Abstracts and Biographies

Christopher Ariza is a PhD candidate in Music Theory Composition at New York University GSAS. In addition to the composition of a wide variety of concert music, recent work has focused on computer music and algorithmic composition. This research has been delivered at national and international conferences, and is made available through the open-source, cross-platform software tool athenaCL. His music, software, and papers are distributed via www.flexatone.net.

Kathy Biddick is a second year Masters student studying Music Theory at Florida State University where she teaches undergraduate ear training and sight singing.  A child of the eighties and a native of New Jersey, she is thrilled to be back up north participating in ëThat Eighties Conferenceí.

Whereís the Beat?: Metrical Ambiguity in the Introductions of New Wave Pop Songs of the 1980s

Metrical ambiguity in Western art music has been the subject of much recent work, including Hasty (1997), Rothstein (1989), and Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983). In the realm of popular music, John Bracket examined rhythmic and metric procedures in the music of Led Zeppelin in his 2001 Society for Music Theory paper. Mark Butler (Music Theory Online 7/6, 2001) investigated the occurrence of metrical shift in electronic dance music. While these studies are significant, little has been explored regarding the metrical uncertainty in popular music of the 1980s.

New Wave music, a reaction to the punk rock of the late 1970s, preserved the bright energy and nerve of punk music while experimenting with synthesizers. The result was pop music with a digitized edge. Perhaps as a response to the thumping grooves of disco and straight four rhythms of rock, New Wave music of the 1980s especially characterized itself through metrical dissonance. New Wave songs, which are well known for their infectious, danceable beats, have largely been overlooked for serious metrical study possibly because of their quirky, synthesized nature. The introductions of several of these songs, however, exhibit ambiguous meter and invite thoughtful scrutiny. In this paper, I will use contrasting interpretations of metrical accents to examine the perceived metrical ambiguities in the introductions of New Wave songs including ìSee Youî by Depeche Mode, "Wake Up" by XTC, and "Since Youíre Gone" by The Cars.

Durrell Bowman is a visiting instructor in music at the University of Alberta, where he teaches cultural musicology (popular music and film music) and music theory.  His dissertation in musicology at UCLA is entitled "Permanent Change:  Rush and the Cultural Articulation of Ideology and Genre in Rock Music."  See also http://durrellbowman.com.

Textu(r)al Undercoding and the Music of the Rock Band Rush:  String Quartets, Death Metal, Trip-Hop, and other Tributes

This paper explores a pair of songs by the progressive/hard rock trio Rush:  "The Spirit of Radio" (Permanent Waves, 1980) and "Tom Sawyer" (Moving Pictures, 1981).  In the early 1980s, Rush began to moderate its mid- to late-1970s progressive hard rock style to account for the emerging post-punk/post-progressive era.  Much later, from 1992 to 2002, both songs then appeared within an extremely wide field of tribute activities, including:

* the Barenaked Ladies' references to "Tom Sawyer" and "The Spirit of Radio" in their pop/rock song "Grade 9" (Gordon, 1992)
* Catherine Wheel's alternative rock version of "The Spirit of Radio" (ca 1994)
* Rachel Barton's live classical string trio version of "The Spirit of Radio" (Storming the Citadel, 1997-98)
* DJ Z-Trip's trip-hop remix of "Tom Sawyer" (soundtrack of Small Soldiers, 1998)
* Premonition's heavy metal version of "The Spirit of Radio" (Red Star: Tribute to Rush, 1999)
* Disarray's death metal version of "Tom Sawyer" (Red Star: Tribute to Rush, 1999)
* Deadsy's alternative/industrial version of "Tom Sawyer" (Commencement, 2002)
* classical string versions of "The Spirit of Radio" and "Tom Sawyer" (and ten other Rush songs, Exit . . . Stage Right: The String Quartet Tribute to Rush, 2002)

The existence of such diverse translations of Rush's music suggests that the band's genre/stylistic undercoding and its status as "musicians' musicians" influenced much more widely than previously believed.  Moreover, the classical translations demonstrate an inversion of normative expectations concerning progressive rock.  Unlike certain rock musicians occasionally creating fusions of classical elements with rock (from the Beatles and Procol Harum in the late-1960s/early-1970s to Metallica in the late-1990s), the string versions of Rush songs demonstrate that even certain classical musicians have found it necessary to come to terms with certain 1980s' rock music.

