Papers by Larissa Wodtke
Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 2018
child musical star (O’Connor; Warwick), the perceived child-likeness of adult pop and rock stars ... more child musical star (O’Connor; Warwick), the perceived child-likeness of adult pop and rock stars (Alberti; Whiteley), actual children’s performance of and interaction with music throughout history and geography (Boynton and Kok; Lury), and music written for a child audience (Askerøi; Bickford; Maloy, “Children’s”; Maloy “Why”), few have examined the figure of the child in pop music and its ideological implications. In “The Obvious Child: The Symbolic Use of Childhood in Contemporary Popular Music,” Roger Neustadter argues that pop music of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World,” Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All,” and Paul Simon’s “The Obvious Child,” sentimentally and nostalgically celebrates the child as representative of innocence and goodness in spite of the contemporary criticism during the 80s and 90s citing the corruption and disappearance of childhood. Björn Sundmark, too, gestures toward the child in popular music by discussing children’s roles and representation in popular music videos and how they are “exploited and ‘voiced over’ by other generations with stronger ‘voices’” (328). Framed by this omission in the fields of childhood studies, popular music studies, and cultural studies more generally, Paul Rekret’s book Down with Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence is a welcome and thought-provoking intervention. Published by Repeater, a para-academic1 press in the UK, Down with Childhood is not peer-reviewed and is meant to reach a wide audience; accordingly, it is shorter and written in a more colloquial style than typical academic monographs. Repeater specializes in topics that engage intellectually, and sometimes polemically, with current events and cultures; the press Rekret, Paul. Down with Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence. Repeater, 2017. 115 pp. $15.95 pb. ISBN 9781910924495.
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Seriality and Texts for Young People, 2014
At age nineteen, Shawn Fanning became the youthful face of rebellion when he launched his peer-to... more At age nineteen, Shawn Fanning became the youthful face of rebellion when he launched his peer-to-peer music file sharing platform Napster in 1999. Alex Winter, the director of Downloaded, a 2013 documentary about Napster, describes Fanning as one of the “brilliant young minds that ignited the biggest youth revolt since Alan Freed hit the radio” (“About the Movie”). For three years, Napster allowed millions of Internet users to share their digital music collections for free, until its shutdown following a lawsuit by major record labels. Napster’s challenge to the music industry was possible because of the development of MP3s, a digital audio encoding format that decreases a file size by discarding all unnecessary auditory data. Combined with faster Internet connections and ever-increasing terabytes of memory storage in technological devices, the lossy data compression characteristic of MP3 files enabled the alternate, “underground” circulation of music through Fanning’s software.
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Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2015
One only needs to look at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) logo, with its abstract out... more One only needs to look at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) logo, with its abstract outline of the CMHR building, to see the way in which the museum’s architecture has come to stand in for the CMHR’s immaterial meanings and content. This seven-story building, which is located at The Forks, a historic area at the confluence of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers in downtown Winnipeg, is composed of four main components: the Roots, which consist of four large stone ramps covered with prairie grass at the base and housing classrooms, the gift shop, the restaurant, and other exhibition areas; the Mountain, a sheer modernist façade of overlapping, angular limestone that rests upon the Roots and contains the gallery spaces; the Cloud, a curvilinear, translucent glass section enveloping the upper portion of the northern façade, containing offices and allowing light into the Garden of Contemplation area; and the Tower of Hope, a 100-m spire of bluish glass that rises above the Cloud and is lit at night. This architecture has been referred to as ‘‘unique,’’ ‘‘iconic,’’ ‘‘a destination,’’ ‘‘awe-inspiring,’’ ‘‘timeless,’’ ‘‘world-class,’’ and ‘‘monumental’’ (Bellamy 2012; The Forks n.d.; Tourism Winnipeg n.d.; Hume 2009; International Association 2012; Knelman 2012; Speirs 2013). The CMHR itself emphasizes the distinctiveness of the museum’s materiality and its symbolic significance to both Winnipeg and its own mandate for human rights; for example, the CMHR website home page declares, ‘‘Winnipeg’s New Skyline: The Canadian Museum for Human Rights,’’ and the CMHR 2012–2013 annual report named the architecture as one of the six guiding principles of the Museum. Adjectives such as ‘‘iconic’’ and ‘‘world-class’’ cast an image of the museum that underscores grand hopes for the city, the country, and global human rights. However, with the limitations imposed by the state and society, including governmental agendas for how
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Dancecult
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Scholarly and Research Communication
This paper describes an environmental scan of online resources for editors and publishers of scho... more This paper describes an environmental scan of online resources for editors and publishers of scholarly journals that was conducted from March to June 2017. The resources in this scan take the form of archived webinars, reports, publications, infographics, and conference presentation videos supplied by other associations and societies, as well as libraries, software companies, and commercial publishers.
