Showing posts with label Sweden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sweden. Show all posts

Friday, September 05, 2008

Women and subcultures

Johan at Birdseed's Tunedown has posted on 'Feminine Men's Peculiar Misogyny', wondering about contemporary 'feminine' men subcultures in Scandinavia and where the women are in these pretty boy scenes. Hmm, not sure - I know very little about these particular 'subcultures' (if such they are), but a point of reference for this discussion might be Pop Feminist's questioning 'Can Women be part of counterculture?' Her basic point is that while men can play around with being outsiders (for a while), women have this status imposed on them whether or not they join any counter/subculture:

"Youth rebellion is the domain of young men, who tend to become progressively less radical as they age and assume the comforts of patriarchy (the power-structure isn’t so bad after all!). Women, on the other hand, lose sexual viability as they age and for those brave enough to confront the fact that the joke was on them, become rebels. This is where we get the stereotype of the “crazy old lady”—a revolutionary if ever there was one.

Let me suggest a basic foundation for counterculture:
Counterculture: Elective marginalization

Women and other disenfranchised groups, on the other hand, constitute a counterpublic:
Counterpublic: Forced marginalization'.

Sunday, February 03, 2008

Songs about dancing (1): Those Dancing Days


There's music to dance to, and then there's music about dancing (which may not even be very danceable). Sometimes a song is simply an exhortation to dance (move that body etc.), sometimes its an attempt to evoke the feeling of dancing or to tell the story of a particular night out, good or bad.

First up in a series of songs about dancing is this slice of Swedish indie pop by Those Dancing Days, a song of the same name that goes: 'High on life, in love with me, dancing in the night, dancing through the days... Living for music, living in a dance, music for life, those dancing days'. OK it's not Shakespeare but I like the bubbly exuberance and sense of music as a lifeforce.