Popular Music Studies
News Archive (05)
first half-year 2001

Some of the hyperlinks are likely to be outdated!

For Information concerning forthcoming conferences, go:
 Conferences & Calls for Papers on Popular Music Studies

For Job Announcements, go: http://www.iaspm.net/rpm/jobs.html

To: Archive News - 2nd half-year 2000To: News - 2nd half-year 2001

January 2001 February 2001 March 2001 April 2001 May 2001 June 2001
21-June-2001 John Lee Hooker ...

... passed away. This is what his agency writes:

John Lee Hooker passed away peacefully in his sleep this morning (June 21st). There is no further information available at the moment and we will communicate any update with regard to any services that might be open to the public on our web-site, www.rosebudus.com, as soon as that information is available.

More information:
18-June-2001 Ian Inglis ...

... is currently talking to Wallflower Press (a London-based publisher which specialises in film theory and film history titles) to produce an edited collection under the general title

"Popular Music And Film".

They agree with him that there is a place for a volume which brings together commentaries, perspectives and insights into

  1. the significance and role of popular music within film and 
  2. the importance that film possesses for the production and consumption of music.

He has already sought out and received outlines for chapters from several potential contributors; and would be very keen to hear from any other colleagues who might wish to put forward a proposal.Some of the ways in which popular music has figured within film and which could be usefully explored might include:

  • the biopic (eg Backbeat, Sid And Nancy)
  • the 'traditional' musical (eg the Elvis Presley catalogue)
  • the soundtrack (eg Dirty Dancing, Pretty Woman)
  • the film about popular music (eg Almost famous, Still Crazy)
  • the documentary (eg Woodstock, The Last Waltz)
  • the mockumentary (eg Spinal Tap, The Rutles)
  • the theme song (eg Titanic, Four Weddings)

Other themes could include:

  • the history of popular music and film
  • changing economic and financial constraints and opportunities
  • technological developments
  • specific careers in film, eg Cliff Richard, Elvis Presley
  • individual directors, eg Dick Lester, John Boorman, Ken Russell
  • perspectives on the audience(s)
  • merchandising and promotion

If any of you are interested in putting in a proposal at this stage, could you please let him have a working title plus 150-ish word outline by June 29?

He anticipates an eventual collection of around a dozen chapters, each 7,000-9,000 words in length, plus an introduction. While accounts of pre-war film and music are not ruled out, he would expect the main emphasis of the book to be from the 1950s onwards.

Over the Summer he will put together a more detailed framework for the book as a whole, trying to include and respond to as many ideas as possible At the moment of course things are still provisional, but Wallflower are very, very keen on the idea, sensing, I think, a large market in both film studies and popular music studies in Europe and the US.

To get in touch, mail to: 
ian.inglis@unn.ac.uk

13-June-2001 Nominations for the 2000 IASPM Book Award ..

... are requested by IASPM-US for the "best" popular music related titled published this past year.

Nominations can be emailed to the address below. Nominations should include the full title of the book, the author, and the publisher. Nominations will be accepted until July 15, 2001.

John Sloop
Box 1558, Station B
Vanderbilt University 20
Nashville, TN 37235
 phone: 615-322-2988 (office)
fax: 615-343-7918
Email: john.m.sloop@vanderbilt.edu
Website: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/Comm/Courses/sloopjm.htm

8-June-2001 IASPM - UK & Ireland sent out ... 

...a final reminder for contributions to their newsletter (which should be published around the beginning of July).

Editor Paul Hodkinson is particularly interested in

  1. any news items (new jobs, new books, new projects, media appearances etc etc etc)
  2. reviews of seminars, conferences or publications
  3. 500-1000 word summaries of PhD projects - whether the project is in its early stages or nearing completion.

Please email any such material, and anything else you think members would be interested in, to paul.hodkinson@northampton.ac.uk, 

preferably within the next week.

IASPM-US ...

... calls for nominations to candidacy, for election to the following positions on the Executive Committee of the US chapter of the Association:

  • Secretary- 2001-'03
  • Treasurer- 2001-'03
  • Open Seat- 2001-'03
  • Student- 2001-'03

Nominations will remain open for thirty days from this notice.

