Professor of Radio and Popular Music Studies Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK I research into the production and consumption cultures around popular music and radio. I am particularly interested in the way that technology can be utilised for creative solutions to challenges in music and radio enterprises, and how the activities of these industries create important regional cultures. I use ethnographic studies of community interactions on- and off-line, interpreted through discourse analysis, combined with political economic and historical analysis of media organisations and fan practice. Jazz practice has become an important theme of my work in the last five years.
The northern soul scene is a dance-based music culture that originated in the English North and M... more The northern soul scene is a dance-based music culture that originated in the English North and Midlands in the early 1970s. It still thrives today with a mix of sixty-year-olds and several generations of new converts, and its celebration of 1960s soul has an international following.
This co-produced book brings together newly commissioned essays together with pivotal earlier articles that have defined the field so far. These chapters are interspersed with key journalistic articles, evocative photographs, and interviews with the directors of northern soul-themed films. This anthology is the first to provide a wide variety of perspectives on the history and contemporary nature of the scene, and creates a forum for vibrant dialogue and debate amongst academic researchers, students and those immersed in the scene. Representations of the scene from different media, and different historical locations, are juxtaposed to construct a rich and diverse statement about the music, people, places and practices that constitute the northern soul scene in the UK and beyond.
The third KISMIF International Conference “Keep It Simple, Make It Fast! (KISMIF) DIY Cultures, S... more The third KISMIF International Conference “Keep It Simple, Make It Fast! (KISMIF) DIY Cultures, Spaces and Places” was help in Porto, Portugal, between 18th July and 21st July 2016. This edition was once again focused on underground music, but directing its attention this time towards the analysis of DIY cultures’ relationship to space and places. Thus, we challenged students, junior and senior teachers/researchers, as well as artists and activists, to come to the KISMIF International Conference and present works which explore the potential of the theoretical and analytical development of the intersection of music scenes, DIY culture and space under a multidimensional and multifaceted vision. Our intention was to enrich the underground scenes and DIY cultures analysis by producing innovative social theory on various spheres and levels, as well as focusing on the role of DIY culture in late modernity. Indeed, the role of music and DIY cultures is once more an important question — taking place in a world of piecemealed yet ever-present change. The space, spaces, places, borders, zones of DIY music scenes are critical variables in approaching contemporary cultures, their sounds, their practices (artistic, cultural, economic and social), their actors and their contexts. From a postcolonial and glocalized perspective, it is important to consider the changes in artistic and musical practices with an underground and/or oppositional nature in order to draw symbolic boundaries between their operating modalities and those of advanced capitalism. Territorialization and deterritorialization are indelible marks of the artistic and musical scenes in the present; they are related to immediate cosmopolitanisms, to conflicting diasporas, new power relations, gender and ethnicity.
Popular music is an important part of our everyday life, entertaining, inspiring and even empower... more Popular music is an important part of our everyday life, entertaining, inspiring and even empowering us, but where did it come from, how is it made, what does it mean, and how does it eventually reach our ears? In this fully revised Second Edition of the popular textbook, Studying Popular Music Culture, Tim Wall guides students through the many ways we can analyse music and the music industries, highlighting crucial skills and useful research tips. Taking into account recent changes and developments in the industry, this book outlines the key concepts, offers fresh perspectives and encourages readers to reflect on their own work. Written with clarity, flair and enthusiasm, it covers:
• Histories of popular music, their traditions and cultural, social, economic and technical factors
• Industries and institutions; production, new technology, and the entertainment media
• Musical form, meaning and representation
• Audiences and consumption
Students' learning is consolidated through a set of insightful case studies, engaging activities and helpful suggestions for further reading. Studying Popular Music Culture is therefore an essential companion for undergraduate students of popular music culture and media, cultural or communication studies.
"
This groundbreaking and innovative introduction to Media Studies will afford undergraduate and ma... more This groundbreaking and innovative introduction to Media Studies will afford undergraduate and mature students a comprehensive overview of the subject area. It will set students firmly on course to be critical, informed and canny operators within the discipline.
The text is pedagogically rich and covers a wide range of topics from the history of media right through to coverage of new media. The text interweaves theory, practice, and professional issues throughout, and will engage the reader fully with the principal issues, challenges and paradigms in the discipline. Through a breadth of reference and support resources, students will activley grapple with a variety of media at both a practical and intellectual level. Students will emerge with a broad range of perspectives, a strong conceptual sense of the area and a firm foundation to take a critical approach to their studies at higher levels.
Media Studies: texts, production and context will be essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, cultural studies, communication studies, film studies, the sociology of the media, popular culture and other related subjects.
Media Narratives in Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic), 2021
The longevity of the British northern soul scene makes it a particularly interesting place to ask... more The longevity of the British northern soul scene makes it a particularly interesting place to ask questions about how and why stories of pop’s cultural past are produced. This chapter looks at the ways in which the externally-mediated histories and the scene processes of “self-documentation” (Raine & Wall 2019) privilege some aspects of that past over others in a music culture which has been constantly re-energised by the entrance of new generations of participants. The analysis explicitly explores the ways these hidden histories operate in the scene and how they represent the participation of women and men, the way they forge the relationships between older and younger scene members, and the way they marginalise the underlying political economy of the scene.
The analysis is both a retrieval of some rather obvious parts of the story of the scene that have been played down, and an account of how and why this happened. In investigating the gendered retelling of the scene’s forty-five-year history, the analysis considers the silence of historic female experience, and how this plays out in the current multigenerational scene. By interrogating the founding documents of northern soul from early 1970s Blues & Soul magazine, we explore how the DIY-culture and economic processes of the scene actually worked. By examining the origins of a scene that functions today through widely dissipated night-time venue promotions, record dealing, and small-scale traditional and social media, an alternative picture emerges.
This chapter builds upon the extensive research of the scene by the authors, threading together questions of popular music history, mediation and cultural engagement. The analysis asks searching questions for scene participants, popular music studies academics and those who produce and recirculate stories of our cultural past. We seek to demonstrate how attention to questions of gender and generation reveal important aspects of the coding and interpretation of popular music culture, and encourage a more systematic approach to the evidence that specialist music magazines have for historians of popular music culture. Fundamentally, it poses the question ‘why are some aspects of a culture’s past relegated to fleeting moments in a scene when they were there in plain sight all the time?’.
in Paula Guerra and Tânia Moreira (eds.) Keep it Simple, Make it Fast!: an approach to underground music scenes (vol. 3) (2017) ISBN 978-989-8648-88-4, 2017
This chapter examines the self-documenting histories produced by participants in the DIY culture ... more This chapter examines the self-documenting histories produced by participants in the DIY culture of the British northern soul scene, and the creation myths which underlie these histories. By calling these stories of the scene’s past creation myths we draw on academic literature from anthropology and cultural studies about the ways we explain ourselves to ourselves as cultural groups.
We argue that a sense of origin is central to the way contemporary participants understand the scene and their own place within it by examining two aspects of these myths. Firstly, we explore those stories about the development of the term ‘northern soul’ and the northerness of the scene. And, secondly, we interrogate the way younger scene participants relate to these myths as a way of locating themselves within a scene dominated by participants who claim status as a scene originator from the 1970s.
At the same time we argue that popular music academics who study the northern soul scene have too often uncritically reproduce these myths as facts. We raise questions about the way that what we term insider popular music academics can sometimes assume the very things they should be analysing and outsider academics often fail to understand the significance and meaning of insider practice.
The Cultural Politics of Jazz Collectives: This Is Our Music, Mar 23, 2015
This chapter examines the conditions under which live jazz is created by musicians, promoters and... more This chapter examines the conditions under which live jazz is created by musicians, promoters and audiences in a major UK city. In particular we highlight the way in which jazz collectives have become a notable organising principle through which young contemporary jazz musicians have created a self-sustaining scene, and we locate this activity within the range of jazz venues and other distinct, but overlapping, scenes within the city.
Through a political economic and cultural analysis of these local jazz scenes we contrast the way that public sector, commercial and collective organisations relate to venues to create performance opportunities, sustain production cultures and negotiate their relationships with the music industries. Based on an analysis of a wide range of venues in Birmingham, and a series of interviews with jazz musicians and promoters, this research finds that the ways that these musicians engage with jazz’s past in the present, the semiotic use of collective organisation, and the relationship of jazz collectives to educational programmes in these locales are all important in understanding contemporary collective live jazz practice.
Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (ed) Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music , May 2014
This chapter examines the role of the transistor radio in the development of mobile music. It sug... more This chapter examines the role of the transistor radio in the development of mobile music. It suggests that understanding of the introduction of the transistor radio as a transformative technology may provide insights into the way that radio created a mobile music and explains that the transistor radio was a key item of technology for cultural agents to exploit and not an agent of change in itself. It also discusses how cultural mobility and the interaction of technological, cultural, and economic factors remade “radio” and created new senses of radio space, radio time and the radio listener.
The northern soul scene is a dance-based music culture that originated in the English North and M... more The northern soul scene is a dance-based music culture that originated in the English North and Midlands in the early 1970s. It still thrives today with a mix of sixty-year-olds and several generations of new converts, and its celebration of 1960s soul has an international following.
This co-produced book brings together newly commissioned essays together with pivotal earlier articles that have defined the field so far. These chapters are interspersed with key journalistic articles, evocative photographs, and interviews with the directors of northern soul-themed films. This anthology is the first to provide a wide variety of perspectives on the history and contemporary nature of the scene, and creates a forum for vibrant dialogue and debate amongst academic researchers, students and those immersed in the scene. Representations of the scene from different media, and different historical locations, are juxtaposed to construct a rich and diverse statement about the music, people, places and practices that constitute the northern soul scene in the UK and beyond.
The third KISMIF International Conference “Keep It Simple, Make It Fast! (KISMIF) DIY Cultures, S... more The third KISMIF International Conference “Keep It Simple, Make It Fast! (KISMIF) DIY Cultures, Spaces and Places” was help in Porto, Portugal, between 18th July and 21st July 2016. This edition was once again focused on underground music, but directing its attention this time towards the analysis of DIY cultures’ relationship to space and places. Thus, we challenged students, junior and senior teachers/researchers, as well as artists and activists, to come to the KISMIF International Conference and present works which explore the potential of the theoretical and analytical development of the intersection of music scenes, DIY culture and space under a multidimensional and multifaceted vision. Our intention was to enrich the underground scenes and DIY cultures analysis by producing innovative social theory on various spheres and levels, as well as focusing on the role of DIY culture in late modernity. Indeed, the role of music and DIY cultures is once more an important question — taking place in a world of piecemealed yet ever-present change. The space, spaces, places, borders, zones of DIY music scenes are critical variables in approaching contemporary cultures, their sounds, their practices (artistic, cultural, economic and social), their actors and their contexts. From a postcolonial and glocalized perspective, it is important to consider the changes in artistic and musical practices with an underground and/or oppositional nature in order to draw symbolic boundaries between their operating modalities and those of advanced capitalism. Territorialization and deterritorialization are indelible marks of the artistic and musical scenes in the present; they are related to immediate cosmopolitanisms, to conflicting diasporas, new power relations, gender and ethnicity.
Popular music is an important part of our everyday life, entertaining, inspiring and even empower... more Popular music is an important part of our everyday life, entertaining, inspiring and even empowering us, but where did it come from, how is it made, what does it mean, and how does it eventually reach our ears? In this fully revised Second Edition of the popular textbook, Studying Popular Music Culture, Tim Wall guides students through the many ways we can analyse music and the music industries, highlighting crucial skills and useful research tips. Taking into account recent changes and developments in the industry, this book outlines the key concepts, offers fresh perspectives and encourages readers to reflect on their own work. Written with clarity, flair and enthusiasm, it covers:
• Histories of popular music, their traditions and cultural, social, economic and technical factors
• Industries and institutions; production, new technology, and the entertainment media
• Musical form, meaning and representation
• Audiences and consumption
Students' learning is consolidated through a set of insightful case studies, engaging activities and helpful suggestions for further reading. Studying Popular Music Culture is therefore an essential companion for undergraduate students of popular music culture and media, cultural or communication studies.
"
This groundbreaking and innovative introduction to Media Studies will afford undergraduate and ma... more This groundbreaking and innovative introduction to Media Studies will afford undergraduate and mature students a comprehensive overview of the subject area. It will set students firmly on course to be critical, informed and canny operators within the discipline.
The text is pedagogically rich and covers a wide range of topics from the history of media right through to coverage of new media. The text interweaves theory, practice, and professional issues throughout, and will engage the reader fully with the principal issues, challenges and paradigms in the discipline. Through a breadth of reference and support resources, students will activley grapple with a variety of media at both a practical and intellectual level. Students will emerge with a broad range of perspectives, a strong conceptual sense of the area and a firm foundation to take a critical approach to their studies at higher levels.
Media Studies: texts, production and context will be essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, cultural studies, communication studies, film studies, the sociology of the media, popular culture and other related subjects.
Media Narratives in Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic), 2021
The longevity of the British northern soul scene makes it a particularly interesting place to ask... more The longevity of the British northern soul scene makes it a particularly interesting place to ask questions about how and why stories of pop’s cultural past are produced. This chapter looks at the ways in which the externally-mediated histories and the scene processes of “self-documentation” (Raine & Wall 2019) privilege some aspects of that past over others in a music culture which has been constantly re-energised by the entrance of new generations of participants. The analysis explicitly explores the ways these hidden histories operate in the scene and how they represent the participation of women and men, the way they forge the relationships between older and younger scene members, and the way they marginalise the underlying political economy of the scene.
The analysis is both a retrieval of some rather obvious parts of the story of the scene that have been played down, and an account of how and why this happened. In investigating the gendered retelling of the scene’s forty-five-year history, the analysis considers the silence of historic female experience, and how this plays out in the current multigenerational scene. By interrogating the founding documents of northern soul from early 1970s Blues & Soul magazine, we explore how the DIY-culture and economic processes of the scene actually worked. By examining the origins of a scene that functions today through widely dissipated night-time venue promotions, record dealing, and small-scale traditional and social media, an alternative picture emerges.
This chapter builds upon the extensive research of the scene by the authors, threading together questions of popular music history, mediation and cultural engagement. The analysis asks searching questions for scene participants, popular music studies academics and those who produce and recirculate stories of our cultural past. We seek to demonstrate how attention to questions of gender and generation reveal important aspects of the coding and interpretation of popular music culture, and encourage a more systematic approach to the evidence that specialist music magazines have for historians of popular music culture. Fundamentally, it poses the question ‘why are some aspects of a culture’s past relegated to fleeting moments in a scene when they were there in plain sight all the time?’.
in Paula Guerra and Tânia Moreira (eds.) Keep it Simple, Make it Fast!: an approach to underground music scenes (vol. 3) (2017) ISBN 978-989-8648-88-4, 2017
This chapter examines the self-documenting histories produced by participants in the DIY culture ... more This chapter examines the self-documenting histories produced by participants in the DIY culture of the British northern soul scene, and the creation myths which underlie these histories. By calling these stories of the scene’s past creation myths we draw on academic literature from anthropology and cultural studies about the ways we explain ourselves to ourselves as cultural groups.
We argue that a sense of origin is central to the way contemporary participants understand the scene and their own place within it by examining two aspects of these myths. Firstly, we explore those stories about the development of the term ‘northern soul’ and the northerness of the scene. And, secondly, we interrogate the way younger scene participants relate to these myths as a way of locating themselves within a scene dominated by participants who claim status as a scene originator from the 1970s.
At the same time we argue that popular music academics who study the northern soul scene have too often uncritically reproduce these myths as facts. We raise questions about the way that what we term insider popular music academics can sometimes assume the very things they should be analysing and outsider academics often fail to understand the significance and meaning of insider practice.
The Cultural Politics of Jazz Collectives: This Is Our Music, Mar 23, 2015
This chapter examines the conditions under which live jazz is created by musicians, promoters and... more This chapter examines the conditions under which live jazz is created by musicians, promoters and audiences in a major UK city. In particular we highlight the way in which jazz collectives have become a notable organising principle through which young contemporary jazz musicians have created a self-sustaining scene, and we locate this activity within the range of jazz venues and other distinct, but overlapping, scenes within the city.
