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Degree Programme Director for Media, Communication & Cultural Studies
Dr. Michael Waugh
Dr. Michael Waugh is Degree Programme Director for Media, Communication and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University, leading the module Popular Culture: Futures and Fictions. Waugh’s research is focused on politics, identity and digitality in club and electronic music, foregrounding decolonial, queer and trans aesthetics and narratives in genres/movements such as deconstructed club, hyperpop and trap. He has published articles in Cambridge Journal of Popular Music and Critical Studies in Television, as well as chapters in Mute Records: Artists, Business, History and in two major anthologies about hip hop. He co-organised a series on digital music titled ‘Sound Salon’ at Somerset House with Jennifer Walshe and Adam Harper, provided a keynote talk at Berlin’s 3hd Festival and produced programme notes for 2015’s London Contemporary Music Festival. He has written press releases for musicians including Arca, aya, KUČKA, Jesse Kanda, Du Blonde and Derek Piotr.
Keynote speaker
Michael's paper
Total Freedom, NON States, boygirls and hardstyle hybrid theories:
The conceptual aesthetics, sonic fictions and metal-as-fuck radicalism of deconstructed club
The story of club music has been one of persistent de- and re-territorialisation, with Black queer and trans counterpublics consistently establishing radical communities and sonic fictions in response to their almost immediate capture by cisheteropatriarchal capital. During the 2010s, a strand of electronic dance music emerged that built this process into a self-consciously decolonial, queer, trans and crip project. Taking the disruptive ethos of NYC party GHE20G0TH1K (whose alumni include Venus X, Total Freedom and Shayne Oliver) as their foundation, collectives and artists such as Janus, NAAFI, boygirl, Arca, Chuquimamani-Condori and NON Worldwide combined insurrectionist manifestos, aggressive collagic juxtapositions and aesthetics lifted from metal, industrial and punk. ‘Deconstructed club’ (as it would later be dubbed) sought to elude essentialism through a rupturing of the relationship between the dancefloor, the art gallery, the fashion show, the university and the digital. This music did, however, face criticism for its noisy experimentation and the perceived elitism of its overt conceptualization. Similar disparagement accompanied ‘hardstyle’ subgenres like gabber, hard trance, donk and makina, but for the opposite reason: the relentlessness of its high-BPMs, coupled with its audience of predominantly white, working-class men, saw it dismissed as a dumbed-down embarrassment by more ‘discerning’ club-goers. The two demographic extremes of rave: deconstructed club as politically progressive but oft-impenetrably intellectualized; hard dance as apolitical – or even dangerously reactionary – and mindlessly gluttonous. In the 2020s, deconstructed club gleefully (d)evolved. Its producers and DJs retained their commitment to social justice and their metal-as-fuck stylization, but they swapped post-structuralist academicization for the escapist silliness of hard dance. aya, Kavari, bela, Medulasa and Lord Spikeheart redeployed screamo and nu metal histrisonics and theatrics to genderfuck hardstyle’s hyper-masc velocities. This paper is a yarn map of the complex, rhizomatic history of deconstructed club, as well as a demonstration of how inter-disciplinary scholarship within Arts and Cultural Studies provides opportunities for creative collaboration with working practitioners.
Keywords: Deconstructed club, hyperpop, conceptronica, metal, Post-Internet, sonic fiction, identity, social justice
Trigger warnings:
Strong language
Flashing imagery
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