Music - Journal Articles
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item New directions in Chinese music research - multi-disciplinarity, in-betweenness, and engagement(Peter Lang, 2025) Stock, Jonathan P. J.This talk identifies prospects for Chinese music studies in the cont emporary era as we collectively develop a multi-disciplinary future that is acade mically valuable, incisive, and inclusive of researchers from contrasting linguistic, societal, and intellectual backgrounds. I present a view of Chinese music studies as a meeting point for scholars who represent positions and perspectives that are inherently “in-between” (between disciplines; between research consultants and readerships; mediating historical, cultural, or linguistic gulfs; etc.), sometimes multiply so. This suggests an explicitly “messy” reality, in which we actively build bridges through cooperation, cross-reading, translation, and consultation. In such a situation, we need to shift continuously from phases of more individual enquiry toward moments of shared focus and back again, sustaining common points-of-reference and the benefits of flexible and diverse responses to newly arising or newly rediscovered concerns. I outline selected concrete steps that we might take in strengthening our “in-betweenness,” which significantly includes greater translation from Chinese to English (and other languages), and I offer a rationale for providing enhanced attention to co-research and co-authoring as ways of producing engaged music research alongside members of musical communities for global readerships.Item To brother Azagaia: a letter of remembrance from Mozambique and beyond(International Association for the Study of Popular Music, 2025-03) Rantala, JanneThis is a considerably updated version of my letter, written soon after Azagaia’s death and published one year after in Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Econo´micos (IESE) series in Portuguese and English: “Rapper Azagaia Rekindled Hope for a Better Society. A Letter to Azagaia”, BoletimIDeIASNo156E, 2024, https://www.iese.ac.mz/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Ideias-156E-JR.pdf. Many thanks for colleagues in the CIPHER ERC CoG team at University College Cork for their support in mourning when I wrote the previous letter, especially professor J. Griffith Rollefson. And many thanks for JPMS editor Jonathan J. Leal for the support in this letter.Item A sonic biography of an afterlife: The expelled liberation leader Uria Simango in Mozambican rap(Taylor & Francis, 2024-08-19) Rantala, Janne; Horizon 2020This article focuses on two interlinked trends in public memory in Mozambique: the rise of alternative heroes and parallel invocations of seemingly incompatible heroes, particularly as they relate to invocations of Frelimo’s ousted Vice President, Uria Simango, in Mozambican rap. The empirical material was produced by listening to rap music, attending shows, and through interviews and conversations with hip hop musicians in Beira, Chimoio and Maputo. This material is examined in relation to historical documents and situated alongside other types of public and private remembering. I argue that critical rap music allows insightful examinations of the links between young peoples’ perspectives on liberation history, present experiences and visions of the future. Rap performances also help to examine how the hegemony of official memory is weakening in Mozambique. These performances are a potentially generative source of alternative history; because they are deeply intertwined in public discussions as well as social activism, I argue that they potentially disrupt and transcend state-sanctioned historiographical frameworks. Taking an ambiguous stance towards historical figures, rap also differs from the opposition meta-narrative, which tends to simply reverse the official canon of heroes and traitors. I find that rappers use a variety of techniques to intervene in disputes around history in creative ways. Regional variations in performed histories draw upon both the local and global wisdoms of hip hop communities, improving their accessibility to the public.Item A love interrupted: A Tribe Called Quest’s resilient path of rhythm(Intellect, 2020-06) McNally, JamesIn 2016, the rap group A Tribe Called Quest returned with their long-awaited sixth and final album, We Got It From Here... Thank You 4 Your Service. Behind it was a long and turbulent story without which the record’s full significance cannot be properly understood. In this longform critical essay, hip hop scholar and critic James McNally examines that history, drawing on an extensive archive of historic interviews and visual material to illuminate the impact this pivotal group made on hip hop’s golden age. It maps the disruption in music and values created by the freewheeling collective they belonged to, the Native Tongues; in particular the new, looser, more expressive modes of Blackness and everyteen vitality they injected into hip hop’s late-1980s moral and stylistic universe. Unpacking the tropes of familiality the Native Tongues promoted, the essay is drawn in particular to the de facto sibling relationship between Tribe’s two core MCs – Malik ‘Phife’ Taylor and Kamaal ‘Q-Tip’ Fareed (born Jonathan Davis). It argues their friendship – as ultimately embodied in the sound of Tribe’s music, but also, increasingly, as public biographical knowledge – was central to the group’s appeal. Engaging with their fraternal ambivalence as well as their love, and with the group’s drawn-out implosion after 1998’s The Love Movement, the essay explores themes around masculine friendship and platonic male love, around estrangement, reconciliation and resilience, and, ultimately – following the interruption of We Got It From Here… by Taylor’s untimely death – the personal tragedy of loss. Bringing these themes together, ‘A Love Interrupted’ provides a critical reading of A Tribe Called Quest’s poignant final album.Item Hip-hop producer-hosts, beat battles, and online music production communities on Twitch(First Monday, 2023-06-06) Ng, Jason; Gamble, Steven; Horizon 2020This article introduces a new creative industry actor, the ‘producer-host’, whose novel cultural practices combine several roles: that of performing artist, music production educator, event manager, livestream broadcaster, and community manager. Producer-hosts use the livestreaming platform Twitch (alongside other digital technologies) to run online beatmaking events with communal and participatory dynamics that indicate expanding uses of streaming platforms. Drawing upon 18 months of ethnography, active community participation, and interviews with three producer-hosts, we provide a nuanced analysis of the political economy of Twitch and developments in the contemporary creative industries during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyse and discuss the outcomes of participation in music production communities on Twitch according to five themes: income and sustainability; personal and professional gratifications; online followings; community identity and belonging; and informal education.