Capitalist ideology sustains the logic of labour-power, competition, accumulation, qualification and alienation. If the proletariat want money to get access to commodities, the market must be embraced, the whole working class becoming the victim of the continuing exploitation of wage labour. There is a “compelling parallel between a worker’s exploitation and alienation under capitalism and a victim’s exploitation and alienation at the market place,” since “workers must consider both the fruits of their labour and their labour itself as another man’s propriety” (Schwöbel-Patel 148). Not even retirement means the end of exploitation, as many senior people throughout the world must continue working to ensure economic survival after retirement from working at minimum wage. We came into this world to work, and only death stops the logic of being a cog in the machine of capitalism.

Horror fiction, however, can stage a scenario where the human continues labouring even after death, thus presenting a nightmarish version of the grand narrative of never-ending exploitation. Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm franchise (1979–98) revolves around a supernatural mortician known as the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) who kills and reanimates the dead as his misshapen slaves. The films establish a mythology in which human corpses must work for the Tall Man as a labour force. Gary Sherman’s Dead and Buried (1981), opening just two years after the first Phantasm, stages a similar premise.

Although slasher cinema is one of the most academically scrutinised subgenres of horror (Hart 43), one of its most notorious tropes, that Black characters die first, remains underexamined. Along these lines, the chapter on 1980s horror films in Robin R. Means Coleman’s Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present is titled “We Always Die First” but offers no examples of Black characters dying first. Instead, she duly notes the deployment of the magic negro trope in The Shining (Kubrick, 1980), the continued stereotyping of Vodou in The Serpent and the Rainbow (Craven, 1988) and Grace Jones’s appearance in Vamp (Elias, 1986) as one of the few horror films to star an African American woman (145, 151–52, 155–56, 165–66). Her brief discussion of slasher cinema notes the subgenre was “extraordinarily grisly” and “very White”, leaving the trope that inspired the title of the chapter unexplored (158). Later, in the 2019 documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, Coleman clarified the Black-characters-diefirst trope, suggesting that it is not entirely true. Instead, Black characters, particularly Black males, can demonstrate the formability of the villain by serving as victims (Burgin). Do these observations pass empirical scrutiny? Prevailing literature gives no clear answer.

Several authors make glancing reference to the Black-characters-die-first trope. Here, in line with Coleman’s “very White” assessment, Isabel Cristina Pinedo argues teen slashers exclude “racial minorities altogether or relegates them to the status of victims, largely undeveloped expendable characters” (111).

Bedrock

Resident Evil Village (Capcom 2021) is a videogame founded in an accretion of Gothic materials: castle masonry, caves, ceramic dolls and rusted metal. This litany of minerals subtends its first-person horror where Eastern European– coded werewolves and vampires are all progeny of a monstrous mold, as with its bayou-based prequel Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (Capcom, 2017; McGreevy et al.), but here the player excavates the monsters’ subterranean origins born from abject loss and fights creatures that leave crystal corpses. The catalyst for the action is the petrification of protagonist Ethan’s daughter, Rose, by a family of Gothic monsters whose matriarch is trying to convert her monstrous-feminine power (Creed) to bring her child back to life, entangling multiple human/nonhuman victimhoods. As Rose’s latent power intimates, all characters here are monstrous: the player-protagonist’s body is revealed to be nothing more (or less) than a cave-mold copy of a man with the same materiality as the magnetically empowered metallurgist Heisenberg and the vampiric Lady Dimitrescu, who are gunned down to ash and crystal. In an amplification and subversion of the survival horror relationship where the player-victim “exists only by and for the monster,” our avatar and fictive daughter are repeatedly broken and recombined, cast as a mutable, monstrous mineral substance abused by the different nonhuman agencies of the narrative (Perron 130). Moreover, these monsters are themselves all victims of subterranean experiments and internecine strife, given homes beneath the rocks of this mountainous landscape.

It is with these words that the mythical figure of Daniel Robitaille, better known as Candyman, beckons Helen Lyle to submit herself to him and to accept him as her killer. While this particular moment will become an anthological point of reference within the horror genre due to the sheer power of the conveyed image, further strengthened by the metaphoric cultural and social meanings imbued within it, what strikes a particular chord is the established and emphasised relation between the two characters. This mythopoetic moment becomes synonymous with both the (re) affirmation of Candyman as the source of the monstrous, the urban myth come to life, and the particular position of Helen as an (in)voluntary victim. As the narrative steadily progresses and the audience becomes aware of Candyman’s tragic history and vengeful nature, the focus slowly starts to shift from the initial antagonist to Helen, who now, through Candyman’s doings, becomes reimagined as the actual source of the monstrous. This shift in purpose and functionality within the narrative becomes once more confirmed in a climactic scene at the very end of the film, with Helen becoming/ replacing Candyman himself, but now, devoid of the burden of Daniel Robitaille’s tragic history, rises as a violent urban myth in her own right. This is a key moment, along with many examples in recent decades, where the initial premise of the victim is challenged as a possibly fluid category and it becomes evident that the position of the victim is not a powerless one, as explored, for example, in the seminal work done by Barbara Creed (The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993, and The Return of the Monstrous-Feminine, 2022) or Carol J. Clover (Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 1992).

