Listening to Britain: Popular music and national identity, 1979-1996

The prolonged economic decline of Britain since World War II, the end of empire, immigration from the former colonies, and the reshaping of Europe have produced a national identity crisis that takes many forms. This dissertation investigates popular music culture as an arena for debates about "Britishness," and "Englishness" during the continuous years of Conservative government 1979-1996. This study shifts the emphasis away from official representations of national history and geography to unofficial versions. I examine how popular music culture activates popular memory. Sound recordings, videos, films, and music packaging are analyzed for their reconstructions of national iconography, and negotiations of cultural identity. I examine the representation of the working class in the Smiths' and Morrissey's work, the Pet Shop Boys' queer approach to the landscape of London, the hybrid forms of British Asian music by Apache Indian, Bally Sagoo, Fun-Da-Mental, and Echobelly, and black British music's diasporic sensibilities exemplified in the work of Massive Attack and Tricky. Since popular music culture has become increasingly visual in this period, I look at record sleeves, music videos by Derek Jarman, and two documentaries, Gurinder Chadha's I'm British But... (1989) and Isaac Julien's The Darker Side of Black (1994). The dissertation draws on critical theory and criticism in the fields of cultural studies, popular music studies, queer and postcolonial discourses.