalism and academic work on this topic, I have noted how the narrative of “the first club DJ” currently shifts away from Jimmy Savile, a factor acknowledged by Brewster and Broughton; nonetheless, the authors blame this phenomenon not upon a lack of evidence, but rather state that: “In posthumous disgrace he is being rapidly whitewashed from history. Despite his unspeakable crimes, he remains a revolutionary DJ and an important figure in our story” (2014: 53). Indeed, Savile is already beginning to be excised from DJ history and substituted with Régine in mainstream journalistic accounts. For example, the Daily Telegraph, an Australian newspaper, omits Savile from the narrative of the first club DJ and grants Régine the title instead: In 1953 at a nightclub named Whiskey [sic] A-Go-Go in Paris … Belgian-born singer and DJ Régine Zylberberg, came up with an influential innovation. She linked two record players together and created mixes of two tunes, or seamlessly slid one song into the next to keep the music going and the dancers dancing. Régine opened her own club … pioneering the record playing format. (Lennon 2019)

Interestingly, the narrative granting Régine primacy in DJ culture is quietly being promoted on Twitter. A search for “Régine Zylberberg” on May 28, 2020, found fifteen tweets posted between 2011 and 2020 that made specific reference to Régine as the “first club DJ” using identical or similar keywords. For example, a user tweeted part of the following paragraph with a link to their Facebook page with the full paragraph:

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Just saw this in Mental Floss: The birth of the DJ occurred in 1953, when 24-year-old Régine Zylberberg, manager of Paris’ famous Whisky a Go-Go, undertook an experiment to replace the club’s jukebox with two turntables and a microphone. In no time, DJs were pumping up the jam at parties the world over. By the 1970s, Zylberberg was running 25 clubs across Europe and the Americas. (@robalahn, September 15, 2011)

Mentalfloss.com has an “Amazing Facts” generator, so perhaps it was through that generator that the key phrase regarding Régine’s prominence was published. Aside from the preceding tweet, however, most of the tweets occur in 2012 or later, and I find this to be significant as 2012 is the year the Savile scandal broke. For example, a user tweeted in Italian to suggest that “International DJ day should be changed from March 9 to December 26, or failing that, the day Régine Zylberberg dies” (@TomasBettolli, October 3, 2019). A tweet from a Rotterdam-based nightclub and radio DJ included Régine’s name along with three prominent, well-known, and respected trailblazing DJs: Francis Grasso, Kool Herc and Grand Wizard Theodore (@OkkieVijfvinkel, February 20, 2019).6 Another user tweeted, “#fact The first DJ was in 1953, when 24-yearold Régine Zylberberg, manager of Paris Whisky a Go-Go, did it to replace the club’s jukebox” (@Maitreya12358, July 26, 2013). Yet another user tweeted that “Régine Zylberberg was probably the first female #DJ to spin on twin turntables” (@Peter_S_Becks1, December 3, 2015) and included a link to Régine’s Wikipedia page. Of all of the extant tweets naming Régine as the first DJ, this “female #DJ” hashtag user was the only one who made the gendered distinction of “female DJ.” Aside from one Twitter user who linked to their own Facebook post, none of the other Tweets affirming Régine as the “first club DJ” link to sources, so it is unclear as to where these users obtained their information. One possibility is the Twitter account for Ripley’s Believe It or Not! which published the following tweet in 2012: “Believe It or Not! (#BION) The birth of the DJ occurred in 1953, when 24-year-old Régine Zylberberg, manager of … [link to Facebook post]” (@ RipleysNiagara, February 4, 2012). The tweet is incomplete, and the link to the Facebook post is dead. Again, I find the date in 2012 to be significant. Overall, this study demonstrates that Savile should not be given primacy in DJ culture for three reasons: he was a despicable person, very little evidence exists to support the claim that he was the very first person to play dance music 6

The Tweet, translated from Dutch, states: “17 Group 7 children talk about @DJ history and late #beatmatchen at 9 am … #Réginezylberberg#francisgrasso#kool herc#grand wizard theodore.”

