Blood-Thirsty Blues. The Sonic Politics of American Murder Ballads

Contains fulltext : 230028pub.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)How can music reframe, remediate, and communicate the experience of death, crime, and murder? The use and function of murder ballads in popular music has not been addressed in an interdisciplinary fashion and remains a desiderata to gain insight into the human condition. In the most general sense, murder ballads can be described as narratives about crimes—both real and imagined. In poetic fashion, we learn about a killing in grisly details from the perspective of the perpetrator. This chapter will approach murder ballads from a three-fold perspective: First, remediating oral history of murder in bluegrass music, second, blues songs about hate crimes and murder as early black feminist statements, and third, murder ballads as political protest songs for the cause of minorities. I will argue that murder ballads with their inherently intermedial powers penetrate both public and political spheres offering creative and self-reflexive responses to social realities. Considering the evolution of murder ballads from seventeenth-century Europe to a staple in American pop and rap, the sonic politics of murder ballads deserve more attention within and beyond the realm of music history

Musikfernsehsender

Der Beitrag widmet sich einer historischen wie systematischen Betrachtung des Phänomens Musikfemsehen unter Berücksichtigung der medialen Gattung Videoclip/Musikvideo am Beispiel des international operierenden Senders MTV. Hinzu kommt die Berücksichtigung historisch einmaliger Konstellationen, im vorliegenden Fall das Zusammentreffen der Kunst- bzw. Mediengattung „Musikvideo“ und der medienökonomischen bzw. -technischen Entwicklung von Musikspartenkanälen - als einer Art „Wahlverwandtschaft“ - sowie einer insgesamt mehr und mehr am Visuellen orientierten Pop(musik)kultur