Media Narratives in Popular Music

Chris Anderton, Martin James, Chris Anderton, Martin James

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501357282
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica della musica

The historical significance of music-makers, music scenes, and music genres has long been mediated through academic and popular press publications such as magazines, films, and television documentaries. Media Narratives in Popular Music examines these various publications and questions how and why they are constructed. It considers the typically linear narratives that are based on simplifications, exaggerations, and omissions and the histories they construct - an approach that leads to totalizing "official" histories that reduce otherwise messy narratives to one-dimensional interpretations of a heroic and celebratory nature. This book questions the basis on which these mediated histories are constructed, highlights other, hidden, histories that have otherwise been neglected, and explores a range of topics including consumerism, the production pressure behind documentaries, punk fanzines, Rolling Stones covers, and more.

Section One

Narratives of Identity

1

Hidden in Plain Sight: Stories of Gender, Generation, and Political Economy on the Northern Soul Scene

Tim Wall and Sarah Raine

In 2019, the online pages of the Liverpool Echo featured the headline “Stunning pictures show clubbers and dance offs at a Wigan Casino all nighter” above sixteen black and white photographs.¹ The photographs had not been in wide circulation before, and given the place of the Casino club, and the northern soul scene in British popular music lore, they gave a glimpse into the early era of a dance music scene that continues to this day. The Echo story asserts, “the stunning photos, taken by our sister paper the Daily Mirror during a Wigan Casino allnighter, show what it was like inside the venue back in 1975.” The short article repeats a standard history of the British northern soul scene: its early 1970s origins; the centrality of the Lancashire-based Wigan Casino dancehall; the “northern soul enthusiasts from all over the country” who make “regular pilgrimages” to the club; and the “love and appreciation” of rare “North American Soul music” by “a generation of Northern Soul fans,” which created the long-lasting music scene.

The lead photograph centers on a young man, executing a backdrop amongst other dancers and a sea of onlookers. In the language of conventional press photography, this privileges the man and his spectacular dancing, and positions the others as mostly spectators. Even given what we can see of the Casino’s internal space, the photographer could have equally chosen one of the women dancers, perhaps emphasizing her embodied pleasure and freedom, or brought out the communality of the space and the people. In fact, given that objectified young women occupy the default focus for the majority of iconic dance photographs, it is noteworthy that they were not the focus for the camera. Attendees at this dance would have also known that the frame excludes other parts of the room that are vital to the functioning of the event: the process of admitting the participants; the positioning of the DJ and his equipment on the stage; and beyond the room in which records are perused and bought and sold. Actually, while fourteen of the images repeat the pattern of the lead photograph, in some, more women than men are shown, though the photographer consistently placed the male dancers to the fore. The remaining two photographs offer some other possibilities. In one of the dance floor shots, no one dancer is singled out, and the women are shown to be just as active in dancing as the men. In the other, the then-young Wigan Casino DJ, Russ Winstanley, is shown behind his mobile disco desks holding a copy of a seven-inch single. As we show below, such representations and selections are widespread.

The prioritization of men over women when mediating the scene is just as apparent in Tony Palmer’s 1977 television documentary Wigan Casino, screened two years later than the Echo photographs were taken, and is repeated in almost all academic studies of northern soul, in later feature films like Soul Boy (2010), and even in the “self-documenting histories” of scene participants themselves. Palmer’s documentary does include a key woman as an interviewee, and we access some glimpses of the political economy of a northern soul club in the background, yet it is the spectacle of the male dancer on the dance floor that is the primary focus of this contemporaneous document of the scene. There have been more recent attempts to unearth the role of women: Cosgrove (2016) details the participation of his women friends, Milestone (2019) reflects explicitly on the issue, and Raine (2020) explores this historic marginalization in the contemporary multigenerational scene. Likewise, the participation of a younger generation of scene participants has become a theme for local television news items (e.g., Soul Boy (2020), part of the “Our Lives” BBC series), but they are most often positioned in relation to their veneration of a past history, and rarely framed as building a new history for themselves. However, as a scene that emerged in the early 1970s and continues today, regularly re-energized by younger generations of participants, the way the history of the scene is told is of vital contemporary importance.