While both authors position their work within theoretical readings of gender and sexuality, with particular attention towards women as the most common victims within the genre, they also articulate two rather different theoretical paradigms. Whereas Barbara Creed observes women being “represented as monstrous” (Monstrous-Feminine 7) and subsequently argues that the now monstrous-feminine functions as a subversion of patriarchal power and the symbolic order, Carol J. Clover, through her concept of the Final Girl, argues the absence of a clear gender binary with the Final Girls/ victims being in fact “boyish” (Men 40).

That we all are, or can be, victims of physics inscribes an agential form to a classical understanding of ideas such as gravity and force. It invokes a reversal of who and what can behave. As Mel Y. Chen writes in Animacies, there is the possibility of a linguistic “conceptual order of things, an animate hierarchy of possible acts” that they trouble significantly as they ponder the borders between the inanimate and the animate (3). In Chen’s early example of “the hikers that rocks crush,” they engage with the problem that “the hikers … play an object role” (2). The solution to the linguistic difficulty emerges when we animate the object, when the traditionally inanimate rock is given the free agency and subjecthood quality to crush the hikers. Upon this animation, the object becomes a thing, described by Robin Bernstein as when “the amateur’s knife should slip and cut a finger … that knife suddenly becomes a thing that has leapt up and asserted itself, a thing that demands to be reckoned with” (69), which centres her idea of “dances with things” as the kind of interplay between a human and the substantive things that they interact with daily. Bernstein borrows heavily from thing theorist Bill Brown’s assertion that “[t]he story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject” (4).

Contemporary horror film can hardly be discussed without considering the work of Jordan Peele, “Hollywood’s most inventive horror voice” (McCann). His debut Get Out (2017) offers a scathing criticism of the evil of racism and racial exploitation, reminding audiences that America is far from “living a blissful state of post-racial harmony” (McCann). In his second horror feature, Us (2019), Peele casts a wider net by exploring further, equally haunting social issues such as capitalist exploitation, poverty and the ever-present trauma of disenfranchisement. While the film may certainly be explored by focusing solely on the issue of race (from the perspective of critical race theory, for instance, which can be a topic of a separate research), the theme of racism is somewhat less prominent here than in Peele’s earlier film, and, due to its focus on dual identities, Us seems to be more intricate and more widely devastating, like capitalism itself. Notably, the only White characters in Us, the Tyler family, are killed by their own White clones (who in turn are killed by Black clones). Peele thereby avoids blatant racist inferences, which would allow for a clear identification of the victim (Black) and the oppressor (White), as was the case in Get Out. In this way, Us rejects clear demarcations of responsibility along the racial lines and looks for them along class lines, where they become more elusive. As this chapter argues, Us reveals that in a capitalist society everyone is simultaneously victim and oppressor, which keeps “us” enmeshed in a web of conflicting identities.

Found footage horror films feature diegetic camera operators that will usually become the victims of whatever antagonistic force they are recording during the events of the narrative. Since Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Mike Williams went camping in the woods of Maryland in The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sanchez, 1999), the found footage narrational technique has become ubiquitous in the horror genre. Found footage horror films are perfect examples of what Thomas M. Sipos calls “pragmatic aesthetic … when a filmmaker puts technical and budgetary compromises to artistic effect” (29). Although the diegetic camera technique affects the way that viewers recognise and empathise with all of these victims, the ways that these operators use their cameras is often different. Therefore, there is a need to construct a taxonomy of how these victims use their diegetic cameras. This taxonomy will classify the different kinds of camera-operating victim characters in found footage horror films: amateurs, students and cinematographers. The different ways that camera operators approach cinematography must be carefully constructed in the opening scenes of the film in order to prime the viewer for a particular experience, and for a particular form of what I have previously labelled “mediated realism” (Turner, Found Footage 9). Amateurs, students and cinematographers have varying degrees of interaction with their profilmic subjects, and there are therefore varying degrees to which they are recognised as characters by the viewer. The more vocal they are as off-screen characters, the more the viewer is required to imagine off-screen space.