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Seriality and Texts for Young People, 2014
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Dancecult
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Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 2019
The English duo Pet Shop Boys and American group LCD Soundsystem are notable for their representa... more The English duo Pet Shop Boys and American group LCD Soundsystem are notable for their representation as artists who entered and succeeded in the predominately youthful market of popular music and the hedonistic aesthetic of electronic dance music (EDM) at ages considered old for the industry: thirty-two for vocalists/lyricists Neil Tennant (Pet Shop Boys) and James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem). Neither of these bands make straightforward EDM—Pet Shop Boys fall under pop and LCD Soundsystem can be considered post-punk—but both are influenced by the New York City dance scene of the late 70s and early 80s, and characterized as ironic. I argue that Pet Shop Boys and LCD Soundsystem are ironic because of their belated, knowing position in a genre that privileges the infinite present and unproductive reproduction through repetition. In light of Lee Edelman’s claim that irony is the queerest of rhetorical devices, the ambivalence of Pet Shop Boys’ and LCD Soundsystem’s ostensible lack of youth and the youthful temporality of their EDM aesthetic place them in a queer tension between notions of immediate authenticity and the distance of age.
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Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2015
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Book Chapters by Larissa Wodtke
Under My Thumb: The Songs That Hate Women and The Women That Love Them, 2017
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Crowdfunding the Future: Media Industries, Ethics and Digital Society, 2015
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Seriality and Texts for Young People: The Compulsion to Repeat, 2014
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Books by Larissa Wodtke
Beginning in the late 1970s as an offshoot of disco and punk, dance-punk is difficult to define. ... more Beginning in the late 1970s as an offshoot of disco and punk, dance-punk is difficult to define. Also sometimes referred to as disco-punk and funk-punk, it skirts, overlaps, and merges with other genres including post-punk, post-disco, new wave, mutant disco, and bloghouse.
This book explores the historical and cultural conditions of the genre as it appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then again in the early 2000s and illuminates what is at stake in delineating dance-punk as a genre. Looking at bands such as Gang of Four, ESG, Public Image Ltd., LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture, and Le Tigre, this book examines the tensions between and blurring of the resilience and emotion in dance music and the cynicism and irony associated with post-punk and indie rock, as well as the racial, gendered, sexual, and class connotations that are implied.
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Manic Street Preachers were and remain one of the most interesting, significant, and best-loved b... more Manic Street Preachers were and remain one of the most interesting, significant, and best-loved bands of the past thirty years. Their third album The Holy Bible (1994) is generally acknowledged to be their most enduring and fascinating work, and one of the most compelling and challenging records of the nineties. Triptych reconsiders The Holy Bible from three separate, intersecting angles, combining the personal with the political, history with memory, and popular accessibility with intellectual attention to the album’s depth and complexity. Rhian E. Jones considers The Holy Bible in terms of its political context, setting it within the de-industrialised Welsh landscape of the 1990s; Daniel Lukes looks at the album’s literary and artistic sources; and Larissa Wodtke analyses the way the album links with philosophical ideas of memory and the archive.
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Review Essays by Larissa Wodtke
Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 2018
Review essay on Paul Rekret's Down with Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence
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Editorials by Larissa Wodtke
Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 2011
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Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 2012
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Conference Presentations by Larissa Wodtke
Roundtable with Warren Cariou, Mavis Reimer, Helen Robinson-Settee, and Doris Wolf. Association f... more Roundtable with Warren Cariou, Mavis Reimer, Helen Robinson-Settee, and Doris Wolf. Association for Research in the Cultures of Young People session, Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Regina
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Roundtable discussion “An Open Book?: Open Access and Music Scholarship in Canada” as part of the... more Roundtable discussion “An Open Book?: Open Access and Music Scholarship in Canada” as part of the Canada 150: Music and Belonging conference, University of Toronto
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Papers by Larissa Wodtke
Book Chapters by Larissa Wodtke
Books by Larissa Wodtke
This book explores the historical and cultural conditions of the genre as it appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then again in the early 2000s and illuminates what is at stake in delineating dance-punk as a genre. Looking at bands such as Gang of Four, ESG, Public Image Ltd., LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture, and Le Tigre, this book examines the tensions between and blurring of the resilience and emotion in dance music and the cynicism and irony associated with post-punk and indie rock, as well as the racial, gendered, sexual, and class connotations that are implied.
Review Essays by Larissa Wodtke
Editorials by Larissa Wodtke
Conference Presentations by Larissa Wodtke
This book explores the historical and cultural conditions of the genre as it appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then again in the early 2000s and illuminates what is at stake in delineating dance-punk as a genre. Looking at bands such as Gang of Four, ESG, Public Image Ltd., LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture, and Le Tigre, this book examines the tensions between and blurring of the resilience and emotion in dance music and the cynicism and irony associated with post-punk and indie rock, as well as the racial, gendered, sexual, and class connotations that are implied.