Papers by Dana Gorzelany-Mostak
The presidential campaigns of 2016 created a unique and beguiling assemblage of musical sounds, m... more The presidential campaigns of 2016 created a unique and beguiling assemblage of musical sounds, many of which incorporated popular music and imitations of and derivations from popular music culture. These political-cultural constellations included campaign playlists, concert events, advertisement soundtracks, musical tributes, protest songs, and the music played at party events like the conventions and the inauguration. Now that the campaign is over and the Trump presidency underway, what can we learn from analyzing the musical landscapes of the 2016 campaign? How do analyses of campaign and campaign-oriented music cultures shed light on the candidates, the electorate, the nation, the present, and the future? How can these analyses inform political action, activism, cultural resistance, pop music education, and musicological methods? Perhaps, the most relevant questions revolve around importance. How relevant is music to the campaign? Does the campaign's soundtrack make a difference in turnout or support? These lines of inquiry are vital, even if the answers are only speculative. Would the Clinton campaign have been more successful if it had chosen a soundtrack full of feel-good 70s rock and Motown, or had a single-theme song that audiences rallied around? There is no way to know. But scholarship should not be tied only to legitimating or criticizing the electoral outcome. Cultural critique, as Marcus and Fischer point out (1986), is useful for discerning and formulating alternate ways of living, thinking, being, and becoming in the present and future. Critical scrutiny of campaigns and their cultural appendages proposes everyday practices and perceptive modes that unmoor us from existing ideologies and intellectual ruts. Exiting the striated planes of partisanship and engaging alternate possibilities makes better thinkers, fosters difficult dialogues, challenges the status quo, and produces the free thought, exchange, and actions, that democracy thrives on. Publicly thinking through and critiquing campaign music is an act of actively resisting, reshaping, and reimagining social life (Turino, 2008).
The 2012 U.S. presidential election provided an opportunity for a team of scholars to undertake t... more The 2012 U.S. presidential election provided an opportunity for a team of scholars to undertake the first comprehensive study of music associated with a national political campaign. Already before the final selection of candidates in August/September, four academics had made plans to follow the musical path of the election battle as it unfolded, whatever the outcome in November. We divided the research tasks according to four major areas of musical deployment in recent presidential campaigns: music at the conventions (James Deaville), music in campaign advertisements (Joanna Love), user-generated, newly composed music on YouTube (Michael Saffle), and candidate and voter engagement with digital playlists (Dana Gorzelany-Mostak). The resulting four papers were presented in one session at the annual meeting of the Society for American Music (SAM) in March 2013 and then revised for publication in this forum. We opened the SAM panel with the above trailer, which reflects certain affinities between the paratexts of the cinematic trailer and the paratexts of campaign music with regard to history, content, and function. 2 In the present day, trailers precede the film as far as the public is concerned; they are a preview of coming attractions intended to cajole audiences into seeing and hearing their favorite celebrities, stories, or film genres on the big screen. However, when the cinema was in its infancy at the beginning of the twentieth century, trailers were exhibited at the end of the film rather than the beginning, which explains their designation. 3 In many cases, the trailer was actually a teaser that hinted towards what was in store for the protagonist of a serial film's next chapter. But hype represents only one function of the trailer. In its desire to aid the war effort, a committee of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry distributed trailers that advertised the sale of war bonds in 1917. While the silent trailers of this period tended to use standard cinematographic practices of the time and draw upon fairly obvious advertising tactics (including photoplay music in theaters), by the 1930s, sophisticated graphics and special effects, underscoring, and narration became commonplace as trailers were offered as transitional shorts between the multiple sound films screened on a given day. 4
During the 2008 and 2012 electoral cycles, the music preferences of presidential candidates becam... more During the 2008 and 2012 electoral cycles, the music preferences of presidential candidates became the subject of endless commentary, critique, and consternation. While “a little musical priming,” to use Irving Berlin’s words, has been par for the course at least since the 1840s, candidates have increasingly relied on thoughtfully curated playlists of pre-existing songs in various campaign contexts, both live and online. Campaign playlists in their many manifestations function as a form of social currency for those who create, listen to, and share music in the twenty-first century. This article investigates the functions of the list in music and music-related discourses, as well as the cultural work lists can perform during campaign season. After providing a handful of examples from early twenty-first-century campaigns to illustrate these functions, I turn to Mitt Romney’s and Barack Obama’s use of playlists in 2012, focusing on Spotify and the public’s reception to their respective engagements with music-sharing communities. To conclude, I consider the ways in which the campaign playlist serves as a tool for political communication, mobilization, and participation, and ponder its changing function in the 2.0 world.
From the earliest elections with popular participation to the present day, American presi- dentia... more From the earliest elections with popular participation to the present day, American presi- dential candidates have harnessed music’s connotative potential and affective properties in a variety of campaign contexts. But in a corporatized electoral landscape where the fields of politics and popular culture are inextricably intertwined, and every aspect of the candi- date’s public and private life is subjected to intense scrutiny enabled by the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies, nontraditional texts (such as music) play an increasingly significant role in candidate identity formation. Adding to recent work that explores the aesthetic and social dimensions of newly composed campaign music and its cultural currency, this essay turns a critical lens toward preexisting music and its impact on campaign discourses dur- ing Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential primary campaign. I investigate three components of Obama’s soundscape: 1) his engagement with hip hop—its artists, audiences, and values; 2) the intersections between his professed musical tastes and his complex biography; and 3) the playlists he used at campaign rallies, and the factors that allowed this soundtrack to solidify his own identity as candidate as well as forge alliances with women voters and black voters. Ultimately, cultural and musical analyses reveal how Obama’s music strategy allowed him to project a black identity that was both “real” and “respectable.”
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Papers by Dana Gorzelany-Mostak