<i>The Mayor’s A Square: Live Music and Law and Order in Sydney</i> by Shane Homan
2016; University of Westminster; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.16997/eslj.117
ISSN1748-944X
Autores Tópico(s)Law in Society and Culture
ResumoDoes anybody remember (Don’t Go Back To) Rockville? This early REM track, from Reckoning, their immaculate second album in the mid 1980s, was echoed in a good deal of the Law and Popular Culture research I did with valued colleagues in Manchester for over two decades. It became an injunction for us in fact: Don’t Go Back to Rockville! It was used as the title of an essay I wrote in 1989 which Shane Homan duly quotes in The Mayor’s a Square (or, rather misquotes, as Rocksville), a book based on his Macquarie University PhD studying Sydney’s live rock music scenes from the 1950s to the 1990s. Homan, now a lecturer in popular music at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, has been a local rock musician himself and used the connections he gained from his day job to interview many rock musicians and venue promoters in this particular area of Australia for the PhD/book. My misgivings about the project are not its focus – in my view, regulatory regimes in popular culture are extremely important social and cultural formations for us to theorize and analyse. The doubts I have are based in the symbolic theoretical and political shifts hidden in the REM title – Don’t Go Back to Rockville. Pop theory, as opposed to Rock ideology, is an important position to fight for in the study of popular music formations, be they local (as in the case of Homan’s study) or global. In my estimation, Homan’s work is too much embedded in Rock theory.
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