Interjecting into inherited narratives : the politics of contemporary music making and creative practice

Abstract

This practice-led PhD attempts to engage with emerging discussions taking place within contemporary cultural discourse, and pays attention to the internet as a constructive discursive arena. The critical lens through which the research approaches these discussions is one broadly concerned with the lineages of modernism, postmodernism and potential post-postmodernisms (although it is tentative and critical in its understanding of these terms). The practical portion of the submission comprises a portfolio of work created during the research period – increasingly concerned with shared language, repetition, creative efficiency and shifts in contemporary popular music – and culminates in the music and video works of the mild-pop endeavor Competition. The written portion of the submission discusses the political implications of creative practice and looks to situate historical and contemporary modes of production within their wider cultural contexts. In doing so, it considers a modernist perspective that can feel pervasive within an inherited discourse of music and art making, the problematic aspects of conceptual poetry, whiteness and (a lack of) self-awareness and/or critique, the phenomenology of a loss of selfevidence, social media and new forms of communication, the use of irony, ‘senses of the end’, the cultural value of contradiction and emerging discussions of metamodernism (amongst other things). Finally, in honouring the form of practice-led research, the submission is positioned in such a way that hopes to collapse certain hierarchies within the dualism of practice and theory – the practice will seek to explain the writing as much as the writing will seek to explain the practice, they are to be experienced as one and the same.