"In recent years, depression has become an undeniable focal point in Western popular music in several key ways, including as a term freely invoked by pop artists and fans to disclose, destigmatize, and normalize everyday experiences of sadness, loneliness, anxiety, and despair; as an explicit pretext for listening to pop music as a form of “mood regulation” in connection with mood, vibe, and activity-based playlists on music streaming platforms and video sharing apps; and as a distinct musical and visual style forming around key musical personae and different gendered and racially-coded subgenres.

Drawing on a range of examples from current mainstream pop, this talk reflects on some of this complexity relative to the prevalence of clinical depression in young people and its associated social inequalities alongside the widespread cultural destigmatization of mental health, particularly among Gen Z. I approach the semantic practices, stylistic conventions, and affective cultures associated with depression in pop music as a dynamic aesthetic formation and expressive language that I call, "the musical vernacular of depression." I ultimately argue that the musical vernacular of depression blurs a clinical definition of depression as a common and serious mood disorder (DSM-5; ICD-11) with a generational sensibility that is unbounded by diagnosis and pathology, thereby transforming the ways young people conceive of, communicate about, and tend to their mental health amid a worldwide disparity of mental health care. 

Bio:
Jessica Allison Holmes is a music scholar with expertise in popular music studies, sound studies, disability studies, voice studies, feminist media studies, and critical public health studies. Her scholarship analyzes the representation of disability in contemporary popular music, with emphasis on vocality, embodiment, and identity formation, an agenda that culminates in two distinct areas of expertise: (1) deaf ontologies of sound and voice, and (2) the gendered aesthetics of disability and mental health in contemporary pop music. Her peer-reviewed articles on popular music and disability appear in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies. She currently serve as co-chair of the UCPH “Art & Health” interdisciplinary research cluster

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The guest lecture is organised by Niclas Nørby Jochumsen Hundahl, with support from the Art, Aesthetics and Communities research programme.