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on twin turntables for a paid audience, and the criteria for defining the “first club DJ” is narrowly constructed with a focus on the UK. Ultimately, re-defining the criteria for primacy in the history of DJ culture would elevate Régine from obscurity to a more prominent place in the narrative. As a respondent to Wilson’s blog post concludes: “Maybe the two-table claim will be slowly forgotten given the much wider positive impact club culture has had on society” (Hobbins, in Wilson 2012, comments section). Given that Régine’s crucial contributions to club culture are becoming more widely acknowledged, and if we follow Hobbins’ suggestion and focus on the impact of club culture—a much vaster and more diverse realm than a personification of Savile—then Régine’s importance becomes evident. In closing, the present study cautions against replacing one figure with another and simply continuing with a narrativization of DJ history; indeed, we should look instead at several narratives, and how they speak to and/or against each other. Therefore, while this chapter opposes a sexist construction of DJ history by demonstrating that women DJs—specifically Régine—made foundational contributions to DJ culture, I follow Rodgers (2010) who carefully articulates how her concern is not centrally focused on uncovering a lost history of women DJs; rather, she also seeks to explore the relationship between history and the present.7 Clearly, the value lies more in reshaping the ways in which history has been canonized as white and male, rather than uncovering a lost history in order to claim said history as valuable in and of itself. It is even more urgent that we push to question the validity of canons, whether chronologically based or not. Such hierarchical frameworks reinforce a linear view of DJ history, flattening or omitting the contributions of many historical subjects, thus reinforcing a DJ canon that continues to distort history.

References Ados France. 2010. “Régine: La Reine de la Nuit en Interview.” YouTube. August 2. Accessed May 21, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHC2jI0CVhw&t=133s. Bayton, Mavis. 1992. “Out on the Margins: Feminism and the Study of Popular Music.” Women: A Cultural Review 3 (1): 51–9. 7

“[Pink Noises’] relationship to electronic music historiography is not to advocate an unattainable completeness in historical accounts but to be concerned with how histories are contained and contested in movements of sound in the present” (Rodgers 2010: 2).

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BBC News 2012. “Jimmy Savile Abuse: Number of Alleged Victims Reaches 450.” BBC News. December 12. Accessed June 2, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/ uk–2069778. Boyle, Karen. 2018. “Television and/as Testimony in the Jimmy Savile Case.” Critical Studies in Television, 13 (4): 387–404. Brennan, Matt. 2015. “Live Music History.” In The Sage Handbook of Popular Music, edited by Andy Bennet and Steve Waksman, 207–22. London: Sage. Brewster, Bill and Frank Broughton. 1999. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey. London: Headline Book Publishing. Brewster, Bill and Frank Broughton. 2006. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey, updated edition. New York: Grove Press. Brewster, Bill and Frank Broughton. 2012. The Record Players: DJ Revolutionaries, London: Virgin Books. Brewster, Bill and Frank Broughton. 2014. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey, updated edition. New York: Grove Press. Burrell, Ian. 2016. “Jimmy Savile Report: The Five Senior BBC Employees Who Knew about Sexual Predators but Did Not Act.” Independent, February 25, 2016. https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/media/tv-radio/jimmy-savile-report-stuart-hall-bbcemployees-who-knew-about-sexual-predators-a6896246.html. Butler, Mark J. 2006. Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter and Musical Design in Electronic Club Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Echols, Alice. 2010. Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. Farrugia, Rebekah. 2012. Beyond the Dance Floor: Female DJs, Technology, and Electronic Dance Music Culture. Bristol, UK: Intellect. Farrugia, Rebekka and Magdelena Olszanowski. 2017. “Introduction to Women and Electronic Dance Music.” Dancecult: A Journal of Electronic Music Culture 9 (1): 1–8. Feustle, Maristella. 2019. “Disco.” In The Sage Encyclopaedia of Music and Culture, edited by Janet Sturman, 738–40. London: Sage. Fikentscher, Kai. 2000. You Better Work! Underground House Music in New York City. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Fikentscher, Kai. 2013. “‘It’s Not the Mix, It’s the Selection’: Music Programming in Contemporary DJ Culture.” In DJ Culture in the Mix: Power, Technology and Social Change in Electronic Dance Music, edited by Bernardo A. Attias, Anna Gavanas and Hillegonda Rietveld, 123–49. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Foreman, Katya. 2009. “Five Minutes with Legendary Night Queen Régine.” W Magazine.July 5, 2009. Accessed June 5, 2020. https://www.wmagazine.com/story/ five-minutes-with-legendary-ni/. Gadir, Tami. 2017. “Forty-Seven DJs, Four women: Meritocracy, Talent, and Postfeminist Politics.” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 9 (1): 50–72.

