Music, Media, and Politics: A Special Issue Introduction

Rosemary Overell, a lecturer in the Department of Media, Film and Communication at the University of Otago, comes from a background in cultural studies of popular music and recently authored Affective Intensities in Extreme Music Scenes (Palgrave, 2014). Oli Wilson serves as a Senior Lecturer in the School of Music and Creative Media Production at Massey University, Wellington, where he leads the Bachelor of Commercial Music programme. His research focuses on music in Oceania, with publications on the recording industry and popular music cultures in Papua New Guinea, Dunedin indie rock production, and New Zealand post-colonial identity politics.

This collection of articles originated from the music/media/politics symposium hosted by the University of Otago's Department of Media, Film and Communication in April 2014.

When Stuart Hall passed away in February 2014, the impact was felt even in the antipodes. Conversations unfolded informally in hallways, over coffee, and in seminar rooms about the wider cultural studies project that Hall had pioneered. For many in Otago's media department, his radical writings on popular culture as a site of hegemonic struggle—particularly "Notes on deconstructing the popular" from 1981—had provided foundational inspiration for academic careers. Recent reflection within media and cultural studies concerning the apparent erosion of the critical-political framework established by Hall and the early cultural studies group prompted collaboration with the Tertiary Education Union and student radio station Radio 1 to organize the symposium.

The event explored the potential for enacting social change through academic work while remaining connected and committed to organized political activity. Radical hip hop artist and activist Boots Riley delivered the keynote address. The symposium and Riley's presentation were designed to disrupt conventional academic conference formats—speaking to a broad working-class and student audience alongside academics about media's capacity to shape cultural contexts for political purposes. The deliberate departure from standard costly registration fees and isolated events reflected this intention. As Turner and others have noted, the pressure to publish means nearly any text can be interpreted as resistant by a sufficiently clever academic reading it "correctly." Riley's work, however, embodies grassroots hegemonic struggle and offered the conference a chance to reassess how Hall's political vision might be implemented meaningfully.

Speaking to an audience of nearly five hundred, Riley opened with a rap before transitioning into a polemic titled "Hip Hop and the Class Struggle." He echoed Hall by emphasizing that all popular cultural production carries political weight and argued that the common claim that hip hop has "lost its way" overlooks the context and violence inherent to late capitalism. "Gangster" rap, for instance, represents the brutality of the dominant economic system. The violence found on hip hop tracks "has nothing to do with falters in communication in black communities. It has nothing to do with 'maleness.' It has everything to do with the way that the system is organised." Riley's speech made such an impact that he took questions for over an hour, both in the auditorium and later in the building's foyer.

This special issue of Media & Revue aims to address the imperatives Riley set out and sustain the momentum generated by the event. It is fitting that the issue's first article engages directly with Boots Riley. Alongside reflections on his time in Aotearoa, Riley discusses with Rosemary Overell his recent work with Podemos in Greece and encounters with striking Coca Cola workers in Spain. Riley's activism remains inseparable from his music production and participation. For him, creative and mediated practice is essential for articulating and representing contemporary struggle. His recent screenplay Sorry to Bother You (2014) offers a comedic critique of precarious worker exploitation in telecommunications. Riley also reflects on the fraught politics of representation in today's mediated context, warning that the proliferation of phone-filmed violence by white police against people of colour in the US does not guarantee transparency or challenge institutionalised racism. He notes that "without a movement that can actually change the way our system works, [viral videos] just serve as a warning to people to listen to the police." Media can spread messages and represent atrocities, but its embedding in activist politics remains crucial. Including an interview with a musician and activist might seem unusual for an academic publication, but the entanglement of media criticism with grassroots organized politics drove both the symposium and this special issue. It also reflects a growing concern among media scholars that critical thought does not belong exclusively to academia.

The following articles develop these themes further, offering a broad interpretation of how music, media, and politics intersect. The collection also demonstrates diverse research methods, including critical text-based analysis, music and musician-focused ethnographies, and reviews of historical discourses. While geographic scopes vary, the issue's international focus indicates widespread engagement with global media politics, especially concerning contemporary colonial positionality and its past.

In the first article, Catherine Hoad challenges the taken-for-granted assumption that heavy metal is inherently white by analysing the exclusion of non-white bodies in metal scenes across Norway, Australia, and South Africa. Hoad's work offers a powerful intervention into the politics of postcolonialism and race in global metal, moving beyond explicit and spectacular racism—such as the National Socialist Black Metal associated with Burzum and Varg Vikernes—to account for the latent "natural" whiteness present in much extreme metal. Through three case studies, Hoad explores how nationalism operates in ordinary forms, including "banal" nationalism in Australia.

Paul McMillan also takes an ethnographic scene-centred approach, drawing on first-hand peer experience to study "covers musicians" in Dunedin, New Zealand. McMillan examines the politics surrounding local musicians' identities as "covers" and "originals musicians." The setting is notable because Dunedin is famous for its DIY indie music scene, which gained international recognition in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He argues that many young originals musicians regularly perform in covers-only contexts for mainstream audiences, and these comparatively well-paid performances help sustain their originals activities. These musicians consciously challenge ideas about authenticity established through mediatised representations of Dunedin's indie rock scene, ideas reinforced by discourses among some originals-only musicians. McMillan's article provides a contrasting narrative to previous academic studies of Dunedin music, which he claims perpetuate outmoded notions of the authentic indie musician. The complex identities of many young Dunedin artists both embrace and subvert the dominant stigma attached to covering, viewing the job as complementary to their other musical ambitions.

