Spasticus: Popular Music and Disability

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Hello to you out there in Normal Land You may not comprehend my tale or understand As I crawl past your window give me lucky looks You can read my body but you'll never read my books. I'm Spasticus, I'm Spasticus, I'm Spasticus Autisticus! Ian Dury, 'Spasticus Autisticus' (1981) The uncontrollability of the pop body has been a persistent feature since its earliest days. From Elvis Presley's 'All shook up' (1956) or Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' 'Shaking all over' (1960), songs about uncontrollable neurological tremors, as physical symptoms conflating the ecstasy of sexual attraction and of dance, are heard from rock and roll on. The opening argument is that popular music has always been about corporeal transformation or excess and the display of those -- there has always been 'a whole lot of shaking going on' -- and reading that shakiness in the context of the disabled body is the starting point for fresh insights into both popular music studies and cultural disability studies.My aims are to widen the scope of cultural disability studies by looking at the arena of popular music, and to contribute to our understanding of popular music studies via a sustained analysis of the place of disability within it. I seek to understand pop, rock and jazz through disability performance studies, but I also want to find out what the trashy, ephemeral, superficial aesthetic of pop can bring to the understanding of the cultural and social performance of disability. Colin Barnes reminds us that an 'element in the development of disability culture and the arts that should not be overlooked is the relationship between disabled people and the 'entertainment' industry. Historically, people with perceived impairments or 'abnormalities' have provided an important source of entertainment for the non-disabled majority'. Such entertainment ranges from 19th century freakshows to 21st century performance art, and there are now extended academic studies of each of these. So cultural disability studies has indeed begun to develop. What there still is not though is detailed critical, historical or theoretical work on disability and popular music studies. The project takes its title from a single released by the chart-topping English singer Ian Dury (a polio survivor and visibly disabled performer) in 1981, to mark the UN International Year of Disabled Persons. 'Spasticus Autisticus' remains debatably the highest profile and most controversial direct intervention from a major pop artist to disability culture. Yet -- as disability cultural studies has taught us more generally -- the moment we begin to look for disability in popular music, we find it everywhere; pop is a profoundly dismodern cultural formation and practice. Chapters explore the extraordinary cluster of musicians who were polio survivors, visibly disabled performers, musicians with hearing impairments and the place of deafness as an occupational hazard, blind musicians, and cognitive impairment. With the AHRC's support, the aim is for this monograph to appear in 2011, in part to mark the 30th anniversary of Dury's single.