A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
A close look at the lives of working musicians who aren’t the center of their stage.
Secret (and not-so-secret) weapons, side-of-the-stagers, rhythm and horn sections, backup singers, accompanists—these and other “band people” are the anonymous but irreplaceable character actors of popular music. Through interviews and incisive cultural critique, writer and musician Franz Nicolay provides a portrait of the musical middle class. Artists talk frankly about their careers and attitudes toward their craft, work environment, and group dynamics, and shed light on how support musicians make sense of the weird combination of friend group, gang, small business consortium, long-term creative collaboration, and chosen family that constitutes a band. Is it more important to be a good hang or a virtuoso player? Do bands work best as democracies or autocracies? How do musicians with children balance their personal and professional lives? How much money is too little? And how does it feel to play on hundreds of records, with none released under your name? In exploring these and other questions, Band People gives voice to those who collaborate to create and dissects what it means to be a laborer in the culture industry.
Here is an illustrated guide to the rich music of Brazil—its history, styles, performers, instruments, and impact on musicians around the globe. From the boisterous rhythms of samba to the cool elegance of bossa nova to the hot percussion of Bahian axé music, The Brazilian Sound celebrates a world music phenomenon. This revised and expanded edition includes discussions of developments in samba and other key genres, the rise of female singer-songwriters in recent years, new works by established artists like Milton Nascimento and Marisa Monte, and the mixing of bossa with electronica. This clearly written and lavishly illustrated encyclopedic survey features new entries and photographs, an extensive glossary of Brazilian music terms and more.
This edition of The Brazilian Sound contains new discussions of:
· música sertaneja and música caipira
· Brazilian funk, rap/hip-hop, and electronic dance music
· important new samba and MPB artists
· Plus! An updated bibliography and glossary, and a list of Web resources
Manuel shows that the cassette revolution, however, has brought new contradictions and problems to Indian culture. While inexpensive cassettes revitalized local subcultures and community values throughout the subcontinent, they were also a vehicle for regional and political factionalism, new forms of commercial vulgarity, and, disturbingly, the most provocative sorts of hate-mongering and religious chauvinism.
Cassette Culture is the first scholarly account of Indian popular music and the first case study of a technological revolution now occurring throughout the world. It will be an essential resource for anyone interested in modern India, communications theory, world popular music, or contemporary global culture.
Averill explores such diverse genres as Haitian jazz, troubadour traditions, Vodou-jazz, konpa, mini-djaz, new generation, and roots music. He examines the complex interaction of music with power in contexts such as honorific rituals, sponsored street celebrations, Carnival, and social movements that span the political spectrum.
With firsthand accounts by musicians, photos, song texts, and ethnographic descriptions, this book explores the profound manifestations of power and song in the day-to-day efforts of ordinary Haitians to rise above political repression.
Most pop songs are short-lived. They appear suddenly and, if they catch on, seem to be everywhere at once before disappearing again into obscurity. Yet some songs resonate more deeply—often in ways that reflect broader historical and cultural changes.
In Footsteps in the Dark, George Lipsitz illuminates these secret meanings, offering imaginative interpretations of a wide range of popular music genres from jazz to salsa to rock. Sweeping changes that only remotely register in official narratives, Lipsitz argues, can appear in vivid relief within popular music, especially when these changes occur outside mainstream white culture. Using a wealth of revealing examples, he discusses such topics as the emergence of an African American techno music subculture in Detroit as a contradictory case of digital capitalism and the prominence of banda, merengue, and salsa music in the 1990s as an expression of changing Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican nationalisms. Approaching race and popular music from another direction, he analyzes the Ken Burns PBS series Jazz as a largely uncritical celebration of American nationalism that obscures the civil rights era’s challenge to racial inequality, and he takes on the infamous campaigns to censor hip-hop and the radical black voice in the early 1990s.
Teeming with astute observations and brilliant insights about race and racism, deindustrialization, and urban renewal and their connections to music, Footsteps in the Dark puts forth an alternate history of post–cold war America and shows why in an era given to easy answers and clichéd versions of history, pop songs matter more than ever.