Through a political economic and cultural analysis of these local jazz scenes we contrast the way that public sector, commercial and collective organisations relate to venues to create performance opportunities, sustain production cultures and negotiate their relationships with the music industries. Based on an analysis of a wide range of venues in Birmingham, and a series of interviews with jazz musicians and promoters, this research finds that the ways that these musicians engage with jazz’s past in the present, the semiotic use of collective organisation, and the relationship of jazz collectives to educational programmes in these locales are all important in understanding contemporary collective live jazz practice.
Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (ed) Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music , May 2014
This chapter examines the role of the transistor radio in the development of mobile music. It sug... more This chapter examines the role of the transistor radio in the development of mobile music. It suggests that understanding of the introduction of the transistor radio as a transformative technology may provide insights into the way that radio created a mobile music and explains that the transistor radio was a key item of technology for cultural agents to exploit and not an agent of change in itself. It also discusses how cultural mobility and the interaction of technological, cultural, and economic factors remade “radio” and created new senses of radio space, radio time and the radio listener.
in Julie Malnig (ed) Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, 2009
This dynamic collection documents the rich and varied history of social dance and the multiple st... more This dynamic collection documents the rich and varied history of social dance and the multiple styles it has generated, while drawing on some of the most current forms of critical and theoretical inquiry. The essays cover different historical periods and styles; encompass regional influences from North and South America, Britain, Europe, and Africa; and emphasize a variety of methodological approaches, including ethnography, anthropology, gender studies, and critical race theory. While social dance is defined primarily as dance performed by the public in ballrooms, clubs, dance halls, and other meeting spots, contributors also examine social dance’s symbiotic relationship with popular, theatrical stage dance forms.
This research demonstrates that jazz programming on the BBC was a major form of output in its fir... more This research demonstrates that jazz programming on the BBC was a major form of output in its first decade, and a vehicle to achieve important institutional objectives. It pushes us to rethink the totalising narratives of the BBC’s past as well as the great-man discourse used in too many histories. This article engages with existing literature on both the early BBC and the foundations of jazz in Britain, and builds upon extensive primary research into the BBC’s publications, schedules and programme content, interpreted within a framework of political economy and organisational analysis to reveal new insights
Histories of the career of Duke Ellington often give a significant, if somewhat superficial, plac... more Histories of the career of Duke Ellington often give a significant, if somewhat superficial, place in the story to radio remotes of the later 1920s and the 1930s. These broadcasts from nightclubs like the Cotton Club in Harlem allowed those listening in to experience at least some of what the club's patrons did. The claim is often made that such broadcasts could be heard nationally and that they both account for and provide evidence for Ellington's rising popularity.However, a detailed examination of the radio stations and their place in America's media, cultural and economic life raises many questions. By focusing on the political economy of the three stations which originated the Cotton Club remotes, and setting them in wider discourses of jazz and radio listening at the time, this analysis proposes new ways to conceive of the reception of Ellington's music in the late 1920s.Specifically, the article argues that the broadcasts were far less extensive than usually thought, and that the reception of the music over the airwaves needs to be understood within the context of different radio stations and different radio audiences. Further, the connection between radio and sound film in this period is examined.Drawing on approaches derived from media and cultural studies, the article explores both the political economy and cultural meanings at play in the mediated representations of Ellington in this period.
This article examines the conditions under which jazz is created as a live music among young musi... more This article examines the conditions under which jazz is created as a live music among young musicians in three major UK cities. The analysis uses approaches from political economy and cultural studies, including interviews with jazz musicians and promoters in these local jazz scenes, to explore how the participants organize themselves and, in particular, how they use ideas of collective working to achieve their ends. The authors make the case that the collective has become the primary organizing principle through which contemporary jazz musicians create performance opportunities, sustain production cultures and negotiate their relationships with the music industries in these scenes. This thesis is supported through a detailed examination of the work of local collectives, the semiotic use of collective organization, and the relationship of the collectives to the jazz educational programmes based in those cities.
This article maps and theorizes online jazz fandom activities around live music, and then reports... more This article maps and theorizes online jazz fandom activities around live music, and then reports on applied experimental work that the authors undertook with jazz promoters and musicians to explore ways in which live music can be situated in the activities of online fandom. Three theoretical themes of online taste-maker-led fan communities, narratives of online fan experience, and modularization of content are explained and discussed. Two case studies, where the theoretical themes are applied to the practical needs of live events organizers, are then introduced, discussed and evaluated. The authors then draw conclusions about the extent to which an understanding of fan practices and the possibilities of online platforms can be combined to extend the experiences of live musical events into online experiences. They also consider the possible ways in which online media re-address a series of questions about narrative and narration, agency and subjectivity, expertise and accessibility.
The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast …, Jan 1, 2009
his article reports on a study into the implications of the development of online fan communities... more his article reports on a study into the implications of the development of online fan communities for specialist music broadcasting on the domestic radio stations controlled by the United Kingdom's publically funded the British Broadcasting Company. In particular it focuses on jazz, soul reggae/urban and indie rock. The early sections explore ideas of specialist music and their role in the development of the idea of public service broadcasting within the United Kingdom. This is followed by an analysis of the activities and communities of specialist music fans online. The final section reports on the way the BBC organizes the production of radio and online media around specialist music forms. We also outline our proposals on modularization and dissemination of content, the exploitation of the taste-leadership of the stations' presenters and experts, and the possible ways in which changes in the production of programmes could serve broadcast and online media. The study concludes that the BBC places the support of specialist music as a key argument in defence of their role as a public service broadcaster, and thus for public funds, as well as demonstrating significant policy and organizational support for the implications of new online media. However, we argue that an appreciation of the place of radio and online media in specialist fan culture is not the basis for organizing production. This results in two orientations amongst staff: a broadcast one built around the centrality of the station brand and an emergent interactive one built around the potential of the new media and the BBC as a provider of public service media.
The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast …, Jan 1, 2007
Radio stations based at universities make up only about 11% of all over-the-air stations in the U... more Radio stations based at universities make up only about 11% of all over-the-air stations in the United States of America, but college radio is often presented as offering an alternative in music radio to the for-profit stations that dominate the airwaves. College stations are now seen as a key means of promoting 'indie rock'. This article traces the development of university-based radio stations in the United States, and reports on a five-year study of music programming in three stations based in Boston and New York, to examine their claim to alternativeness. The paper concludes that the stations do use different forms of music programming, that the programming extends well beyond the scope of 'indie rock' and that the current notions of alternativeness utilised by station staff have their roots in the development of the sector from the 1920s onwards.
David Murray has been a leading innovative jazz musician for the last thirty years. He has been a... more David Murray has been a leading innovative jazz musician for the last thirty years. He has been a prolific recording artist and concert performer, and an eclectic collaborator within and outside the jazz tradition. This paper explores the cultural and political economic context in which he works as a professional musician and in which his work is listened to and understood. Reinterpreting Scott DeVeaux’s notion of the ‘progressive musician’, Murray’s work is discussed in terms of the venues, record companies and wider media in which he performs, and the different ways in which ideas of progress have both changed over time, and been interpreted in the US and UK. It also explores the important role of critic Stanley Crouch in the development of Murray’s career and the wider critical context in which the meanings and value of jazz are discussed. The analysis is based upon a historiography of Murray’s career and recorded output and an examination of original press coverage and primary interviews with key music industry personnel. Conclusions are drawn about distinctly different European and African American ideas of progress and tradition in jazz, and about the infrastructure that sustains working jazz musicians.
Southern Review: Communication, Politics & …, Jan 1, 2006
This paper explores the way in which staff at a British local commercial radio station deal with ... more This paper explores the way in which staff at a British local commercial radio station deal with the tension between their licence obligations to serve an ethnic minority audience and the imperatives to widen the station's audience in order to maximise their profits. It reports on the findings of a yearlong ethnography and unstructured interviews interpreted through a framework of critical discourse analysis. Three areas of research and analysis are outlined: the way that the licence relates to the ideas of professional radio practices and to music culture; the systems of scheduling and music programming; and the accounts of professional media workers. The paper demonstrates that the radio professionals are involved in acts of transformation which attempt to attract a wider, more mainstream audience, while at the same time avoid the censure of the regulator. It raises issues about the effectiveness of particular regimes of regulation, the relationship between radio music and listener culture, and the work of radio professionals and their attempts to explain and justify their work.
