Resilience & Melancholy

Following the first edition’s breakthrough study of popular feminism in 2010s popular music, this new edition of Resilience & Melancholy expands its original analysis into the 2020s. Robin James reads pop music from artists like Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, Rihanna, Beyonce, and Lady Gaga against the work of philosophers, feminists, and media theorists like Michel Foucault, Patricia Hill Collins, and Steven Shaviro. The result is an accessible dive into the last two decades of pop music and its politics. Throughout the book, James shows how pop music and the politics of gender and race intersect in their discourse of resilience. While the book argues that resilience is a post-feminist strategy that invites female artists to lean into patriarchal, racial, capitalist privilege, it also finds that artists such as Beyonce, Rihanna, and Atari Teenage Riot offer a melancholic alternative to resilience in their work. As music has continued to evolve, this melancholic opposition has evolved and responded to the co-optation of melancholy into chill, the asset-ification of music, the de-monetization of musical labor, and the rise of a reactionary masculine resilience.