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Schofield, Hugh. 2005. “No Holding Back French Disco Diva.” BBC News, October 24, 2005. Accessed October 18, 2019. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4372150.stm. Shapiro, Peter. 2005. Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. New York: Faber and Faber. Strong, Catherine. 2011. Grunge: Music and Memory. Farnam: Ashgate. Tantum, Bruce. 2016. “Judy Weinstein: She Was There.” Redbull Music Academy, May 13, 2016. Accessed March 24, 2020. https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2016/05/ judy-weinstein-feature. Thornton, Sarah. 1990. “Strategies for Reconstructing the Popular Past.” Popular Music 9 (1): 87–95. Williams, Holly. 2017. “The Woman Who Could ‘Draw’ Music.” BBC, May 30, 2017. Accessed April 26, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170522-daphneoram-pioneered-electronic-music. Weil, Jennifer. 2009. “Last Call: Queen of the Scene.” Women’s Wear Daily, 197 (127): 42. West, Naomi. 2011. “Régine: By Invitation Only.” Elle, April 25, 2011. Accessed February 27, 2020. https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a11625/reginezylberberg-nightclub-owner-interview/. White, Hayden. 1980. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 5–27. Wilson, Greg. 2012. “Jimmy Savile—DJ Originator or More Smoke and Mirrors?” Greg Wilson: Being a DJ, [blog]. November 21, 2012. http://blog.gregwilson. co.uk/2012/11/jimmy-savile-dj-originator-or-more-smoke-and-mirrors/. Zylberberg, Régine. 1988. Call Me by My First Name. London: Andre Deutsch.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank the team at Bloomsbury for their guidance and support, especially Leah Babb-Rosenfeld and Rachel Moore. We would also like to thank our families for their support and encouragement throughout the process of preparing this book, as well as all of the contributing authors.

Index 100 Club Punk Festival 105, 213 Adam, Margie 40, 41, 43, 44, 46, 49 Advert, Gaye 209, 210 Ali, Muhammad 77 Alternative Media Conference 117–18 See also alternative music alternative music See also Alternative Media Conference authenticity 119 definitions 112–13 history 109–10 industry practices 116, 119 music press 112–13, 113–14, 119–20 pre-punk context 113–15 and radio 119 Asian Underground/Asian Kool 152 authenticity and alternative rock 119 and drum ‘n’ bass 61, 116 and hip-hop 83–4 and music documentaries 177, 179 and Northern Soul 23, 25, 27, 31 and progressive rock 93 and women’s music 40 BBC Radio 57 n.4, 100–1, 103, 117, 125, 225–6 Black Nationalism and the Civil Rights Movement 73 and hip-hop 71, 78–9 and Islam 74–7 media representation 78–83, 84 Black Power 75 Blase, Cazz 202–3, 207, 214–15 Blues & Soul 19, 21, 25, 26–30 Blur 109, 145 Bourdieu, Pierre field theory 203–6 and punk 204–5, 206–7 Bowie, David 1, 103

Britpop See also national identity, pop nationalism, Union Jack counter-narratives 142, 146 and Echobelly 151–6 narratives 141, 143–4, 146 and Oasis 146–51 omissions 154 racism 144, 147–8, 151–2, 154–5, 156 sexism 154, 155 subversive artwork 148–9, 150, 153–4 Clash, The 114, 206, 208 Clawson, Mary Ann 208 Cobain, Kurt 110, 143 Coon, Caroline 91, 102–3, 104, 105 Davies, Helen 54, 58, 155, 183, 201–2 Dean, Dorothy 37, 40, 42, 46 See also Paid My Dues disc jockey (DJ) See also drum ‘n’ bass, mobile disco, northern soul cultural primacy 219–20, 224–5, 227, 229–30, 231–3 definitions 223–5, 227–8 gendered history 19, 20–4, 56–7, 60–4, 221–3 hip-hop 76, 77, 78 radio DJs 130, 138, 223–4 representation 18, 56–7, 57–8, 60–4, 225–6 as tastemaker 25, 229 DJ Flight 56 DJ Magazine 55, 227 DJ Rap 56, 57, 61 do-it-yourself (DIY) See also fanzines DIY culture 25–6, 111, 208, 216 DIY preservationism 5, 11 self-documenting histories 18, 20, 25, 26, 29 Dobkin, Alix 41, 47, 48 Drayton, Tony 211, 212, 215 See also Ripped & Torn

