Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Dayton, Ohio was teeming with musical talent during the 1970s....

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Visual culture studies seeks to broaden our perception of the world seen, expanding our sense of what constitutes culture and the possibilities for the interpretation of what has been called the vernacular. How do the signs and symbols of a particular visual culture disturb historical narratives? How might images perform more than an illustrative function as historical evidence? In what ways might that visual culture inform our renderings of historical truths? As a historian engaged in placing photography at the center of my research, such questions are central to discovering just what my work is all about. As I examine the world of postwar jazz photography in magazines, album covers, and fine art, a distinctive visual culture emerges, complete with archives rich in artistic texture but perhaps more opaque in terms of historical significance.
The 12-inch long playing record provided a new visual forum in which photographers, designers, record producers, and musicians collaborated to create iconography with both commercial and artistic functions. I argue that photographs of musicians on album covers linked the music to its makers in the eyes of collectors and communicated across language and national barriers as companies such as Columbia sought to penetrate an emerging global market for recorded music in the 1950s.
My paper, based on published primary materials, oral interviews, and company archives, examines images of musician Miles Davis on his early album covers for Columbia beginning in 1956. The covers are based on the photography of Robert Parent, Dennis Stock, and Roy DeCarava among others, the art direction of S. Neil Fujita, and the record production of George Avakian and other company executives. I argue that Davis gradually gained artistic control over his visual presentation on these covers, culminating in the imagery of the 1961 recording Someday My Prince Will Come.
I place the evolution of Davis’s image in the context of Columbia’s efforts to market Davis domestically and internationally as a popular album artist rather than as a niche jazz musician. In addition, Davis’s Columbia albums appeared contemporaneously with two significant developments. The resurgence of American consumer culture in a burgeoning postwar economy of which the long –playing record became a cultural staple meant that images of African American jazz musicians now penetrated broad national and international markets, including intimate domestic spaces. At the same time, an intense intellectual debate on images of African American masculinity and racial authenticity in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a debate that engaged writers as diverse as Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) in addition to the jazz musicians themselves, played out against a backdrop of movements for social justice in America and anticolonialism abroad. Davis’s self-presentations complicated the question of jazz’s identity as a popular art form, evolving versus traditional notions of black masculinity and its place in a global marketplace, the concept of racial authenticity, and the jazz community’s ideas of class aspiration and /or rejection that had been first inspired by the bebop movement of the 1940s.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: In November 1972, Kris Kristofferson released Jesus Was a Capricorn, an album that marked a somewhat unexpected crossroads in the singing career of the former Rhodes Scholar and writer of such recent country hits as �For the Good Times� and �Sunday Mornin� Comin� Down.� Despite his almost unprecedented success as a country songwriter, which included winning Song of the Year Awards in 1970 for two different songs, country fans seemed slow to embrace the long-haired outsider and his own songs about the Rolling Stones, a hippie Jesus, and �good Christian soldiers.� However, it was these same types of songs and Kristofferson�s �free thinking, modern� take on the music that also broadened his appeal beyond the traditional country audience. Nonetheless, inhabiting that middle ground between the country and pop audiences especially during these increasingly politicized � and market-segmented � times could be a risky proposition for artists trying to establish themselves and their primary audiences.
In fact, by 1972, Kristofferson�s label indeed seemed to be struggling to define his primary audience. His first release that year, Border Lord, was considered a disappointment both critically and commercially. On the heels of this disappointment came Jesus Was a Capricorn, and, almost immediately, critics declared that Kristofferson was �back on track.� Unfortunately, critical success did not immediately translate into sales. As with the previous album, the label struggled to find a successful single. The album�s title track barely cracked the pop 100, and a second single failed to chart at all. Thus, in the first several months of its release, Capricorn seemed to be well on its way to saddling Kristofferson�s burgeoning country recording career with its second major disappointment in less than a year�and then a deejay began to play �Why Me?�
Considering Kristofferson well-deserved reputation as one of the leading lights of the so-called �new breed� of country artists, it is more than a bit ironic that his only #1 single as a (solo) country singer was the traditional gospel song, �Why Me?� This paper begins with this surprising hit single and the manner in which it propelled Jesus Was a Capricorn to the top of the country charts, but it is the dialogue that occurred between Kristofferson and his intersecting, and at times competing, audiences that will be the primary focus. A related topic will be the examination of one writer�s assertion that country music �provided no obvious space for the social concerns and restlessness of the young.� With the stark reality of his songs and their �un-country literacy,� Kristofferson was beginning to create just such a space, but what were the limitations that he faced and how did these change as a result of the success of Jesus Was a Capricorn, and the album�s top single? Drawing upon country fan magazines, industry publications, newspaper accounts, and interviews, this study will attempt to answer this and other questions associated with the rise of Kris Kristofferson � the singer � to the top of the country charts.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 (9/11) have provoked various collective and personal responses in the US, whose meaning continues to be negotiated through time. This paper analyses two popular music albums released in 2002, which address the events of 9/11. The analysis engages with the question: How do these albums incorporate religious symbolism in formulating a response to 9/11? In exploring this question, the paper draws conclusions about the relationship between popular culture and religion within the context of collective crisis and suffering.

The paper is theoretically informed by constructivist and cultural studies frameworks and adopts an interpretive approach towards the analysis of the albums as cultural texts. Further, the analysis draws upon the scholarly debate on the increasingly blurred line between the sacred and the profane, as well as on the literature on media and religion. In addition to providing a close reading of the albums, the analysis seeks to contextualize its interpretations and situate them historically. The paper argues that the two albums represent two divergent forms of spiritual sensibility present in American society today. By implication, they express specific articulations of collectivity, while, at the same time, serving as sources for the construction of personalized meanings and identities.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This study explores motivations of online photo album users in Taiwan and finds that the distinctive “staging” phenomenon with media gratifications and a priori theoretical framework, the Spectacle/performance paradigm (SPP). Media drenching, performance, function and reference are “new” gratifications, which no prior research was found and consistence with the argument of the “diffused audience” on the Internet. This study finds that staging phenomena is highly related with internet addiction and further verifies the problematic dichotomous gratification structure, process-content gratifications, the process gratification relates to Internet addiction. Along with some research findings, the process-content distinction may simply not be an applicable one in the Internet settings since distinctions between the real world and the mediated world are vanishing which is also the main argument of the SPP paradigm.