The Northern Soul scene is a dance-based music culture that originated in the English North and M... more The Northern Soul scene is a dance-based music culture that originated in the English North and Midlands in the early 1970s. It still thrives today with a mix of forty-year-olds and new converts, and its celebration of 1960s' soul has an international following. Centred on the ...
The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast …, Jan 1, 2004
The new technologies of the World Wide Web have become an important arena for sound broadcasting,... more The new technologies of the World Wide Web have become an important arena for sound broadcasting, and for those with access there is a whole world of radio available to listen to online. The relatively small cost of making music radio programmes for online distribution has led many to argue that the technology makes the possibility of free access and diverse radio. Using empirical research and a broadly political economic analysis this paper examines recent and likely future trends to judge the degree to which the technology is adding to the public good. It concludes that two major ways of presenting streamed radio are developing, related to two business models, which are leading to the domination of this new form of radio by a small number of companies.
This paper examines the language and practices of regulation that have constructed the idea of Br... more This paper examines the language and practices of regulation that have constructed the idea of British commercial radio. It concludes that the regulator's definitions of its purpose and practice are characterized by variability because of the attempt to draw simultaneously from repertoires of definition established in Britain's public service, commercial, and community traditions. In turn, it is noted that this discourse of regulation does not seem to be shared by those who run commercial radio stations. The paper explores the way that the dominance of a particular public service ideal is negotiated with the increasing influence of commercial orders of discourse, and the marginalization of concepts of community broadcasting.
Place, Perspective and Popular Music Newcastle, 2024
This paper explores the music, writing and activism of British jazz trumpeter and band leader Ian... more This paper explores the music, writing and activism of British jazz trumpeter and band leader Ian Carr who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, both chronicled and theorised a new British jazz through Melody Maker articles, BBC broadcasts and a book of essays, Music Outside (1973). Carr first co-led the innovative Don Rendell-Ian Carr Quintet and, later, led jazz-rock pioneers, Nucleus. He was also a successful cultural activist in encounters with the Arts Council, Musicians’ Union and the BBC. With close attention to this work, we can see his role as a thought-leader, reimagining jazz as a European music and repositioning it in the paradoxical discourses of contemporary jazz and popular music. The research builds upon extensive archive and analytical work, including contemporary periodicals, BBC broadcasts and written documents, and commercially-released recordings. It uses a theoretical frame of the organic intellectual to understand where and how Carr positioned jazz and jazz musicians, and the discursive resources he called upon. While Carr has, in recent years, been celebrated in histories of British jazz as an innovating jazz musician, his role as a thought-leader and activist is less well explored. The presentation uses examples of his recorded and broadcast music, his journalism and his role in attempts to influence BBC programming policy and open up new opportunities for popular music musicians, to establish the ideas and perspectives Carr developed and institutionalised in Britain’s major cultural organisations. It detailed an exciting, but contradictory moment in which new forms of cultural artifact – including festivals, the LP and BBC programming – responded to and organised new listeners and formed new ways to listen to and identify with British music.
8th Rhythm Changes Conference Jazz Encounters , 2024
Drawing on detailed and systematic study of the BBC’s jazz broadcasting, this paper tracks the wa... more Drawing on detailed and systematic study of the BBC’s jazz broadcasting, this paper tracks the way gender pervaded the programming and institutional practices of the British Broadcasting Corporation (and its predecessor) over its century of existence. The connections between individual, historically-located examples tells us something of the way jazz in Britain (particularly in relation to a European cultural construction of ‘America’) was formulate in terms of gender, as well as how this played out in a key British cultural institution.
Focusing on the ways in which the BBC and British jazz gendered core practices with which jazz was associated – dancing, singing and playing – we can open up the often-hidden assumptions of manliness, effeminacy, and femininity that playout in the decisions about who should broadcast and how and what they should broadcast. Talking explicitly about gender in the jazz output of the BBC, is primarily about the way we deal with absence. Stephen Barnard (1989) argues that jazz was a ‘problematic music’ for the BBC during its history, and in many ways the problematic nature related to issues of intersectionality between conceptions of gender and nationality, ethnicity and class.
In the year the BBC is celebrating its centenary, the role of ideas of race and ethnicity in the ... more In the year the BBC is celebrating its centenary, the role of ideas of race and ethnicity in the corporation’s jazz broadcasting reveals important aspects of cultural diversity in Britain. Taking case studies from the first ten years of BBC history, this paper examines what they tell us about the organisational processes established at different points in time, the shifting attitudes of BBC staff over its history, and the changing output of jazz over five decades.
The presentation draws upon extensive research in the BBC Written Archive, contemporary sources and, when available, recordings of the types of music that the BBC broadcast. The case studies cover the late night relays of jazz from London West End hotels in the 1920s to the British nations up to the live broadcast of Duke Ellington’s Orchestra from the BBC studios in 1933.
This research reveals a complex, and often contradictory attempt to understand and present the racial politics of what Barnard has called “a problematic music” within the monopoly broadcaster for the nations of the UK.
This paper explores what is at stake in the debates about the now-ness of Davis’ 1986 Warner reco... more This paper explores what is at stake in the debates about the now-ness of Davis’ 1986 Warner recording, Tutu. The record has been identified by a range of authors as pivotal, not only in Davis’ late career, but also in the development of late-twentieth-century jazz more broadly. Views on the recording are somewhat polarised, from those who summarily dismissed it as "an abject surrender to popular trends" (Crouch, 1990) to those extolling it as a classic (Cole, 2005). Such discussions of Miles Davis music are almost always framed within the idea that the trumpeter was driven to change, and that these changes were (or were not) always culturally valuable. At heart, these differences of opinion seem to turn on ideas of the creative agency and identity of jazz musicians and the determining factors of the then-contemporary music industry, on the notions of progress in jazz, and on core definitions of what jazz is.
Accordingly, this paper explores Davis’ own attempts to define his own agency in his recordings, his self-identity through notions of cool and African American masculinity, and the ideas of leadership and collaboration that pervade these debates. In doing so, I plot out the discursive plains, or maps of meaning, which contributors draw on as repertoires to stake their claims. This enables a far richer discussion of the role of Warner records as a company, Tommy LiPuma as exec producer and Marcus Miller as collaborating music-maker/producer in the production and meaning of Tutu.
We explore the representation of British reggae culture through three films: Babylon (Franco Ross... more We explore the representation of British reggae culture through three films: Babylon (Franco Rosso, 1980), Reggae Britannia (Jeremy Marre, 2011), Small Axe: Lover Rock (Steve McQueen, 2020). The first, a British feature film, explores life in London underscored by a music soundtrack by Dennis Bovell (Matumbi, Blackbeard) and staring Brinsley Forde (Aswad). Reggae Britannia is a four-part BBC music documentary film series, part of their prestigious Music Britannia strand, and directed by Jeremy Marre, long-time film-maker of music of black origin. Lovers Rock, the second of a five-part BBC drama film series made by internationally-renown film maker and artist Steve McQueen, is a fictional exploration of 1970s British reggae blues parties and the culture in which they flourished.
By focusing on diverse forms of film, and depictions of British reggae culture during its 1970s heyday, we explore the music of this period, the vibrant culture in which it developed and the way it has been mediated for a broad British and international audience. We argue that reggae has become a significant part of British music cultural identity which owes a substantial debt to Jamaican culture, but also to a notably British life. The paper shows how different film makers have presented the stories, artists and music of this important strand of British life, and the way the programmes exists as important art works in their own life. Finally, we ask questions about the value of these films as primary and secondary documents of British reggae culture.
