The Eighties were a time in Western popular music that seemed to exist only by virtue of it coming after something else---namely, the 1960s counterculture and the punk rock of the 1970s. Inheriting both the failure of permanent cultural revolution and the intense cynicism that is punk's strongest legacy, youth cultures in the 1980s found it increasingly difficult to live in the present. This thesis labels this historical dilemma postmodern. It will show how SPIN magazine attempted to move past this dilemma in order to assert a unique identity for 1980s popular music and youth cultures. In particular, John Leland, a columnist for SPIN, appropriated a pop aesthetic as an identity marker and, in the process, questioned the supposed ineffectiveness of pop music for a political postmodernism. An analysis of Leland's writing uncovers what accounts of this era tend to ignore: the social function of postmodernism.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.82688 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Bozelka, Kevin John |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of Art History and Communication Studies.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002211254, proquestno: AAIMR12702, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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