This thesis considers rap music produced in London. The project employs close textual analysis and ethnography to engage with the formal characteristics of rap and the social relations constructed through its production and use. The black cultural tradition has a considerable history and the thesis focuses upon its appropriation in contemporary London. The study begins with an examination of the process of becoming a rapper. I then consider the collaborative work that rap artists engage in and how these skills contribute to construction of the UK Hip-Hop and Grime scenes. Moving on from this focus on cultural producers, I then consider the practices of rap music’s users and the role of rap in mainstream metropolitan life. I use the public bus as a site through which to observe the ethical relations that are constituted through sharing and playing with rap music. My analysis then turns to the processes through which identity is solicited and produced within nightclubs and concerts. I discuss the production of subaltern masculinities and femininities by the audience in this space. I also consider how MCs orchestrate their audiences in the production of special forms of collectivity and the organisation of a social consciousness. Following this, I examine rap lyrics in a selection of tracks and videos in order to engage with the representation of urban dwelling within the black public sphere. This close analysis allows me to consider rap songs as part of a cultural politics that challenges socio-economic inequality and racist oppression. I then discuss the structural position of the black working classes and the role of cultural production in providing means of avoiding the economic vulnerability of low skill labour. The study concludes with an examination of artists’ efforts to transform their socio-economic positions through their cultural production and self-representation.

This thesis addresses the question of how socio-political differences and lived experiences of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity may be perceived to manifest in the making of sound arts and experimental musics with a specific focus upon works made by women. Drawing upon compositions, installations and artist-archives including works by Lina Džuverovic, Anne Hilde Neset, Cathy Lane, Emma Hedditch, Sonia Boyce, Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether, the research considers the different ways in which the category of “woman” has been historically silenced, erased, ignored and disqualified from and misrepresented within dominant historical sound and music histories. I then ask what representations of “woman” might have materialised within this relational paradigm that “privileges the perspective of an archetypal Western, white, and male subject” as the universal subject of sound (Rodgers 2010b: v)? In particular noise and silence are addressed as the assumed polar limits of sound arts and experimental musics combined with a reconsideration of the fundamental parameters of pitch, timbre and amplitude as sound’s dominant laws, norms and conventions. The analysis of how the artists addressed within the research have in turn used and critiqued historically dominant representations through their aesthetic practices aims to demonstrate the ways in which these artists have challenged, resisted or transformed sound art and experimental music practices in the historical present. This research aims to contribute new insights within the emerging field of feminist sound studies by connecting social and aesthetic processes in contemporary sound arts and experimental music practices within a discourse of feminist composition. Such a discourse seeks to contribute to the materialisation of alternative sound and music economies through the subtle calibration of compositional strategies that seek to displace dominant compositional processes intent upon regulating the noise of the social as a field of normalisation for the reproduction of the individual, self-sovereign and universally masculine subject of sound. Ultimately, what this research seeks to contribute is how to experience feminist composition as a social event.

Hip hop is part of a global economy of music, images and signs. In Tanzania, since political and economic liberalisation in the 1990s, local musical forms which appropriate the practice of rapping have become popular. Rapping has become a widespread practice which has produced musical stars as well as unrecorded ‘underground’ rappers. This study explores the aesthetic, performative and ideological commonalities and differences between these two forms of rapping. Situated at the intersection of debates about masculinity, youth and globalisation, this study will contribute to ongoing debates about new forms of identity and sociality created by rappers. It explores both appropriation from the transnational circulation of styles and signs as well as local orders of meaning rappers use to fashion themselves. While recognising the difficult social and economic conditions under which young people in Dar es Salaam live, I view rapping as productive and highlight the creativity, inventiveness and ingenuity of rappers.

