No description available.

No description available.

This thesis investigates the role of gender in popular music, exploring the possibility of a feminine mode of writing. It focuses on the work of four leading female singer-songwriters, namely Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush and Tori Amos, whose songs are analyzed as textual entities. Building a theoretical bridge between musicology and feminist theory, the relationship between the text and the body is examined. The discursive perspective of this research allows pieces of popular music to be considered not only as ideologically signifying cultural commodities but also as textually signifying entities of words, music and images complementing (rather than supplementing) one another; in other words, that their cultural and ideological embodiments may be musicologically interpreted in tandem. My analysis of popular music pieces created and envoiced by these four artists departs from the presumption of the significance of gender-consciousness informing this word-music-image entity, located simultaneously at a representational and textual/musical level. Throughout this thesis, different female subjectivities are discussed, drawing primarily upon French feminism. Theories which establish a foundation for my arguments are Julia Kristeva’s the semiotic, Luce Irigaray’s feminine multiplicity and Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine, as well as Joan Riviere’s womanliness as masquerade. The resulting multilayered discourse acquires an interdisciplinary character, drawing upon and seeking to contribute to fields such as feminist musicology, popular music studies and gender theory. It also aims to shed light on issues from which gendered discourses arise, both in general terms and in the specific realm of music. This thesis concludes by discussing the extent to which female musicians achieved the feminization of popular music through manipulating both the lyrical and musical structures imposed by dominant discourses.

This Literature Review contextualises the work I undertook for 'Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head', a 140,000 word biography based on the life of the musician Syd Barrett, lead guitarist, vocalist, and principal songwriter in the original line up of Pink Floyd. The book is based on two and a half years of focussed research, carried out between January 1997 and August 2009. During this time I interviewed family, friends, schoolmates, fellow college students, musicians, artists, and admirers from every stage of Barrett‟s life, from his earliest days growing up in Cambridge, through his period as an active musician and pop star, to his final years as a reclusive and enigmatic figure in his home town. However, these 65 interviews comprise only one element of my research. In addition I utilised an extensive range of primary and secondary source material, and the bibliography for the book runs to some 49 texts. (See appendix.) I also drew upon significant audio and video material including rare and hard to find television transmissions, and archive and bootleg recordings, many of which are not in the public domain.