Week 2: Will Sing for Clothes

In an article entitled Teaching Music as Democratic Practice, Lisa C. DeLorenzo (2003) articulates her belief that educators are responsible for more than simply preparing quality lesson plans; they must also prepare their pupils to become thoughtful citizens in a democratic society. As such, she describes music not as an discrete area of knowledge, but rather as an "aesthetic deeply embedded in social political context where democracy and its moral underpinnings play a key role" (DeLorenzo, 2003). DeLorenzo uses instruments and modern music to teach students about responsibility, participation, cooperation, and social issues.

One social issue in popular music, indeed in pop culture at large, that is highly relevant to today's students is the entertainment industry's portrayal of women, and the impact these over-sexualized depictions have on women and girls. Many groups and individuals have taken on this issue, attempting to raise awareness for the inaccuracy and potential danger of the unrepresentative female images. For example, one home-made website, called The Objectification of Women in the Music Industry (n.d.), contends that through music videos and lyrics, women in the music industry are portrayed in terms of their physical and sexual power, while their deeper-than-skin characteristics, like personality or intelligence, are seldom, if ever, acknowledged. According to this concerned individual, such focus on physical features contributes to the proliferation of negative stereotypes about women. Other efforts include the Girls, Women, and Media Project, the Women's Media Center, and the International Women's Media Foundation.

Scientifically speaking, such interest in media portrayals of women is not for nothing. Research suggests that the exaggerated beauty of high-profile women may result in feelings of inadequacy, as viewers are bombarded with images that communicate an unrealistic standard of physical attractiveness (Media Awareness Network, 2009; Want, 2009). The Media Awareness Network (2009) found physical characteristics (i.e., age, height and weight) of many actresses to be unrepresentative of those of the average woman, offering the financial profit associated with a nation of women striving for a virtually unattainable body type as a possible explanation. Similarly, Fouts and Burggraf (1999) reported a disparity between central female characters of situational comedies and average American women; over a quarter (33%) of central female characters were underweight and 79 percent were under the age of 35 (Fouts & Burggraf, 1999). The visual and editorial content of magazines send a similar message. According to Malkin, Wornian and Chrisler (1999), women are affected before they even open the cover. In a survey of 21 popular women’s magazines they estimated that more than 78 percent of the covers displayed at least one message about physical attractiveness, and used strategic placement that seemed to associate weight loss with an enhanced quality of life (Malkin et al., 1999).

That female pop stars are no exception to this trend is a fact that seems to have been noticed by, and perhaps even sparked the conscious of, several prominent singers. Since the 1990s, a theme of female-empowerment has rippled across several groups and solo artists in the pop genre. Yet, even these would-be examples of female empowerment in pop music cannot be said to be themselves innocent of broadcasting an overly-sexualized, highly made-up image and maintaining an underweight body type. 

In 2002 Christina Aguilera released a solo track entitled Beautiful. The chart-topping song, which spoke of the resilience of beauty in the face of social scorn, was met with raving views from music critics and the LBGTQ community, and ultimately won a Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. The lyrics are, to say the least, inspiring: "You are beautiful/ no matter what they say/ words can't bring you down." However, Aguilera's performance in the music video evidenced a lack of sincere belief in these words. While Aguilera did, admittedly, appear more clothed in the video than is her custom, she far from resembled a real, natural woman. Instead, she lounged attractively on an old armchair, wearing layers of makeup and a sexy, tousled, artificially colored hair style. In her other work, this hyper-sexualized image is even more defined.


Social comparison theory has become a popular framework for evaluating the relationship between media exposure and body image. The theory states that individuals evaluate their own attributes by comparing them to the attributes of other people and images. People are most likely to gage in social comparisons with people who are similar enough to themselves that they would consider comparison would be relevant and informative (Dalley et al., 2009). Regardless of Aguilera's good intentions, it's difficult to say whether such words of encouragement are especially meaningful or helpful when hearing them will involve exposing girls to a pop icon who allows herself to be photographed undressed. Instead, Aguilera's words may falsely signal to girls that its safe to lower the guard of whatever media intelligence they have acquired and engage in a social comparison with this stunning beauty.

