Postmodernism and Music Research based task: The focus of your task will be postmodernism in relation to music.

You will need to have an understanding of music that includes the following: y y the postmodern sensibility that anything can be considered cool in an ironic I know it s bad, but it s so bad it s good way Work that is created based (entirely or in part) on older material. This incorporates sampling and will take you from the realms of hip hop culture transporting you finally in today s modern fragmented musical landscape. You will have to listen to some of the artists to fully appreciate them and their work. Audiences that are both niche and mainstream. E.g.: Radio 1, 1xtra, BBC6, XFM The ways in which people engage and listen to music e.g.: iPod, DAB, mobile phones etc The legal issues surrounding sampling. (Led Zeppelin borrowed heavily from old bluesmen and it took years for the songwriters to be credited and paid royalties. The same group took a hard-line stance initially to be sampled by hip hop groups.) The state of the music industry incorporating any recent developments that change how we access/ interact with music e.g.: Spotify, X Factor, iTunes, illegal downloading, free cds with newspapers etc

y y y

All of the above need to have example attached to help them make sense. The examples need to have explanations that place them within a postmodern context. Possible artists to include in your research: DJ Shadow Lady Gaga M.I.A Timbaland (his work with Missy Elliott) Beastie Boys Afrika Bambaataa Bjork Dangermouse Girl Talk Madeon

You may look to other artists as well. This is particularly important as it will mean you have a personal input.

The following essay may prove helpful.

MUSIC AND POSTMODERNISM Postmodernism celebrates the end of what the French philosopher Jean Franois LYOTARD calls the 'grand narratives' of history - reason, progress and socialism and the dissolving of semiotics into a merely libidinal 'energetics'. Nothing is fixed any more, and ideology is in a war of position, a struggle for space. 'Totalization in any human endeavour is potentially totalitarian' (Ibn Hassan, 1977). In fact, as Neil POSTMAN says, we are more likely to destroy ourselves with the unlimited pleasures of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than the totalitarian state of George Orwell's 1984. Postmodernist philosophers like Jean Baudrillard emphasise how the barriers between art, literature and a wider political and social life are now non-existent. Bono and Chris Martin (both, ageing male rock stars) become authorities on the environment and development economics). School students know more of the cultural life of their country (TV, films, and above all the internet and its applications) than teachers. The alienation and 'high tech' emphasis of modernism have given way to a flamboyant celebration of the power centres of modern life, particularly in industry and finance. It was first noticed in architecture, especially in the work of the American Philip Johnson, who put sloping roofs and columns on skyscrapers. Features 1. A new attitude to interpretation, rejecting the idea that art contains a meaning that can be decoded by the diligent. It is no longer possible to operate notions of musical value since different musical structures articulate different forms of meaning. 2. Pick 'n' Mix culture: the past, or distant and exotic cultures, are a) detached from their environment and b) used selectively to anchor the chaotic images of modern European and American life (Elvis Presley's 'It's Now or Never/O Sole Mio'; Gregorian chants in the Top Ten). A modern example would include artists such as Lady Gaga, M.I.A., Madeon and Active Child. 3. The blurring of image and reality: to what extent does television 'create' personalities like the US President or events like the Gulf War? 4. Intertextuality: The preference for parody, nostalgia, kitsch and pastiche over realism (sampling). 5. The dominance of surface over depth. 6. No strong sense of history or the future. Alienation is abolished by saying, 'Utopia is now' as in raves or music festivals. Even a critic of postmodernism like Hans Magnus Enzensburger has observed, 'consumption as spectacle is in parody form the anticipation of a utopian situation' (1974). 7. A new status for art culture. Art does not represent or reflect reality: it is reality. Like the characters in a soap opera, pop stars can seem more 'real' than our own friends. Patrick Brantlinger: Postmodernism can just as easily be stripped of its avant-garde appearance to reveal a position according to which the 'society of the spectacle' produced by 'late capitalism' seems right and inevitable. . . It becomes indistinguishable from behaviourism, a functional positivism that, no matter how radical it sounds, involves an implicit affirmation of the status quo.