This thesis explores the extent to which, and the ways in which, KCC Live, a volunteer youth-led community radio station situated in Knowsley, neighbouring Liverpool, UK, provides a space for young people to find and realise their voices. The body of geographical work on radio has predominantly focussed on large-scale geopolitical questions at the international scale. In particular, there has been a deficit of research considering community radio in the UK. Research from other countries is not easily transferable, due to the specific regulatory paradigms in different countries. This study takes a step towards remedying the neglect of community radio in geographical research in the UK. This research project adopts a participatory design in collaboration with young people at KCC Live. Mixed methods were employed, including: 18 months of observant participation; interviews and focus groups with volunteers; interviews with management at KCC Live and Knowsley Community College; a listener survey, listener diaries, and follow-up interviews. Accompanying this thesis are two co-produced audio artefacts: an audio documentary named ‘Community to me is…’, which explores young people’s musings on community, and a three-part radio series called ‘What we found’, which discusses the findings of this research in audio form. First, my research provides insight into a twofold vision of youth voice as both restricted and creative concurrently. This thesis shows that community radio is not a cure-all solution for disenfranchised and silenced young people, as young people at KCC Live work within a pre-censored idea of speech. Second, this thesis finds that young people conceptualise the KCC Live community in multiple ways. These include: friendships which constitute communities of choice; geographic communities within specific locales; the functioning of KCC Live as a community of practice; imagined communities of listeners; and virtual communities, formed through use of social media. This research therefore advances recent debates that shift notions of community away from static place-based understandings to more networked approaches. Third, this thesis demonstrates that young people are capable of learning skills, locating resources and building networks, thereby generating their own stocks of social capital. It therefore challenges the dominant perception within the literature of young people as receivers, rather than producers, of social capital.

Focusing where possible on folk and early popular music as historical documents, this thesis investigates how successive waves of culturally alien Irish immigrants were able to overcome hostility and eventually integrate into the population of New York City. It establishes that legacies of Protestant reformation, British domination and Catholic deprivation carried from Ireland and Great Britain combined in New York City with economic and political competition to invigorate latent anti-Catholic and anti-Irish hostility. This process was greatly aggravated by the huge and incessant scope of immigration; and the unsuitability of a poorly-educated, rural people for settlement in an increasingly urbanised commercial industrial environment. Irish Catholics refused assimilation because it required the rejection of their heritage. Instead, they opted to integrate en masse through the acquisition of political power, a far longer process marked by ebbs and flows of fortune and opposition. Employing lyrics and the wider culture of folk and popular song, as well as period newspaper reportage and modern scholarship, the thesis traces the chronology of Catholic Irish integration beginning with the establishment of state and national sovereignty in late 1783. The Introduction provides broader thesis overview and definitions. Chapter One establishes that by 1700 official British colonial policy purposefully discouraged Catholic settlement in New York. Chapter Two shows conservative Federalist opposition to providing equal religious and political rights. Chapter Three examines the dual impact of Ireland's Great Hunger and America's Second Great Awakening. Chapter Four investigates the opportunity and challenge presented by the American Civil War, and the catastrophic Draft Riots of 1863. Chapter Five sees the Catholic Irish banish Orangeism, gain control of Tammany Hall and then the mayor's office. Throughout, songs illuminate the Catholic Irish path towards integration.

Sociable folk dancing in the UK is an organised group activity in which a significant number of people take part, often practising folk styles which have their origins in other countries. These groups are generally not run for profit, operate under the radar of media attention, and consequentially their activities remain largely hidden from view. This thesis addresses the fact that there have been no in-depth studies of these groups. It reports on the findings of a detailed ethnographic research project, to offer in-sights into the practices and motivations of participants in social dance. The thesis answers the key question: ‘What is the meaning and significance of participation in these folk music and social dance styles to those taking part?’. An interdisciplinary and ethnographic research approach was adopted to investigate two such folk styles: Cajun and Zydeco, and Scandinavian. This approach allowed research participants to make a significant contribution to the focus of the research, and to inform the subsidiary questions: ‘What are the concerns and interests of those involved in social folk dance?’, ‘What is it that makes involvement in these dance practices so appealing?’, and ‘What are the overall benefits of being involved?’ The research produced an interpretive account of these practices, through investigating sites of participation in these dance styles in the UK, which were explored by means of immersive involvement in their dance practices. This gave an insight into the way in which participation was organised and managed, and allowed for introductions to be made which were followed up with thirty in-depth interviews. The study revealed that despite the stylistic differences between the two dance styles and how they are practised, both nevertheless benefitted participants in similar ways. That dance events are organised on a not-for-profit basis was particularly important to participants, and encouraged loyalty and cooperation, promoting feelings of empowerment and ownership. An atmosphere of supportive inclusion was also built in to the loose organisation of events and activities, which allowed a consensus to develop where social attitudes and ideas could be negotiated, cultivated, and shared. This created a sense of belonging to an unboundaried, and fluid community or social network, a safe environment in which participants were able to experience dance as a communicative and expressive dialogue between individuals and within the group. This thesis argues that participants found their involvement in these dance styles socially and personally satisfying, and that this made a considerable contribution to their individual wellbeing. The research found that sociable folk dancing served as a vehicle for community, improving participants’ sense of self-worth, supporting creativity, and well-being. These findings complement clinical research that champions dance, and social dance in particular, as a healthy and worthwhile leisure activity. This thesis supports the results of such scientific studies into the benefits of dance by providing supporting evidence from within a social setting. This has implications for further research, and for policy and practice, whether dance activities are pursued formally or informally and whatever their aim.