References

Dalley, S. E., Buunk, A. P., & Umit, T. (2009). Female body dissatisfaction after exposure to overweight and thing media images: The role of body mass index and neuroticism . Personality and Individual Differences, 47, 47-51. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2009.01.044

DeLorenzo, L. C. (2003). Teaching Music As Democratic Practice. Music Educators Journal, 90(2), 35. Retrieved from EBSCOhost

Fouts, G., & Burggraf, K. (1999, April). Television situation comedies: Female body images and verbal reinforcements. Sex Roles, 40, 473-481. doi:10.1023/A:1018875711082

Malkin, A. R., Wornian, K., & Chrisler, J. C. (1999, April). Women and weight: Gendered messages on magazine covers. Sex roles, 40, 647-655. doi:10.1023/A:1018848332464

Media Awareness Network. (2010). Beauty and body image in the media. In Media stereotyping. Retrieved from http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/women_and_girls/ women_beauty.cfm

The Objectification of Women in the Music Industry. (n.d.). Educate yourself about the music industry's portrayal of women as sex objects. Retrieved from http://objectificationofwomeninthemusicindustry.yolasite.com/

Christina Agulera- Beautiful

Week 2: Rebelling and Rebelling Again

There is a time and place for everything--even music. It’s not uncommon to select music fitting of the situation in which it will be heard, in fact, to not do so would be, in many instances, rather shocking. For example, Brittany Spears’s “Hit Me Baby One More Time” might be welcome at a pre-teen slumber party, but it would be an unlikely and seemingly disrespectful selection at most funerals. Oftentimes, songs are even referred to by the emotion with which they correspond, like love songs, break-up songs, protest songs, and so on. In the absence of a suitable musical manifestation of a particular situation, the need to match our music to our mood has been so compelling as to lead to the creation of entire musical genres to fill the emotional void.

The 1970s weren’t easy for British teenagers. Somonelli (2002) characterizes the British punk subculture as a rhetoric of class culture, a musical means of restoring working-class values to rock and roll music. British youngsters of the era were troubled by the state of the economy, feeling the sting of inflation and unemployment. Of the eight million citizens between the ages of 13 and 21, two thirds were working-class citizens, while others were unable to find work at all. Distressed by their current situation and the apparent bleakness of their futures, British youth were in dire need of some mood music. On an artistic level, the group was also dismayed by the professionalization of rock and roll music. Simonelli (2002) explains: “Bands that had once been great rebels against popular convention--the former Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who--had become pillars of respectibility. Rock stars were now rich and far removed from their audiences.” 

Sensing a need for social revolution, as well as a less “professionalized” music that could reflect their values, punk rockers carried on in the tradition of their predecessors’ social rebellion. They commented on the state of the nation, infusing their lyrics with emotionally charged words like “anarchy,” and adopted outlandish stage presence that challenged, and alert their audience to, the scripted and truncated nature of much popular music. With lyrics like “God save the queen/ The fascist regime/ They made you a moron/ Potential H-bomb” it’s no surprise that the Sex Pistols are ranked among the UK Punk scene’s forerunners (or that they were, at one point, banned from British airwaves). 

Working-class youth were able to identify with the punk rockers’ music and tattered style, facilitating the spread of the trend. The punk fashion of spiked hair and ripped clothes “became an escape from conventional personalities and roles” and the movement as a whole was perceived as an artistic protest against societal issues like the neglect of the lower class (Simonelli, 2002). Punk groups became so popular, in fact, that by the early 1980s, the same punk rockers who protested the disconnection and professionalization of perviously-popular rock stars came to embody just that; they were the new high rollers on the rock scene.

