YouTube, Ageing and PJ Harvey

Gardner, Abigail S ORCID: 0000-0003-2994-741X (2019) YouTube, Ageing and PJ Harvey. Convergence, 25 (5-6). 1155 -1167. doi:10.1177/1354856517750367

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Abstract

Ageing is starting to matter in popular cultural studies but the matter of ageing within YouTube is, at present, unwritten. This article is an attempt to start that process. YouTube hosts the music video for PJ Harvey’s single release ‘The Community of Hope’ (2016). Shot by Seamus Murphy, it shares screen space with official music videos from Harvey’s 23-year career. Raising questions about the relationship between her past and present, this article examines the link between YouTube and ageing through two concepts, repetitive circularity and the flat archive. These rely and inform each other in a process that prioritises the presence of youthfulness through the absenting of age, whereby the ageing body is erased from a popular cultural forum. YouTube’s ‘wallpaper of the past’ has a nagging impact on how we might read the body's progress through time, in particular, how it ages. Tackling the paucity of work on ageing as it surfaces within the changing topographies of popular music encounters, the article considers how ageing is presented within a digital environment such as YouTube and concludes that the story is one of age erasure.

Item Type: Article
Article Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Ageing; Archive; Erasure; Feminist; Older women; PJ Harvey; Topography; YouTube; REF2021
Related records:
Subjects: M Music and Books on Music > M 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: 20 Sep 2017 14:03
Last Modified: 08 Aug 2023 19:08
URI: https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/4940

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