Re-producing pop

Abstract

Electroclash is an electronic dance music popular in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and London between 2001 and 2004. In this article, I use the example of electroclash to demonstrate the significance of media in structuring social reality. I argue that electroclash constitutes a set of aesthetic tactics for living through the confusions and contradictions of life in a media-saturated, increasingly globalized, late capitalist economy. It is produced by a diverse assemblage of urban youth, whose primary commonality is an ambivalent relationship towards media. Electroclash artists, I argue, engage with and respond to meanings within existing media texts. They ironically perform the clichés and representations of popular culture, re-investing them with critical, though often ambiguous new meanings. In these re-readings of media, I conclude, electroclash artists blur the distinction between celebration and critique, and ultimately complicate any clear-cut, theoretical opposition between resistance and accommodation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.