Ethnomusicologist, music professor, and musician Aileen Dillane will speak on two of the "protest songs" of Dublin singer-songwriter Damien Dempsey—songs that critique neoliberal capitalism prior to and in the wake of the fall of Ireland’s ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy in 2008.
Aileen Dillane is an ethnomusicologist, music professor, and musician at the Irish World Academy, University of Limerick, Ireland. For the Fall 2017 semester, she is the Herbert Allen & Donald R. Keough Visiting Faculty Fellow and the Moore & Livingston Faculty Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies.
In this talk, Dr. Dillane will explore Dempsey’s gently subversive singing, through a broad contextual reading of this artist’s output and close musical and performance analysis of two protest songs, ’Celtic Tiger" (2003) and ‘Community’ (2011). To place a contemporary performer such as Dempsey at the center of a narrative of artist as protester and critical citizen is to offer a way of understanding the power of a working-class, and, in this instance, particular Irish voice to sensuously and uncompromisingly perform and embody critique.
Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.