Kevin John Bozelka is in the Graduate Program in Art History and Communications at McGill University. His film and popular music criticism has appeared in the Boston Phoenix, the Chicago Reader, CMJ-New Music Monthly, Detour, MTV.com and Neumu.net.

Getting Beyond: Spin Magazine in the Late 1980s

For the November 16th, 1989 issue of Rolling Stone, fourteen of the magazineís editors contributed to an article assessing "The 100 Best Albums of the Eighties." The introductory essay, printed with no byline but later revealed to be the work of longtime Rolling Stone scribe David Fricke, began thusly: "This has been the first rock & roll decade without a revolution, or true revolutionaries, to call its own." Frickeís brief, hurtful declaration apotheosized not just the perpetuation of Rolling Stoneís 1960s countercultural rhetoric into subsequent decades but the nervous struggle to maintain that hegemony in the field of 1980s cultural production. This paper examines the position of Spin magazine within this field, focusing on the years between its first publication in 1985 and the rise of Alternative around 1991. In particular, it situates the criticism of Spin "Singles" columnist John Leland as a self-conscious break with the Rolling Stone hegemony. In pieces on Paula Abdul, Debbie Gibson and the "New Disco" (Madonna, Jody Watley, ExposÈ), Leland challenged dominant ideas about authorship and musical digitization. But always this relational discourse was a transformed expression of social relations, in this instance, between 1960 countercultural hegemony and Generation X, between a generation whose ideals became upheld as common sense and a generation trying to seize ownership of their unique cultural moment.

Ryan Dorin was born and raised in Santa Monica, California, where he began piano lessons at a young age. He received his BA in Music Piano and Composition from UCLA, and is currently completing his PhD in Music Composition and Theory at NYU. Lately Ryan has been composing electronic musical animations and his most recent video, 'Globeland' was co-created with NYU professor Elizabeth Hoffman and was premiered at the Sound Unseen festival in Minneapolis last fall. His dissertation will discuss aspects of surrealism in music.

His video project is called "The 1980s: A Collage Barrage".

Clay Drinko is currently an MA student in the Performance Studies Department at NYU's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  Clay graduated from the College of Wooster in 2002 as a Theatre Major  with a performance focus; he threw in an English Minor just because he could.  After graduating from NYU this May, Clay plans on doing everything in his power to not get a PhD.  He will stay in New York to pursue acting, writing, comedy, and the age-old art of becoming a celebrity "persona."  Perhaps you'll spot Clay at an 80s-influenced dance club in his trusty platforms "researching the scene."

Clash: Ephemeral Gender Politics of Eighties-Influenced Club Spaces in New York

A club scene has been emerging and developing in Williamsburg for a few years that combines eighties, electronica, hip-hop, and punk rock sounds to create an "electroclash" subculture.  Luxx is the home of this emergent scene, and currently its popularity and cultural influence is gaining momentum.  Felix da Housecat, Avenue D, and W.I.T. are popular names with electroclash with Peaches being one of the first break-out successes.  But at this very moment electroclashís eighties fusion reflects more than just a passing fad or nostalgia.  Housed within the electroclash subculture is also a nostalgia for the gendered freedom and decadence of the pre-Guiliani New York.  Electroclash fuses musical genres, theatrics, and fashion to create an ephemeral sphere of recreational activism. Electroclash has hit the mainstream to some extent as well.  Virgin Records sells Eighties Versus Electroclash which is a compilation of eighties artists as well as electroclash artists who have riffed off their eighties predecessors.  The title Eighties Versus Electroclash sets up an interesting model for how to view the electroclash movement politically as well.  What are the recycled or revamped gender politics that emerge from electroclashís heavy eighties influence, and how do club spaces such as Area 10009 and Luxx promote these gender politics?

I will analyze these electroclash club scenes through an interdisciplinary performance studies lens that borrows heavily from queer and feminist theory.  My main interest is in the gender performances that in many ways serve as a political backlash to the current climate of New York City.  I will use the eighties as a model from which to compare the current eighties explosion.  Fashion, music, style, theatre, and art are fused together in what I will argue are very important political spaces.

