Identities

Identities

1. Identity as a process (Stuart Hall)

   • Different ways of identifying with yourself
   • Physical boundaries form your identity
   • National, linguistic and racial boundaries
   • 'Identities are...the forms in which we are obliged to act' (Hall, 1995)
   • 'We become who we are...through a whole series of responses to people and images, identifying with some, distinguishing ourselves from others' (Street)

2. Music: aid of self-identification

   • Music can align people with similar ideologies. Strong way of associating commonality of politics, sexuality etc.
   • A whole audience singing same message can be very politically powerful
   • Place a musical idea within a certain musical genre to short cut processes e.g. angry Mcdonalds lyrics to punk
   • When Morrissey for example writes lyrics, he is trying to express emotion that young people can associate with
   • One can assume an identity to express the identity of a particular song
   • When one sings with the personal pronoun 'I', one assumes they can identify with that lyric

3. Authenticity (Allan Moore)

   • First person:authenticity of expression
     • Originator's utterance represents an attempt to communicate in an umediated form with an audience
     • Example: Paul Weller 'The Changing Man' (1995) sense of rawness, integrity, immediacy and raginess in voice, live recording setting
   • Second person: authenticity of experience
     • Performer is 'telling like it is' for the audience; 'when a performer succeeds in conveying the impression to listeners that their experience of life is being validated'
     • Example: 'promenade' U2
   • Third person: authenticity of execution
     • When the 'performer succeeds in conveying the impression of accurately representing the presence of another'
     • Example: Robert Johnson 'Cross Road Blues': CLapton conveys 'this is what it is like to be me' through 'this is what it is like to be Johnson'

4. Audience participation

   • singing along to something is a statement of belonging
   • Example: Tom Robinson, 'Glad to be Gay'
     • Thatcher's era: If audience had sung along, they would be aligning themselves with a particular identity
     • Lyrics invite audience to sing along and support the minority which shows the power of a group sing along
   • Much of the time, audience don't know the real message of a song. Performer can spread message without audience knowing meaning
     • Example: U2 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For' (1987): Lyrics actually have a christian message
     • One of the dangers of music is that you can decontexualise it

5. Reading: Music and Identity (Stuart Frith, 1997)

   • 'Who is expressing what when say Ella Fitzgerald sings Cole Porter?'
   • 'The issue is not how a particular piece of music or a performance reflects the people, but how it produces them, how it creates and constructs an experience'
   • 'Music seems to be a key to identity because it offers, so intensely, a sense of both self and others, of the subjective in the collective'
   • '... Music...gives us a way of being in the world, a way of making sense of it'
   • Popular music is popular...because it creates our understanding of what 'popularity' is
   • Identity comes from the outside not the inside; it is something we...try on, not something we reveal or discover