In order to create and elucidate this taxonomy, it is first necessary to consider some key theoretical notions.

It was Poland in the mid-1980s and I was three, maybe four. My mother didn’t know. It took, probably, a few weeks before the song was on one of the two television channels again (or was it on the radio?), and my father and I happened to listen to it together.

This is my first music-related memory. The second must have happened not long after that. I was in a music store, in a long queue, lifted up by my mother to a tall man behind the register, so I could proudly ask: ‘Can I have Michael Jackson’s album, please?’

‘Am-beh, am-beh’, as readers might have guessed by now, had been, of course, ‘I’m bad, I’m bad’, the chorus line from Jackson’s bestseller hit song ‘Bad’. It was the title song of his 1987 legendary album, and apart from the US, it charted in Canada, UK, New Zealand, and several European countries. I didn’t know anything about that at the time, naturally. I was just happy we were able to get the album (a vinyl record) and I could sing along to the tune at home. This was the first meaning-making through music that I can recall. Whereas the line ‘I’m bad’ has been interpreted by music experts as Jackson’s attempt at ‘roughing up’ his image and departing from his gentler pop style, for me, ‘am-beh, am-beh’ meant something cool, flashy and exotic. It also marked the beginning of my burgeoning music collection.

By the time I was ten, indulged by my parents I had amassed a collection of albums (now on cassette tapes). At the time, popular music (largely from the US, UK and Western Europe) was starting to become widely available in Poland, and it was cheap too, as in the absence of copyright law, the cassette tapes were usually pirated and sold unofficially at markets and fairs. There was rarely a period of silence; when a cassette ended, I would just flip it to the other side and push ‘play’ again. Unsurprisingly, the songs stuck in my head and, since I could not understand English, the foreign songs spurred a myriad of original interpretations of what I thought they meant.

As the music accompanied my everyday activities, I sang and I listened, recorded and dubbed.

How and why is music listened to? Do we let go and immerse ourselves in musical sounds as if they ‘wash around us’, like Mrs Phelps advised young Matilda in Roald Dahl’s classic novel? Or do we let the music ‘kick its way through to capture our hearts’, as in the popular lyric to Ikuze! Kaitō Shōjo by the idol band Momoiro Clover? What do we actually do when we listen, and how do these practices relate to everything else in our everyday lives: our demographic markers, jobs, families, emotional states and routines?

In this chapter, I argue that successfully linking the spheres of the personal with the social connection can be realised through conceptualising audience engagement as ‘practice’, that is, a regular and social set of activities (Bräuchler and Postill, 2010). This allows me to move from the linear musicological models towards a more circular account of listening, and will help answer the main questions for the chapter: namely, ‘What are people’s practices surrounding music?’ and ‘What is the role of music in people’s lives, and how is it interpreted in the context of social and cultural relations and identity work?’ In the second part of the chapter, I present a detailed analysis of the music engagements of five people. I chose these five out of the hundred participants from the study as aptly representing the various musical practices emerging from the data, as well as the demographics of the analysed audiences. Additionally, the five were chosen out of the 20 participants I had the most interaction with throughout the study as part of focus groups and individual interviews, as well as the actual practices of listening I observed.

Idols and Their ‘Offices’

So far, we have discussed Japanese ‘idols’ (aidoru) as mostly teenage male or female singers and/or media personalities, who also frequently model for magazines and appear in promotional campaigns. But exactly who is and who is not an aidoru? Or more specifically: how do they differ from virtual idols, i.e., non-corporeal music performers brought to life with technological assistance?

‘Completely different’, says Taiki (‘the relaxed’, man) about the similarities between idols and virtual idols’ songs. Taiki explains that with the former, all you get are boring and predictable accounts of summer flings (presumably, like the one by AKB48 in the previous chapter), or narratives of having a secret crush on a classmate. ‘How is this different?’ I ask, pointing to the karaoke screen from which Taiki’s friend, Shōta, is passionately singing the lyrics of ‘Melt’ by Hatsune Miku (written by ryo and Supercell in 2007). The song is energetic, the lyrics seem typical of J-pop: a protagonist in love but unable to confess their feelings. ‘Wait for it’, promises Taiki, and so we wait, singing along with Shōta. When the song is over, I feel like I missed the answer, so Taiki helpfully recalls the last line of the song: ‘Hug me now! … or something’. I must still look confused, and Taiki explains that because of the last phrase (‘or something’), you can see that Miku, the singing virtual idol, was only half-serious throughout the song, when she sang about preparing for a date. She was not cute, naive or bubbly – ‘that’s not who she is.’ Taiki says that it was all a ruse to get closer to that boy she likes in the song, but Miku is not girly like that. And the cover’s blown in the last line.