Amy Frishkey is a doctoral student in ethnomusicology at UCLA.  Her interests include musics and cultures of the Black Atlantic, identity, performativity, temporality, and technoculture.  Her proposed dissertation will look at the intersection between female singing and modernity, drawing upon examples from electronic dance music, world music, and choir culture in North American universities.  

Intimacy, Transcendence, and Iconicity in the Man-Machine of 1980s Synth Pop   

For Young Urban Professionals ("Yuppies") in North America, the early 1980s was a period of better living through downsizing, as microelectronic technologies delivered the capabilities of computing, movie viewing, video gaming, and electronic sound production from sacred institutional confines into home offices and living rooms.  The intimacy that this trend engendered in interactions between humans and machines in everyday life ìde-otheredî the latter to an unprecedented degree. Popular culture became a primary site for the expression of both collective anxieties over and inquisitive explorations into the "mechanomorphizing" of human beings.  In the realm of popular music, such explorations engaged the synthesizer, catapulted to prominence by the commercialization of New Wave, through the persona of the "man-machine" cyborg manipulating its keys. 

Elaine Graham (2002) and Donna Haraway (1991) have interrogated the multiple desires for "freedom" harbored in the cyborg construction of the post-Descartes Western cultural imaginary.  On one hand, cyborgs represent the transcendence of such givens as "bodies, death, and finitude" through reasonÖthe ultimate end of the Enlightenment project. In turn, cyborgs potentially subvert the division between Self and Other "that serve[s] to privilege the rational male subject," serving as a model for reconfigured social identities.  Theodore Cateforis (2000) leans toward the latter premise in his reading of the androgynous appearance of the cyborg persona affected by early synth pop icons ñ such as Gary Numan, Kraftwerk, and the British "New Romantic" bands ñ as representing the gendered corollary of a constructed equilibrium between human and machine.  In an effort to extend and complicate this interpretation, my paper will posit that: a) as in heavy metal, the subsumation of the "feminine" into semiotic code renders this androgyny a form of jouissance within the ìmasculineî universal of Western modernity; and b) subsequent to the commercialization of New Wave, the synth-playing cyborg became an unambiguous marker of the "technological sublime" in its use as a postmodern marker of 80s affinity during the past 20 years.  I will examine this usage in the music and performances of Prince with his former band, the Revolution, and in present-day 80s retro bands. 

Bernd Gottinger

"Learning the language of making modern records is learning the language of talking about component parts and atmospheres of other people's records" write The Timelords in their 1988 edition of The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way (UK:KLF Publications, 1988). At the same time, learning to create the recorded sound of modern recordings has become a learning of the art of emulation. Through this practice, certain techniques and pieces of technology - now called vintage gear - have attained a legendary status amongst the industry for their ability to conserve and recreate the sound that made previous hit records so memorable.

Despite this idea of conservatism, however, history has also shown that the advancements in sound recording technology imprint distinct sound qualities on an entire generation of pop music recordings. In the 1980s most hit records were produced with what was then considered an utterly novel concept: the fully-automated mixing console. The B and E Series mixing consoles made by Solid State Logic throughout the late 70s and 80s dominated the field and imposed a distinct quality on the recorded sound of the 80s. This paper investigates recording and mixing techniques that are specific to this equipment, to the way it functions and the idiosyncrasies of its human user interface. The presentation will contain demonstrations and specific recorded examples.

Monica Hairston taught horn and music history at Morris Brown College in Atlanta before moving to New York. She is currently a graduate student in the Doctoral Program of Ethnomusicology at New York University where she is exploring feminist approaches to rethinking the Jazz Tradition. Her areas of special interest include jazz, popular music, identity, gender, and cultural theory.

