Season 1
1968: Radical Chic and Revolution as Rhetoric
The Troubles: Pop's Hidden Hibernia and Ireland's Quest for Freedom
Nationalism: Imagined Communities and Invented Traditions
Modernity, Suffrage and the Emancipation of Women
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.
This episode of Music & Politics explores the sectarian strife in Ireland through the lens of pop music. The long-lasting oppression and occupation have left its mark on the countless pop stars of Irish ancestry, amounting to what we call "hidden Hibernia." Music from the 60s-90s is explored along with lesser known tracks by Lennon and McCartney and groups from the Emerald Isle like U2 and the Cranberries.
This episode grapples with the perennial potent power of nationalism in politics. How do nations get created, even invented, we ask. Multiple theories on the construction of nations are explored such as that of "the invention of tradition" and the "imagination of community." Musically we listen to hymns, tone poems and folk based anthems, by composers like Verdi, Sibelius and Smetana. We explore the musical imagination of nationalism as it is drawn to landscape, nature and history buried deep in the past.
Modernity is universally acknowledged as a time of disruptive change and energies hard to tame. At times overlooked is the central role obsession over women played in the anxieties of the European fin-de-siecle. Almost every breakthrough work of "modern" music, whether Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," or Strauss' "Salome" had at its center a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Out of these anxieties emerged a whole new science of the mind, psychoanalysis that helped frame and develop what had originally been viewed as feminized illness into the generalised state of being modern.
In this episode we explore the knowledge/power construct of "Orientalism" as elaborated by Palestinian Scholar Edward Said and how it may be discerned via music of the age of Imperialism. A construct of the Other that fuses the exotic, the erotic and the eternal, from the Sahara to the Steppes, composers like Borodin and Verdi dramatised this encounter between the "West" and "East" in ways that went beyond ornament directly impacting power relations and the means to reckon with global difference.