This study explores the construction of “authenticity” and related identity-competencies in popular electronic music through an investigation of the music group Ladytron during their formative first decade: 2001-2011. Textual analysis is used to examine the Ladytron narrative; the story that discursively emerges in/between industry and popular articles, music reviews, and band interviews. In developing the Ladytron narrative, the band's identity depends on negotiations between a “roots” concept of electronic music authenticity, performing artistic integrity, and interaction with audiences who participated in the perpetuation and maintenance of this alternative/indie identity. The Ladytron narrative shows how music artists might maintain an identity alternative to mass culture, while creating their own space within it.

In the fall of 2012 Palestinian hip-hop group DAM released a provocative music video titled, “If I Could Go Back in Time,” focusing on so-called “honor crimes.” Despite widespread support for their previous work, “If I Could Go Back in Time” drew considerable criticism for de-contextualizing, romanticizing, and by extension disempowering Palestinian women. Through a critical analysis of this music video as well as the ensuing debate surrounding its interpretation and reception, this article argues that the critical interventions made by politically engaged hip-hop artists, such as DAM, offer a unique vantage point with which to better understand the contested terrain of Palestinian activism. By tracing DAM's long history of political engagement this article examines the discourses that determine “acceptable” forms of activism among competing publics, and further demonstrates how the field of popular culture serves to shape (both positively and negatively) the potential impact of, and audience for, any activist intervention. Drawing from the recent release of the bi-national feature film, Junction 48, this article further explores how DAM front man, Tamer Nafar, has attempted to displace the compassionate gaze of international audiences, respond to colonial logics of elimination, and carve out autonomous spaces for self-reflection and radical vulnerability.

Throughout the discourse surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict many methods have emerged to examine the ways in which artists engage with the issues through popular culture. As hip hop spread globally, its universal themes and ability to constitute community led to the use of rap as a vehicle for political commentary. This paper explores how the Palestinian hip hop group DAM provides a commentary on the experiences of Palestinian-Israelis through carnivalesque methods to create shocking juxtapositions. Using an inter-textual method, we can see that humor allows DAM to freely speak “their truth,” defusing tensions and providing a new perspective on the conflict, opening dialogue, and regaining control over a painful history. This case study raises questions of authenticity, agency, and parody in hip hop. The genre blurs the threshold of true and false and allows artists to present a conventional hip hop persona, giving them the freedom to safely comment on social issues. Humor allows for further political commentary under the façade of a joke. By parodying painful racial, gender, and class stereotypes, artists reclaim their identity and further subvert prejudices against them. This case study challenges the notion of what protest music looks like, and how it functions to promote change.

This paper explores the way in which hip hop artists Iraqi British Lowkey, Iraqi Canadian Narcy, and the Palestinian crew DAM deploy music to challenge narratives of terrorism that are constructed to achieve political objectives and consequently obfuscate geopolitical inequities. Central to these narratives is the figure of the terrorist who is often conflated with Arabs, Muslims, Middle Easterners, and those who express dissent against these narratives. All three artists use hip hop to deconstruct the narratives of terrorism in order to address the perspectives of marginalized groups and to problematize their use. Through their music, Lowkey, Narcy, and DAM contest definitions of terrorism that are differentially applied to certain communities and do not address the use of violence, specifically state violence, to achieve political objectives. These artists suggest an alternative framework where terrorism is not determined by a specific cultural, ethnic, national, or religious affiliation, the root causes of violence are considered, and the complex geopolitical landscape contextualized.

This paper addresses the importance of singer-songwriters to understanding China's contemporary folk music ethos. Instead of considering singer-songwriters as those who perform their own material, this paper examines them as a discursive field that involves the notion of authorship. The first part of the paper revisits the history of singer-songwriters as a thickening process of the aesthetic and sociological voices in their singular authoritarian role. Drawing on Negus's “unbundling” concept, the myth of singer-songwriters' heightened investment of authorship is deconstructed via analysis of the dynamic relationships between the song, the performance and the real author. We then demonstrate three kinds of authorship across three phases of the making of folk singer-songwriters, namely confession, parody and scenius. The analysis reveals why and how the making of singer-songwriters and the issue of authorship are useful to the understanding of contemporary folk ethos in China. Overall, the transformation of authorship in the making of singer-songwriters reveals the complexity of textual narratives, the expansion of performance approaches, and the enhancement of sociological agency in the evolution of contemporary folk music. Folk music carves out a distinctive space for reflection on the process of urbanization and its effects on the thought and practice of people of different cultural, social and ethnic backgrounds.

This essay explores white masculinity and the recuperation of privilege in the figure of Sturgill Simpson, an American country music singer from Jackson, Kentucky. Operating at the intersection of country music studies and third wave whiteness studies, it demonstrates how Simpson deploys the outsider identity of the industry outlaw to recuperate insider benefits of critical acclaim, commercial success, and creative license. As an artist who makes country music for “people who don't like country music,” Simpson functions as a representative figure of the adaptive tactics of white masculinity and the broader politics of inclusion and exclusion in contemporary country music.

During World War II, American media consistently portrayed the typical young female Frank Sinatra fan as a disinterested citizen who failed to devote adequate attention to the war effort and harbored an inappropriate obsession with the pop idol. What contemporaneous critics and current scholars have generally not acknowledged, however, was how Sinatra fandom allowed thousands of American teenage girls to navigate their stressful, confusing, and often contradictory wartime realities with purpose and enthusiasm. This article examines wartime Frank Sinatra fan clubs through the lens of fan club newsletters and correspondences, which were authored, printed, and distributed entirely by the primarily teenage female members of these clubs. In contrast to professionally published press coverage and criticism, these fan-made texts provide unprecedented insight into how this specific fan community used their adoration of Sinatra as a base to explore international relationships, develop professional skills, and engage in personal expression amidst heightened feelings of nationalism and conflicting expectations regarding American gender roles.