Rhythm Nation: Janet Jackson Gets Down on the One

Commercial success, extreme danceability, and a topical focus on artistic autonomy and agency are reasons 1984's Control is often cited as the definitive album in Janet Jackson's 21-year long career as a solo artist. In support of the argument that Rhythm Nation 1814 should hold the title, this paper will offer a close reading of the 1989 release within two interconnected contexts: first, the trajectory of her solo career as she progresses from name-brand fluff to pop icon and second, within a tradition of black musical activism. The latter analyses will incorporate a discussion of the album in general but will focus on the title track as an important example within a tradition of songs that delineate what Mark Anthony Neal calls "black nationalist urban utopias." Early and prominent amongst this tradition is Parliament-Funkadelic's 1978 hit "One Nation Under a Groove." Through song and video analysis and with reference to the critical race theory of Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall among others, I will compare and contrast these two singles in terms of aesthetic priorities and political message to illustrate ways in which Jackson's multi-cultural Rhythm Nation both continues and transcends the political strategies of P-Funk's "chocolate cities."

Fred Maus

Ph.D. in music theory, Princeton University. M.Litt. in Philosophy, Oxford University. Research interests: theory and analysis, gender and sexuality, popular music, aesthetics, dramatic and narrative aspects of instrumental music. Recent publications include "Narrative, Drama, and Emotion in Instrumental Music," in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55/3 (1997); "Concepts of Musical Unity," in Cook and Everist, Rethinking Music (1999); "Musical Performance as Analytical Communication," in Gaskell and Kemal, Performance and Authenticity in the Arts (1999); "Criticism: General Introduction" and "Narratology, narrativity," in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians; "Learning from 'Occasional' Writing," in repercussions 6/2 (2001); "Glamour and Evasion: The Fabulous Ambivalence of the Pet Shop Boys," in Popular Music 20/3 (2001). Forthcoming: "Sexual and Musical Categories"; "The Disciplined Subject of Musical Analysis." Visiting Fellow in Music and Popular Music, University of Liverpool, 2002. AMS Council, 1997-2000. Secretary of Program Committee, Feminist Theory and Music 5 (London, 1999). Co-director, and co-chair of program committee, Feminist Theory and Music 4 (Charlottesville, 1997). Program Committee, AMS, 1997. Program Committee, SMT, 1995. Founding member of editorial board, Women and Music, 1994-, and reviews editor, 1997-. Member-at-large, Executive Board of SMT, 1994-97. NEH Fellowship, 1992-93.

"Three Songs by R.E.M." discusses R.E.M.'s music in relation to several issues: the critical reception of R.E.M., in particular critics' ways of relating the band to older rock and folk traditions; the songs' mysterious lyrics; and the notoriously 'enigmatic' qualities of vocalist and lyricist Michael Stipe. Maus will discuss "Laughing," from R.E.M.'s first album Murmur; "World Leader Pretend," from Green, their first album on a major label; and "New Test Leper," from New Adventures in Hi-Fi.

Thomas Nesbit is a graduate student in the Department of Religious and Theological Studies at Boston University, where he is pursuing his doctorate in "Religion and Literature."  Although primarily a scholar of modern American fiction and poetry, he has recently begun to pursue his interests in digital art and electronic music.  Mr. Nesbit is currently writing his dissertation on American writers Hart Crane and Henry Miller.

Black Futurism in 1980s Electro

Early 1980s Electro was the apotheosis of Black Futurism, a tendency in black artistic expression to look towards the future as a time of emancipation.  Electro music is remarkably different than Black Futurist precursors of the 1970s, such as George Clintonís Parliament/Funkadelic, because it does not have a black supremacy undercurrent. Instead, the new wave of artists from New York and Miami looked to the future as a time of racial equality and political freedom for everyone.  Electro musicians embraced new technologies to create a purely electronic music in which traditional instruments, associated with African and American folk traditions, were not involved.  Their lyrics celebrated the meltdown of nations and envisioned a world united under music.  Sounding like dispassionate robots, they transformed their own voices with vocoders to create a universal accent for all peoples.   By emulating cyborgs in their stage dress and depicting them in graffiti, Electro artists welcomed an age where silver plating would eradicate prejudice based upon skin color.  Although the utopian vision of Electro may seem like escapism from the plight of many black Americans, most Electro artists were deeply concerned with building up their communities.  Influenced by the Black Muslim movement, some musicians were united under Afrika Bambaataaís "Zulu Nation," which promoted community activism and presented artistic expression as an alternative to street life.  While many stage names acknowledged African roots and numerous songs rekindled images of Egyptís empire, Electro ultimately promoted the idea that blacks can create a utopian environment not only for themselves but for everyone.  In this paper, I will flesh out how Electro is the apex of Black Futurism through examining the work of Afrika Bambaataa, The Egyptian Lover, Newcleus, and Twilight 22.  This paper will present an important, though often overlooked, genre of 80s music while providing a place to reflect upon the current electro revival.