This research explores the functions of music by analyzing the relationship between musical and social classification. More particularly it focuses on the manifestation of this relationship during the active participation of audiences in music events where the individual and the collective, the musical and the social are argued to be experientially interwoven. The main argument proposed is that music categories as well as the ritualistic structures and expressions that shape their corresponding live performances are linked with perceptions and fantasies of the social self. Considering elements such as representations, performativity and the constitution of identity within social interaction, this study questions the class-­‐focused approaches conventionally employed to explore the subject. Contrarily it proposes that the ‘reality’ or fantasy of the social self is not ‘a given’ but it is personally configured, and relates the construction of social identities to notions of the spectacle. The interplay between the mediatized representations that shape music categories and individuals’ agency to choose and construct their identity is argued to produce different discursive and performative expressions of ‘the ideal’. In this context, music rituals are sketched as opportunities for the celebration and legitimization of their embodied values, and idealized social identities and relationships. The empirical part of this investigation focuses on Greek music audiences. Employing semi-­‐structured interviews it examines the way individuals with different music identifications construct their understandings of music categories and their rituals, as well as their perceived interconnections with social identities. Its findings suggest that music categories are perceived as naturally linked with different aspects of individuals’ social selves and realities that are expressed and actualized in music performances, verifying the performative and discursive intertwinement of the two modes of classification. However, the analysis of the data collected also indicates that the values expressed or experienced during such immersive processes, which combine social relationships, cultural categories, and multisensory experiences, necessitate widening the theorization of the ‘ideal’.

The aim of this thesis was to examine changing representations of men and masculinities in a particular historical period (“The Sixties”) and to explore the impact that this had in a period of rapid social change in the UK and the legacy of that impact. In order to do this, a multi-method study was developed, combining documentary research with a set of eleven semi-structured interviews. The documentary research took the form of a case study of The Beatles, arguing that their position as a group of men who became a global cultural phenomenon, in the period under study, made theme a suitable vehicle through which to read changing representations of masculinities in this period and to reflect on what this meant for men in UK society. The Beatles’ live action films were chosen as a sample of Beatle “texts” which allowed for the Beatles to be looked at at different points in the “The Sixties” and for possible changes over that time period to be tracked. Textual analysis within discourse analysis (based on a framework suggested by van Dijk [1993], Fairclough [1995] and McKee [2003]) was used to analyse the texts. Ideas advanced by the Popular Memory Group (1982) about the interaction of public representations of the past and private memory of that past were influential in the decision to combine this piece of documentary research with interviews with a sample of men, in an age range of 18 to 74. The interview stage was designed to elicit data on the perception of the participants of the role of representation (with particular reference to the Beatles) of masculinities on them as individuals and their ideas about how this may have had an impact in terms of longer term social change. Ehrenreich’s (1983) notion of a male revolt in the late 1950s, an emergence of a challenge to established ideas about men and masculinity, was also influential, particularly as it is an idea at odds with the “crisis in masculinity” discourse (Tolson, 1977; Kimmel, 1987; Whitehead, 2002) at work in a number of texts on men and masculinity. Examining further Inglis’ (2000b : 1) concept of The Beatles as “men of ideas” with a global reach, the chosen Beatle texts were examined for discourses of masculinity which appeared to be resistant to the dominant. What emerged were a number of findings around resistance, non-conformity, feminised appearance, pre-metrosexuality, the male star as object of desire and The Beatles as a global male phenomenon open to the radical diversity of the world in a period of rapid social change. The role of popular culture within this process was central to the thesis, given its focus on The Beatles as a case study. However, broader ideas about the role of the arts also emerged with a resultant conclusion that “the sixties” is where a recognition of the importance of representation begins as well as a period where representations of gender (as well as class and race) became more accessible due to the rise in popularity of TV in the UK and a resurgence in British cinema. The thesis offers a number of ideas for further research, building on the outcomes of this particular study. These include further work on the competing crisis/ revolt discourse at work in the field of critical men’s studies, ascertaining female perspectives on representations of masculinities and their impact, further work on the Beatles through fans and an application of some of the ideas at work in the thesis to other periods of British history.