From Occupy to #Casseroles: Urban Music and Social Protest 2.0

For our final meeting, we will be discussing sonic strategies of social protest following the global Occupy protests. We will be reading this short essay by leading sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne on the unique soundscape of the student protests in Quebéc known as “casseroles” or for the more twitter oriented, “#casseroles.” We will also be reading this article on the anti-nuclear protests in post-Fukushima Japan by ethnomusicologists and theorist Noriko Manabe.

I’ll be uploading the sounds and music associated with Monday’s class by the weekend. Here is a link to the music for Monday. I blame the delay in getting these to you on the difficulty of letting this class come to a close.

Punk, Riot Grrrl, Queercore etc.

For the last full week of classes, we’ll be discussing punk music’s engagements with political movements in the U.S. and England. For Monday, we’ll be reading this essay by Kevin Dunn from an edited collection on Music and Human Rights as well as Simon Frith and John Street’s essay on Rock Against Racism in Rockin’ The Boat. These readings should prove especially resonant for those of you covering a punk-related artist for your final projects. For Thursday, we’ll be discussing Riot Grrrl, third-wave feminism, and queercore. I know I mentioned Elizabeth Keenan‘s work in class today, but I’d like to reiterate that she’s the unique ethnomusicologist who is also at home doing historical work. We’ll be reading Keenan’s article (UPDATED link here) on pop music and third-wave feminism in addition to this article on queercore.

I’ll be posting the listening for next week tomorrow. UPDATE: Here is the music for this week. It was stupidly difficult to pick tracks, and I look forward to this week’s discussion.