MAKING TELEVISION HISTORICAL

This article considers the role of cultural memory in the interpretation of a long-standing television programme by analysing the development of cultural memory on the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) on Finnish television and print media from 1961 to 2005. Following a cultural historical approach to television history, the article identifies four memory discourses on the ESC: Eurovision history as a national narrative of disappointment (from the 1960s onwards); histories of decline (from the 1970s onwards); the ESC as part of a national heritage of popular culture (from the 1980s onwards); and camp readings of Eurovision history (increasingly in the 2000s). The case study illustrates how even a live television event like the ESC, although not explicitly concerned with history, produces a wealth of memory discourses. The article also shows how the ESC has been commemorated increasingly since the 1980s, anticipating the current memory boom in television culture.     

Urbanizing folklore,Folkloricizing the urban: cultural communication between the urban poor and popular music in Dhaka

This article explores how a particular kind of popular music of Dhaka city called ‘urban folk’ and the cultural identity of the rural migrants have been producing each other in an ongoing process of cultural communication. Following a discussion on the historical background of urban migration and its depiction in the prevailing pop music culture, this article uses the concepts of ‘cultural hybridity’ by Homi K. Bhabha and ‘political society’ by Partha Chatterjee to argue how the fluid structure of this hybrid form of music and its unconventional mobility between the folk and the pop have been in close association with the urban poor's formation of political society in contemporary Dhaka.     

Métissage on the Airwaves: Toward a Cultural History of Broadcasting in French Colonial Algeria, 1930–1936

This article explores the methodological challenges and possibilities of writing a cultural history of broadcasting in French colonial Algeria during the tumultuous decades between the two world wars. In a diverse, multi-ethnic colonial society, how can historians and media scholars evaluate audience reception? What meanings did radio broadcasting acquire in the colonial context? To answer these questions, this article considers the controversies surrounding two culturally hybrid broadcasts produced by Radio-Algiers during the 1930s. A careful examination of the remaining historical record concerning these broadcasts, from newspaper accounts to archival sources, exposes the cultural fluidity that typified everyday colonial life and reveals how radio broadcasting politicized music and oral language in novel ways. Broadcasting—as a purely sonic medium—challenged the classificatory mechanisms of the French colonial state and the racial and ethnic boundaries that undergirded colonial society. In consequence, historical memories of Radio-Algiers and its role during the waning years of the French empire deny the sonic cultural hybridity that flourished over the interwar airwaves.     

Transnationalizing the local: The rock records story

This article examines recent changes to the popular music industry in Taiwan in the light of globalization. Specifically, it seeks to answer the following three questions: What impact does transnational capitalist expansion have on local cultral industries? What is the the significance of changes taking place in local cultural industries? And, can the theories of globalization properly explain the dynamics of change? In order to answer these questions the paper presents a case study of the experiences of Taiwan's largest record company, Rock Records, looking in particular at how the company has managed to compete on an equal footing with multinationals backed by transnational capital.     

Operation Diplomat and Other Smuggling Stories

During the early years after the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, a number of smuggling operations from behind the Wall were executed, and the reports of them spread through the Western media. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the popular Swedish men’s magazines Lektyr and Fib Aktuellt published several exclusive photo reportages about such operations, providing Swedish readers with information about the East Germans’ desire to escape their country, and the West Germans’ willingness to assist. This article discusses the Swedish escape reports as examples of border crossing through their form as well as their content. It is analysed, how the escape reports published in Sweden both represented and generated border-crossing activity. The smuggling stories also illustrate the entangled character of popular print media: the travels of texts and pictures beyond national, cultural and lingual borders as well as travels between apposite publications. The material of the article consists of a total of ten reportages published in Lektyr and Fib Aktuellt between 1965–1966 and 1973.     

Consuming the Fractured Female: Lessons from MTV's The Real World

Using MTV's popular long-running program The Real World as a case study, this essay examines the interrelationship of the construction and consumption of bodies in an increasingly surveillance-based, commercial, hybrid media culture. This article is part of a larger project that employed a multi-method approach grounded in feminism combining textual data from The Real World with interviews with producers and female fans of The Real World. The author investigates how Real World viewers make sense of the series' claims to the real, using the body as the site of cultural production. Two key frames of bodies on The Real World are identified: the troubled body and the heteronormative body. The analysis is situated among studies of media realism to interrogate the context in which real women today are recreated as the “fractured female” in popular culture. The author argues that scholars should continue in a move toward interdisciplinary approaches that link the cultural with the capital and offers the body as a major site of cultural production and reception.     