Candidates for office must be CURRENT members of IASPM-US by the close of the nominating period.

Nominations should include contact information for the proposed candidate to confirm their willingness to run and for solicitation of a biographical statement.

Self-nominations are welcome and should be accompanied by a one paragraph biographical statement, highlighting qualifications for the position sought.

All nominations should be sent to IASPM-US:

President Paul Fischer
at: pfischer@mtsu.edu
or by snail mail at: 
6664 Clearbrook Drive
Nashville, TN 37205
USA

POSITION DESCRIPTIONS:

Secretary- The Secretary shall attend and take detailed, accurate minutes of meetings of the Association's Board of Directors, Executive Committee, and membership. The Secretary serves on the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of the Association.The Secretary is also charged with drafting Amendments to the association's Bylaws which arise from these meetings, and maintaining an accurate, updated set of those Bylaws. The Secretary is the primary communications officer of the Association during periods between meetings, handling the Association's official notices and correspondence. Other duties as assigned.

Treasurer- The Treasurer shall maintain charge of and responsibility for all funds and other assets of the Association, maintaining accurate records of the income, deposits and disbursements of the Association's accounts. The Treasurer shall maintain accurate financial records for the Association and report to the President, Board of Directors, or Executive Committee as requested. The Treasurer serves on the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of the Association.The Treasurer also takes primary responsibility in the preparation and filing of State and Federal tax documents for the Association each year. Other duties as assigned.

Open Seat- The open seat holder serves on the Executive Committee of the Association. Duties are flexible, consisting largely of committee and project assignments, as assigned. The "most recently elected" Open Seat holder also serves on the Board of Directors of the Association.

Student- The student seat holder serves on the Executive Committee of the Association. The student seat holder must be actively enrolled in a degree program at the time of nomination and election. Duties are flexible, consisting largely of committee and project assignments, as assigned.

ALL TERMS ARE TWO YEARS IN LENGTH

7-June-2001 Programme, Report and Proposal ...

... to serve the 11th Biannual IASPM conference in Turku/Finland (July 6-10, 2001), and the IASPM General Meeting in Turku (July 9, 2001) are ready for download: 

http://www.iaspm.net/doc/downloads.html.

To read it, it is necessary to have the Acrobat Reader on the Computer.

The Programme is only prelimanary, and a few more changes are rather likely. For updates and abstracts go: http://www.iaspm.net/2001
23-Mai-2001 Music Video (Studies) in the New Millennium ...

...is the title of an edited collection planned by Roger Beebe (Film and Media Studies, University of Florida) and Jason Middleton (The Literature Program, Duke University, North Carolina). 

Deatails:
In the late 80s and early 90s, an abundance of new and exciting scholarship was produced about the novel form of the music video and the televisual apparatus that it seemed to represent. Over the past decade, this first wave of writing has subsided, transforming into a fixed canon for future teaching and scholarship on the form. This canon includes Andrew Goodwin’s Dancing in the Distraction Factory, Frith, Goodwin, and Grossberg’s collection Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, E. Ann Kaplan’s Rocking Around the Clock, and Lisa Lewis’ Gender Politics and MTV. These works sought initially to demarcate the specificities of the forms of spectatorship constructed by music video and the televisual apparatus that it embodies, casting MTV as an almost pure realization of Raymond Williams' notion of television as "total flow" that decenters and fragments the subject position of the viewer. The later of these seminal works attempted to rethink these earlier studies, looking more closely at the programming structure, textual strategies, and historical context of MTV, but they remained largely within the boundaries of debate established by the first writings on the form. As important as this first wave of writings was, it has also proven very limited and limiting for those who wish to continue to explore the form and the evolving formats of its presentation. The principal limitation in these works seems to be the conflation of music video with MTV, which, as should now be abundantly clear with the proliferation of outlets for music video, represents only one of many possible music video formats.

