Dangerous Mediations

Winner of The Woody Guthrie First Book Award 2021
In 2007, an unlikely troupe of 1500 Filipino prisoners became Internet celebrities after their YouTube video of Michael Jackson's ground-breaking hit 'Thriller' went viral. Taking this spectacular dance as a point of departure, Dangerous Mediations explores the disquieting development of prisoners performing punishment to a global, online audience. Combining analysis of this YouTube video with first-hand experiences from fieldwork in the Philippine prison, Áine Mangaoang investigates a wide range of interlocking contexts surrounding this user-generated text to reveal how places of punishment can be transformed into spaces of spectacular entertainment, leisure, and penal tourism.
In the post-YouTube era, Dangerous Mediations sounds the call for close readings of music videos produced outside of the corporate culture industries. By connecting historical discussions on postcolonialism, surveillance and prison philosophy with contemporary scholarship on popular music, participatory culture and new media, Dangerous Mediations is the first book to ask critical questions about the politics of pop music and audiovisual mediation in early 21st-century detention centres.

Áine Mangaoang is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Popular Music at the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo, Norway.

List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Interlude I: 'The Evil of the Thriller'
Chapter 1: Seeing Sound: Locating Music and YouTube's Symbiosis
Interlude II: 'You're Fighting for your Life inside a Killer, Thriller'
Chapter 2: Performing Postcolonialism: Filipino History Through Four-Part Harmony
Interlude III: Fade to Black
Chapter 3: Penal Tourists: The Birth of CPDRC's Prison Pop Programme
Interlude IV: 'Music, the Language of the Soul'
Chapter 4: Beats Behind Bars: Music, Docile Bodies, and the Digital Panopticon
Interlude V: Michael Jackson, the Undead, and the Posthumous Duet
Chapter 5: Thrilling: Remediating Thriller
Interlude VI: 'It's More Fun in the Philippines'
Chapter 6: 'Together in Electric Dreams': Hybridity, Nostalgia, and Imagination in CPDRC
Interlude VII: 'Thank you for the Music'
Chapter 7: YouTube's Penal Spectators
Coda: Dangerous Mediations, Prisoners of Love, and Other Considerations
Appendix
Abbreviations and Glossary
Notes
References
Index