Special issues by Lyndon C. S. Way
Papers by Lyndon C. S. Way
This article considers how news stories about piracy off the coast of Somalia reflect Said’s (197... more This article considers how news stories about piracy off the coast of Somalia reflect Said’s (1979) concept of Orientalism, that is, the West representing the Rest in ways beneficial to the West. Critical Discourse Analysis is applied to news stories from the international BBC news website to reveal strategies used to represent a non-Western ‘other’ in need of control by a successful West. This legitimates the West’s military presence and actions whilst challenging BBC’s claims of objectivity. An historical account of both Somalia and piracy precede this analysis. The former illustrates how Somalia’s current ‘failed state’ status is in part due to foreign involvement while the latter describes how this status has produced conditions condusive to piracy. Actions by the West together with the BBC’s Orientalist perspective does little to relieve Somalia’s hardship,suffering and ending Somalia’s multiple problems.
Bloomsbury eBooks, Dec 1, 2017
Popular music has long been used to entertain, provoke, challenge and liberate but also to oppres... more Popular music has long been used to entertain, provoke, challenge and liberate but also to oppress and control. This book asks what is the nature of relations between music and meanings, and more specifically, between music and political meanings. Can popular music be political? What types of popular music work best with politics? What types of politics work best with popular music? This book considers the extent popular music can articulate ideas about society, identities and events, questions which are commonly asked across the field of popular music studies. These issues are explored in this book by considering exactly how popular music is perceived by fans to be political. That is, this book considers how a song, a video, a concert, a band or any other musical commodity conveys meanings about power, politics and identity. By answering how this is done, questions about what become clear. Leaning on Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies (MCDS), this book reveals the deeply political role played by some popular music. The book demonstrates how MCDS can provide an important and timely step forward due to its attention to the details of how communication takes place, its interest in discourse and how ideologies are naturalised and legitimised. It is set in contemporary Turkish society, with its complex and deep ideological divisions increasingly obvious under the stewardship of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his centre-right political party in power since 2002. It looks at how the authorities seek to harness and control popular music and how a wide range of popular music genres such as rock, rap, protest and folk music expressed in official promotional videos, protest cut-and-paste offerings, party-political election songs, live music events and internet discussions about popular music emerge as sites of power and resistance in certain venues and particularly across social media.
Popular Music, Oct 1, 2022
Populism is a discursive construct that represents popular interests and values by 'pretend[ing] ... more Populism is a discursive construct that represents popular interests and values by 'pretend[ing] to speak' for the people who are constructed separate and opposed to a powerful elite. Yet populism, in its various forms and accents, 'can adapt flexibly to a variety of substantive ideological values and principles'. This is manifested in 'the people' not being a prefixed natural category, but a signifier that acquires meaning through discourses and contexts. This article considers how populism is articulated in hip hop videos that criticise two authoritarian-populist politicians: America's Trump and Turkey's Erdogȃn. Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies, Eminem's 'The Storm' and Ezhel's 'Yarınımız Yok (We have no tomorrow)' are analysed to demonstrate how oppositional popular music can articulate its own brands of populism, transcending contexts, yet shaped by them.
The EU is the pinnacle of modernity to some Turks, whilst something to be loathed by others. Alth... more The EU is the pinnacle of modernity to some Turks, whilst something to be loathed by others. Although Turkey’s Islamic-rooted government pays lip service to joining the EU, very little progress has been achieved during its time in office. News of Britain’s EU referendum received mixed reactions in the Turkish press, depending on where the newspaper falls in Turkey’s deeply polarised political landscape. Throughout the Turkish press, coverage of foreign news is either ‘news stories’ sourced from Western news agencies or opinion pieces where more ‘home grown’ views of events are expressed. This chapter examines how a mainstream ‘oppositional’ online newspaper represented the EU referendum in opinion pieces. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, the chapter explores how stories of the referendum are used by the newspaper to express criticism about the government’s domestic and international affairs. I reveal how these criticisms are ideologically driven to the advantage of those associated with the newspaper, but do little in terms of informing the public of the foreign events that directly affect them.
Newcastle University eBooks, Jan 26, 2017
This cha1?ter considers the topic of multimodal metaphor from the perspective of cross-domain map... more This cha1?ter considers the topic of multimodal metaphor from the perspective of cross-domain mappings between the musical and the linguistic domains. Beginning with an example of what musicans call "text painting" (in which music is used to "paint" an image related to the text of a vocal work), I explore the different ways music and language structure thought. Examples of musical passages from Palestrina, Biber, Bach, Schubert, and Jerome Kern are used to demonstrate how music contributes to meaning construction and thus may serve as a source domain for a multimodal metaphor. I conclude with a brief discussion of how conceptual blending theory can be used for the analysis of text-music relations, and the multimodal metaphors that may result.
Visual Communication, Mar 24, 2016
Globalisation brings with it fears of cultural imperialism and a global mass culture from the Wes... more Globalisation brings with it fears of cultural imperialism and a global mass culture from the West. This article contends that global imagery in the promotion of Turkish popular music actually enhances difference within Turkey. Global images are employed alongside Turkish ones to create an array of cross-cultural hybrids which Turkish viewers may read as expressions of cultural, political and social difference. A social semiotic approach is used on a sample of visuals from three genres of popular music. Analysis is complemented with an historical and social contextualisation in order to enhance understanding of how images blend the global with the ‘local’ in different ways to enable a medium of protest. Here is a case where global images are an integral part of hybrids which express dissent to national social and political issues.
