Audimat 20

In this article, taken from his presentation at a study day at the École cantonale d’art de Lausanne dedicated to the history and figures of youth, Guillaume Heuguet shows how the history of popular music is organized around relatively artificial generational logics, but he also seeks to approach the conditions that give these representations their weight, and the more or less good reasons why we sometimes invest ourselves in them. His aim is to explore both the interest and discomfort aroused in him by the way the media portray an opposition between “boomers” and today’s youth.

Since the 1960s, the former have squatted on the scene of protest and arrogated to themselves the exclusivity of rebellion, equating youth with an attitude of rejection of adult values – a point of view that deserves to be qualified – while the latter live in conditions and with prospects that are far more difficult, and therefore have other things to worry about. A closer look not only at the musical productions of recent years, but also at the struggles of our times, reveals a perhaps more optimistic picture of intergenerational relations.

Adrien Durand reflects on the strange trajectory of emo music, how it has nourished his own life and fueled his reflections. This personal history of emo is as much a love letter to the exacting standards and flamboyance of the early hardcore scene, as it is a meditation on how it transformed into a certain embodiment of fragile masculinity, often oscillating between the passionate exploration of a rebellious subjectivity and the most toxic self-victimization. This exercise in the introspection of taste, ultimately an emo gesture par excellence, shows how we can’t so easily escape our youthful obsessions, no matter how much they hurt us; but perhaps it’s also a way of making amends.

This article is a double-edged sword. You may start reading it as we did, happy to discover or revisit the history of French-language soccer fan songs, the multitude of inspirations behind them, and the more varied objectives they serve in stadiums. But you’ll also read about the ambiguities involved in rallying around a club, but often also a city and a country. Where does pride in history end and chauvinism begin? Where others see a dumbed-down crowd, how is a certain sense of community expressed? The current situation radicalizes these issues. In stadiums as elsewhere, as soon as a certain popular autonomy resounds, we also hear repression advancing.

In this pioneering 1994 article, Princeton academic Walter Hughes takes up the torch of disco music defense, which no one has really raised since gay socialist intellectual Richard Dyer’s famous article “In Defence of Disco” (1979). Today, such a desire to legitimize the genre may seem a little out of place, given that it has infused popular culture and become the object of cults, multiple re-releases (from Italo Disco to Patrick Cowley), and covers, sometimes in diluted form, in numerous variety hits. But in asserting the importance of disco pleasure, Hughes is also, and above all, concerned with a major issue that was to run through the 1990s, heralded by Mute’s famous 1991 EBM compilation, Tyranny of the beat, whose sleeve notes spoke of a society under the “martial law of rhythm” and a “disco curfew”. The dialectic between submission and liberation generated/imposed by machine-like, repetitive music, with its sexual and ideological dimensions, is still at the heart of house and techno experiments and discourse.