Oh Boy!

by Freya Jarman-Ivens (Editor)

From Muddy Waters to Mick Jagger, Elvis to Freddie Mercury, Jeff Buckley to Justin Timberlake, masculinity in popular music has been an issue explored by performers, critics, and audiences. From the dominance of the blues singer over his "woman" to the sensitive singer/songwriter, popular music artists have adopted various gendered personae in a search for new forms of expression. Sometimes these roles shift as the singer ages, attitudes change, or new challenges on the pop scene arise; other times, the persona hardens into a shell-like mask that the performer struggles to escape. Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music is the first serious study of how forms of masculinity are negotiated, constructed, represented and addressed across a range of popular music texts and practices. Written by a group of internationally recognized popular music scholars―including Sheila Whiteley, Richard Middleton, and Judith Halberstam―these essays study the concept of masculinity in performance and appearance, and how both male and female artists have engaged with notions of masculinity in popular music.

Genres: Music

288 pages, Paperback

First published April 25, 2007

About the author

Freya Jarman-Ivens is a lecturer in music at the University of Liverpool. She received her PhD from the University of Newcastle in 2006, and her thesis explored ways in which identity is fragmented in late twentieth-century popular music, especially through the use of the voice. Her research interests include queer theory and performativity, psychoanalytic theory, and discourses of technology and musical production. Dr. Jarman-Ivens works on a wide range of musical material, including easy listening, alternative rock, and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century opera. Her teaching ranges from popular music analysis to the musical construction of character in the Austro-German operatic canon.

Reviews

[Susan B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book of articles on masculinity and rock written by a wide variety of authors, all of whom are professors of music (except Judith Halberstam who is in English and Feminist Studies). The subject matter ranges from Elvis, to the mosh pit, to emo, to Justin Timberlake, and to Indonesian pop (just to mention a few). My favorites were Freya Jarman-Ivens' "Don't Cry Daddy" on the degeneration of Elvis' virile masculinity in the course of his career and what that might mean for the (in)stability of masculinity more generally, and to assign to my Gender, Women and Rock and Roll class, and Judith Halberstam's "Queer Voices and Musical Genders" which uses Big Mama Thorton (the original singer of "Hound Dog")to queer the butch (masculine) personas of the early women blues singers. Neither of these articles is an easy read, mostly due to unnecessary academic jargon, but they are worth the effort, as taken together they offer a different "founding" or beginning for the history of rock and roll, one that features a less stable view of gender and sex identity, which could in turn provide a very different basis upon which the rest of the story of rock might be told.

[Rafael Munia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not a good book.
It is specially not a good book compared to what it promises to be.
It promises to be a book that discusses the concept of masculinities within music. It isn't.
It is a collection of essays on music performance that uses 'masculinity' as a category of analisys.
This is also not a good book for what it is.
For a book that wants to use 'masculinity', the range of theories on masculinity, and gender performance more in general, is quite narrow.
This might be precisely because the book does not "discuss" masculinities, but "uses" masculinity to talk about their cases.
Therefore, rather than chalenging assumptions and coming up with new discussions on masculinities, it instead often choses a theory of masculinity to attach it to the analysis being made.
It comes short of its promise, and it does not go a good job on what it does. It can be an interesting read at times, specially for someone looking for ways people use masculinity to analyse data; but if one is looking into gaining more understanding on Masculinity itself, I wouldn't recommend.

[Alyx · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily one of the stupidest covers on a music scholarship anthology, but a fascinating, discursive look at masculinities in contemporary music. Also, it should be credited for covering a lot of ground -- everyone from the Darkness to Devendra Banhart to Jeff Buckley to Eminem to Justin Timberlake to Stephen Merritt are given consideration.

[Nicola ✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

read for an essay on gender identity & music