Sex, Drugs, and Disappointment: Popular Music And Feeling Badly
Keynote Speaker: Sara Marcus (University of Notre Dame)
AMS National Meeting – Chicago, IL – 14-17 November 2024
Application Deadline: 1 March 2024
From Billie Eilish to Olivia Rodrigo, recent work from scholars like Jessica Holmes has shown how some of popular music’s most visible artists are making hit songs about bad feelings (Kim Lee 2019; Kresovich 2022; Gale 2023; Hamori 2023; Holmes 2023). And while the gendered “breakup song” continues to thrive, contemporary artists are also expanding what counts as a legitimate subject for musical exploration. Unlike the alternative rock of the 1990s—in which depression was taken seriously from a predominantly white/masculine perspective—today’s popular music is overwhelmingly oriented toward the psychic lives of women, girls, and others on the margins of heteronormative/bourgeois norms. These developments are certainly noteworthy for scholars of contemporary music—but they also occur in the context of a much longer history that sees popular forms intersecting with sustained efforts to affect positive political change in the face of what Sara Marcus calls “political disappointment.”
Following writers like Ann Cvetkovich, Angela McRobbie, Mark Fisher, and others who connect experiences of “social melancholy” (Oliver 2020) to patriarchy, neoliberal capitalism, and related catastrophes, bad feelings can be understood as chronic, widespread, and tied to policy choices. More the result of shared cultural conditions than a clinical diagnosis, depression and anxiety disorders are, in this framing, political: unevenly distributed amongst vulnerable populations who are less able to insulate themselves from what Lauren Berlant called the “crisis ordinary,” bad feelings take on raced and gendered dimensions even as they appears to continue growing throughout the overall population.
At the nexus of popular music, identity, and bad feelings, The Popular Music Study Group at AMS seeks paper proposals for a special session considering the widespread instances of depression and anxiety disorders prevalent across young people in conjunction with longstanding histories of political disappointment, as well as the particular ways that sex and gender nuance such conversations. Finally, we want to consider the role of different responses to trauma—from the politicized terms like “self-care” and “resilience,” to the sustained efforts of activists, to moments of genuine release, collectivity, and joy.
Topics for consideration include (but are not limited to):
- Political disappointment and popular music
- Sex, gender, and popular music
- Musical perspectives on Gen Z
- Reframings of “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” for our political present
- Music and mental health
- Music and chronic crisis (climate change, student debt, gun violence, structural racism, et al.)
- Music and public policy (Dobbs, anti-trans bills, anti-diversity bills)
- Music and coping—including self care, medication, therapy, and other responses to trauma
We define “popular music” in the broadest possible sense, including, but not limited to pop, rock, R&B, hip-hop, EDM, country, blues, parlor songs, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz, as well as non-Western popular musics. We seek papers from a variety of disciplinary, historical, methodological, and personal perspectives. We welcome papers from instructors from a variety of institutions, including (but not limited to) R1/2 universities, small liberal arts colleges, conservatories, and community colleges. We especially encourage submissions from junior and contingent faculty, in addition to graduate students.
The session format allows each speaker 10–15 minutes for presentation, followed by a joint Q&A for the entire panel. To apply, please send proposals of no more than 300 words to fdipiero@umkc.edu by March 1, 2024. In your email, please include your name, affiliation (if any), and any audio, visual, or other needs for the presentation.
References
Berlant, Lauren. 2022. On the Inconvenience of Other People. Durham: Duke University Press.
Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press.
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. Zero Books.
Gale, Emily. 2023. “How Olivia Rodrigo produced a powerful teen girl album.” Raidió Teilifís Éireann, October 5.
Hamori, Kate. 2023. “‘It’s Brutal Out Here’: Adolescence, Betrayal, and Vulnerability in Olivia Rodrigo’s SOUR.” American Music Perspectives vol. 2, no. 2: 198–210.
Holmes, Jessica. 2023. “Billie Eilish and the Feminist Aesthetics of Depression: White Femininity, Generation Z, and Whisper Singing.” Journal of the American Musicological Society vol. 76, no. 3: 785–829.
Kim Lee, Summer. 2019. “Staying in: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality.” Social Text vol. 37, no. 1: 27–50.
Kresovich, Alex. 2022. “The Influence of Pop Songs Referencing Anxiety, Depression, and Suicidal Ideation on College Students’ Mental Health Empathy, Stigma, and Behavioral Intentions.” Health Communication vol. 37, no. 5: 617–627.
Marcus, Sara. 2023. Political Disappointment A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
McRobbie, Angela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change. London: SAGE Publications.
Oliver, Kelly. 2020. “Shame, Depression, and Social Melancholy.” Sophia vol. 59, no. 1: 31–38.
Popular Music Study Group 