Abstracts

The Art of Noise: How the Providence, RI Loft Scene Hears its Godawful Racket

Every year, the incoming classes of RISD and Brown trek up college hill, taking a look out at the post-industrial wasteland that is Providence, RI. Some will find their way to the neighborhood known as Olneyville, where dozens of converted textile mills have become the home of a thriving alternative arts culture, of which "noise rock" has become a defining feature. Bands like Lightning Bolt, Arab on Radar and Black Dice have become the city's cultural emissaries, having ignited passionate reviews from critics worldwide and put the city on the avant-garde music-making map. Yet in Providence, these are just three of several dozen artists recording and performing under the noise moniker. In the loft culture, there is little importance placed on financial reward or critical accolade for the creation of music. The problematic situation of accruing a popular status for making experimental, dissonant and highly sight-specific music is one that challenges veteran artists in this scene while compelling new noise artists to dig deeper in their quest for new noise.

In my paper, I will address how Providence's noise culture defines its creative output and how perceives and interprets outside criticism of this output. With information gathered from Providence based musicians, artists, label owners, radio DJs and fans, I will attempt to create a localized definition of the term noise music and relate this to historical definitions as written by John Cage, Jacques Attali, Luigi Russolo, Douglas Kahn, Michael Nyman and Simon Reynolds. I hope in this paper to be able to create a discursive language for the understanding of the Providence noise scene that moves beyond the body-centric invocations of primitivism that still inform much of mainstream writing on noise rock.

Dancing, democracy and kitsch: Poland’s Disco-Polo

Through the 1990’s, the conservative, highly nationalist dance music genre disco-polo was Poland’s best selling form of underground music. Rejected by major labels, laughed at by Polish intelligentsia, the media, and urban sophisticates, disco-polo music was sold at street fairs and was embraced mostly by rural or suburban Poles who felt disenfranchised by the nation’s post-communist alignment with the West, capitalism and urban cosmopolitanism.

Paradoxically, the music has moved from a distinctly Polish interpretation of disco (as understood by Central Europeans), using synthesized versions of acoustic folk instruments and polka rhythms and melodies, to a more open ‘Euro-house’ sound with slick production values and DJ savvy breaks.  Disco-polo stars are vocalists of an amateur musical background who stress their ordinariness and humility while routinely selling over 400,000 copies of each of their albums, often unaided by traditional music business marketing techniques. Disco-polo’s lyrics range from paraphrased traditional folk songs to love ballads, drinking songs and lyrics celebrating a highly romanticized period of Slavic historical dominance. Polish intellectuals and scholars of Polish history are quick to condemn this apolitical form of popular culture, including the Polish film critic Tadeusz Sobolewski, who wrote in 1996, “Disco-polo occupies the place abandoned by art.”

O Superman: Gender and pop music performance by art-school trained musicians

As Frith and Horne discussed in their Art Into Pop, Art school trained popular musicians have been on the forefront of sonic and visual culture of pop music since the golden age of rock. One particularly rich, and yet unexplored part of these musicians’ influence has been in complicating notions of gender in popular music. From Keith Richards' femininized rock bravado to Brian Eno's transvestite peacock strut, from David Byrne's "big suit man" to “butch lesbian icon” JD Samson’s major label contract as part of Le Tigre, a rich genealogy of critical gender performance has been led by successful art-school trained popular musicians. Likewise, art/pop crossover musicians such as Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson and Winne Greenwood (Tracy + the Plastics) have become part of a genealogy of women’s feminist critique of American pop music, both critical of dominant American masculinity and radical in carving space for a pop avant garde of women musicians.
In my paper I will build from literatures on gender and performance in popular music and the role of gender identity and feminism in American fine art education and business to articulate the historical and contemporary different range of gender roles historically acceptable in American popular music and the art worlds. Through ethnographic research with musicians, audiences, music and public relations industry professionals and through review of traditional popular music history texts, feminist musicological popular music projects, I will build an argument that New York City based art-school trained figures as David Byrne, Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth), Wynne Greenwood and Casey Spooner (Fischerspooner) have used their training in fine art to infuse radical feminist critique into popular music performance through sound, text, image and business practice and that audiences and media professionals