Journal of African Media Studies, Mar 1, 2013
This article considers how news stories about piracy off the coast of Somalia reflect E. Said’s c... more This article considers how news stories about piracy off the coast of Somalia reflect E. Said’s concept of Orientalism, that is, the West representing the Rest in ways beneficial to the West. Critical discourse analysis is applied to news stories from the international BBC news website to reveal strategies used to represent a non-western ‘other’ in need of control by a successful West. This legitimates the West’s military presence and actions whilst challenging BBC’s claims of objectivity. An historical account of both Somalia and piracy precede this analysis. The former illustrates how Somalia’s current ‘failed state’ status is in part due to foreign involvement while the latter describes how this status has produced conditions conducive to piracy. Actions by the West together with the BBC’s Orientalist perspective do little to relieve Somalia’s hardship, suffering and ending Somalia’s multiple problems.
Social Semiotics, Nov 1, 2013
Turkey and the United States (US) have had a close mutually beneficial political and military rel... more Turkey and the United States (US) have had a close mutually beneficial political and military relationship since the end of World War Two. However, this relationship came under pressure when the US government and Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) tried to cooperate closely in the 2003 military invasion of Iraq. AKP's leadership failed to persuade Turkey's parliament to accept the deployment of US troops and equipment in Turkey partially due to public opinion. Despite Turkish media and its government being intertwined to the extent where subversive discourses are all but silenced, some popular music videos were able to articulate discourses which questioned AKP's military policies. This paper analyses lyrics, visuals and sounds of one of these songs to look at the way war and political issues become articulated through a form of simplified popular politics, despite being presented as serious and authentic by a number of key signifiers across the different modes. A number of scholars have addressed the issue of subversion in music both as actual political challenge and as popular counter culture. This case study is used to assess subversion in music in these terms in order to consider its likely place in political debate in Turkey.
Journal of Language and Politics, Oct 7, 2016
Journal of Multicultural Discourses, May 4, 2015
During and immediately after the 2013 anti-government protests in Turkey, while there was almost ... more During and immediately after the 2013 anti-government protests in Turkey, while there was almost complete state control over mainstream media, anti-government pop videos posted on YouTube became a symbolic rallying point for protest movements and attracted vast amounts of posted comments. These were widely shared and became sung in public places and during clashes with the police. These videos and the comments posted below them can be examined in the light of scholarly debates about the role of social media in public debate and protest movements. For critical discourse analysis, this provides the challenge to analyse the discourses realised in both the video and in the comments themselves. In popular music studies, it has been suggested that pop songs have been unsuccessful at communicating more than populist political sentiments. From a discursive point of view, the paper shows that this is indeed the case for one Turkish iconic protest video. It also finds that comments do not deal with the actual events represented in the video but seek to frame these in terms of wider forms of allegiances to, and betrayal of, a true Turkish people and in the light of homogenised and reduced forms of history.
Punk & post-punk, Jun 1, 2016
Turkish hardcore punk rock can easily be dismissed as an example of cultural imperialism due to h... more Turkish hardcore punk rock can easily be dismissed as an example of cultural imperialism due to heavy borrowing from the West. However, mapping the cultural flow of music globally is insufficient. Though the global flow of culture (including music) is characterized by an imbalance which favours the West, we prefer viewing cultural flows as 'complex patterns of cross-fertilisation and cultural hybridity' where semiotic resources from the local and the West produce new packages of semiotic meanings. This article outlines how punks are able to harness the power of western hardcore punk and western technology such as the Internet to express real concern about Turkey for Turkish and international fans. Band members and fans of two hardcore bands are interviewed and lyrics and visuals of a typical video is analysed. This research reveals how bands use western resources to express opinions and views about life in Turkey for a local and international audience. In this sense, Turkish punk is not a case of cultural imperialism, but a cultural hybrid. Through internationalizing punk using technology and a DIY approach common in punk, punk thrives in a place which is inhospitable to most things alternative, different and not easily controlled.
Journal of Language and Politics, May 29, 2019
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2015
Turkey stands on the periphery of the dominating centre of Europe, straddling the East and West p... more Turkey stands on the periphery of the dominating centre of Europe, straddling the East and West politically, culturally, and geographically. Oppositional Turkish voices come from the periphery of Turkey itself, challenging the government’s political Islamist centre. ‘Ozgun’ (authentic protest) music is one such voice of protest. With its roots in Anatolian musical traditions, it also borrows liberally from Western musical styles, instrumentation and even harmonies raising fears of cultural imperialism where the West is seen to dominate the rest. This chapter argues that it is useful to think of this borrowing in terms of relocating semiotic resources from both the West and Turkish culture to construct spaces of resistance. Other than musical traditions, representations of place and people in places in music videos are also relocated into a semiotic package of subversion (meaning to undermine principles and corrupt). These representations are powerful, affecting our understanding of places, reinforcing myths, and providing listeners with a sense of identity (Forman 2002). In song, analysis of settings are ‘highly revealing about the world being communicated’ (Machin 2010: 92), and ‘can be used to understand broader social relations and trends, including identity, ethnicity, attachment to place, cultural economies, social activism, and politics’ (Johansson and Bell 2009: 2).
Social Semiotics, Feb 1, 2011
This paper, drawing on data from a news production study, carries out a critical discourse analys... more This paper, drawing on data from a news production study, carries out a critical discourse analysis of two stories produced by the Turkish Cypriot national news agency (TAK) and the stories produced by three local radio stations based on these texts. Both TAK and the three stations are ...
Critical Discourse Studies, Dec 21, 2022
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Special issues by Lyndon C. S. Way
Papers by Lyndon C. S. Way