{"id":69579,"date":"2003-10-31T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2003-10-31T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/uri-ph-d-student-rocks-on-with-icelands-sigur-ros\/"},"modified":"2003-10-31T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2003-10-31T00:00:00","slug":"uri-ph-d-student-rocks-on-with-icelands-sigur-ros","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2003\/10\/uri-ph-d-student-rocks-on-with-icelands-sigur-ros\/","title":{"rendered":"溏心vlog免费B站 Ph.D. student rocks on with Iceland\u2019s Sigur R\u00f3s"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tMedia Contact: Jan Wenzel, 874-2116
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\nFocuses study on band\u2019s erasure of language
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\nKINGSTON, R.I. — October 31, 2003 — Rebecca Romanow is a fan of college radio. Commuting from her home in Weston, Mass. to and from the 溏心vlog免费B站 where she is a Ph.D. student in English, Romanow scans her satellite radio\u2019s 120-plus stations searching for cutting edge stuff, especially songs by Sigur R\u00f3s, an Icelandic band, which has developed an international following.
\nIn a rare nod to commercialism, Sigur R\u00f3s created two songs for Tom Cruise\u2019s movie, Vanilla Sky. “Their music was befitting Cruise\u2019s swan dive off a building in the finale,” says Romanow, a 52-year-old mother of three.
\nTo say the least, the group has an unusual approach to music. Two of the band\u2019s four members play their instruments in unique ways. Jon Bor “Jonsi” Birgisson plays the guitar with a cello bow and Georg Holm plays the bass with drumsticks. Rather than sing in English or his native Icelandic, Jonsi, who is also the vocalist of the group, sings in an imaginary language called “Hopelandic.”
\n“I found Hopelandic to be an astounding and daring idea,” says Romanow. “Sigur R\u00f3s has removed the cultural burden of language which comes between music and its listeners.”
\nRock and roll, Romanow notes, has been a conduit for the West since it has been dominated by American and English bands since its inception. The music also globally transmits the dominance of the English language, which reinforces the power structure of the West and its values and culture. What, then, happens to the native voices? How do they get heard? Romanow wonders.
\n“How do we experience art and separate cultural messages being sent to us at the same time?” Romanow asks.
\nShe uses Michelangelo\u2019s Sistine Chapel as an example. “The art is transmitting other messages than creation,” she says. “What should a man look like? How should people dress? Relate? What are the cultural expectations?”
\nSo, too, do words have huge cultural meanings. By refusing the English language, Sigur R\u00f3s frees music from its commercialized rock and roll corporate structure, according to Romanow. Their latest CD called ( ) contains no notes or titles. Devoid of all “known” language, the band leaves a space for the listener\u2019s personal reaction, much like the empty space in the parenthesis.
\n\t “Sigur R\u00f3s has made a huge in-road here,” says Romanow. “Hopelandic promises a place where rock music separates itself from the local and the global\u2026Sigur R\u00f3s asks if we can take on a world that doesn\u2019t exist; a world which refuses the implications of the language of all power systems; a world which liberates rock music from the global commodity it has become.”
\nThe 溏心vlog免费B站 graduate student attended the Cultural Studies Association\u2019s founding conference in Pittsburgh in June where she presented her paper “The Erasure of Language in the Globalization of Rock Music: Sigur R\u00f3s and the Politics of Hopelandic.” Her paper appeared in the e-journal, Politics and Culture, vol. 3, 2003, at http:\/\/politicsandculture.neu.edu.\n\t<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Media Contact: Jan Wenzel, 874-2116 Focuses study on band\u2019s erasure of language KINGSTON, R.I. — October 31, 2003 — Rebecca Romanow is a fan of college radio. Commuting from her home in Weston, Mass. to and from the 溏心vlog免费B站 where she is a Ph.D. student in English, Romanow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}