Boyz to Menz (Own): Irish Boys Bands and the Alternative Nation

Abstract

Grunge, trash metal, rap, garage, and Britpop, the modes of rock and pop nomic national present is popularly associated with a move away from nationalism, and official nation-state signifiers of Irishness, towards an inter? nationally identified modernity. Commemoratively invoking a nationalist past and ancestry tied to a revolutionary nationalism is thus associated with fiscal retrogression, so the figure of the archaic becomes the site in which ideologies of national identity and futurity are grounded. The 'alterities' of the Irish 'nation s historical present' in 2005 are those people from minority groups who do not enjoy full human rights under the protection of the national body-politic: non-nationals, especially non-white peoples, women, travellers, homosexuals, and people who find themselves disabled by non inclusive policies, inaccessible public spaces and transport. Feminized, racialized, homoerotic, travelling and 'disabled', the Irish boy band uses the signifiers of such alterities to establish 'authority and genealogy' and, like the Wren Boys with their balloon boobs, ushers in the 'future anterior' of a nation that will not honour those for whom such difference is not merely a signifier but a way of life. These aspects of alterity ? femininity, blackness, traveller life, homosexual?

Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture

“…These seek to mark him, not only as musically 'authentic', or in the words of his own song, 'Real to Me', but also as authentically Irish. 9 But arguably by 1999, none of this mattered. Irish pop had been accepted -naturalized -into the Irish rock establishment, and pop masculinity, boys on display, similarly incorporated (by this stage it was clear that pop wasn't going to threaten rock or the sensitive singersongwriter's dominance of the Irish musical landscape).…”