Page 136 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

120 Music

Student Exercise

Anyone who doubts popular music is connected to bodily life has
only to watch someone listening to an iPod and swaying to the beat
to see the connection. Youth popular music especially is associated
with motion, energy, and bodily desire. At this point in life, sexuality

especially is freshest and newest, a field of exploration that opens
multiple possible routes of connection to others. Emotions are
tightly wound with sexuality, and the successes and failures of con-
nection that sexual desire produces register in emotional chords of
many notes, both high and low. Youth culture in general and youth
music culture especially is a zone where old conventions are almost
by necessity challenged and rethought. The last thing most new
generations want to do is to live by the rules of the old. Those chal-
lenges and explorations make popular youth music one of the most
interesting sites for understanding culture as creation and explora-
tion, the remaking of culture understood as the architecture of our
lives that maintains stability.
Consider two Katy Perry songs, “ Hot N Cold ” and “ I Kissed a
1
Girl. ” Look at the videos on YouTube. “ Hot N Cold ” poses an
immediate challenge to older gender forms. The girl bride is the
primary active agent; the boy is passive, the one being chased. Until
recently, men were expected to be the primary agents of romantic
pursuit. But notice how the song evokes and preserves those older
forms. The girl bride treats the man as if he were a “ girl ” and even
compares his vacillation about love and commitment to that of a girl
choosing clothes and not being able to decide what to wear. So the
song, while challenging stereotypes and conventions, also evokes
them and would even seem to endorse them. Is it both radical and
conservative at once?
Discuss “ I Kissed a Girl ” in these same terms. Where are implied
cultural norms and rules present in the song and the video? How
does the song challenge them? Does it nevertheless endorse and
preserve them? Compare it with Jill Sobule ’ s song of the same name
(available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4r41vPTF8k&feat
ure=PlayList&p=8421B1E229EEDAA2&playnext=1&playnext_
2
from=PL&index=9 ).