We are thus seeking papers that attempt to address the shortcomings of the extant body of music video scholarship and which provide new ways of thinking beyond the theoretical and historical limitations of this work. We are most interested in essays that explore other specific music video formats (CMT, BET, MuchMusic, VH1, sonicnet.com, music videos on tape or DVD, etc.) in a broad theoretical way, but we are also interested in other challenges to or revisions of the received wisdom on music video as a general form or on MTV as a specific kind of "music television." We are also interested in discussions of music video as a form that bridges the gap between the older technology of television and emergent digital media.

Papers and proposals should be sent to:

Roger Beebe
Film and Media Studies
4008 Turlington Hall
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611-7310

or

Jason Middleton
The Literature Program
Art Museum 104, Box 90670
Duke University
Durham, NC 27708

Essays should be received no later than August 15, 2001.
 Questions can be addressed to Roger Beebe or Jason Middleton .

16-May-2001 Genre ...

... a journal on forms of discourse and culture, published by the University of Oklahoma, wants to call the popular music studies audience to pay attention to an upcoming special issue 

21st Century Schizoid Bands:
 Rock & Roll and the Experience of Postmodernity

Submissions are welcome. Deadline  is December 1, 2001.  

Click on this hyperlink to visit the full call for paper: http://www.ou.edu/cas/english/genre/rock_call.htm

7-May-2001 This year's POPkomm  ...

... is going to happen in Cologne/Germany: August 16-18, 2001.

POPkomm claims to be the world's biggest market place for the pop and entertainment industry. The conference parallel to the fair is debating the future of pop music and its business with high level representatives of music, industry and academia. During the whole weekend Cologne's city centre is full of music presented by the POPkomm.Festival.

For IASPM members the German speaking IASPM branch has negotiated special conditions with relatively cheep fees: 
DM 106 (€ 54.19) . 

To register, download, fill in and mail the appropriate form:

English registration form Deutsches Formular / German registration form

To read these forms you need to have the acrobat reader on your computer. Its free!!! If you don't have this tool, first download it:

Final deadline for registration at IASPM's conditions: June 18, 2001. For questions please contact the manager of the IASPM delegation:

Ines Christen
fk8y102@public.uni-hamburg.de

4-May-2001 20 Years of Madonna: 
New Approaches to Madonna's Cultural Transformations ...

... is the title of a book project the Department of Music of the University of Newcastle (UK) is calling for papers. It is planned to publish this volume with a major publisher, to tie in with the twentieth anniversary of Madonna's first single release in 2003. Also, the editors hope that it will be possible to present work in progress at the 2002 UK IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music) Conference which will be held at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (United Kingdom). 

These are themes the book shall deal with:

Madonna and:

  • Hispanism
  • Hinduism
  • Judaism (kabbalah)
  • Japanese culture (the Geisha look)
  • Black culture
  • All-American culture (Hollywood, Country and Western, Cowboy look)
  • European culture (Cockney, Germanic)
  • Motherhood
  • Marriage
  • Gay and Lesbian culture
  • Queer culture
  • The Internet (fan sites and discussion boards/web domain/webcasts)
  • The class system in the UK and the US (Fashion magazines/hunting/London's East End)
  • Girl acts (Spice Girls/Britney)

The editors argue: In the six years since the publication of The Madonna Connection, Madonna, perhaps one of the most consistently transgressive and self-transforming artists of the late 20th century and early 21st century, has presented a set of strikingly new challenges to cultural analysis.

The release of Evita in 1996 was at once the culmination of her recurrent interest in Hispanism and the beginning of an unexpected transformation into exemplary matriarch. The arrival of her two children, her second marriage and the release of two critically acclaimed and best-selling albums have renewed media interest in Madonna. This ew attention seems to have been attracted in no small part by the latest persona which seems, on the surface at least, to signal a dislocation with past personae. This putative dislocation generates a new set of resources such as media interviews and publ statements worthy of academic study. New developments in Gender, Queer and Ethnic studies also shed new light on her entire oeuvre. Consequently, there is a fresh need to (re)address configurations of race, gender and sex(uality) in Madonna's work to date. 

500-word abstracts are requested by 27th July 2001. 

Please mail to

Freya.jarman@newcastle.ac.uk AND Santiago.fouz@durham.ac.uk

or write to

Madonna Project
Department of Music
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
United Kingdom

3-April-2001

Music Video (Studies) in the New Millennium ...