Jason Oakes

Stephan Pennington arrived at UCLA with an undergraduate degree in Electronic Music Composition and a banjo.  He is now a second year Musicology graduate student.  His research interests include Historical Popular Music, German Popular Music, Electronic Art Music, Music and Politics and Music, Gender and Sexuality.

Fear of the Police State: Cold War Politics, Dystopias and New Wave Music

The standard narrative of New Wave is that it emerged as the detoothed, commercial version of punk music.  Music journalist Stephen Thomas Erlewine in his article "New Wave" for the on line All Music Guide describes New Wave as "humorous, quirky and, most of all, not dangerous. It had a left-of-center sensibility, but none of the revolutionary danger, of punk rock."  The image of New Wave as radio and MTV friendly apolitical music misrepresents a genre that was just as political as punk, but in a different way.  New Wave dealt with many different themes, from fear of technology and computers to xenophobia, from anxiety over nuclear war to concern over the economic greed of the early 80's.  New Wave embodied a deceptively lighthearted nonpolitical music that was the reactionary cry of a generation convinced that there would be no future.  This paper will explore one particular theme, the fear of an approaching Orwellian police state.  The fear of 1984 had different resonances within the early 1980's cultural contexts of the three big New Wave music-producing countries, England, the United States and Germany.  Accordingly, the paper will explore the issues, construction and communication of this fear in English Hazel O'Connor's "Big Brother," American Oingo Boingo's "Wake Up (It's 1984)," and German Extrabreit's "Polizisten."  Through this process New Wave, rather than safe, nonpolitical music, will hopefully begin to be seen as the political manifestation of an ultimately nihilistic, frustrated, and hopeless moment for youth culture.

Michael Birenbaum Quintero (A.A. Simon's Rock College of Bard 1994, B.A. Eugene Lang College at The New School for Social Research) is a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology at New York University. His current research deals with race and government cultural policy in the popular and traditional black musics of Colombia's Caribbean and Pacific coasts.

Christian Wikane currently resides in Boston, MA where he conducts research projects at Northeastern University relating to the field of Media, Culture, and Society. Recent papers include, "'Space Children' & 'Gypsy Moths': The Significance of Labelle to the Gay Community," "Batman & Robin: A Gotham Marriage," and "Empathetic Since Day One: Reflections on Male Feminism."

"Transformation": Being Black & Female in Rock's White World

This paper aims to analyze the social and industry barriers confronting black female singers associated with soul, R&B, and disco genres who, in the 1980s, embarked on an aesthetic shift to the rock music genre. I will examine the music, images, and performative identities of a coterie of black female artists -- primarily Grace Jones, Nona Hendryx, Donna Summer, and Tina Turner -- who contradicted prevailing industry and audience notions of the black female singer and challenged dominant assumptions about rock music itself. Amidst divergent musical styles and the dawn of the music video revolution in the 1980s, there occurred a profound movement in popular music as women, including Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, Pat Benatar, and Joan Jett joined their male counterparts on the rock airwaves. Although black artists such as Jones, Hendryx, and Summer displayed, what Hendryx referred to in one song title as a "transformation" from disco and R&B to rock music in the '80's, their pursuit of a rock identity met with opposition, confusion, and commercial disappointment due to the rigid parameters inscribed by the music and broadcast industries and by audience expectations of black female singers.

