On December 5, Taula de Nova Recerca closed its 2019 cycle with a session on musical analysis in different cultural contexts, carried out by guests Dr. Shane Blackman, from Canterbury Christ Church University (England), and Carlos Arango, from Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (Colombia), and UPF professor Dr. José Sánchez.

The session began with a presentation by Blackman, which centered on the “Canterbury Sound”, a cultural phenomenon developed in Canterbury during the 1960s and 1970s. The movement, associated with progressive rock, jazz and psychedelia, involved bands like Soft Machine and Caravan, which fought against the conceptualization and the seriousness of rock by appealing to absurdity and humor in their lyrics. In his presentation, he analyzed the mythology present in several of the albums from Canterbury Sound, while it also studied the reproduction and normalization of everyday sexism in the visual representations of the bands and in the wordplay present in their writing.

Blackman was then followed by the visiting PhD candidate Carlos Arango, whose talk focused on pop music and its cinematic representation through the genre of biopic. According to Arango, popular music involves a biographical phenomenon in which the artist walks a path that takes them from their creations into their massive success. In this realm, the biopic follows the artist’s trajectory from the private sphere into the public sphere and utilizes the Dyonisiac and Apollinean imaginaries, while at the same time recurring to archetypical characters such as the manager who discovers the artist’s talent and commodifies him/her, and the mother or the romantic partner, who feed the desire to succeed.

The final presentation was delivered by Dr. Sánchez, member of the TRANSGANG project, who studied the roles of rap music and mahragan in the Egyptian political context. Utilized in order to demand freedom and social justice during the sit-ins during 2011, rap and mahragan were an important element to motivate political activity, political expression and participation in the public sphere. Nonetheless, while rap and mahragan do challenge the political hegemonic discourses, they do not challenge societal norms nor gender roles. Moreover, while mahragan is a genre belonging to religious festivities that was then appropriated by young marginalized Egyptians, rap is a foreign cultural manifestation, developed by the government in order to reach the middle and high classes. In this dichotomy, the mahragan artists are stigmatized, while rap is valued and used to spread “official” discourses.