This paper explores the ways that audiences encounter jazz through radio. Using as a jumping-off-... more This paper explores the ways that audiences encounter jazz through radio. Using as a jumping-off-point a December 1973 BBC report, ‘A BBC Jazz Policy?’, this research investigates both how we can understand the role of radio in national jazz cultures in the second half of the twentieth century, and how we should read the archived documents of these encounters. The report was submitted to the then BBC Jazz Committee, specifically focused on the BBC radio broadcasts of jazz programming in the early 1970s; a period in which, it is often argued, jazz ‘lost its way and its audience.’ In exploring our engagement with varied archived materials as researchers, and the British post-war listener’s engagement with broadcast jazz that is illuminated by these materials, we can start to address how we can understand the mediation of a mediation of a mediation. What emerges is an unstable sense of the British jazz listener, the conflicted notion of jazz as a ‘problematic music’ for BBC staff, and of the struggle British musicians had to make their music relevant for their listeners and for themselves. It is during this time that jazz is seen by BBC personnel as a specialist music that requires specialist programmes and presenters, and yet struggles to find a home in the new broadcast services established at this time.
Geoff Dyer dedicates his 1996 monograph But Beautiful: a book about jazz to the visual critic and... more Geoff Dyer dedicates his 1996 monograph But Beautiful: a book about jazz to the visual critic and theorist, John Berger and opens with ‘a note on photographs’, in which he asserts that (photography) can be as sensitive to sound as it is to light. Berger’s rethink of the visual arts seems an exciting foundation to begin such a reflection, especially as his most influential contribution is to be found in the 1972 television series and book, Ways of Seeing, which he opens with the statement that “the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled”. It should be clear from my chosen title that I too want to pay homage to Berger and explore the ways in which we do and can document jazz using his seminal ideas and approaches to unsettle the relationship between what we document and what we know about jazz.
To do so, I follow Berger, but I paraphrase his core questions about the visual arts to become core questions about jazz: how is jazz of the past interpreted through jazz criticism? How might we recontextualise and rethink these interpretations with attention to the documents of jazz’s past?; and how would our understanding be reconfigured if juxtapose jazz as ‘high art’ with its circulation in popular culture, in order to rethink both? In doing so, I want to take Dyer’s own interpretation of Berger to task, welcoming Dyer’s “imaginative criticism” but pushing past the essentialising of jazz found in But Beautiful, and reframing the argument that good photographs depict “what has just been said, and what is about to be said …” (original emphasis). To achieve this goal, I set out the relationship between the object of interest (jazz) and its documents, I discuss the mythologising narratives that have (over) determined our documenting practices and I explore how the visual can be understood as representation and evidence of a culture that is primarily built around sound.
Jazz and Cultural Identity - In and Out of Europe, 2019
In the 1960s a new concept of European jazz started to emerge in popular music culture across the... more In the 1960s a new concept of European jazz started to emerge in popular music culture across the continent. Not only did this new notion endorse the idea that there was something distinctive about European jazz, but it resulted in a new set of public institutions that organised, promoted and often funded the music-makers. These changes put longer-running institutions like the BBC at a disadvantage and, one could speculate, served the emerging musicians, cultural infrastructure and audiences poorly.
This paper explores the relationship between the BBC’s jazz programming and this new European music during a crucial decade. At the start of the period Britain had grabbed a cultural leadership in popular culture, jazz (it was argued) had found its own voice and the BBC was undertaking a thorough rethink of its cultural role. By the end of the phase commercial radio had been established in Britain and rock music dominated the tastes of a generation who had previously been the main audience for jazz. And somewhere in there programme makers were struggling with the idea that they possibly needed to respond to a new pan-European jazz music.
Sixth Rhythm Changes Conference: Jazz Journeys, 2019
This case study of the mediation of jazz in early British radio uses the music of Jack Payne’s BB... more This case study of the mediation of jazz in early British radio uses the music of Jack Payne’s BBC Dance Orchestra to interrogate existing histories of jazz in Britain. The band’s programmes provide a brilliant example of how jazz entered British cultural life, its musical characteristics and critical reception. The broadcasts presented an English synthesis of British music hall and light music with highly selected elements of American jazz.
Using commercial recordings by the Payne band, the paper analyses jazz and jazz culture are signified within this music, and what it meant in British society of the time. Payne’s own very English singing style, the highly rehearsed band of impressive professional musicians, and a repertoire from ‘I Love the College Girls’, ‘The Girl Friend’, and most wonderfully ‘Since Tommy Atkins Taught The Chinese How To Charleston’, provide a rich picture of jazz’s place in Europe at this time.
Such a study highlights the institutionalising processes of the BBC, the importance of the visual and written word for audio media, and the journey that jazz was taking in the 1920s.
6th Global Reggae Conference: Reggae Innovation and Sound System Culture II, 2019
This contribution will explore the way that the British commercial radio industry has understood ... more This contribution will explore the way that the British commercial radio industry has understood reggae and British reggae fans, and in particular the way reggae is seen to relate to other popular musics and to British music culture. I can draw upon both the broader history of reggae on the different British radio sectors, as well as detailed studies of radio programming I have published.
Since its inception in 1972, the licensed commercial radio sector has steered a line between the more uncomfortable engagement of the BBC and substantial commitment to reggae and associated musics in the unlicensed, or pirate radio, sector. Local radio has tended to treat reggae programming with more enthusiasm, and BBC stations in London in particular provided informed space for specialist reggae programmes. It was the incremental stations of the 1990s that gave more airtime to reggae and dancehall forms, and I can offer interesting insights into the perspectives of radio managers, programmers and DJs from this period to inform the debates.
As a former radio presenter with a specialist reggae programme, and now a radio and popular music studies academic, I offer a distinctive contribution to the conference’s discussions.
Documenting Jazz, Conservatory of Music and Drama Dublin 17 – 19 January 2019, 2019
This paper explores how early jazz on radio in the 1920s can be studied when recordings of sound ... more This paper explores how early jazz on radio in the 1920s can be studied when recordings of sound broadcasts are so few in number. The historical record does show that British contemporary jazz fans from the 1920s complained about the lack of understanding of jazz at the BBC, and such positions are perpetuated by later historians of British jazz, when they suggest the BBC hosted a culture of neglect when considering jazz.
I present practical examples of how we can test the view that the BBC attitude to jazz at this time was “haughty”, “niggardly” and “aloof” (Godbolt). Using the BBC written archive, the BBC’s Genome Radio Times database, biographies and commercially-available recorded music, as well as splintered examples of broadcasts, I set out to understand how the BBC actually treated jazz. I focus on Jack Payne’s 1926 to 1932 broadcasts, lampooned by jazz fans as a “bowing, beaming, frock-coated and baton-waiving leader … (whom) allowed their jazz-minded sidemen the occasional chorus’.
I argue that a speculative, discursive historiography allows us to reassess how radio dance band music leaders like Payne used jazz as a material for a new musical hybrid. This provides new insights into the notion of jazz in Britain of the time, how it sat within major cultural institutions like the BBC, and how we can effectively use documents of jazz’s past to explore its historical specificity.
Reaching out: the past, present and future of BBC Local Radio Audiences De Montfort University and MeCCSA Radio Studies Network event: Leicester, Weds 8th Nov 2017, 2017
This paper examines the language and practices of state regulation that have constructed the idea... more This paper examines the language and practices of state regulation that have constructed the idea of ‘community’ and ‘the local’ in British radio and the way they contextualise the formation and development of BBC local radio. In imagining radio’s audience as a community, British regulators, the vested interests of commercial companies and the campaigns of community activists have constructed a complex field of meaning in which the BBC has attempted to establish a distinctive public service. The variability of our regulatory language, and the self-justifying attempts at defining just what a community service and a local audience is, have established distinct public service, commercial, and community traditions to which senior BBC strategists have attempted to intervene.
The paper explores the way that the dominance of a particular public service ideal is negotiated with the increasing influence of commercial orders of discourse, and the active marginalization of concepts of community broadcasting, to form an unevenly successful, but very interesting, relationship between broadcaster and audience.
Rhythm Changes Conference ‘Re/Sounding Jazz Conservatory of Amsterdam, September 2017, 2017
British post war jazz fans were riven by a divide between self-defined curator-activists of jazz ... more British post war jazz fans were riven by a divide between self-defined curator-activists of jazz as an early century folk music and aficionados of post bebop modernism that played out across all media that carried content about jazz, but created significant problems for a national broadcaster like the BBC. This paper explores the way that the corporation responded to the fundamental and often heated disagreements about the value and future of jazz in its radio output.
