Week 2: Music and Identity

In his seminal article, Simon Frith questions the role of music in constructing our individual and social identities. Rather than looking at music as representing a certain identity, such as African-American music representing African-American people and their culture, Frith explores how music “produces” us, “how it creates and constructs an experience – a musical experience, an aesthetic experience – that we can only make sense of by taking on both a subjective and a collective identity” (109). In the view of postmodern cultural theorists such as Frith, identity is viewed as unstable, constructed and most importantly, an on-going process.


The infamous iPod ad...faceless figures for you to identify with

Ultimately, Frith argues how “music constructs our sense of identity through the direct experiences it offers of the body, time and sociability, experiences which enable us to imagine ourselves in imaginative cultural narrative” (124). We imagine ourselves as aligned with the performers of music, as well as other fans of the same song or musician. Through aligning ourselves through the enjoyment of music, we are constructing our identities. Frith argues how music is unique in this process of shaping and reshaping identity because of its role as “the cultural form best able to cross borders - sounds carry across fences and walls and oceans, across classes, races and nations” (125). Music is a part of most people's lives, making it a universal phenomenon for the construction of human identity.

***

The first band I really 'got into' is No Doubt. The ska/pop/rock band's 1995 album 'Tragic Kingdom,' was taped for me by my fifth grade best friend as a birthday present. Although - as I discuss later in my journal Gwen Stefani has gone from a strong female role model to somewhat of a 'sell out' - at the time, in fifth grade, No Doubt's lead vocalist was my hero. One of my favorite songs was 'I'm Just a Girl,' in which Stefani angrily confronts the constraints placed upon younger women:

I'm just a girl

I'm just a girl in the world...

That's all that you'll let me be!

I'm just a girl, living in captivity



My first brush with feminism was through these lyrics, which spoke to me as a realization that girls and women did not have the same freedoms and opportunities as boys and men. I admired Gwen Stefani's agency as the fronts-person of a successful pop band, and using her ability to communicate through music as a way of protest. At the age of eleven, when I was beginning to realize different constraints placed upon women, I strongly identified with Gwen Stefani and her music.

The other day my boss, making friendly conversation, asked me what my favorite kind of music was. I couldn't think of a clear, definitive answer - "Uh...rock I guess?"
Gwen Stefani is no longer my hero. But I think the reason why I no longer identify definitively with a certain artist or genre has got to do with my understanding of identity as socially and culturally constructed as opposed to something that evolves from within. Through my learning, I've also realized that women have been socially constructed as well, and it is essentially impossible to pin down 'woman' as a definitive, all-encompassing identity. Perhaps my uncertainty of musical tastes and my lack of a musical identity is indicative of the instability and uncertainties surrounding human identity.