Popular Music in Japan

To understand the relevance of idol groups for contemporary Japanese audiences, we need to look back briefly at the history of popular music in Japan, and the dialogue between local and global influences of the form and the content. Idol pop and vocaloid music emerge as influential styles for both analysed cohorts in this book, albeit in different ways. They are closely tied in with the spectrum of economic, social and technological transformations that Japan has experienced in the past 40 years.

For scholars of Japan, modern Japanese popular music usually begins with the start of the Meiji restoration in 1868 (Condry, 2011). After centuries of an isolationist stance, Japan was forced to open up to the world, and the changes, shaping and restructuring of the country for years to come, also included music, brought in on foreign vessels in the form of marching bands and military tunes – which was very different to popular shamisen or shakuhachi music of the earlier Edo period. Soldier training centres in Japan started incorporating the marches into the military regimen before 1868 (as early as the late 1850s, after Commodore Perry’s second visit to Japan), creating a style that scale-wise drew from earlier Japanese folk songs, but was undeniably more influenced by the sound of Western drum and fife bands (Mitsui, 2014, p. 3).

Military music bands accompanied Japan in periods of war surrounding the dawn of the 20th century and thereafter, but were only one aspect of the changing soundscape (Oba, 2002). Much of the musical shift was done through the education system, as Western (including, among others, English, American, German, Spanish) melodies became officially used in the Japanese elemental school music curriculum.

Dancing about Architecture?

Writing about music has always been difficult. Our personal experiences, just like mine detailed in the Preface, seem to suggest that music is hugely relevant to our lives, that it is embedded in and revealing of our routines and practices, that it is one of the meaningful threads in our everyday existence and the symbolic exchange. However, it is difficult to analyse what is actually going on when we interact with music, because on the one hand, music is very personal, and on the other, it is situated strongly in the social sphere of our lives.

When we think about music, we often imagine it as a social, cohesive force, much more than we do about new media. The academic and media debates suggesting that technology, and the internet, are driving us apart (Turkle, 2011) do not focus on music as often as they focus on social media or video games. Sure, moral panics have concerned various musical genres and artists (Jenkins and Maier-Katkin, 1992; Cohen, 2002; Wright 2000), but there has been much more research on cultures, sub-cultures, groups and collectives (now and in the past) which have told us that music can be understood as social behaviour or as mass communication, yet it is always strongly tied to group identity and belonging (Frith, 1978; Hebdige, 1979; Cashmore, 1984; Born and Hesmondhalgh, 2000).

Is this still true in the digital music soundscape, where audiences interact with songs more in isolation from each other: through individual playlists, personalised streaming sites, personal headphones and devices – and yet, through their generational experiences? In 1936 Walter Benjamin famously argued that with mechanical reproduction a certain mode (‘aura’) of engaging with art disappeared, and this opened up the potential to experience art differently. It happened with the invention of photography and film, as Benjamin noted, but we can easily make the connection to recorded music (cf. Benjamin, 1977).

Of all media, we have often reached to music for discussions of generational identities. This may be somewhat less visible now, as practices and emerging technologies inspiring new generational labels have shifted interest towards the online sphere. Still, music remains a significant part of generational experience, but how so?

In Club Cultures, Sarah Thornton describes music as the cultural form closest to the youth (1995, p. 15), and since in scholarship it is the young, adolescent cohort that is usually investigated and dubbed a certain way, music emerges as an important cultural artefact and/or practice. For Thornton, it was rave culture as a rite of passage for young single Britons living with their parents in the early 1990s. Earlier, for Dick Hebdige (1979) it was punk as a youthful counter to the British crisis of the 1970s. For scholars of Japan, it was the development of politicised, protest performance spaces (Manabe, 2016a) or the emergence of hip-hop and the new reality of Japanese modernisation and urban youth (Condry, 2001). Other studies, of course, can easily be found, and across them a strong link between music and identity, stronger, perhaps, than in other cultural forms (Frith, 1988; Bennett, 2000).

Although this book is not about lyrical trends in Japanese music, the texts and their interpretations remain vital. When popular songs in Japan make generational claims, they usually do it subtly, and it is in their readings by the audiences that the meanings take specific shapes. Sometimes, however, the songs are more overt.