August round-up
August round-up
What I’ve been writing about this month.
Hi everyone,
I’ve changed things up slightly with the newsletter. Now all posts are freely available for a month after publication; all posts older than that are paywalled.
If you appreciate my work, and you want to check out my full archive of work, dating back over a year now, please do consider taking out a paid subscription, for just £3.50 a month or £35 for a full year. Paid subscribers help sustain this newsletter and enable me to keep writing regularly for it.
Rewound
For Rewound this month, I wrote this piece on Jesus Jones’s 1991 album Doubt, and how it captured a sense of optimism following the end of the Cold War.
I also wrote this post on John Ford’s 1953 The Sun Shines Bright and its depiction of law, race, gender, and the social order in post-Civil War Kentucky.
Research and Reflections
With Oasis having just announced their reunion, I wrote this piece for Research and Reflections placing their coming tour in the broader context of Britpop artists recording and performing music, and balancing creativity with retrospection, in the twenty-first century.
More on Britpop nostalgia
If this is a topic that enthuses you, I’ve also temporarily removed the paywall on two pieces I previously wrote for the newsletter on Britpop and public memory. Firstly, this post on the BBC’s commemoration of Britpop’s ‘twentieth anniversary’ in 2014.
Secondly, this piece on the way Britpop’s relationship with New Labour has been remembered since the 1990s.
My other writing
After several years of work, my and Tobias Becker’s edited volume, , The Uses of the Past in Contemporary Western Popular Culture: Nostalgia, Politics, Lifecycles, Mediations, and Materialities, has finally been published by Palgrave Macmillan. As always with academic publishers, the asking price is a little steep; those of you who work at universities, though, please consider asking your library to order it in!
That’s it for this round-up. Again, please do consider taking out a paid subscription to the newsletter, if you can afford to do so.
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Take care, all. X