Black Britain in the weekly music press during the late-1960s and 1970s
Abstract
Music is a means of communicating and sharing. Sounds and lyrics, even the most abstract or oblique, can document memories, impressions of the present and articulate desires for the future that listeners unpack and reinterpret imposing their own contexts, experiences and prior understandings. Recorded music provided a memory technology that allowed these ideas, sounds and cultures to be articulated, transmitted and interpreted more quickly and further than oral cultures previously allowed. A culture industry and mass media (newspapers, magazines, books television and radio) gave certain—profoundly shaped by capitalism, creating and perpetuating structures of power in society—recorded songs and musics the chance to be shared across and between countries and continents. Within the colonial and post-colonial context Britain after 1945, music made and performed by people who had arrived in Britain from colonies, created in dialogue with those who remained, and the reaction to it by their ‘hosts’, provided an impression of both new arrivals and British society. As Jon Stratton argues regarding Caribbean migration to Britain, ‘[music] offered sites for memory and identity, a refuge from the present and a source of opposition and to and commentary on the migrants’ circumstances. In the new situation cultural exchange with the dominant culture was inevitable.’Citation
Glen, P. (2020) Black Britain in the weekly music press during the late-1960s and 1970s, Immigrants and Minorities (forthcoming)Publisher
Taylor & FrancisJournal
Immigrants and MinoritiesAdditional Links
https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fimm20/currentType
Journal articleLanguage
enISSN
0261-9288Collections
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