Major popular music conference comes to ANU School of Music

How does Beyonce use feminism to empower herself and connect with her fans? Are there commonalities between the art of John Lennon and Kurt Cobain? What impacts has Eurovision had on national identity and international relations?

 

These and other questions will be explored at a popular music conference starting today and hosted by the ANU School of Music. 

 

For the first time, the Australian and New Zealand branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) has brought their annual gathering to Canberra. 

 

Alongside the IASPM scholars will be INXS songwriter Andrew Farriss, the 2015 H.C. Coombs Creative Fellow. Andrew’s paper concerns using repetition in popular music.

 

Dr Samantha Bennett, an association organising committee member and Senior Lecturer at the School, spoke about the value of studying popular music.

 

“Popular music is arguably the biggest cultural phenomenon of the 20th century and beyond,” Sam says. “Many historical milestones have been quintessentially defined by popular music and musicians.”

 

Sam muses that popular music and musicians wield a certain type of power that political leaders lack. She cites Armenian-American rock band System of a Down and how this year they “managed to command the attention of the entire country in memorialising the 1915 genocide in a way that the government could never do.”

 

“Through the lens of popular music, we see our culture, our society, our politics,” Sam says. “We see how people deal with issues of class, race, gender, sexuality in ways that we wouldn’t if we were looking at those areas alone.”

 

Sam’s conference paper reflects her interest in how recording and sound production technologies and the decisions made by recordists influences what a listener hears. Her paper focuses on two songs British recordist Gus Dudgeon produced, ‘Space Oddity’ by David Bowie and ‘Rocket Man’ by Elton John.

 

PhD Music student Stuart Gregg is also interested in the process of music creation. His paper likens popular musicians who have a void of technical knowledge, but still manage to create great music, with dark matter and how its existence is inferred by its gravitational effects.

 

“I think creativity is a mystery,” Stuart says. “You can pull it apart and try and prescribe how to do it, but I don’t think it’s possible. I remember Keith Richards was asked, how do you do it? And he said, ‘I don’t think about it too much, because if I think about it, it will leave me.’ So there’s a point where you have to respect the mystery of the process.”

 

Stuart adds: I still think it can be described. In my creative work and my PhD I’m trying to come up with a set of methods that can be used, but every person, every creative artist, will use them differently.

 

For the first time, four School of Music undergraduates will present their research at the conference. Yvette Griffiths’ paper posits that hip-hop music and musicians have an important role to play in advancing discussions about race in the United States.

 

Her starting point is the belief racial equality there was achieved with the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, and 2012 re-election. For many African-Americans, however, their reality and prospects remain unchanged. 

 

“There’s a lot of talk amongst socio-political activists and black public intellectuals trying to bring back into the light that there are still issues out there,” Yvette says. “A lot of them are asking, ‘How can we bring this back into the public?’”

 

“So I’m looking at the role that hip-hop could play as a crossover with white mainstream American audiences and African-American diaspora music and the way that that could be an important avenue for bringing these issues up and having them made aware of and spoken about.”

 

Yvette makes a distinction between hip-hop that has consciousness-raising as its core function, and commercial hip-hop.

 

“Historically, hip-hop was used as a socio-political platform – that’s where it was born and that’s kind of what I’m saying it needs to go back to now,” Yvette says. “A lot of artists and artists that are gaining prominence aren’t using it that way at all. It’s more things like misogynistic values, and violence, and a kind of bragging culture have taken over.”

 

Hip-hop artists like Kendrick Lamar, however, have managed to achieve both commercial success and embody the values of his issues-based peers. 

 

“At the moment he’s the number one rapper, his album is the most highly acclaimed both critically and commercially, but also he’s giving back to his community,” Yvette says. “He’s raising issues, he’s having discussions about respectability politics and he’s having discussions with white artists and white rappers.”

 

She ventures that musicians like Kendrick Lamar have an advantage over public figures like President Obama in conveying these sorts of messages to the public and ensuring they absorb them.

 

“The discourse generally points to the fact that the media kind of strongarms [President Obama]. They distil him with these values and frame him in a certain way that doesn’t necessarily correspond with what he’s doing.”

 

“A lot of hip-hop scholars are starting to say that musicians have a lot more power over how they’re framed in the media because exactly what they say is exactly what is being heard.”

 

 

Learn more about the IASPM-ANZ conference here.