XIII (May 19, 2016) Aileen Dillane

Dr. Aileen Dillane is a Lecturer in Music (Associate Professor) at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick. Aileen has a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago where she was a Fulbright Scholar and Century Fellow. Her research interests include ethnicity, identity, and performativity in traditional, vernacular and popular musics of Ireland, North American and Australia; urban soundscapes and critical citizenship; music and the utopian impulse; and songs of social protest. Aileen is co-founder/co-director of LimerickSoundscapes, and of the Popular Music, Popular Culture and Power, Discourse & Society research cultures at the University of Limerick, as well as a member of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies. She co-edited Morrissey: Fandom, Representations, Identities (Intellect 2011), David Bowie: Critical Perspectives (Routledge 2015), and the forthcoming Public and Political Discources of Migration: International Perspectives (Rowman and Littlefield 2016). Aileen is also the 2016 O’Donnell Research Fellow at Newman College, University of Melbourne.

A Dillane pic

 

 

 

 

 

PRESENTATION:

 Against the Grain: Protest Songs of an Irish Singer-Songwriter (Damien Dempsey – A Case Study)

In the past twenty years or so, Ireland has undergone quite radical social and economic change. The country experienced an era of unprecedented economic growth and inward, global migration, irrevocably altering the fabric of Irish society. However, the ‘Celtic Tiger’ of the 1990s and early noughties was followed by a period of relentless ‘Austerity’ measures in response to the economic crash of 2008, the effects of which are still resonating across the country. In the early 1990s, a young singer-songwriter from a north-side Dublin, working-class background began adapting Irish ballads, infusing these forms with influences from other protest genres, and seeking to draw attention to inequality in Ireland, even as the country was apparently experiencing a ‘boom’ and politicians were quick to dismiss any criticism. Growing in stature over that twenty-year period, Damien Dempsey has never stopped writing or singing songs to counter inequality or injustice, championing a particular post-colonial inflected, cosmopolitan ‘Irishness’ that places community, love, and social engagement at its heart. This presentation explores Dempsey’s gently ‘subversive’ singing (subversive both in terms of song content and performance style), through a broad contextual reading of this artist’s output and close musical and performance analysis of two specific protest songs, ‘Celtic Tiger’ (2003) and ‘Community’ (2011). To place Dempsey at the centre of a narrative of artist as protester and critical citizen is to offer a way of understanding the power of a working-class, Irish voice to sensuously and uncompromisingly perform and embody critique and counter-hegemony.