Employing theories of race, gender, and performance, this paper will critically analyze the issues and practices of "cross-over" relating to the 1980s music industry.  More specifically, I will center my research around factors related to Tina Turner's successful 1984 "comeback" and her professional repositioning as a bonafide rock singer. Noting Turner's career as an exception, I will further analyze why success may have eluded other female singers engaged in similar pursuits. Original articles and reviews from Billboard, Rolling Stone, Melody Maker, and Crawdaddy will serve as primary historical sources to assess the critical views on black female artists and to locate them on a 1980s sociocultural barometer. I will focus on specific albums recorded by these artists that exemplify salient uses of rock stylings, including Grace Jones' Warm Leatherette (1980), Donna Summer's The Wanderer (1980), and Tina Turner's Private Dancer (1984)

Sarah Williams lives in Chicago and is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Northwestern University. Her dissertation is currently titled "Representations of sound and music in witchcraft in Northern Europe, ca. 1500 - ca. 1650". She has taught courses at the Northwestern University School of Music for majors and non-majors including Introduction to Music,  The History of Western Music, 80s Music and Mass Media, and Reading Gender in Popular Music II: Men.

"She blinded me with science": Technology, Androgyny and Mass Media in 1980s Music Culture

Within recent years, academics have begun to turn their attention to questions of sexuality, power and identity in popular music and culture. Despite this recent scholarly focus on popular music, there is a lack of serious musicological research on the intersections between mass media, popular music and sexuality, particularly "New Wave" music of the 1980s. The works of popular music scholars such as Susan McClary, Robert Walser and Sheila Whiteley tend to focus on sociological issues of identity formation and gender construction. Yet these works overlook the importance of musical styles as well as their interrelationship with the cultural position of popular music, specifically in the 1980s.  In a decade when looking good was equally, if not more important than, sounding good, the music industry grew rife with gender-benders and androgynes exploring the power of Music Television and new synthesized sounds. Other disciplines such as feminist studies, literary criticism, entertainment marketing and communication studies have pondered these trends in popular music; however, they have never united these themes with a scholarly investigation of the music itself and its position among media and culture. 

This study will examine the popular music culture of the 80s through a cross-media and cross-disciplinary lens by utilizing critical texts on feminist theory, visual theory, marketing and economics, as well as popular print and visual media including television, radio, film, album cover art and photography. Focusing on Grace Jones, Annie Lennox and Prince, I will demonstrate how one aspect of 1980s music culture, or the "New Wave" as this music came to be termed, synthesized and disguised not only their vocal timbres but also their sexual identitiesóthat is, technology as a tool toward achieving aural and visual androgyny.

Griffin Woodworth

Big in Japan: Orientalism, Camp, and Cultural Anxiety in Pop Music of the 1980s

The 1980s were a time of enormous social and political anxiety. Reagan's America was moving out from under the Soviet cloud, yet our global hegemony was under threat from the seemingly unstoppable Japanese economy. At home, A.I.D.S. panic was fanning the flames of bigotry and threatening to roll back all of the gains made by the Gay liberation movement.  The U.S. faced anxiety from without and within, the monolithic "red scare" having been replaced by "yellow" and "lavender" scares.  These anxieties met, and were negotiated, in a number of cultural forms, including several hugely popular new-wave pop songs, which display not only Orientalist strategies of containment, but also a double-distancing mechanism by which anxiety over queer sexuality was also mitigated.

I begin my analysis by outlining the economic and political anxieties present in the United States during the 1980s, a decade the increasing strength of Japanese industry threatened to overwhelm Americaís long-standing dominance in high-tech manufacturing. Using Edward Said's formulation of Orientalism, I unpack the discourses that American business journals deployed to contain the threat of Japanese business prowess.  Using the ideas of musical Orientalism developed in the essays of Jonathan Bellman's The Exotic in Western Music, I then engage in close analyses of several popular songs from the period, including the Vapours "Turning Japanese," Alphavilleís "Big in Japan," and David Bowieís "China Girl." Specifically, I use Mary Hunter's concept that deficiency and incoherence mark musical depictions of the oriental other to demonstrate how these songs symbolically construct -- and ultimately defuse -- the oriental "threat." I conclude my paper with a discussion of how the camp elements of these songs act as a double-containment.  By mapping the oriental other onto a campy and effeminized subject, these songs defused not only fears of Japanese economic ascendance, but also anxiety over the A.I.D.S. crisis and the increased visibility of gay and lesbian people in American culture.

Wynn Yamami is currently a Ph.D. candidate at New York University. His dissertation will investigate various representations of the "composer" in American popular culture, ca. 1900 - 1950. He previously organized the NYC graduate student conference, "The Postmodern Inheritance" in 2000.