« Tomorrow Belongs To Me » : représentations de la femme dans une ballade suprémaciste blanche
This Master’s thesis examines the intertextuality processes related to female gender representation in the folk and soft rock music culture and examines the mechanisms by which those are hijacked by tenants of white supremacism. The research focuses solely on the analysis of a folk ballad for voice and piano: Tomorrow Belongs To Me, as recorded by Swedish racist songstress Saga. This arrangement of an excerpt from the movie soundtrack Cabaret raises the issue of the emergence of women on the racist musical scene, as well as the issue of the reception of their music by male militants. The thesis shows that Saga’s esthetic allows her to conform herself to the codes of a male-dominated milieu, as well as to defy them simultaneously, thus allowing her to assimilate a fascist ideology to the expression and experience of womanhood.In its first section, the paper is based upon the semiological analysis of the musical components of the piece, supported by musicological and sociological literature about folk and mass music, as well as by interviews aiming at collecting inter-objective comparison material from the participants, according to Tagg’s model. The analysis is then grounded ona holistic approach, which integrates a text analysis, providing the setting as context in addition to the understanding of that piece as propaganda, with the aim to understand the new forms of rhetoric employed in racist music.
Popular music Far-right Genre Gender Semiology