While digital fitness requires unique instructor labor to connect with users, limited scholarship has considered the practices of fitness instructors via digital platforms. We investigate how musical genre serves as a resource for digital instructors to construct identities for themselves and fitness participants that motivates exercise participation and attaches users to fitness brands. We conduct a content analysis of rider and instructor identity constructions across country and hip hop cycling rides led by six Peloton instructors. Across genre, riders were constructed as hardworking, resilient, and positive, while instructors constructed themselves as caring for users’ well-being through the mental and physical challenges of exercise. During country rides, instructors constructed riders as happy, grateful, and appearance-focused and themselves as nostalgic, relationship-centric, and values driven. In contrast, instructors constructed riders during hip hop rides as fighters who cared about their competitive performance, whereas they were out of control and unapologetic in pursuing fitness excellence. Instructors drew on and extended the distinctly racialized cultural meanings attached to country and hip hop music to construct Peloton identities, appealing to a diverse audience but reinforcing social inequalities in the process.
Punk histories often omit the significance of objects and labor of music scenes in favor of an approach that tells the stories of “legendary” bands. These simplified narratives prove useful in creating a unified history of rock music that traces a line from the past to the present. However, for a subculture that often bristles at the narratives created by the Rock Writer and shuns the notion of “rock stars,” such an approach to writing histories has been an awkward fit for punk. This article shifts focus from genealogies of great bands to the importance of how the objects used by participants shaped the scene, specifically its use of cassette tapes, to take a bottom-up approach in telling the story of the late 1980s/early 1990s East Bay Punk scene of Northern California. Through archival research and interviews, the author theorizes an East Bay Punk ontology built on the tenets of collectivism, leftist activism, and a do-it-yourself ethic enabled by the ease of use and copiability of the compilation cassette tapes produced by members of the scene that serve as the author’s case studies. In doing so, this article explores how cassettes helped to construct and reinforce the value systems of East Bay Punk and how they perform the type of memory work and approach to history (re-)making that has allowed East Bay Punk participants to shape the way people remember the scene through these tapes.
This paper offers a novel perspective on the materiality of fandom by exploring the relational and embodied material networks that connect people, music keepsakes, and domestic spaces. Drawing on object-oriented interviews with fans of Irish blues musician Rory Gallagher, analyzed through a multimodal ethnographic lens, it investigates the motivations behind the arrangement and display choices of keepsakes in the home and how these practices express narratives of memory and the self. Specifically, it examines how items were obtained, where they were initially placed and where they were moved following Gallagher’s death, as well as how they are compiled into material assemblages. The study puts forward a typology of micro-, meso-, and macro-displays of fandom to explore these assemblages and understand the logic governing their formation. In doing so, it highlights how such practices are shaped not only by personal memories but also by ongoing relationships—with Gallagher as a felt presence, with other fans through shared meanings, and with evolving selves anchored in past experiences. Ultimately, the paper underscores the vital role of fans in co-creating and sustaining musical heritage from below, showing how material objects enable the persistence of relational selves and collective memory even as living connections fade.
In July 2021, the electronic musician and scholar Holly Herndon launched Holly+, a vocal deep fake modeled on her singing voice. Holly+ is powered by an artificial intelligence engine trained on recordings of Herndon’s voice. Musicians were welcome to use the transformed audio commercially and simply credit Herndon and Holly+. They also could release their work with the official imprimatur of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), a Web 3.0 entity tied to the Ethereum blockchain. My paper situates the Holly+ project against the backdrop of intellectual property law in the US, both as it stood in the late 2010s and 2020s and in light of the legacy of legally sanctioned appropriation and extraction of work by Black performers. The DAO framework Holly+ uses is unlikely to gain traction, and Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s provocative invocation of “identity play” suggests an uneasy relationship to the racialized legacy of mimicry and impersonation in the history of American popular music. But the project stands as an important attempt at creating an artist-driven, grassroots effort at monetizing, authenticating, and protecting the intellectual property of musicians in the era of machine learning.
This article reframes African postcolonial cultural history through the lens of popular music, examining how 1970s Zambian rock musicians contested and reimagined Kenneth Kaunda's Humanism. Whereas existing scholarship on Humanism emphasizes its political and philosophical dimensions, this study reveals how ideology was performed and negotiated through sound, style, and stage. Moving beyond recent reissue and nostalgia-driven accounts, this article situates Zamrock within the politics of postco-lonial Zambia as a form of cultural resistance and cosmopolitan creativity. It demonstrates that debates over musical style and cultural authenticity were central, rather than peripheral, to Zambia's negotiation of postcolonial modernity. By redefining cosmopolitanism from below as a participatory and diasporic pro-cess embodied in performance, it restores Zambian musicians to the center of global rock history. Zamrock thus emerges as a critical, hybrid expression of postcolonial identity and agency.
Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone magazine, gained wealth and influence by tapping into the Sixties counterculture in the pages of his publication. The magazine has gone on to define rock culture in America, in particular shaping the widespread culture of nostalgia for the classic rock era. One of the reasons for Rolling Stone's success was their ability to capture a market that was notoriously anti-capitalistic, in ideology if not spending habits. They did so by positioning themselves as a part of the counterculture and an alternative to the corporate media-true believers in the music and its messages rather than interlopers coming in to exploit it. It was not long, however, before the line between hippie capitalism and outright capitalism blurred and the magazine became one of the most powerful businesses to emerge from the Sixties rock scene. In the process, the magazine's commitments came into question. Did they serve their audience or their industry advertisers? Was their interest in speaking honestly to rock and roll fans or to increase their market share? These questions were debated in real time among rock critics and are still debated by histo-rians. Because the magazine was so influential in projecting its musical tastes forward into the present, the motivations behind the music they chose to champion are important to understand. By exploring Wenner's leadership and the writing he published, we can discover the ideological commitments of the magazine and how these influenced-and continue to influence-how we perceive rock history.
This article looks through a critical feminist cultural lens into the music of famous female and queer Nigerian musicians whose artistic expression has been tagged sexualization and objectification. One question primarily animates the article: Does the vulgarity, eroticism, and pleasure in famous female and queer Nigerian artists' music have a political or ideological undertone? Drawing from selected music by female and queer artists (Tiwa Savage, Teni Apata, and Temmie Ovwasa), complemented by specialized literature in gender, sexuality, and cultural studies, I examine pleasure and sexuality as defiance, not deviance, in Nigerian popular music. Specifically, using textual analysis of selected lyrics and close reading of accompanying images, whether moving or static, I argue that through a genre I call "moaning music," artists challenge and resist hegemonic masculinity, assert agency, and decolonize gender and sexuality in Nigerian popular music. Moaning music also serves as a form of "politics of redressing" African female bodies and sexuality, which have historically been racialized, objectified, vilified, and demonized. Although moaning marks many registers, I use it here within the context of sounds and images of sexual pleasure. Moaning music subverts the gaze, expectations, and sexual discipline of heteropatriarchy through lyrics, sounds, visuals, stylistic choices, and bodily and beauty repertoire.
Most academic studies of DJ practice in electronic dance music have so far favored canonical groove-based genres, namely house and techno. In these genres, transitions should generally be seamless, take listeners on a journey and build them up to elation. In this literature, different dance musics and their approaches to the craft of DJing have been left behind. While continuity is key for a progressive house or techno set, an artist influenced by reggae or hip-hop may relish instead in rupture: audience members or a collaborating MC may call for a "rewind," when a bass line is so strong it simply has to be heard again from the top. Such creative interaction between MC(s), DJ(s) and audience and its emergent discontinu-ities run counter to stereotypes about DJing that circulate informally and academically. This article seeks to redress these (mis)conceptions, aiming to nuance how researchers understand live electronic dance music performance. To do so, it analyzes two DJ sets in grime and dubstep, genres that emerged from localized subcultures of early 2000s London. These are part of a wider field of electronic dance music that has been substantially influenced by reggae, and especially dub, its experimental offshoot that integrates rewinds and similar ruptures of sonic flow into its aesthetic strategies. Using track listing, tempo mapping and spectrogram analysis, among other tools, this article builds on existing analyses of house and techno performance to develop a more inclusive methodology for understanding how DJs and MCs perform across electronic music.
What emotions can music resist? Emotions are not only personal. They are also socially formed within divided societies. During the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, fear and anger towards Chinese and Asians intensified in media and public spaces. Within an atmosphere thick with insecurity, members of the public increasingly targeted people perceived to be from these groups with verbal and physical attacks, generating worry and outrage among many AAPIs. This article examines cultural strategies for responding to the emotions of racism. Through performance analysis and media ethnography, this study argues that rap music enabled personal and collective resistance against the formation and impact of racialized emotions negatively affecting Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders during the pandemic. Analyzing the artistry and influence of rap musicians through the lens of emotion offers a nuanced understanding of the formation of rap music and the forces of oppression and opposition shaping racialized subjectivities and society. Given that racism pervades many areas of the world, it is crucial to consider how rap music, and popular music more broadly, can function as artistic mediums for resistance and solidarity, challenging systems of racial discrimination and offering new channels for emotional expression and empowerment.
