Dear Forum,
Eagerly watching the debate on sport, I have been wondering to myself
a little bit about swimming. While we can all probably say something
very lame and lazy about swimming as an embodied performance of identity,
I have been particularly engaged by what I see as the ability
of the sport to (latently) carry other meanings.
check out http://www.front242.com
This is intriguing to say the least. Explore the site. This is the
homepage of Belgian Electronic Body Music (a subgenre of industrial
music) artists Front 242. 242 are known for flirting outrageously with
totalitarian imagery and to often dress in deliberately ludicrous
outfits to subvert such rhetoric. Two things to particularly note
here.
(1) The highly comical use of cricket equipment by a group of old belgian
men above a caption which reads 'Special forces'.
I am thinking here of how national sports teams are indeed deployed in a manner
not dissimilar to that in which troops are sent (in fact I think increasingly
they retain a national image that is often lost to troops engaged in allied, almost
global, armies). Cricketers as our special forces - often not as embarrasing as
the SAS (sometimes more so).
(2) The way in which 242 repeatedly used images of swimmers in the early
1990s to promote an album entitled 'Tryanny for You'.
Vital to note that both of these sets of images are deployed with a
strong sense of irony but they do, I would argue, make some very
valid points in simple ways. The swimming male is here iconic of the strong,
athletic, disciplined male of totalitarian traditions. Taking this
further, the swimming images were particularly dominant in the
promotion of the single 'Never Stop' - the lyrical content of which asserts
that 'We are the nation, we have control' as well as the repeated
mantra to 'Never Stop'. Interesting comparison of the similar regimes
operated by sports coaches and dictators.
I think some of you will agree that this constitutes a very
interesting mixture of sports and totalitarian imagery and wondered
if anybody knows of anything in a similar vein or, indeed, any work
that has been done on such.
Cheers
Dan
Dan Knox
Department of Geography
University of Durham
South Road
Durham
England
DH1 3LE
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