I had 2 major problems with this presentation.
The first was the ideas of Richard Dyer and stardom.
In order to understand the relationship between the music industry and its audience, it is important to consider the roles of music stars. The term 'star' refers to semi-mythological set of meanings constructed around music performers in order to sell the performer to a large and loyal audience.
Irrespective if the medium, stars have some key features in common : a star is an image, not a real person, that is constructed out of a range of materials e.g advertising, magazines etc ... Stars are commodities produced and consumed in the strength of their meanings.
He says that stars depend upon a range of subsidiary media - magazines, TV, radio, the Internet - in order to construct an image for themselves which can be marketed to their target audiences. The star image is made up of meanings which are attractive to the target audiences.
The second was the ideas of Levi Strauss.
Levi Strauss was a french structural anthropologist. He was interested in finding those features which underline all societies, no matter how developed they were. Through his works, he identified a large number of universal social structures- importance of kin, nurturing role of females, taboo on incest etc...
One of the key features identified by Levi-Strauss was the universality of myths. Myths are narratives which belong to cultures rather than individuals and which tend to be passed down in generation's. The origins of myth tend to be obscured by history. Levi-Strauss believed that myths were more than just ‘entertainment’ for a culture. He said that they perform a valuable social function by embodying values and ideas which are important for particular societies, often in the form of binary oppositions. By dealing with these values through the fictional forms of myth, a society can defuse potential conflict and tension – a kind of safety valve.
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