Politics and race in American historical popular music: contextualized access and minstrel music archives

On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama, an African-American man was elected as the 44th President of the United States. The election of a man of Obama??s racial and ethnic background is an event of monumental social and political significance. Many Americans, both black and white, stated openly that they would never have imagined that such an election result could take place in their lifetimes, or during the lives of their children or even grandchildren. Such is the awareness of the legacy of racial hatred and injustice toward African-Americans in the United States. Ever present, that legacy was apparent in a myriad of expressions of racism throughout Obama??s presidential campaign and still continues since his election. Knowledge of the social and political dynamics that emerged from the demise of African-American slavery is essential to understanding race relations in twenty-first century America. Many of the economic and social ills that have plagued the nation for generations can be traced back to the struggle for and resistance to racial equality and fair treatment. Now accessible in digitized sheet music collections of blackface minstrel music on the internet, a record of nineteenth and early twentieth century perspectives is uniquely captured through the popular music of past generations. Illuminating the political and social attitudes that led to commonly held beliefs and practices regarding African-Americans, this music has the power to help make sense of current racial dynamics and contributes to understanding the connection between meaning and context in how cultural knowledge is developed and represented.     

How Popular Music is Exhibited by Museums in Portugal at the Beginning of the Twenty‐First Century: A Case Study

Popular music is deeply embedded in the dynamics of the contemporary world by means of its capacity to engender modes of privacy and publicness, to communicate emotion, and to enable us to create connections—and so to work within communities. Museums have traditionally addressed art‐music through the exhibition of musical instruments. But now that the exhibition of popular music has presented new challenges and opportunities worldwide for museum professionals, examining popular music discourses in museums is of the utmost importance in order for it to be meaningfully celebrated as instances of heritage. This paper expands on the representation of Popular Music in museums in Portugal at the beginning of the twenty‐first century by discussing a case study: the exhibition No Tempo do Gira‐Discos: Um Percurso Pela Produção Fonográfica Portuguesa at Museu Nacional da Música, Lisbon, Portugal, in 2007. Two methods of analysis are deployed: interviews with the curators, which revealed insights on their understanding of popular music, and analysis of the exhibition through discourse analysis, specifically through the lens of the analytical concepts genre and register. Although the curators had themselves previously developed insightful and innovative concepts with regard to popular music, discourse analysis reveals how, in this instance, the museum practices were primarily inherited from past traditions, and so failed to convey the meanings previously envisioned by the curators. In order for genuine public engagement with museum exhibitions about music, a collaboration is required between the music studies and museum studies professionals. Only through such a collaboration can it be ensured that those contemporary dynamics are present and meaningful.     

Social noise and segmented rhythms: News,entertainment, and celebrity in the crusade for animal rights

Building out from a case study of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), this essay offers a cultural account of popular social protest in the narrowcast era. Founded in 1980, PETA has grown into the world's largest and highest profile animal rights group. I trace the evolution of the group's public relations efforts and describe them via vocabularies of sound— as creating social noise and generating popular rhythms. Through the mid‐1980s, PETA made public noise primarily by orchestrating news‐based controversies, but by 1987 they were increasingly turning to narrowcast and broad circulation music and entertainment media as a way to spread the word to outsiders and ritually express the beliefs of the group. I argue that these cultures of entertainment and celebrity provided structured rhythms of affection that took the cause further than the more discordant sounds of news‐based controversy.     

When facts,truth, and reality are God‐terms: on journalism's uneasy place in cultural studies

This article tracks the uneasy coexistence of journalism and cultural studies, arguing that the tensions between the two fields have worked to mutual disadvantage. The article suggests that rethinking the ways in which journalism and its inquiry might be made a more integral part of cultural studies could constitute a litmus test of sorts for cultural studies. Figuring out how to embrace journalism's god‐terms of facts, truth, and reality alongside its own regard for subjectivity and construction could help move cultural studies into further degrees of maturation as a field.     

Radio,Race and Identity in South Africa: The Case of Metro FM

This article presents a qualitative content analysis of Metro FM, a commercial music station owned by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). Metro FM has the second largest audience in the country and was the first SABC station to intentionally target a black audience. While fostering black pride, the station attempts to create a narrative of responsibility while simultaneously negotiating the cultural imperative to interpellate listeners as consumers. The narrative of black identity assumes a homogenous black audience located in urban areas, and while broadcasts are in English, a great degree of codeswitching allows for in-group identification.     

Hurry Up,Please. It's Time—State of Emergency

This article explores the ethics of preservation, both as they have been traditionally established and as they might apply to current and future digital preservation efforts. The first part of the article reviews the literature of the past two decades to see how the preservation community has defined the ethical dimensions of its work, as well as developed guidelines to support an ethical practice. The second part considers digital preservation and the ways it both extends and complicates established ethical tenets. Digital preservation challenges the library community to revisit fundamental preservation practices and responsibilities. Our ability to come to consensus on these issues will be critical for the public's continued trust in our roles as stewards of the cultural record.     

‘ONE STATE,ONE TELEVISION,ONE PUBLIC’

This article seeks to reappraise two popular yet neglected examples of variety programming, which appeared on French television during the 1960s: Discorama and Age tendre et tête de bois. While the former has been situated within a realist televisual aesthetic and regarded as a launch-pad for French singer-songwriters, the latter has been represented as a youth-oriented vehicle for rock ‘n’ roll and yé-yé pop music. Although such interpretations are to a large extent valid, this article will argue that both programmes should also be viewed as symptomatic of Charles de Gaulle's statist broadcasting strategy, which placed great emphasis on creating social cohesion via programmes designed to appeal to the widest possible audience.     

