Discs of Dissent! Sounds of Subversion! "Music and Politics" is a theme based podcast that combines an exploration of political philosophy with analysis of musical composition. Ranging across all genres and countries, fusing fascinating ideas with exciting and iconic musical sounds. Each episode has a set theme with a couple central challenging concepts and then examines at least 3 to 4 musical texts.
Join us and we listen to prog and punk as a window onto theories of the postmodern, during the decade of decay and decline, the 1970s. This episode features theorists such as Baudrilliard and Lyotard, and concepts of the hyperreal and simulacrum and music from Yes, Caravan, the Clash and the Sex Pistols. These wildly different music responses, one escapist and virtuosic and the other confrontational and self-consciously primitive, share the same home environment: an era of spectacle and decline, deindustrialization and urban decay, the 1970s.
Embodying the Enlightenment ideal of emancipation of the self, Beethoven reworked the modern orchestra at the same time that Napoleon restructured the modern army and both became dominant in their fields. Beethoven famously dedicated his 3rd Eroica Symphony to the Corsican General, then striking it away when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor. The two would clash again when French troops occupied Beethoven's Vienna, with much of the audience at the premiere of his only opera, Fidelio, made up of French army officers. A prison break opera, with a transgender twist, Fidelio would become a political hot potato, from the Nazis to apartheid to Latin American juntas, join us as we take a deep dive in.
This episode spans the history of popular music (e.g. Little Richard, Beatles, Lou Reed, Queen) with a focus on gender non-conformity, androgyny, and theories of camp. With a special focus on the 80s and the AIDS crisis, we delve into the gradual coming out amongst pop stars and apply theories of Adler,, Sontag and Foucault, to uncover how pop became a central nexus for the gender revolution of the last few decades.
Its a musico-political faceoff of two opera titans of the 19th Century: Wagner and Meyerbeer. The former lives on in Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings while the latter is largely forgotten and not by accident. Wagner, a young revolutionary ultimately embraced racism and carried out career assassination against his one-time mentor and competitor in the opera world. We will probe into Marx and the Communist Manifesto and how Wagner ultimately distorted its message of struggle against the tyranny of capitol into antisemitism and racism. The Jewish Meyerbeer by contrast carried on high the liberal ideals of the French Revolution. inveighed against political fanaticism and ended his career placing an African woman front and centre bravely standing up against avaricious invaders from Europe.
This episode focuses on the seminal year 1968, year of the Prague Spring and the French General Strike. Examining the philosophies of new intentional living communities or communes, we examine how pop music of the time attempted to intervene in the revolution spirit of the day. We pose the question whether the audacious psychedelic sounds may ultimately prove more revolutionary than any rhetoric of radical chic.