Popular Music Discourses: Authenticity and Mediatization 2018

Authenticity has long been a keyword in the discourses of and surrounding popular music. What is an authentic musical expression? Who is a true fan? What is a real musical format or experience? The authenticity of music is often connected to performance and materiality – but what happens to such notions of authenticity in an era of digital mediatization? These questions are addressed by three invited keynote speakers and our local KuFo Popular Music Discourses research group.

Program

Tuesday 13 November, Fryxellsalen 1B306

• 10.30 – Introduction
• 10.45–12.00
  • Keynote 1: "Authenticity, Mediatization, and Musical Persona in Popular Music" 
    • Prof. Philip Auslander, School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA
• 13.00–14.00
  • Paper Session 1
    • Per Bäckström – "Authenticity through the Anti-Aesthetics of Rock"
    • Morten Feldtfos Thomsen – "Who's Dead? The Grateful Dead, John Mayer, and the Mediation of Authenticity"
• 14.10–15.10
  • Paper Session 2
    • Erik van Ooijen and Peter Wikström – "Post-Authentic D̸i̶g̷i̶t̸a̴l̵i̵s̸m̶ in Cloud Rap"
    • Anna Linzie – "Beyoncé goes black? Super Bowl, Formation, and the Harnessing of Blackness for Popular Culture Activism"
• 15.40–16.50
  • Keynote 2: "Magic Moments and Metal Memories: On Metal Culture's Problem of Nostalgia"
    • Dr. Niall R. W. Scott, Reader in Philosophy and Popular Culture, UCLan, Lancaster, UK

Wednesday 14 November, Fryxellsalen 1B306

• 9.30–10.45
  • Keynote 3: "Touch Me in the Morning: The Metalepsis of Pop"
    • Prof. Magnus Ullén, Stockholm University, Sweden
• 11.00–12.00
  • Paper Session 3
    • Marinette Grimbeek – "The Struggle as Pop: Authenticity and Nostalgia in Post-Apartheid Music"
    • Andreas Jacobsson – "Intercultural Movements in Music Films"
• 13.00–14.30
  • Panel discussion on the future of the Popular Music Discourses project

Keynote Speakers

Philip Auslander, Georgia Institution of Technology

Philip Auslander is Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech and has written multiple books on performance, mediatization, and music, including Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture  (Routledge, 1999) and Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality  (University of Michigan, 1996). His influential approach to the mediatized and performative aspects of music as well as other cultural expressions resides at the intersection of Cultural Studies, Communication Studies, and Media Studies.

Niall Scott, University of Central Lancashire

Niall R. W. Scott is Reader in Philosophy and Popular Culture at the University of Central Lancashire, and holds a PhD in Philosophy from Lancaster University. He has an interest in philosophical, cultural, and ethical aspects of popular culture, with a special interest in Metal Studies. He has published work on genres such as Heavy Metal and Black Metal, on topics such as masculinity, horror, and melanchology. Niall chairs the International Society for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS), edits the journal Helvete  and is the short publications editor/reviews editor for the journal Metal Music Studies.

Magnus Ullén, Stockholm University

Magnus Ullén is Professor of English at Stockholm University, Sweden. He is the author of The Half-Vanished Structure: Hawthorne’s Allegorical Dialectics  (2004), and Bara för dig: pornografi, konsumtion, berättande  (“Just for you: pornography, consumption, narrative ”; 2009), a study on pornography and narrativity in consumer society. His articles on American literature, pornography, and literary theory have appeared in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Critical Quarterly, Jump Cut, Studies in the Novel, New Literary History, Applied Linguistics,  and several other journals. He has published on Gwen Stefani and the textuality of pop.