‘Viv and Patti look back: Musical memoirs, marking time’ for Female Creativity and Age in Popular Music panel

Gardner, Abigail S ORCID: 0000-0003-2994-741X (2017) ‘Viv and Patti look back: Musical memoirs, marking time’ for Female Creativity and Age in Popular Music panel. In: Women's work in Music, 4 –7 September, University of Bangor. (Unpublished)

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

‘Viv and Patti look back: Musical memoirs, marking time’ This paper positions the female rock memoir as an age-appropriate survival story. Memoirs by Viv Albertine, Tracy Thorn, Carrie Brownstein and Patti Smith are illustrative of an Anglo-American neo-liberal emphasis on individual resilience (James, 2015). These narratives of overcoming the odds are not restricted to women, as the number of rock recollections indicates. What is notable about the timing of these female rock memoirs (see Jude) is that their presence indicates an acceptability of the ageing female authorial voice when it is couched within a literary, rather than a musical tradition. This ageing female literary voice is then mobilised to present a popular cultural nostalgia for the youthful ‘age’ of punk and post-punk that is mirrored by contemporary cultural reflections on the era from the world of art and media. This is, in part, due to an alliance between the contemporary cultural gatekeepers, the curators, publishers, journalists, who share similar life courses to the authors, but it is also about a need to reflect on a time when rebellion was being fomented within music, and historicising that through memoir. It is also about the relationship between women and ‘girls’ (Apolloni, 2016) and the residual traces of girlhood recalled as palimpsest on the ageing female musician as memoirist.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Subjects:	M Music and Books on Music > ML Literature of music
Divisions:	Schools and Research Institutes > School of Creative Arts
Research Priority Areas:	Creative Practice and Theory Culture, Continuity, and Transformation
Depositing User:	Abigail Gardner
Date Deposited:	18 Oct 2017 14:24
Last Modified:	08 Aug 2023 19:26
URI:	https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/5024

University Staff: Request a correction | Repository Editors: Update this record