Scary Monsters: Monstrosity, Masculinity and Popular Music

Popular music and masculinity have rarely been examined through the lens of research into monstrosity. The discourses associated with rock and pop, however, actually include more ‘monsters’ than might at first be imagined. Attention to such individuals and cultures can say things about the operation of genre and gender, myth and meaning. Indeed, monstrosity has recently become a growing focus of cultural theory. This is in part because monsters raise shared concerns about transgression, subjectivity, agency, and community. Attention to monstrosity evokes both the spectre of projection (which invokes familial trauma and psychoanalysis) and shared anxieties (that in turn reflect ideologies and beliefs). By pursuing a series of insightful case studies, Scary Monsters considers different aspects of the connection between music, gender and monstrosity. Its argument is that attention to monstrosity provides a unique perspective on the study of masculinity in popular music culture.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Jon Hackett 1. A Night at the Opera: Updating The Phantom Mark Duffett 2. ‘His Muscles Still Bulged Like Iron Bands’: King Kong and the Promotion of Lead Belly Mark Duffett 3. Colonel Parker and the Art of Commercial Exploitation: The Manager as Monster Mark Duffett 4. The Platformed Prometheus: Frankenstein and Glam Rock Jon Hackett 5. The Case of Mark Chapman: Extreme Fandom as Monstrosity? Mark Duffett 6. Exhuming the Gravediggaz: Gothic Hip Hop and Monster Capital Jon Hackett 7. Masculinity on Trial: Noir Désir and Perverse Narcissism Jon Hackett 8. ‘Jingle Jangle Man’: Jimmy Savile, Paedophilia and the Music Industry Mark Duffett References Endnotes Index

About the Author :
Mark Duffett is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Chester. He is known for the book Understanding Fandom (2013). Jon Hackett is Associate Professor in Film and Communications and Head of Communications, Media and Marketing at St Mary's University, Twickenham, UK. His research and teaching interests include critical theory, film studies and popular music studies.

Review :
Mark Duffett and Jon Hackett have compiled a fascinating collection of analyses that provide new perspectives on popular music figures, popular culture, and the societies and cultures of both the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st. Thanks to their innovative utilization of different theories regarding concepts such as masculinity and monstrosity, their collection is of interest to a wide range of scholars ... Through their close readings of popular culture figures, texts, and discourses, they demonstrate an adeptness at incorporating the less commonly applied monstrosity studies with the more prevalent gender studies to provide new insights into music studies. The collection of set pieces in the volume … is also strangely, perversely entertaining and seems weirdly suited for our viral, pox-ridden times in the era of post-truth. Seldom has the monster metaphor been used with such depth, diversity and complexity in the field of popular music studies. Applying an overarching approach that covers music artists, managers, fans and associated showbusiness personalities, in Scary Monsters Duffett and Hackett present a compelling and theoretically rigorous account of popular music, monstrosity and masculinity that will serve as an invaluable resource for students and scholars in popular music studies, cultural studies, media and communications, sociology, social history and other fields concerned with the intricate relationship between popular culture and society. Scary Monsters brings popular music studies into an innovative and important dialogue with theories of monstrosity. Exploring how culture and industry attribute the monstrous also enables Duffett and Hackett to analyse who is marked as innocent, naïve and exploited. Monstrosity is more than attribution alone, however, and this book interrogates pop music’s monsters of toxic masculinity, ranging from managers to stars, and from fans to DJs. Pop’s shiny glamour may promise what have often been culturally feminised pleasures, but Scary Monsters instead approaches the darker recesses and the dangerously romanticised excesses of popular music’s 'monstrous masculine.' [A] useful collection of interviews and ideas for musical majors or biographers of each individual featured, and the reader should expect a ‘true-crime’-esque experience that exposes the deliberate (or indirect) monstrosities of the music industry.