Populism in musical mash ups: recontextualising Brexit

Abstract

For many of us, social media is our preferred option when we want to be informed and entertained. Though memes, mash ups and other forms of digital popular culture are dismissed by some as “just a bit of fun”, scholars have shown how these can be political (Denisova 2019; Wiggins 2019; Way 2021). It is precisely through popular culture where we most experience politics “as fun, as style, and simply as part of the taken for granted everyday world … [though this is] infused by and shaped by, power relations and ideologies” (Machin 2013). This has never been more evident than now as we scroll through a constant flow of entertaining offerings at the swipe of a finger. Leaning on Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies, this paper analyses written and spoken lexica, images and musical sounds to reveal how a musical mash up distributed on social media recontextualises the UK government's withdrawal from the European Union (Brexit). Here, logically structured political arguments are side-lined in favour of entertaining, affective and populist discourses. It is through such a close reading that we consider the role(s) such digital popular culture plays in our understanding of politics during users’ search to be entertained online.

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