The University of Washington Music History program hosts a talk by Sumanth Gopinath, Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota, presenting “This Four-Letter Word Stops Fascists: Music for, With, and From the Minneapolis Resistance.”
Abstract
Despite its reputation as a politically progressive area, the US state of Minnesota is also in certain respects somewhat socially conservative, one notable index of which is a widespread aversion to swearing, especially in public. This makes the pervasiveness of the word “fuck” in the current resistance to the siege of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul) and the wider state by thousands of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents all the more striking. In this talk, I want to argue that the use and appearance of the word indexes a major social transformation taking place in the metropolitan area and perhaps beyond. This word’s surfacing is significantly musical. Not only does it course through protest chants and a number of songs written about, for, and in parallel with the resistance movement; the very complexity and richness of the word, inseparable from its designation as vulgar and taboo, performs expressive labor in communications involving shifts in linguistic register. When it appears in musical contexts, it may help us to rethink questions of musical meaning.
Biography
Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form (MIT Press, 2013). He co-edited, with Jason Stanyek, The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Rethinking Reich with Pwyll ap Siôn (Oxford University Press, 2019). His writings on Steve Reich, musical minimalism, Marxism and music scholarship, sound and digital media, and post-WWII concert and popular musics have appeared in various scholarly journals and edited collections. He is currently working on a book project on musical minimalism and on additional projects on Prince and country music. He is the leader of the independent Americana band The Gated Community.