Index drum ‘n’ bass authenticity 61 gendering 56–7, 60–4 mentoring 64–5 objectification of women DJs 53, 54, 57, 61–3 patriarchy 54–5 power relations 57, 62–4, 65 sexism 60, 61–2, 63 sexual harassment 60–1 spatial and sonic environments 58–60 Echobelly See Sonja Aurora Madan Emerson, Lake and Palmer (ELP) 94, 131, 132, 133 Faiers, Jonathan 207 fanzines See also Paid My Dues, Ripped & Torn, Sniffin’ Glue gender-coding 209–11 gendered descriptors 211–12 photography 213–14 Feldman, Maxine 48 feminism 35–6, 39–40 See also women’s music Feustle, Maristella 225 Fikentscher, Kai 223–4 Five Percent Nation (5percenters) See also Nation of Islam doctrines of 74–7, 84 erasure from popular histories of hip hop 79–80 negative media representations 81–2 Frank, Thomas 120 Gabriel, Peter 134, 137 gender representations See also women’s music and Britpop 154 and drum ‘n’ bass 56–7, 61–2 gender equality 53, 58, 201, 203 in Hot Press magazine 182–3, 188, 191–8 hypersexualization 62, 183, 193 masculinity and northern soul 19, 20–4 music industry 54–5, 62–4 and nationalism 151 objectification 17–19, 48, 53, 57, 61–2, 193–4 in punk fanzines 201–2, 207–15

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Genesis in the charts 125–6, 130, 134–5 magazine coverage 102–3, 138 and the symphonic orthodoxy 94 Goffman, Erving 183 hidden histories construction of 4, 6–8, 10–11 of hip-hop 76, 84–5 of Hot Press magazine 182 of northern soul 19, 21, 31–2 hip-hop See also hidden histories, Islam in the United States commercialization 83 documentaries 80, 81–4 and Islam 71–2, 75–81 and MTV 83 tenets of 76, 83 Zulu Nation 80 Hot Press editorial narratives 181, 182, 183–9 gender narratives 191–8 nostalgia 186–7, 197 production values 189 independent record labels 30, 64–5 Islam in the United States See also hip-hop African American Islam 82 erasure 77–9, 82, 83 Islamophobia 81 media perceptions 76–7 othering 78 and US immigration 73, 75 It Bites 137 Jethro Tull and the charts 131–2 press coverage 95, 96, 102 and the symphonic orthodoxy 94 television appearances 132, 136 Jett, Joan 210, 211 Jones, Allan 97, 98, 101 jungle See drum ‘n’ bass Kemistry and Storm 56, 58 King Crimson 94, 104, 137 Last Night a DJ Saved My Life 219, 221–2, 226, 230–1

240 Lavender Jane Loves Women 41, 45 Lieb, Kristin 182, 193 Loben, Carl 55, 227 Lobley, Neil 223 n.5, 224, 225 Madan, Sonja Aurora 142, 151–6 Malcolm X 74, 79, 80 marginalization of women in Britpop 154–6 in DJ history 219–20, 221–3 in drum ‘n’ bass 53–5, 58, 60, 66 in Northern Soul 20–4 in punk rock 201–3, 208–16 Marillion 137 Martin, Halloween 224 McGee, Alan 149 McLeod, Kembrew 62, 63, 203, 207 Melody Maker See also progressive rock and the “alternative society” 114, 115 dominant male narrative 201 fan narratives 92, 96–8, 104–5 positioning 91–2 and the “rock establishment” 94–5, 97 the “Rock Report” 95–6 mentoring 23, 64–5 Michigan Womyn’s Festival 47, 50–1 mobile disco 18, 25, 29, 31, 100 MTV 82–3, 109, 120, 133, 134 music documentaries archives 172–4 curation 10, 176 editing 175–6 heritage discourses 163–4 hip-hop documentaries 82–4, 85 narrative challenges 164–5 narrative choices 166, 167–70 production constraints 166 rock documentaries 111 use of interviews 170–2 “working in circles” 167 music histories See also do-it-yourself, hidden histories, music documentaries, music magazines canonization 215–6 constructedness 1–3 material culture 5–6 musealization 189–92 museumization 5