In this chapter, we explore aspects of northern soul history that seem embedded in these original 1970s photographs and in their selection and arrangement in the twenty-first-century Liverpool Echo. How we tell the story of the past of popular music culture is especially germane to a music culture like northern soul, in which the past is a pervasive part of the present multigenerational scene. In taking this example, we want to set out important ways in which we can retrieve aspects of hidden popular music histories that are actually available for all to see. First, we approach questions of gender and visibility, analyzing the absence of the historic role of women in the northern soul scene, and reflecting upon this through an ethnographic study of the current and multigenerational scene, which is itself hidden in many attempts to document northern soul, including the Liverpool Echo feature. While women are plainly participating in this dancefloor culture, their place in the story of northern soul never reaches that of the heroic male dancer portrayed in many of the Liverpool Echo images. This is a reversal of the dominant photographic practice that captures dancing to popular music; here, it is the spectacle of the male dancer that is objectified. Our act of retrieval draws particular attention to the role that men have had in transmitting the story of the past to younger members of today’s distinctly multigenerational culture, and in doing so we highlight the ways in which they have gendered this history and the continuing practices of northern soul. We then explore the scene’s tangible heritage as primary evidence for understanding the function of the scene. While the vital roles of music selection, record release, and commercial venue operation are apparent to those attentive enough to see, they are sidelined and transformed into the icon of the male personality-DJ. Taking some of the founding documents of northern soul from early 1970s Blues & Soul magazine, we argue that we must move beyond their use as touchstones in an existing story and to interrogate them to see what they can tell us about the political economy in which such DJs operated. Equally, we also need to understand who, today, has been enabled to speak about the scene’s past, and how it is made available to younger newcomers, who go unmentioned in the Echo’s feature.

This chapter shifts from what is highlighted in the dominant processes of mediation and remediation to what is hidden in plain sight. In doing so, we excavate some of the stories less often told on the contemporary scene or in the retrospective documents that celebrate its past. This involves interrogating, and going beyond, the dominant stories told by academics, by “outsider” documentarians and “insider” historians through books, magazines, films, and YouTube videos. Here we ask what these hidden histories tell us about how northern soul’s—and more generally, pop’s—past is constructed; how we can handle the nuances and multilayered experience of popular music culture; and what these dominant histories do in relation to our claims to belong to a music subculture.

Beyond the Spectacle: Gender and Generation in the Northern Soul Scene

The photographs taken for the Daily Mirror at Wigan Casino in 1975 are clearly posed to place the acrobatic male dancers in the front of the shot, and as a clustered backdrop the onlooking audience all look to the photographer behind the lens. As any attendee at a northern soul event will attest, these photographs do not capture the “allnighter” experience: the press of the people, the heat of the room, the distorted blare of the speakers. More importantly, they relegate the role of women participants in the historic northern soul scene to the edges of the dance floor, clutching their handbags in the shadow of their male counterparts. This positioning of gender in the northern soul scene within the media histories of popular music is a common one.

Frequently placed in contrast to the mainstream clubbing experience of the female dancer, the northern soul dance floor has traditionally been represented, and since remembered, as a stage for the performance of competitive masculinity. As we have argued before, by reiterating shared scene stories as accurate testimonies—rather than analyzing personal and shared narratives as processes of claiming to belong—academic studies have further inscribed the pervasive male hero of the historic dance floor (see Raine and Wall 2019; Raine 2020). For instance, Barry Doyle’s (2005) analysis of the 1970s scene completely removes women participants from consideration, and many other academic studies rely upon the same male voices—mostly of well-known DJs—as key interviewees, some even quoting from self-documenting histories as evidence to back up claims (see, for example, Smith 2006: 190). As the photographs published by the Liverpool Echo show, equal numbers of men and women attended Wigan Casino. And yet, in the stories of the Casino’s past, like the subjects of these posed photos, the acrobatic male dancer commands center stage. At best, women are relegated to the edges of the dance floor. The story is repeated for many other personal and shared stories of since-mythologized northern soul allnighters.

The contemporaneous and retrospective documents of the historic scene consistently foreground the experiences and activities of men. Images similar to these—of young men springing up into the air or down into backdrops—adorn many northern soul books (see, for example, Cosgrove 2016, and Jones 2016) and the marketing posters for films (for Soul Boy 2010 and Northern Soul 2014), becoming icons of the northern soul scene, past and present. This gendering of the northern soul fan during the 1970s is also clearly set out in the media texts that document the scene or use this cultural form as a setting for feature films or fiction (e.g., McDonald 2008 and films cited above).

