PJ Harvey’s performances are premised on the core contention that she is somehow causing ‘trouble’. Just how this trouble can be theorised within the context of the music video and what it means for a development of the ways we might conceptualise ‘disruption’ and think about music video lies at the heart of this book. It is the first academic book to present analysis of Harvey’s music videos and opens up fresh avenues into exploring what is at stake in the video work of one of Britain’s premier singer-songwriters.

PJ Harvey’s performances are premised on the core contention that she is somehow causing ’trouble’. Just how this trouble can be theorised within the context of the music video and what it means for a development of the ways we might conceptualise ’disruption’ and think about music video lies at the heart of this book. Abigail Gardner mixes feminist theory and critical models from film and video scholarship as a rich means of interrogating Harvey’s work and redefining her disruptive strategies. The book presents a rethinking of the masquerade that allies it to cultural memory, precipitated by Gardner’s claim that Harvey’s performances are conversations with the past, specifically with visualised memories of archetypes of femininity. Harvey’s masquerades emerge from her conversations and renegotiations with both national and transatlantic musical, visual and lyrical heritages. It is the first academic book to present analysis of Harvey’s music videos and opens up fresh avenues into exploring what is at stake in the video work of one of Britain’s premier singer-songwriters. It extends the discussion on music video to consider how to make sense of the rapidly developing digital environment in which it now sits. The interdisciplinary nature of the book should attract readers from a range of subject areas including popular music studies, cultural studies, media and communication studies, and gender studies.

Publisher Description

The debut book by artist and writer PJ Harvey, in collaboration with film-maker and photographer Seamus Murphy, emerges as a one-of-a-kind collection of poetry and images

For female pop stars, whose star bodies and star performances are undisputedly the objects of a sexualized external gaze, the process of ageing in public poses particular challenges. This title focuses on British and Latina women performers and ageing. It investigates the cultural work performed by artists such as Madonna, Celia Cruz, and more.

This thesis takes a qualitative approach to interrogating a selection of PJHarvey's music video performances via the textual analysis of seven videos from 1993 - 2004. Its theoretical position is broadly feminist. This is because it follows debates emerging from feminist popular music studies that are concerned with the ways in which women within the popular music industry might be said to challenge or 'disrupt' certain expected codes and conventions (Whiteley, 1997,2000; Burns and Lafrance, 2002). It takes these debates across to Harvey's music video performances and starts to address how this move requires a rethinking of the ways in which such challenges have been formulated. The theoretical underpinnings for this thesis sit at the intersections of feminist popular music theory, music video theory and diva theory. The literature review situates this work within a context of previous work in these fields and here gaps are identified that are developed more fully in the analyses chapters. The first claim is that most, if not all of the critical approaches under review have produced work that has mapped out the 'disruptive' feminine by drawing on the psychoanalytical work of the mid to late twentieth century of Riviere ([1929]1986), Irigaray (1977,1985) and Butler (1990,1993). Perhaps inevitably, theorists in popular music and music video theory have engaged with the resulting debate that is couched within the binary of resistance verses recuperation that this thesis argues is unhelpful to a reading of Harvey's performance of the masquerade (Walser,1993). Whilst its methodological thrust is propelled by existing routes of enquiry from within music video studies, it also asks for a reconsideration of the nature of the 'text' in relation to music video, reviewing the security of a 'textual account' to consider how reframing music video as a moving archive impacts on methods and access. This organic reaction to a rapidly developing media environment within which the videos have been accessed has seen the analyses chapters reflect and reframe concepts related to challenge that articulate both dissatisfaction with those debates in relation to Harvey's videos and a fresh way of approaching music video performance. First it argues that because Harvey's performances of the masquerade are invested in the past, she is an archivist. It therefore puts forward the concept of the 'memory-ade' which is a rethinking of the masquerade that allies it cultural memory (Van Dijck, 2007; Grainge, 2002; Pentzold, 2009). This takes into account the weight of the masquerade and the investment that Harvey has in it. Continuing on with the concern that a binary model of resistance and recuperation does not allow for a flexible reading of Harvey's video work, it then argues that her video performances are ambiguous. They foreground a mimetic and wicked sense of humour that allows her to subvert and challenge dominant tropes of femininity, by 'miming and displacing' them (Butler).

This book takes Polly Jean at her word. Kate Schatz puts together a collection of stories that is weird, dark, and seductive in its portrayals of women, kidnapping, love, sex, isolation and power.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • David Byrne’s incisive and enthusiastic look at the musical art form, from its very inceptions to the influences that shape it, whether acoustical, economic, social, or technological—now updated with a new chapter on digital curation. “How Music Works is a buoyant hybrid of social history, anthropological survey, autobiography, personal philosophy, and business manual”—The Boston Globe Utilizing his incomparable career and inspired collaborations with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and many others, David Byrne taps deeply into his lifetime of knowledge to explore the panoptic elements of music, how it shapes the human experience, and reveals the impetus behind how we create, consume, distribute, and enjoy the songs, symphonies, and rhythms that provide the backbeat of life. Byrne’s magnum opus uncovers thrilling realizations about the redemptive liberation that music brings us all.

Listening, Belonging, and Memory puts connected listening at the center of current debates around whose voices might be listened to, who by, and why. Arguing that listening has to be understood in relation to the self, nation, age, witnessing, and memory, it uses examples from digital storytelling, listening projects, and critical media analysis to highlight connections between listening and power. It centers on voices, stories, and silence, how they interweave, and are activated, maneuvered, reconfigured, and denied. It focuses on the small, microengagements that crouch within the superstructures of violent border control and the censorious policing of sonic citizenry, identifying cracks in the reshuffling of histories and hierarchies that connected listening affords.