Essays on Music, Adolescence, and Identity

The Adolescentia Project

Mary Beth Ray

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9783031552168
• eBook ISBN: 9783031552175
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Pop Music

Essays on Music, Adolescence, and Identity: The Adolescentia Project explores music consumption, self-discovery, media culture, and memory through autoethnographic essays on albums we loved during adolescence covering three decades (1980-2010) as the music industry and socio-cultural identity landscapes in the United States significantly changed. The collection advances our understanding of music culture, identity, and adolescence in three ways. First, by expanding our knowledge of the shifting relationship between music and identity by using historical methods to examine changes in music culture and socio-cultural landscapes from 1980 to 2010. Second, by interrogating the role of musical memory and the act of cultural remembering by including autoethnographic reflective essays charting contributors' experiences of understanding and performing self through a particularly formative album of their adolescence. And third, by critiquing the act of music consumption in relation to identity construction and cultural remembering. By examining these influential albums, we can better understand the role of popular culture in identity construction and the long-term impact of these formative musical experiences.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The Adolescentia Project
• 2. Part I: The 1980s
• 3. Something I Can Say, Something I Can Do: I’ve Come for My Emotional Rescue
• 4. ‘What’s it like to be a fucked-up teenager?’: Violent Femmes, a Primal Scream for Generation X
• 5. Cultivating a Rebel Without a Pause
• 6. Part II: The 1990s
• 7. “A Long Way from Boston”: Loving and Listening to New Kids on the Block as a Jamaican Adolescent
• 8. The Magic of “Blacks’ Magic”
• 9. Prude Pirates and Other Contradictory Bodies: Gender, Ideology, and Identity in Adolescence
• 10. “Destroy the mind, destroy the body, but you cannot destroy the heart”: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and the Reclamation of a Teenage Fat Body During the “Age of Fatphobia”
• 11. Rage Against the Machine’s Evil Empire: An Autoethnography of Music and Political Socialization in Early Adolescence
• 12. “What am I supposed to do?” Cher’s Believe and the Siren Call of a Gay Icon
• 13. Part III: The 2000s
• 14. Everything Will Change: Revisiting The Postal Service’s Give Up
• 15. OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below: Musical Theatre, Performance, and Style
• 16. (Nonbinary Panic!) at the Disco: A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out
• 17. “I’m All Out of Love”: Nostalgic Music Through the Lens of a Queer Asian Immigrant
• 18. Raising My Voice: Japanese Visual Kei and Musical (Self-)discovery
• 19. The Little Trans Monster: Gender Actualization and Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster
• 20. Conclusion: Looking Back and Moving Forward—the Courage to Become Who We Are
• Back Matter