Index omissions/erasure 53, 154 See also marginalization of women rock era histories 2, 3 music magazines See also gender representations alternative music magazines 112–13 as cultural objects 202, 205–6 dominant male narratives 20–4, 155, 183, 201, 205 male gaze 62, 203, 211–12 patriarchy 53–4, 56–7, 62, 202 prestige 205–6 representation of women in mainstream magazines 183, 191–8 narrativization See also authenticity, do-it-yourself (DIY), music documentaries alternative narratives 4, 5 nostalgia 102, 111, 186–7, 197 rock critics 116, 117 Nation of Islam (NOI) See also Black Power Movement, Five Percent Nation, Malcolm X, Public Enemy and American society 71, 75, 77 Elijah Muhammad 74 Louis Farrakhan 80–1, 83, 84 Wallace Fard Muhammad 74 national identity in-betweenness 142, 147, 156 Britpop narratives 142, 143–6, 148, 150, 154, 155 diasporic experience 78, 142, 156–7 National Women’s Music Festival (NWMF) 39, 45 nationalism See also Black Nationalism, pop nationalism and gender 151, 155–6 and racism 152–4 Natterer, Kathrin 186 Near, Holly 38, 40, 43, 44, 45 New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band 40, 45 New York Dolls 95, 97, 101, 209 Nirvana 109 northern soul See also Blues & Soul, disc Jockey, mobile disco gendered representations 20–4

Index multigenerational scene 19, 22 political economy 25–31 Oasis 141, 143, 146–51, 156 See also Britpop Olivia Records 36, 44 Paglia, Camille 208 Paid My Dues narratives of professionalism and antiprofessionalism 42–7 narratives of separatism 47–9 origin and overview 36–42 political consciousness 39–42 Penetration 208, 212, 216 Perry, Mark 212, 215 See also Sniffin’ Glue Pink Floyd 91, 94, 85, 96 pop nationalism 141, 142–6, 150 Postchardt, Ulf 224–5, 227 progressive pop 97 n.3, 131, 137 progressive rock “Atlantic Syndrome” 99 commercialism 96–7 complexity 92, 130 gigantism 93 magazine coverage 91–3 peri-generational split 98, 102, 105 pretentiousness 93, 130, 131 “punk killed prog” 93, 128 the “rock establishment” 94, 95 singles charts 125–6, 129–30, 134–6, 138 Students’ Union (“college”) circuit 98–100, 102 symphonic orthodoxy 94, 103 n.13 pub rock 95, 102, 126–7, 136 Public Enemy 77, 79, 84, 85 punk-rock See also do-it-yourself, fanzines, Ripped & Torn, Sniffin’ Glue consecration practices 203–8, 212, 215, 216 and fashion 201, 206–7 and gender 209–15 moral panic 128–9 “Year Zero” 91, 93, 94, 105, 128 Queen 102, 130–1, 133

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racism See also Black Nationalism, nationalism gender 151–6 Irish experience in the UK 147–8 and Morrissey 146 Orientalist gaze 72, 85, 155 racist murders 144–5 South Asian experience in the UK 154–6 Ripped & Torn female erasure 214 gendered representations 211–12, 215 Rolling Stone female representations 183, 191–6, 208 as mainstream 112, 113, 206 rock criticism 92, 109–10, 116 Savile, Jimmy 219–20, 221, 224–5, 225–8, 231–3 Sex Pistols and Britpop 143–4, 148, 149 contested narratives 6 as “memory entrepreneurs” 216 and progressive rock 133 reunion tour 111 Today Show appearance 128 Sioux, Siouxsie 128, 208, 213 The Slits 208, 211–12 Sniffin’ Glue female erasure 213–15 gendered representations 209–12 Stinky Toys 212 Stokes, Niall 181, 184, 186, 187–91 See also Hot Press Strummer, Joe 114–5, 126, 205 Thornton, Sarah 3–4, 77–8, 219, 220–1, 231 Top of the Pops (TOTP) 129–30, 131, 150, 225 True, Sybil 223, 224 Union Jack See also Britpop, pop nationalism in the British press 141 Morrissey 145, 146, 149 Oasis 148–51 Sonja Aurora Madan 145, 153–4, 156 Suede 145, 149

242 White, Hayden 2–3, 220–1 Wigan Casino 17–18, 20, 23, 28, 29 Wilson, Greg 219–20, 224–5, 226–7, 233 Winstanley, Russ 18, 25, 29–30, 31 women’s music anti-professionalism 42–3 feminist politics 35–40, 45, 47–51 lesbian music and culture 36–42 omission from music history 50–1 separatism 47–9 women-only concerts 47–9

Index Womansphere festival 42, 43 Woodstock Festival 118, 128 “Year Zero” See punk-rock Yes in the charts 98 n.6, 133–4 magazine coverage 91, 93, 95, 97, 102–4 and punk-rock 94 and the symphonic orthodoxy 95 Zylberberg, Regine 220, 225, 228–31, 232–4

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