Indigenous and Pacific cultural politics are addressed in two articles. Jen Cattermole questions the extent to which indigenous perspectives and agency are reflected in government initiatives supporting popular music and culture in Aotearoa-New Zealand and Australia. Her comparison responds to previous calls in ethnomusicology to consider and compare indigenous issues across these post-colonial contexts. Cattermole explores specific administrative and policy frameworks in both countries, concluding that although indigenous perspectives have gained increased recognition, government frameworks remain sites for contemporary cultural and socio-political struggle. These struggles take different forms in each context. For example, Cattermole notes that Māori political power and policy influence has increased, whereas Australian Aboriginal peoples remain sidelined with little or no real political influence. Annalise Friend provides a reading of Samoan Aotearoa-New Zealander vocalist Ladi6's "brand" by analysing the presentation and packaging of her physical albums, music videos, online presence, merchandising, and live persona.

Friend identifies parallels with meanings found in other pop-culture trends including hip hop, soul, reggae, and electronic music, while grounding the analysis in a local context. She argues that Ladi6 constructs a form of self-reflexive "ladyspace" that embodies her position as a Pacific Island woman in both an ambiguous and reflexive way. Friend concludes that in this case, branding functions according to the logic of global capitalism, where consumption practices restrict alternative ways of engaging with cultural texts.

Contemporary nation building and identity politics are explored by Henry Johnson, who examines events surrounding a competition to find a new anthem for the small British island of Jersey in 2007. While remaining a British crown territory, Jersey is a separate fiscal, legal, and political entity with its own distinct regional and local identity. Johnson shows that Jersey has been rethinking its relationship with Britain, as evidenced through media, political, and cultural spheres engaged with the national anthem topic. Johnson applies media analysis alongside ethnographic research comprising informal interviews with musicians, composers, language activists, and educators. The case study examines how music, media, and politics are played out in discourse before, during, and after the anthem selection process.

Rob Burns explores national identity politics further, focusing more broadly on the United Kingdom. He examines contemporary discourses around English identity by drawing on the work and media narratives presented by UK folk musicians, principally political activist Billy Bragg. Burns' research is informed by interviews with Bragg and builds upon previous work on folk music and nationalism. Folk musicians' perspectives are given special significance because they historically functioned as media sources through which news of national events was disseminated. Burns argues that this tradition has continued as contemporary folk musicians frequently discuss historical events and provide commentary on current political issues. The focus is on folk musicians' perspectives regarding the gradual devolution of the UK. Bragg and others note that Englishness does not enjoy the political representation experienced by other UK nations, yet notions of Englishness remain key to English cultural arts and traditions, particularly within the folk music canon.

The final three articles adopt text-based analytical approaches. Jonathan Marshall's piece—a historiography of hip-hop in the USA and France—provides a provocative account of "hip hop radiophonics" as a mode of "dialectical acoustic installation." Marshall argues that hip-hop from the 1980s and 1990s is best understood as a "boom" (dialectical clash) between spatiality and acoustics ranging multidirectionally across historical formations. Drawing on Eshun's AfroFuturism, Marshall ranges from the banlieue of Paris to mid-century North Africa, to the graffitied streets of New York.

He provocatively suggests that Gilroy's famous "Black Atlantic" model is insufficient for accounting for hip-hop's uptake in Europe.

Peter Stapleton examines cinematic representations of rock music. He proposes that 1980s "punkmentaries" like D.O.A. (Kowalski, 1980) and Punk Rock Movie (Letts, 1978) viscerally embody the ethos of the punk scene. He describes how such films function as Bakhtinian "chronotopes" that make visible an inverted space-time relative to the reactionary mode of 1960s and 1970s "rockumentaries." Stapleton takes Gimme Shelter (Mayles, Mayles and Zwerin, 1970) as a transitional moment where inversion between rock- and punk-umentary occurs. The filmic chronotope (time-space) swaps around the idealism and apparent utopianism of the 60s "Summer of Love" spirit to expose the brutality of late capitalism ascending by the 1980s. Stapleton argues that the punkumentary is carnivalesque—a materialised embodiment of "chaotic punk time-space."

The final article, by Alison Blair, also draws on Bakhtin to develop a textual analysis of a music scene—in this case, glam rock. She uses Bakhtin's concept of the "masque" to examine Marc Bolan and David Bowie as represented in 1970s popular media and video clips. Blair posits that Bolan and Bowie's performative personae—like the punkumentary described by Stapleton—operate as a mode of inversion and suspension of normative hierarchies. Conventional heterosexism, in particular, is challenged through the masque-ing articulated by glam rock. Blair argues that Bolan and Bowie do this primarily by destabilising the "authenticity" favoured by progressive rock and folk music through an emphasis on the performative aspects of glam musical production.

This special issue brings together a diverse range of encounters between music—as a culturally significant media form—and politics. Boots Riley's stirring keynote reminded us of the importance of praxis as the necessary outcome of theoretical critique. Whether that praxis is creative, as it is for Riley declaring "my music is based on what I think is needed in the world," or takes the form of engaged academic output, the imperative of connecting cultural production with progressive politics remains essential.