Sarah Louise Baker

Pop in(to) the bedroom Popular music in pre-teen girls' bedroom culture

Drawing on ethnographic research with seven young girls in Adelaide, South Australia, this article examines the centrality of the bedroom in the girls’ exploration of popular music and cultural identity. In particular, it explores the popular music practices of two of these girls, nine-year-olds Kate and Rosa, in the space of their bedrooms. I argue that, by way of serious play, the girls enact and represent alternative possibilities in this immediate life space. The hard work in their musical play was not only observed in the process of fieldwork, but was also captured by the girls themselves using still cameras and tape recorders provided as part of the research project. The resulting materials from this ethnographic approach highlight that although girls’ bedrooms may seem rather ordinary, the musical practices that take place in this experiential space are complex, highly nuanced and far from trivial. As I demonstrate in this article, the girls’ play in their bedrooms is accompanied by an underlying seriousness, what Turner calls the ‘human seriousness of play’.

Notes towards a typology of the DIY institution: Identifying do-it-yourself places of popular music preservation

This article presents some notes towards identifying what we have come to call ‘DIY institutions’: places of popular music preservation, archiving and display that exist outside the bounds of ‘official’ or ‘national’ projects of collection and heritage management. These projects emerge instead from within communities of music consumption, where groups of interested people have, to some degree, undertaken to do it themselves, creating places (physical and/or online) to store – and, in some cases, display publicly – the material history of music culture. In these places people, largely volunteers, who are not expert in tasks associated with archiving, records management, preservation or other elements involved in cultural heritage management, learn skills along the way as they work to collect, preserve and make public artefacts related to popular music culture. The article argues that these places are suggestive of broader desires from within communities of popular music consumption to preserve popular music heritage.

Rap, recidivism and the creative self: A popular music programme for young offenders in detention

Popular music is increasingly being viewed by local, state and national governments as a useful form of creative activity for at-risk youth both within and outside young offender institutions. This paper examines a music programme operating for a group of predominantly black youth within one North American detention centre, and considers the range of benefits observed in fostering individual creativity, self-esteem and social communication. Popular music programmes—in this case, rapping and basic music sequencing and composition—offer a highly practical and direct means of allowing youth offenders to express a particular form of creativity in connection with their existing music and cultural interests. This paper considers the relative success of one programme and the implications for drawing upon hip-hop music, with its themes of deviance and resistance, as a creative vehicle within a broader environment of ‘offender to citizen’ discourses for the youth involved.

Sex, gender and work segregation in the cultural industries.

This chapter addresses work ‘segregation’ by sex in the cultural industries. We outline some of the main forms this takes, according to our observations: the high presence of women in marketing and public relations roles; the high numbers of women in production co-ordination and similar roles; the domination of men of more prestigious creative roles; and the domination by men of technical jobs. We then turn to explanation: what gender dynamics drive such patterns of work segregation according to sex? Drawing on interviews, we claim that the following stereotypes or prevailing discourses, concerning the distinctive attributes of women and men, may influence such segregation: that women are more caring, supportive and nurturing; that women are better communicators; that women are ‘better organized’; and that men are more creative because they are less bound by rules.

'It's not about candy'. Music, sexiness and girls' serious play in after school care

This article explores the musical practices of a small group of pre-teen girls in an after school care centre in Adelaide, South Australia. These practices constituted ‘serious play’ as the girls attempted to transform and reconfigure the space through their engagement with popular music. The article illustrates how the girls challenged the power relations of the institutional setting both musically and sexually. It concludes that the music that the young girls listened to and the way they played with such music were ‘not about candy’. Rather, the girls’ musical engagement in after school care was related to constantly shifting fields of power and a struggle over western cultural beliefs regarding asexual childhood.

Young People and Community Radio in the Northern Region of Adelaide, South Australia

This paper examines the music practices of a group of young Australians in regard to their development, maintenance, and broadcast of a weekly, 30‐minute ‘youth’ radio show on a community radio station in suburban Adelaide. It discusses challenges faced by the young people in terms of sourcing funding and compiling appropriate play lists. Coming out of the Australian Research Council‐funded Playing for Life project, the paper addresses key questions concerning ways that informal, community‐based music‐related practices are a means to agency and social inclusion.

Cultural Precincts, Creative Spaces Giving the Local a Musical Spin

This article examines the role of three community-based music projects—in Newcastle (Australia), Thanet (United Kingdom), and the City of Playford (Australia)—in engendering notions of regionalism, locality, and identity. Through their involvement in these projects, young people are placed at the intersection of music program management, city mythologies, and national policy. Each of the three projects examined attempts to facilitate urban regeneration through supplying their target community with what one regional arts development officer has coined a “musical spin.” However, within wider cultural frameworks, youths lived experience is often at odds with grander ideals of community arts space. Thus, although the discourses of “creative” urban regeneration articulated by the facilitators of community-based music projects may appear credible at the level of cultural policy, their practical implementation is problematized by competing local narratives that are grounded in established local knowledges and often highly resistant to intervention by outside sources.

Sustaining popular music’s material culture in community archives and museums

This article examines the challenges of sustainability faced by community archives and museums that are concerned with the preservation and display of the material culture of popular music’s recent past. The sustainability of grassroots sites of popular music heritage is of great concern due to their role in making accessible cultural artefacts that have limited representation in the collections of more prestigious institutions. Drawing on three sites that have ceased operation – Jazz Museum Bix Eiben Hamburg, Mutant Sounds and Holy Warbles – the article highlights difficulties faced by the founders and volunteers of physical and online archives in sustaining their ‘do-it-yourself’ heritage practices in the medium- to long-term.

The sound of music heritage: curating popular music in music museums and exhibitions

Abstract A significant amount of previous academic research into popular music museums centres on critiques of the content, design and layout of predominantly authorised institutions. Throughout much of this research, authors consistently criticise the use, or rather, the perceived misuse, of music played within music museums, arguing that the music itself, rather than artefacts, constitutes the most significant part of popular music exhibition. This article seeks to counter this trend by exploring the challenges of incorporating recorded sound into popular music exhibits as understood by curators and exhibit designers. Utilising interviews conducted within 14 authorised and DIY museums devoted to popular music, the researchers demonstrate a distinct contrast between current academic critiques of music use in these museums and the attitudes of the people who create them. The result is a varied discussion surrounding sound in the museal space, including issues of sound bleed, technology and the creation of balance between artefacts and sound. This account draws attention to curators’ intentions of telling the story of popular music history by engaging with both the visual and aural memories of museum patrons, and suggests a new understanding of the purpose underpinning popular music museums in modern contexts.

Historical Records, National Constructions: The Contemporary Popular Music Archive

This article examines the contemporary role of archives in relation to the curation and preservation of popular music artifacts, drawing upon interviews with a range of archival institutions and popular music curators in several countries. It explores the current technological, financial, and aesthetic challenges facing curators and archivists in the era of digital abundance. Previous strategies of “collecting everything” are being revised, with more recent strategies of selective narratives of particular national significance. This in turn presents further challenges for institutions that wish to adopt more playful and innovative uses of their material, particularly as pressures mount from the state to increase user/visitor numbers. The article also explores how “the national” is configured in these forms and presentations of popular music and cultural memory, and where archives are situated between the music industries, the state, and popular music fan communities.