....of interest to VG+ers?
Returning from an excellent, but specifically punk-oriented music conference in Porto, got me combing through abstracts from the most recent IASPM conference, held in Brazil at the end of July to seek out material of more interest to me. I'll post a few up and if they lead to any conversation at all I'll sporadically post others up here in the future as and when I find them.
Runaway to Where? Del Shannon and the Top 40 Space-Time Continuum
Eric Weisbard (University of Alabama)
Maria Rosetto writes from Australia: “I want to meet Bobby Rydell because his parents are Italians and I never met an Italian singer before.” Shirley Westover writes to Michigan: “Tomorrow is the last day in Sweden. Chuck is glad as they are a very weird people.” One is a fan, looking to meet Rydell, Chubby Checker, and Del Shannon. One is the wife of Shannon, born Charles Westover and thrown by the 1961 hit “Runaway” into a global Top 40 youth culture so new that a London program touted: “Real American Hamburgers and specially imported Hot Dogs.” Shannon killed himself in 1990, never reconciled to the path from hometown minstrel programs to Israeli cabarets and 30,000 in the Phillipines, then revival by Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, and Crime Story. How much clearer is popular music studies about processes abstracted as globalization and (post)modernization? Drawing on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Archives, which include Shirley Westover’s scrapbook, fan letters, and an interview Shannon gave over a Sanka-drenched breakfast in 1981, I’ll consider how pop’s “Runaway” circulated across borders and eras and the interpretive challenges presented when pop sends young icons worldwide, then preserves them in temporal display cases.
Returning from an excellent, but specifically punk-oriented music conference in Porto, got me combing through abstracts from the most recent IASPM conference, held in Brazil at the end of July to seek out material of more interest to me. I'll post a few up and if they lead to any conversation at all I'll sporadically post others up here in the future as and when I find them.
Runaway to Where? Del Shannon and the Top 40 Space-Time Continuum
Eric Weisbard (University of Alabama)
Maria Rosetto writes from Australia: “I want to meet Bobby Rydell because his parents are Italians and I never met an Italian singer before.” Shirley Westover writes to Michigan: “Tomorrow is the last day in Sweden. Chuck is glad as they are a very weird people.” One is a fan, looking to meet Rydell, Chubby Checker, and Del Shannon. One is the wife of Shannon, born Charles Westover and thrown by the 1961 hit “Runaway” into a global Top 40 youth culture so new that a London program touted: “Real American Hamburgers and specially imported Hot Dogs.” Shannon killed himself in 1990, never reconciled to the path from hometown minstrel programs to Israeli cabarets and 30,000 in the Phillipines, then revival by Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, and Crime Story. How much clearer is popular music studies about processes abstracted as globalization and (post)modernization? Drawing on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Archives, which include Shirley Westover’s scrapbook, fan letters, and an interview Shannon gave over a Sanka-drenched breakfast in 1981, I’ll consider how pop’s “Runaway” circulated across borders and eras and the interpretive challenges presented when pop sends young icons worldwide, then preserves them in temporal display cases.
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