Since their beginnings, popular music studies have conducted an implicit (sometimes explicit) dialogue with musicology. To be sure, the musicological side of this conversation has more often than not been marked by insult, incomprehension or silence; and popular music scholars for their part have tended to concentrate on musicology's deficiencies. But musicology is changing (more about this later); at the same time, recent work on popular music suggests a new confidence, manifesting itself in part in a willingness to engage with and adapt mainstream methods. I believe each needs the other.
Repetition, as a component of musical structure in popular songs, has long played an important part in ‘popular common-sense’ definitions, and criticisms, of the music. ‘It's monotonous’; ‘it's all the same’; ‘it's predictable’: such reactions have probably filtered down from the discussions of mass culture theorists. From this point of view, repetition (within a song) can be assimilated to the same category as what Adorno termed standardisation (as between songs). Of course, the significance of the role played by such techniques in the operations of the music industry – their efficacy in helping to define and hold markets, to channel types of consumption, to pre-form response and to make listening easy – can hardly be denied; it is, however, equally difficult to reduce the function of repetition simply to an analysis of the ‘political economy’ of popular music production and its ideological effects. Despite Adorno's critical assault (see Adorno 1941), despite later twists to the theory by, for instance, Fredric Jameson (1981), who argues that rather than being a negative quality of mass culture, repetition is simply a fundamental characteristic of all cultural production under contemporary capitalism, the question of repetition refuses to go away. Why do listeners find interest and pleasure in hearing the same thing over again? To be able to answer this question, which has troubled not only mass cultural theory but also traditional philosophical aesthetics, as well as more recent approaches such as psychoanalysis and information theory, would tell us more about the nature of popular music, and hence, mutatis mutandis, about music in general, than almost anything else. We must start by locating repetition within an overall theory of musical syntax.
This research examines group consciousness among people of African descent in Miami-Dade County, Florida, and its possible impact on their political participation. Using an original survey of over one thousand respondents, the authors question whether African Americans and black ethnics (Africans, Afro-Caribbean Americans, Afro-Cuban Americans, and Haitians) possess a shared group consciousness and, if so, why. Second, does group consciousness or socioeconomic status most influence the political participation of our respondents? The authors find that these groups have a common consciousness because of their skin color, experiences with discrimination, common interests, similar ideological views, and leadership preferences. They also find that while group consciousness has more of an impact on African American political participation, socioeconomic status more heavily influences black ethnics. Last, factors such as age, gender, partisanship, religion, and second-generation citizenship also affect African American and/or black ethnic political participation.
A single plank with integral cleats, recently discovered on the East Riding of Yorkshire coast at Kilnsea, has been identified as a fragment of a Bronze Age plank boat, and dated to 1870–1670 BC. This makes the ‘Kilnsea-boat’ England's oldest dated plank built boat.
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