The corporation’s main strategy was to try and serve both groups within the limited broadcast hours available while at the same time striving to keep a coherent sense of jazz as an important music in British cultural life. The attempt to negotiate between sometimes dramatically opposed discourses of jazz is apparent in the way that programmes were conceived and scheduled, music was selected for broadcast and the shows were presented.
Drawing on an extensive exploration of BBC jazz broadcasts and institutional documentation, the paper presents a range of programmes and individual shows that bring to the fore how corporation staff conceived and responded to these different taste groups, their sometimes polarised positions and the way this disrupted what had become a settled place for jazz in the BBC schedules. The very particular British take on this divide and the way an important cultural institution like the BBC organises its self in relationship to often hostile music listeners offers an intriguing case study of the mediation of jazz.
In December 1986 Warner Bros. Records released a striking new Miles Davis record, Tutu. The album... more In December 1986 Warner Bros. Records released a striking new Miles Davis record, Tutu. The album presents a creative working relationship with multi-instrumentalist and producer, Marcus Miller, but it also represented a major shift in the way Davis would be understood as a contemporary musician. In this paper I explore the context in which this new stage in Davis’ career developed. With attention to ideas of musical maps of meaning, to the political economy of major record companies and the nature of jazz in the late 1980s, I will offer some new ways to understand this much-neglected phase in the career of one of the twentieth centuries most influential musicians.
Abstract This survey of current approaches to the teaching of radio studies in universities seeks... more Abstract This survey of current approaches to the teaching of radio studies in universities seeks to identify common themes and elements of such courses. In addition, it identifies notable examples of interesting, unusual and creative pedagogic approaches, based on contributions ...
The Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership will be awarding 410 PhD studentships over a fi... more The Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership will be awarding 410 PhD studentships over a five year period to excellent research students in the arts and humanities. A collaboration between Birmingham City University, De Montfort University, Leicester, Nottingham University, Nottingham Trent University, and the University of Birmingham, the partnership provides research candidates with cross-institutional mentoring, expert supervision including cross-institutional supervision where appropriate, subject specific and generic training, and professional support in preparing for a career.
As a member of The Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR) at Birmingham City University I am inviting applications from students whose research interests include:
Popular Music Culture
Jazz Studies
Radio Studies
We also welcome students interested in:
Media and Cultural History
Creative Industries, Cultural Policy and Cultural Work
Songwriting
Sexuality, Gender, the cultural construction of masculinity
Screen Melodrama
Pornography studies
Cult Media fandom and entrepreneurship
Film and television audiences
Comedy
Innovative research methodologies
Austerity and the media
Community Media, Hyperlocal Media and Media Activism
Media for Social Change, Media in the Arab Region
This chapter examines the conditions under which live jazz is created by musicians, promoters and... more This chapter examines the conditions under which live jazz is created by musicians, promoters and audiences in a major UK city. In particular we highlight the way in which jazz collectives have become a notable organising principle through which young contemporary jazz musicians have created a self-sustaining scene, and we locate this activity within the range of jazz venues and other distinct, but overlapping, scenes within the city. Through a political economic and cultural analysis of these local jazz scenes we contrast the way that public sector, commercial and collective organisations relate to venues to create performance opportunities, sustain production cultures and negotiate their relationships with the music industries. Based on an analysis of a wide range of venues in Birmingham, and a series of interviews with jazz musicians and promoters, this research finds that the ways that these musicians engage with jazz’s past in the present, the semiotic use of collective organisation, and the relationship of jazz collectives to educational programmes in these locales are all important in understanding contemporary collective live jazz practice.
The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media, Dec 1, 2009
This article reports on a study into the implications of the development of online fan communitie... more This article reports on a study into the implications of the development of online fan communities for specialist music broadcasting on the domestic radio stations controlled by the United Kingdom's publically funded the British Broadcasting Company. In particular it focuses on jazz, soul reggae/urban and indie rock. The early sections explore ideas of specialist music and their role in the development of the idea of public service broadcasting within the United Kingdom. This is followed by an analysis of the activities and communities of specialist music fans online. The final section reports on the way the BBC organizes the production of radio and online media around specialist music forms. We also outline our proposals on modularization and dissemination of content, the exploitation of the taste-leadership of the stations' presenters and experts, and the possible ways in which changes in the production of programmes could serve broadcast and online media. The study concludes that the BBC places the support of specialist music as a key argument in defence of their role as a public service broadcaster, and thus for public funds, as well as demonstrating significant policy and organizational support for the implications of new online media. However, we argue that an appreciation of the place of radio and online media in specialist fan culture is not the basis for organizing production. This results in two orientations amongst staff: a broadcast one built around the centrality of the station brand and an emergent interactive one built around the potential of the new media and the BBC as a provider of public service media.
The longevity of the British northern soul scene makes it a particularly interesting place to ask... more The longevity of the British northern soul scene makes it a particularly interesting place to ask questions about how and why stories of pop’s cultural past are produced. This chapter looks at the ways in which the externally-mediated histories and the scene processes of “self-documentation” (Raine & Wall 2019) privilege some aspects of that past over others in a music culture which has been constantly re-energised by the entrance of new generations of participants. The analysis explicitly explores the ways these hidden histories operate in the scene and how they represent the participation of women and men, the way they forge the relationships between older and younger scene members, and the way they marginalise the underlying political economy of the scene. The analysis is both a retrieval of some rather obvious parts of the story of the scene that have been played down, and an account of how and why this happened. In investigating the gendered retelling of the scene’s forty-five-year history, the analysis considers the silence of historic female experience, and how this plays out in the current multigenerational scene. By interrogating the founding documents of northern soul from early 1970s Blues & Soul magazine, we explore how the DIY-culture and economic processes of the scene actually worked. By examining the origins of a scene that functions today through widely dissipated night-time venue promotions, record dealing, and small-scale traditional and social media, an alternative picture emerges. This chapter builds upon the extensive research of the scene by the authors, threading together questions of popular music history, mediation and cultural engagement. The analysis asks searching questions for scene participants, popular music studies academics and those who produce and recirculate stories of our cultural past. We seek to demonstrate how attention to questions of gender and generation reveal important aspects of the coding and interpretation of popular music culture, and encourage a more systematic approach to the evidence that specialist music magazines have for historians of popular music culture. Fundamentally, it poses the question ‘why are some aspects of a culture’s past relegated to fleeting moments in a scene when they were there in plain sight all the time?’.
Jazz Britannia is a UK-produced three-part BBC television documentary about the post-war developm... more Jazz Britannia is a UK-produced three-part BBC television documentary about the post-war development of jazz in the United Kingdom. We analyse the programmes to examine how the narrative, form and assumptions of the series can be understood within a series of contextual debates about jazz historiography, history on television, and the value of historiographic method in public service television. We utilize the debates around Ken Burns’s US-produced ten-part documentary series Jazz, to develop an argument about the way that the British documentary constructs a very different history from Jazz, but using many of the approaches and techniques deployed by Burns. We locate the series within questions of quality television and other forms of television history. Finally, we seek to explore the way that the programmes produce a totalizing narrative in which the primary material is ordered to tell a predetermined story about innovations and an identifiably British form of jazz.
This article examines the conditions under which jazz is created as a live music among young musi... more This article examines the conditions under which jazz is created as a live music among young musicians in three major UK cities. The analysis uses approaches from political economy and cultural studies, including interviews with jazz musicians and promoters in these local jazz scenes, to explore how the participants organize themselves and, in particular, how they use ideas of collective working to achieve their ends. The authors make the case that the collective has become the primary organizing principle through which contemporary jazz musicians create performance opportunities, sustain production cultures and negotiate their relationships with the music industries in these scenes. This thesis is supported through a detailed examination of the work of local collectives, the semiotic use of collective organization, and the relationship of the collectives to the jazz educational programmes based in those cities.
Abstract: This paper explores the way in which staff at a British local commercial radio station ... more Abstract: This paper explores the way in which staff at a British local commercial radio station deal with the tension between their licence obligations to serve an ethnic minority audience and the imperatives to widen the station's audience in order to maximise their profits. It reports ...
This article maps and theorizes online jazz fandom activities around live music, and then reports... more This article maps and theorizes online jazz fandom activities around live music, and then reports on applied experimental work that the authors undertook with jazz promoters and musicians to explore ways in which live music can be situated in the activities of online fandom. ...