Information markets to improve information value and utilisation

Abstract

The Internet provides a challenge to existing media structures and cultural values, particularly in the distribution of recorded music. Peer‐to‐peer (P2P) file‐sharing sites like Napster and KaZaA have facilitated the widespread downloading of unlicensed music and the creation of a new kind of shared culture. In response, the established music industry is simultaneously attempting to undermine the impact of these exchanges (describing them as theft) and to take advantage of the possibilities of the Internet in reducing distribution costs and offering the possibility of a more direct relationship between labels and consumers. By drawing on both historical and contemporary analyses of the music industry, this article critiques the argument that digital downloads are necessarily hurting legal’ record sales and then problematises dominant definitions of piracy. The article then evaluates the evolving strategies of the major record companies as they try to come to terms with P2P culture and concludes that, while they may have the resources and the legal clout to withstand the challenge, they lack the cultural capital embodied in these new decentralised systems of cultural distribution and consumption.     

Hip-hop Realness and the White Performer

Hip-hop's imperatives of authenticity are tied to its representations of African-American identity, and white rap artists negotiate their place within hip-hop culture by responding to this African-American model of the authentic. This article examines the strategies used by white artists such as Vanilla Ice, Eminem, and the Beastie Boys to establish their hip-hop legitimacy and to confront rap music's representations of whites as socially privileged and therefore not credible within a music form where credibility is often negotiated through an artist's experiences of social struggle. The authenticating strategies of white artists involve cultural immersion, imitation, and inversion of the rags-to-riches success stories of black rap stars.     

Where Pop Meets Purl: Knitting,the Curation of Craft,and the Folk/Mass Culture Divide

Since the 1970s, the de‐differentiation of high and low culture has legitimized the curation of craft and popular culture. The curation of some crafts, such as quilting, has assisted in reducing art‐craft distinctions, and the exhibition of fashion and popular music has highlighted links between folk culture (e.g., stories, songs, and crafts) and mass culture. With reference to the craft of knitting, we draw on the concept of the contact zone) to show how the current breaching of museum boundaries by yarn bombers can draw further attention to inclusions and exclusions in museum curation. Just as traditional age and gender distinctions are both problematized and perpetuated in public images and press reports on knitting, we argue that discussion of new forms and new contributors to curation processes may be tempered by broader analysis of the representation of craft within popular culture.     

The Political in Cultural Journalism

This article explores how nine Swedish cultural editors and managers in mainstream media institutions define cultural journalism and its political dimensions during times of increased digitization and media convergence. Swedish cultural journalism is aesthetic and political critique applied to subject areas (music, literature, etc.) and contemporary societal and ethical issues. Drawing on Zelizer we ask whether there is a common interpretive community of cultural journalists in different media regarding: (1) how they define their scope, (2) how they understand “the political” in cultural journalism and its implications for democracy, and (3) how they view media convergence and digitalization. We find that although editors/managers from different media share a basic understanding of cultural journalism as an alternative perspective to news, “the political” in cultural journalism is approached differently in the press and the public service broadcast media. Furthermore, due in part to structural conditions, they also see the effects of digitization differently, forming sub-communities on two counts. This study thus contributes new knowledge to a field previously focused almost exclusively on newspapers.     

Sonic Sturdiness: The Globalization of “Chinese” Rock and Pop

To theorize further global and regional flows of popular culture, this article provides a critical analysis of “authentic” rock music from Beijing as well as “commercial” pop from Hong Kong. Following Appadurai, I theorize rock as a hard cultural form, which, under the scrutinizing eyes of the West, demands localization when it travels to places outside its perceived homeland, the West. By comparing hardcore punk from Beijing to Cantopop, I discuss whether the soft relates to the hard as pop does to rock. I conclude it does not. The transient, intertextual, and multivocal opaque voice of pop demands a different theorization. I therefore recast Appadurai's hard–soft distinction into a clear–opaque dualism as a more accurate theoretical tool for understanding cultural globalization.     

Connecting the Disconnected: Balkan Culture Studies

This article looks at the emergence and potentials of a Balkan cultural studies. I argue that the productivity of a Balkan cultural studies lies in its willingness to engage with popular culture as a very real political force in the revolutionary transformations from the 1980s on. Some recent cultural developments are presented here to show how the mix of culture and cultural studies contributes to the political relevance and academic vibrancy of Balkan cultural studies, which captures the imagination of students in the region precisely because of its engaged character and its contemporary relevance.     

Buying Time to Start Spanish-Language Radio in San Antonio: Manuel Davila and the Beginning of Tejano Programming

This article reveals how Spanish-language radio started in San Antonio, Texas—as blocks of time bought by Hispanics interested in providing music to San Antonio's Spanish-speaking residents. In particular, this study recognizes the contributions of San Antonio radio pioneer Manuel Davila and his role in starting Spanish-language radio and the Tejano format, drawing from a combination of on-site observation at Davila's station, personal interviews, and the collection of historical data. The article also lays a foundation for critically analyzing the political economy and hegemonic process of maintenance of economic and cultural power possible in the early days of radio broadcasting to compare it to the current corporately dominated marketplace.