Taking it as a Man? : Music, Youth, and Gender, Outside and Within Mainstream Media Cultures

Abstract: Since the establishment of the Internet as an aspect of everyday life in the Western world, popular culture has generated new prospects for artists and other cultural agents to disseminate their creative outcomes. This thesis focuses on the early years of the new millennium, a time of pessimism and conflict around file-sharing and other illegal activities, but also a time for renewed thinking and enthusiasm regarding the potential of the prospering information and communication age.The thesis serves two main purposes. The first purpose is to (re)consider methodologies regarding cultural theory and critical analysis in order to transgress traditional disciplinary boundaries within and around this area of scholarly research. In turn, the interdisciplinary foundation serves to show how intersectional perspectives on cultural identities may be applied to the persona or ‘image’ of musical artists in order to undertake on the one hand media- and discourse- oriented analysis, and on the other hand conventional accounts of musical harmony, modality, and tonality.The second purpose is to show how popular music of late comes to pass in medial contexts. Two relatively young music constellations (at that time) are presented as case studies, in which a substantial amount of attention is drawn to cultural theory and critical analysis. The first case study, a solo project called Le Bombe, shows alternative music, crafted using simple instruments in a home studio setting. The music is distributed by means of underground networks, entirely without involvement from the corporate music industry. In contrast, the second case study, an all-female constellation called Sahara Hotnights, sheds light upon a rock band, to whom much attention is dedicated, although their production is to some extent subject to the hegemonic contacts and aesthetic norms of mainstream culture.Overall, the analytical accounts stem from post Marxist cultural critiques, as well as gender research and analyses of intertextuality using music theory. The musical production presented in the case studies is thus observed amongst other musical recordings and related music within a larger historical framework of musical style and genre. The analyses also reveal a multitude of explicit strategies and implicit tactics towards the cultural hegemony of the globalizing music industry.