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Books by Tim Wall
This co-produced book brings together newly commissioned essays together with pivotal earlier articles that have defined the field so far. These chapters are interspersed with key journalistic articles, evocative photographs, and interviews with the directors of northern soul-themed films. This anthology is the first to provide a wide variety of perspectives on the history and contemporary nature of the scene, and creates a forum for vibrant dialogue and debate amongst academic researchers, students and those immersed in the scene. Representations of the scene from different media, and different historical locations, are juxtaposed to construct a rich and diverse statement about the music, people, places and practices that constitute the northern soul scene in the UK and beyond.
• Histories of popular music, their traditions and cultural, social, economic and technical factors
• Industries and institutions; production, new technology, and the entertainment media
• Musical form, meaning and representation
• Audiences and consumption
Students' learning is consolidated through a set of insightful case studies, engaging activities and helpful suggestions for further reading. Studying Popular Music Culture is therefore an essential companion for undergraduate students of popular music culture and media, cultural or communication studies.
"
The text is pedagogically rich and covers a wide range of topics from the history of media right through to coverage of new media. The text interweaves theory, practice, and professional issues throughout, and will engage the reader fully with the principal issues, challenges and paradigms in the discipline. Through a breadth of reference and support resources, students will activley grapple with a variety of media at both a practical and intellectual level. Students will emerge with a broad range of perspectives, a strong conceptual sense of the area and a firm foundation to take a critical approach to their studies at higher levels.
Media Studies: texts, production and context will be essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, cultural studies, communication studies, film studies, the sociology of the media, popular culture and other related subjects.
Book Chapters by Tim Wall
The analysis is both a retrieval of some rather obvious parts of the story of the scene that have been played down, and an account of how and why this happened. In investigating the gendered retelling of the scene’s forty-five-year history, the analysis considers the silence of historic female experience, and how this plays out in the current multigenerational scene. By interrogating the founding documents of northern soul from early 1970s Blues & Soul magazine, we explore how the DIY-culture and economic processes of the scene actually worked. By examining the origins of a scene that functions today through widely dissipated night-time venue promotions, record dealing, and small-scale traditional and social media, an alternative picture emerges.
This chapter builds upon the extensive research of the scene by the authors, threading together questions of popular music history, mediation and cultural engagement. The analysis asks searching questions for scene participants, popular music studies academics and those who produce and recirculate stories of our cultural past. We seek to demonstrate how attention to questions of gender and generation reveal important aspects of the coding and interpretation of popular music culture, and encourage a more systematic approach to the evidence that specialist music magazines have for historians of popular music culture. Fundamentally, it poses the question ‘why are some aspects of a culture’s past relegated to fleeting moments in a scene when they were there in plain sight all the time?’.
We argue that a sense of origin is central to the way contemporary participants understand the scene and their own place within it by examining two aspects of these myths. Firstly, we explore those stories about the development of the term ‘northern soul’ and the northerness of the scene. And, secondly, we interrogate the way younger scene participants relate to these myths as a way of locating themselves within a scene dominated by participants who claim status as a scene originator from the 1970s.
At the same time we argue that popular music academics who study the northern soul scene have too often uncritically reproduce these myths as facts. We raise questions about the way that what we term insider popular music academics can sometimes assume the very things they should be analysing and outsider academics often fail to understand the significance and meaning of insider practice.
Through a political economic and cultural analysis of these local jazz scenes we contrast the way that public sector, commercial and collective organisations relate to venues to create performance opportunities, sustain production cultures and negotiate their relationships with the music industries. Based on an analysis of a wide range of venues in Birmingham, and a series of interviews with jazz musicians and promoters, this research finds that the ways that these musicians engage with jazz’s past in the present, the semiotic use of collective organisation, and the relationship of jazz collectives to educational programmes in these locales are all important in understanding contemporary collective live jazz practice.
This co-produced book brings together newly commissioned essays together with pivotal earlier articles that have defined the field so far. These chapters are interspersed with key journalistic articles, evocative photographs, and interviews with the directors of northern soul-themed films. This anthology is the first to provide a wide variety of perspectives on the history and contemporary nature of the scene, and creates a forum for vibrant dialogue and debate amongst academic researchers, students and those immersed in the scene. Representations of the scene from different media, and different historical locations, are juxtaposed to construct a rich and diverse statement about the music, people, places and practices that constitute the northern soul scene in the UK and beyond.
• Histories of popular music, their traditions and cultural, social, economic and technical factors
• Industries and institutions; production, new technology, and the entertainment media
• Musical form, meaning and representation
• Audiences and consumption
Students' learning is consolidated through a set of insightful case studies, engaging activities and helpful suggestions for further reading. Studying Popular Music Culture is therefore an essential companion for undergraduate students of popular music culture and media, cultural or communication studies.
"
The text is pedagogically rich and covers a wide range of topics from the history of media right through to coverage of new media. The text interweaves theory, practice, and professional issues throughout, and will engage the reader fully with the principal issues, challenges and paradigms in the discipline. Through a breadth of reference and support resources, students will activley grapple with a variety of media at both a practical and intellectual level. Students will emerge with a broad range of perspectives, a strong conceptual sense of the area and a firm foundation to take a critical approach to their studies at higher levels.
Media Studies: texts, production and context will be essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, cultural studies, communication studies, film studies, the sociology of the media, popular culture and other related subjects.
The analysis is both a retrieval of some rather obvious parts of the story of the scene that have been played down, and an account of how and why this happened. In investigating the gendered retelling of the scene’s forty-five-year history, the analysis considers the silence of historic female experience, and how this plays out in the current multigenerational scene. By interrogating the founding documents of northern soul from early 1970s Blues & Soul magazine, we explore how the DIY-culture and economic processes of the scene actually worked. By examining the origins of a scene that functions today through widely dissipated night-time venue promotions, record dealing, and small-scale traditional and social media, an alternative picture emerges.
This chapter builds upon the extensive research of the scene by the authors, threading together questions of popular music history, mediation and cultural engagement. The analysis asks searching questions for scene participants, popular music studies academics and those who produce and recirculate stories of our cultural past. We seek to demonstrate how attention to questions of gender and generation reveal important aspects of the coding and interpretation of popular music culture, and encourage a more systematic approach to the evidence that specialist music magazines have for historians of popular music culture. Fundamentally, it poses the question ‘why are some aspects of a culture’s past relegated to fleeting moments in a scene when they were there in plain sight all the time?’.
We argue that a sense of origin is central to the way contemporary participants understand the scene and their own place within it by examining two aspects of these myths. Firstly, we explore those stories about the development of the term ‘northern soul’ and the northerness of the scene. And, secondly, we interrogate the way younger scene participants relate to these myths as a way of locating themselves within a scene dominated by participants who claim status as a scene originator from the 1970s.
At the same time we argue that popular music academics who study the northern soul scene have too often uncritically reproduce these myths as facts. We raise questions about the way that what we term insider popular music academics can sometimes assume the very things they should be analysing and outsider academics often fail to understand the significance and meaning of insider practice.
Through a political economic and cultural analysis of these local jazz scenes we contrast the way that public sector, commercial and collective organisations relate to venues to create performance opportunities, sustain production cultures and negotiate their relationships with the music industries. Based on an analysis of a wide range of venues in Birmingham, and a series of interviews with jazz musicians and promoters, this research finds that the ways that these musicians engage with jazz’s past in the present, the semiotic use of collective organisation, and the relationship of jazz collectives to educational programmes in these locales are all important in understanding contemporary collective live jazz practice.
The research builds upon extensive archive and analytical work, including contemporary periodicals, BBC broadcasts and written documents, and commercially-released recordings. It uses a theoretical frame of the organic intellectual to understand where and how Carr positioned jazz and jazz musicians, and the discursive resources he called upon. While Carr has, in recent years, been celebrated in histories of British jazz as an innovating jazz musician, his role as a thought-leader and activist is less well explored.
The presentation uses examples of his recorded and broadcast music, his journalism and his role in attempts to influence BBC programming policy and open up new opportunities for popular music musicians, to establish the ideas and perspectives Carr developed and institutionalised in Britain’s major cultural organisations. It detailed an exciting, but contradictory moment in which new forms of cultural artifact – including festivals, the LP and BBC programming – responded to and organised new listeners and formed new ways to listen to and identify with British music.
