• English & American cultural studies
• /
• v.14 no.1
• /
• pp.287-310
• /
• 2014

While Janis Joplin is generally known as a hippie rock star of an untimely death to Korean audience, she is more strongly evoked in the image of blues mama in American context. Blues, definitely based on African-American vernacular tradition, is defined as a matrix, which is "a point of ceaseless input and output, a web of intersecting, crisscrossing impulses always in productive transit," to borrow Houston A. Baker's expression. This article explores how her life and music can be understood in blues tradition, especially in terms of personal and social transgression for which she was criticized, focusing on her blues performance. First of all, born and growing up in southern Texas between 1940s and 1960s, she expressed her innate suspicion against segregation and white supremacy, actively embracing rich black musical heritage of the area. Second, against the normative social and moral expectation of a middle class white woman to be a suburban housewife, she sought her own desire, whether it was professional ambition or sexual possibility. Third, beyond the selling image of a heterosexually lascivious blues mama, she dared to be a homosexual and bisexual, while it was not publically acknowledged. Along with her alcohol and drug dependence, such transgressions against normative social expectation were not made without her inner conflict, leaving a trace of trauma, hesitation, and the blues. While she was "buried alive in the blues," as a sacrifice at the altar of the 1960s, she still remains "alive" provoking "fire inside of everyone of us."

• Journal of Fashion Business
• /
• v.10 no.4
• /
• pp.114-129
• /
• 2006

This purpose of this study is to research on the influence on the creation of young generation's street fashion of pop stars focused on pop music given the fact that fashion can be created by popular culture in this multi-media era. Also, this study is to provide useful data for the activation of the creation of young fashion culture and the fashion industry through pop stars' fashion. The pop stars' fashion that has affected young street fashion is as follows : Elvis Presley's rock'n'roll style, Beatles' mods style, Janis Joplin's hippy style, Sex Pistols's punk style, Madonna's boy-toy and corset style, Michael Jackson's androgynous style, Puff Daddy and L.L Cool J's hip-hop style, Bob Marley's reggae style, Spice Girls, Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears's sexy style. The young street fashion culture of pop stars and its industrial meaning withdrawn from the above are as follows : Creation of a fashion icon, Creation of anti-fashion, Liberation of a sex role, Costume play culture, Activation of the young fashion industry through star marketing.