The emergence and destination of British punk rock highlights not only the important role of music in emotional regulation and expression, but also demonstrates the power of popular music to influence trends, spread ideologies, address social issues, and be influenced and directed, like any other commodity, by the tides of market capitalism.

References

Simonelli, D. (2002). Anarchy, Pop and Violence: Punk Rock Subculture and the Rhetoric of Class, 1976-78. Contemporary British History, 16(2), 121. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Week 2: Crime to Cultural Truncation

Through a discussion of France's music scene, David Looseley (2003) demonstrates an interesting relationship between political and popular culture. Despite conventional opinions to the contrary, France boasts a flourishing pop culture, one comparable to that of other western democracies. Even so, compared to other western nations, French academics have displayed a marked lack of interest in launching an intellectual exploration of such topics. Looseley attributes the French's disinclination to consider pop an important aspect of their culture to cultural legitimacy, explaining that the trend is "partly no doubt because of official resistance to Americanisation" but can be more specifically attributed to "the complex way in which the word populaire in la culture populaire is construed in France."

The institutional understanding of la culture populaire provided by France's Ministry of Culture, the country's main source of cultural legitimization, differs importantly from the way the term is generally understood in English-speaking countries. Whereas la culture populaire is usually anthropologically defined as the spontaneous ways in which the members of a society (especially the working class) express themselves through creative and recreational endeavors, Looseley (2003) explains that "in French governmental and some intellectual discourses ... the term has tended to have a more aspirational than anthropological sense, signifying something to be fought for rather than something that already exists."

Looseley calls the phenomenon cultural democratization and traces it back to the aftermath of a French military scandal, the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully charged with treason and sentenced to life in prison. Two years after his imprisonment, evidence emerged that pointed to Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy as the actual traitor, but instead of exonerating Dreyfus and convicting Esterhazy, Military officials acquitted Esterhazy and forged documents to reaffirm Dreyfus's supposed guilt. When an open letter, penned by Émile François Zola, was published in the newspaper,  the scandal was finally brought to the attention of the public.

The news of the military's wrongdoings received a range of passionate responses from the French people, but in the end, Dreyfus was exonerated and restored to his military duties. The aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair saw a new appreciation for intellectuals, like Zola, and a movement to increase access to education, culture, and leisure. This access, which was entrusted to the government, led to the attachment of the epithet "populaire" to relevant activities (e.g., theatre, sports, aviation). Looseley explains: "From then on, for the artists,  animateurs  and politicians committed to it, la culture populaire tended to signify above all that the working class should have access to cultural, educational and leisure activities previously reserved for a bourgeois elite; it meant a culture brought to people rather than made by them." This, Looseley says, is cultural democratization.

France's first Minister for Cultural Affairs, André Malraux, narrowed the scope of popularization (which was more often called democratisation) so that it referred specifically to the arts. As they emerged, newer forms of music (e.g., rap, pop, rock, techno) were not absorbed into la culture populaire, and were even sometimes met with distain. In the case of rock and roll, which reached France in the 1950s, "its coarseness and air of menace were greeted with dismay, or with the kind of amused paternalism illustrated by de Gaulle’s remark that if rock fans had so much energy they should be building roads" (Looseley, 2003). As stated earlier, the lack of appreciation for modern musical genres as "real culture" has lead to a lack of interest on the part of academics. Elsewhere, music and democratic governance are being brought together to different ends.

While entrusting the government with making art, leisure, and education more accessible to citizens seems like a good way to cultivate an informed and content citizenry, allowing the government to decide what is and isn't "true" culture is unlikely to be well received by many Americans. In fact, American popular culture is paid a great deal of attention not only by the country's academics, who study it's trends, impact, and future directions, but also by many other interest groups (e.g., some clergy spend much time and effort educating their flock of it's dangers), and by the population at large.

References

Looseley, D. (2003). Cultural democratisation and popular music. Modern & Contemporary France, 11(1), 45. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Photo Credits

L'Aurore (1898). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:J_accuse.jpg