Focusing on the ways in which the BBC and British jazz gendered core practices with which jazz was associated – dancing, singing and playing – we can open up the often-hidden assumptions of manliness, effeminacy, and femininity that playout in the decisions about who should broadcast and how and what they should broadcast. Talking explicitly about gender in the jazz output of the BBC, is primarily about the way we deal with absence. Stephen Barnard (1989) argues that jazz was a ‘problematic music’ for the BBC during its history, and in many ways the problematic nature related to issues of intersectionality between conceptions of gender and nationality, ethnicity and class.
The presentation draws upon extensive research in the BBC Written Archive, contemporary sources and, when available, recordings of the types of music that the BBC broadcast. The case studies cover the late night relays of jazz from London West End hotels in the 1920s to the British nations up to the live broadcast of Duke Ellington’s Orchestra from the BBC studios in 1933.
This research reveals a complex, and often contradictory attempt to understand and present the racial politics of what Barnard has called “a problematic music” within the monopoly broadcaster for the nations of the UK.
Accordingly, this paper explores Davis’ own attempts to define his own agency in his recordings, his self-identity through notions of cool and African American masculinity, and the ideas of leadership and collaboration that pervade these debates. In doing so, I plot out the discursive plains, or maps of meaning, which contributors draw on as repertoires to stake their claims. This enables a far richer discussion of the role of Warner records as a company, Tommy LiPuma as exec producer and Marcus Miller as collaborating music-maker/producer in the production and meaning of Tutu.
By focusing on diverse forms of film, and depictions of British reggae culture during its 1970s heyday, we explore the music of this period, the vibrant culture in which it developed and the way it has been mediated for a broad British and international audience. We argue that reggae has become a significant part of British music cultural identity which owes a substantial debt to Jamaican culture, but also to a notably British life. The paper shows how different film makers have presented the stories, artists and music of this important strand of British life, and the way the programmes exists as important art works in their own life. Finally, we ask questions about the value of these films as primary and secondary documents of British reggae culture.
The report was submitted to the then BBC Jazz Committee, specifically focused on the BBC radio broadcasts of jazz programming in the early 1970s; a period in which, it is often argued, jazz ‘lost its way and its audience.’
In exploring our engagement with varied archived materials as researchers, and the British post-war listener’s engagement
with broadcast jazz that is illuminated by these materials, we can start to address
how we can understand the mediation of a mediation of a mediation. What emerges is an unstable sense of the British jazz listener, the conflicted notion of jazz as a ‘problematic music’ for BBC staff, and of the struggle British musicians had to make their music relevant for their listeners and for themselves. It is during this time that jazz is seen by BBC personnel as a specialist music that requires specialist programmes and presenters,
and yet struggles to find a home in the new broadcast services established at this time.
To do so, I follow Berger, but I paraphrase his core questions about the visual arts to become core questions about jazz: how is jazz of the past interpreted through jazz criticism? How might we recontextualise and rethink these interpretations with attention to the documents of jazz’s past?; and how would our understanding be reconfigured if juxtapose jazz as ‘high art’ with its circulation in popular culture, in order to rethink both? In doing so, I want to take Dyer’s own interpretation of Berger to task, welcoming Dyer’s “imaginative criticism” but pushing past the essentialising of jazz found in But Beautiful, and reframing the argument that good photographs depict “what has just been said, and what is about to be said …” (original emphasis). To achieve this goal, I set out the relationship between the object of interest (jazz) and its documents, I discuss the mythologising narratives that have (over) determined our documenting practices and I explore how the visual can be understood as representation and evidence of a culture that is primarily built around sound.
This paper explores the relationship between the BBC’s jazz programming and this new European music during a crucial decade. At the start of the period Britain had grabbed a cultural leadership in popular culture, jazz (it was argued) had found its own voice and the BBC was undertaking a thorough rethink of its cultural role. By the end of the phase commercial radio had been established in Britain and rock music dominated the tastes of a generation who had previously been the main audience for jazz. And somewhere in there programme makers were struggling with the idea that they possibly needed to respond to a new pan-European jazz music.
Using commercial recordings by the Payne band, the paper analyses jazz and jazz culture are signified within this music, and what it meant in British society of the time. Payne’s own very English singing style, the highly rehearsed band of impressive professional musicians, and a repertoire from ‘I Love the College Girls’, ‘The Girl Friend’, and most wonderfully ‘Since Tommy Atkins Taught The Chinese How To Charleston’, provide a rich picture of jazz’s place in Europe at this time.
Such a study highlights the institutionalising processes of the BBC, the importance of the visual and written word for audio media, and the journey that jazz was taking in the 1920s.
Since its inception in 1972, the licensed commercial radio sector has steered a line between the more uncomfortable engagement of the BBC and substantial commitment to reggae and associated musics in the unlicensed, or pirate radio, sector. Local radio has tended to treat reggae programming with more enthusiasm, and BBC stations in London in particular provided informed space for specialist reggae programmes. It was the incremental stations of the 1990s that gave more airtime to reggae and dancehall forms, and I can offer interesting insights into the perspectives of radio managers, programmers and DJs from this period to inform the debates.
As a former radio presenter with a specialist reggae programme, and now a radio and popular music studies academic, I offer a distinctive contribution to the conference’s discussions.
I present practical examples of how we can test the view that the BBC attitude to jazz at this time was “haughty”, “niggardly” and “aloof” (Godbolt). Using the BBC written archive, the BBC’s Genome Radio Times database, biographies and commercially-available recorded music, as well as splintered examples of broadcasts, I set out to understand how the BBC actually treated jazz. I focus on Jack Payne’s 1926 to 1932 broadcasts, lampooned by jazz fans as a “bowing, beaming, frock-coated and baton-waiving leader … (whom) allowed their jazz-minded sidemen the occasional chorus’.
I argue that a speculative, discursive historiography allows us to reassess how radio dance band music leaders like Payne used jazz as a material for a new musical hybrid. This provides new insights into the notion of jazz in Britain of the time, how it sat within major cultural institutions like the BBC, and how we can effectively use documents of jazz’s past to explore its historical specificity.
The paper explores the way that the dominance of a particular public service ideal is negotiated with the increasing influence of commercial orders of discourse, and the active marginalization of concepts of community broadcasting, to form an unevenly successful, but very interesting, relationship between broadcaster and audience.
The corporation’s main strategy was to try and serve both groups within the limited broadcast hours available while at the same time striving to keep a coherent sense of jazz as an important music in British cultural life. The attempt to negotiate between sometimes dramatically opposed discourses of jazz is apparent in the way that programmes were conceived and scheduled, music was selected for broadcast and the shows were presented.
Drawing on an extensive exploration of BBC jazz broadcasts and institutional documentation, the paper presents a range of programmes and individual shows that bring to the fore how corporation staff conceived and responded to these different taste groups, their sometimes polarised positions and the way this disrupted what had become a settled place for jazz in the BBC schedules. The very particular British take on this divide and the way an important cultural institution like the BBC organises its self in relationship to often hostile music listeners offers an intriguing case study of the mediation of jazz.
As a member of The Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR) at Birmingham City University I am inviting applications from students whose research interests include:
Popular Music Culture
Jazz Studies
Radio Studies
We also welcome students interested in:
Media and Cultural History
Creative Industries, Cultural Policy and Cultural Work
Songwriting
Sexuality, Gender, the cultural construction of masculinity
Screen Melodrama
Pornography studies
Cult Media fandom and entrepreneurship
Film and television audiences
Comedy
Innovative research methodologies
Austerity and the media
Community Media, Hyperlocal Media and Media Activism
Media for Social Change, Media in the Arab Region
Please send initial expressions of interest and research proposals to john.mercer@bcu.ac.uk before Friday 12th December 2014. The deadline for completed applications is Wednesday 14th January 2015 at 12 noon. You can find out more about supervision at http://www.bcu.ac.uk/research/midlands3cities/media. For full details of eligibility, funding and research supervision areas, please visit www.midlands3cities.ac.uk or contact enquiries@midlands3cities.ac.uk .