The motif of the acrobatic male dancer is further reiterated by male insider “experts” who set out published histories of the scene, regaling the assumed insider reader with tales of drugs, allnighters, and a passion for the music (e.g., Nowell 1999; Waterhouse 2011; McKenna and Snowball 2013). This claim to authoritatively and authentically speak of, and for, the scene is backed up by the personal experiences, material evidence, and social networks of the author, demonstrated in the firsthand accounts, flyers and photographs, interviews, and forewords of the text. These self-documented histories reiterate a dominant northern soul story, focusing on certain people, venues, records, and periods. Books offering “definitive” or “official” northern soul histories start to appear in the 1990s and have proliferated in recent years, with insider authors recounting personal experiences, carefully weaving these into an authenticating and shared remembering of what northern soul meant “back in the day.” Significantly, these published histories are primarily written by men active on the scene in the 1970s, individuals who quote other men well-known within the scene in the roles of DJ, record collector and dealer, and of specialist journalists (especially Blues & Soul columnist, Dave Godin) as they attempt to construct a linear narrative for their readers. As we have noted in other publications, this pervasive male voice, experience, and reliance upon a network of “experts” in male-dominated scene roles relegates women to the “girlfriend” of key players. This, therefore, is an analysis of an absence rather than an argument for its presence.

The “writing back in” of the contributions of women to accounts of popular music culture has been undertaken by scholars across a range of fields, from understanding the dynamics and processes of popular music as gendered (see Cohen 1997; Leonard 2007; Reddington 2012) to identifying and giving voice to “hidden histories” (e.g., McGee 2009; Attrep 2018; Wolfe 2019). Interviews with women who were active on the UK northern soul scene have been included in studies by Milestone (2019) and Catterall and Gildart (2020), finally adding their voices to the oral histories of scene participation, albeit within academic publications rarely accessible to members of the now multigenerational scene. It is also clear that women did hold the influential roles of DJ and record collector in the 1970s, albeit more rarely, and some have gone on to build successful careers in the contemporary scene (see Raine 2020). However, the power of the image of the acrobatic male dancer—and indeed the knowledgeable male record collector and DJ, also depicted in the collection of photographs explored within this chapter—continues to permeate the contemporary scene and to push women of all ages to its edges.

Raine’s four-year ethnographic study of the current younger generation of “northern soulies” makes clear that the gendered remembering of the historic scene—and the subsequent gendering of insider roles of dancer, DJ, event organizer, and record collector/dealer—has had a significant impact on the experiences of women, irrespective of age. For female members of the original generation, not only are their contributions notably absent from the media texts that attempt to document and remember the historic scene, but their current engagement remains undervalued. Indeed, some of the women event organizers that Raine spoke to even deferred to their male partners as the “brains behind the operation” or the “true fan.” This discomfort about applying a valued role to their own activities is not limited to the northern soul scene but evident in other male-dominated music scenes and industry roles, such as by open mic singer-songwriters (Martin 2019) and studio producers (Reddington 2021). This may be an issue of confidence in claiming expertise within these roles and their associated skills, or reflective of a wider community assumption that men organize events (Raine 2020: 188–9 discusses this further). This reticence to self-identify leads to an increased silencing of the experience of women and a continued spotlighting of men as influential individuals, from those willing to be interviewed by researchers to loud voices within the current scene politics.

As we have argued in greater detail (Raine and Wall 2017, 2019), for young newcomers, the role of men within the development and refinement of the scene is unmistakable. They are the central characters of the scene’s shared and mythologized origin stories, from the coining of the term “northern soul” to the discovery of rare vinyl in dusty US record company warehouses. In the contemporary scene, many of the same men continue to organize the largest events in the scene calendar, act as tastemakers and authenticators of “new sounds,” and reiterate the dominant history of northern soul—as emcees behind the decks, and as the official historians of the scene in their own book publications and blogs. Through this activity, the role of men is manifest and available for emulation, from audiotapes of DJs on the mic at Wigan Casino in the 1970s (see Raine 2020: 184) to high-kicks captured in Tony Palmer’s The Wigan Casino (1977), a television documentary for Granada (analyzed in Duffett, Raine and Wall 2019: 287). For incoming women, however, a scene-authenticated role is much less visible and uncovering female role models requires significant immersion within the scene.

Through common stories told in the queue for the bar, on the edge of the dance floor and online, individuals craft their own journey into and through the scene, aligning their own experience as closely as possible to the domina...