... is supposed to be the title of a publication, Roger Beebe (Film and Media Studies, University of Florida) and Jason Middleton (The Literature Program, Duke University) have sent out a 

Call for Papers

These are their considerations:

  • In the late 80s and early 90s, an abundance of new and exciting scholarship was produced about the novel form of the music video and the televisual apparatus that it seemed to represent.  Over the past decade, this first wave of writing has subsided, transforming into a fixed canon for future teaching and scholarship on the form. This canon includes Andrew Goodwin’s Dancing in the Distraction Factory, Frith, Goodwin, and Grossberg’s collection Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, E. Ann Kaplan’s Rocking Around the Clock, and Lisa Lewis’ Gender Politics and MTV.  These works sought initially to demarcate the specificities of the forms of spectatorship constructed by music video and the televisual apparatus that it embodies, casting MTV as an almost pure realization of Raymond Williams' notion of television as "total flow" that decenters and fragments the subject position of the viewer. The later of these seminal works attempted to rethink these earlier studies, looking more closely at the programming structure, textual strategies, and historical context of MTV, but they remained largely within the boundaries of debate established by the first writings on the form.

  • As important as this first wave of writings was, it has also proven very limited and limiting for those who wish to continue to explore the form and the evolving formats of its presentation.  The principal limitation in these works seems to be the conflation of music video with MTV, which, as should now be abundantly clear with the proliferation of outlets for music video, represents only one of many possible music video formats.  We are thus seeking papers that attempt to address the shortcomings of the extant body of music video scholarship and which provide new ways of thinking beyond the theoretical and historical limitations of this work.  We are most interested in essays that explore other specific music video formats (CMT, BET, MuchMusic, VH1, sonicnet.com, music videos on tape or DVD, etc.) in a broad theoretical way, but we are also interested in other challenges to or revisions of the received wisdom on music video as a general form or on MTV as a specific kind of "music television."  We are also interested in discussions of music video as a form that bridges the gap between the older technology of television and emergent digital media.

 Papers and proposals should be sent to:

 Roger Beebe
Film and Media Studies
 4008 Turlington Hall
Gainesville, FL 
32611-7310, USA

                   Jason Middleton
            The Literature Program
 Art Museum 
104 Box 90670
           Duke University
Durham, NC
 27708, USA

Essays should be received no later than August 15, 2001.

21-February-2001 Napster ...,

according to CNN (their source: Associated Press), and the file sharing company's press briefing, offers the major record labels -- Sony, Warner, BMG, EMI and Universal -- an anual fee of $150 million for the next five years, while the independent labels may expect $ 50 million per year. To settle a copyright infringement lawsuit Napster is willing to spend more then one billion Dollar. To finance their proposals the company released on Tuesday the idea of a tired membership fee model.

13-February-2001 Scholarly work on either MP3 ...

... or "on music retail in general" one participant on the IASPM discussion list was asking for. These are some of the responses:

Bernhard Günther 
(Music Information Center Austria): 

Steve Jones
(Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Chicago):

I had an essay titled "Music and the Internet" in _Popular Music_19(2) and have another forthcoming in _Cultural Studies_ titled "Music That Moves: Music, Distribution and Network Technologies." The materials I found most helpful for those are as follows:

  • Hawkins, Richard, Mansell, Robin and Steinmueller, W. Edward Steinmueller (1998). Towards "Digital Intermediation" in the European information society', ACTS/FAIR Working Paper No. 50, Brighton: Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), March.
  • Hayward, Philip (1995). Enterprise on the New Frontier: Music, Industry and the Internet, Convergence 1(1), 29-44 .
  • Janson, Emma and Mansell, Robin (1998). A case of electronic commerce: The on-line music industry - content, regulation and barriers to development. ACTS/FAIR Working Paper No. 40, Brighton: Science Policy Research Unit(SPRU), March.
  • Laing, Dave. (1997). "Rock anxieties and new music networks." In Back to reality? Social experience and cutural studies, Angela McRobbie, ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 116-132.
  • Lovering, John. (1998). "The global music industry: Contradictions in the commodification of the sublime." In The place of music, Andrew Leyshon, David Matless and George Revill, eds. New York: The Guilford Press, pp. 31-56.
  • Neuenfeldt, Karl. (1997). "The sounds of Microsoft: The cultural production of music on CD-ROMs." Convergence 3(4), 54-71.
  • Reebee Garofalo's "From Music Publishing to MP3: Music and Industry in the Twentieth Century," _American Music_ (Fall 1999), 318-353, I highly recommend particularly for context surrounding MP3 debates about revenues.
  • Bruce Haring's book, while not necessarily "schoarly" as such, is a good introduction to the technology and some of the issues. 
  • There's a slew of research reports and the like concerning Napster, but, to again be potentially self-promoting to the point of embarrassment, the ones I recommend most are at   http://www.pewinternet.org   in the form of two research reports about online music and Internet users. 
  • USC's entertainment studies program in the Annenberg School published a report by Mark Latonero that's linked at http://entertainment.usc.edu/nlc/mp3.html .

Reebee Garofalo
(Universitiy of Massachusetts):

  • I have also written a more recent chapter on Napster and copyright called "Policing the Internet: Music and Copyright in the Digital Age" which will appear in POLICING POPULAR MUSIC, a collection I am editing with Martin Cloonan. It will be opublished this fall by Temple.
  • Last fall I participated in an online discussion about Napster moderated by the impressive UCLA student-run online journal ECHO (http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo). This dialogue is being reproduced in the Spring 2001 issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. To access the online discussion, point your browser to http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo/Volume2-Issue2/napster/napster.html
1-February-2001 Battling Hate Online ...

... is the title of a Washington Post article, Road Angel discovered. His summury he posted to the Rocklist:

When MTV launched an Internet discussion board, Fight for Your Rights, where users could address issues related to hate and violence, it quickly became a forum for the expression of bigotry and hatred. MTV has decided to censor any of the posts, including those that promote prejudice, hoping that viewers will learn from reading bigoted expressions. Some, however, believe that MTV needs to offer more guidance in the chat area if they want anything good to come out of the discussions. Marc Weiss, the founder and executive producer of Web Lab, a New York-based nonprofit that specializes in creating productive online discussions, says unmediated discussions often "turn into 'flame' wars. The people who are the most passionate start butting heads, and then the people who really want to talk don't want to stay there." [SOURCE: Washington Post (C04), AUTHOR: Kimberly Shearer Palmer]

27-January-2001 IASPM-USA ...

... has a new website: http://www.ucr.edu/ethnomus/IASPM-USA/IASPM-USA.html

But this may change sooner or later. Instead you also can click the everlasting URL, as this always routes to the valid URL : http://www.iaspm.net/us

The Journal of Popular Music Studies (JPMS) ...

... and its new editorial collective – Murray Forman, Reebee Garofalo, Jeff Melnick, Deborah Pacini Hernandez, and Rachel Rubin – will assume full editorial responsibilities for the first issue of 2001. This first issue will also be the first produced by Taylor and Francis (parent company of Routledge and Garland), one of the largest producers of academic journals in the world. JPMS is committed to publishing outstanding scholarship on popular music from a variety of disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) positions. The editors especially encourage younger scholars to submit their work. To submit a manuscript for consideration, send a disc copy and three hard copies with authorship, institutional affiliation (if applicable), and address on a separate title page. Each manuscript page should be numbered and contain an abbreviated title. References should follow the most recent APA Publications Manual. 

Please send submissions to: 

Jeff Melnick, Editor
Journal of Popular Music Studies
Division of History and Society
Hollister Hall, Babson College
Babson Park
MA 02457, USA.

10-January-2001

The regular Midem fair in 2001 ...

... in Cannes/France is going to happen soon: 

21 to 25-January-2001. 

Midem is a Music market as much as a congress. This years keynote speakers are for instance: Peter Gabriel, Herbie Hancock and Michael Robertson (CEO, MP3.com). For programme details, go: http://www.midem.com/midemnet-prog.html . 

Details for registration: http://www.midem.com/

Last time updated on 22-June-2001 • © Heinz-Peter Katlewski

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