George Lipsitz is professor of black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his many books are Life in the Struggle, Dangerous Crossroads, and American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minnesota, 2001).
The popularity of the motion picture soundtrack O Brother, Where Art Thou? brought an extraordinary amount of attention to bluegrass, but it also drew its share of criticism from some aficionados who felt the album’s inclusion of more modern tracks misrepresented the genre. This soundtrack, these purists argued, wasn’t bluegrass, but “roots music,” a new and, indeed, more overarching category concocted by journalists and marketers. Why is it that popular music genres like these and others are so passionately contested? And how is it that these genres emerge, coalesce, change, and die out?
In Genre in Popular Music, Fabian Holt provides new understanding as to why we debate music categories, and why those terms are unstable and always shifting. To tackle the full complexity of genres in popular music, Holt embarks on a wide-ranging and ambitious collection of case studies. Here he examines not only the different reactions to O Brother, but also the impact of rock and roll’s explosion in the 1950s and 1960s on country music and jazz, and how the jazz and indie music scenes in Chicago have intermingled to expand the borders of their respective genres. Throughout, Holt finds that genres are an integral part of musical culture—fundamental both to musical practice and experience and to the social organization of musical life.
McCann explores the links between the growth of the culture industry, rapid industrialization, and the rise and fall of Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo dictatorship. He argues that these processes opened a window of opportunity for the creation of enduring cultural patterns and demonstrates that the understandings of popular music cemented in the mid–twentieth century continue to structure Brazilian cultural life in the early twenty-first.
Was the first white European blues singer an Irish woman? What links The Rolling Stones to the birth of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement? Did the state suppress the work of a key countercultural director because his film was shot in Belfast in 1965?
This book provides the answers in an engaging and dynamic reconsideration of Belfast’s long-ignored contributions to the popular music and cultural politics of the 1960s. In an expansive socio-cultural history, Noel McLaughlin and Joanna Braniff explore how popular music engaged with and influenced the global cultural and political currents of the decade.
The popular history of Northern Ireland has been overshadowed by the violence of the Troubles. But How Belfast Got the Blues offers a corrective, reconsidering the period before 1969 and arguing that popular music in Northern Ireland was central to the politics of the time, in ways not previously understood or explored. In addition to big names like Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher, the authors highlight lesser-known artists—notably Ottilie Patterson, Ireland's first blues singer—and restore them to music history. By intertwining politics, culture, and key personalities, the authors reexamine this radical decade and the complex but essential relationship between music and identity in a place where it could mean the difference between life and death.
The result is Karaoke Idols, a close ethnography of life at a karaoke bar that reveals just what we’re doing when we take up the mic—and how we shape our identities, especially in terms of gender, ethnicity, and class, through performances in everyday life. Marrying a comprehensive introduction to the history of public singing and karaoke with a rich analysis of karaoke performers and the community that their shared performances generate, Karaoke Idols is a book for both the casual reader and the scholar, and a fascinating exploration of our urge to perform and the intersection of technology and culture that makes it so seductively easy to do so.
It has long been assumed that people who prefer Led Zeppelin to Mozart live aesthetically impoverished lives. But why? In Listening to Popular Music, award-winning popular music scholar Theodore Gracyk argues that aesthetic value is just as important in popular listening as it is with “serious” music. And we don’t have to treat popular music as art in order to recognize its worth. Aesthetic values are realized differently in different musical styles, and each requires listening skills that people must learn.
—William Echard, Department of Music, and Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture, Carleton University
—Stephen Davies, Department of Philosophy, University of Auckland, and author of The Philosophy of Art
—Mark Katz, Assistant Professor of Music, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music
Raï music is often called the voice of the voiceless in Algeria, a society currently swept by tragic conflict. Raï is the voice of Algerian men, young men caught between generations and classes, in political strife, and in economic inequality. In a ground-breaking study, anthropologist Marc Schade-Poulsen uses this popular music genre as a lens through which he views Algerian society, particularly male society. He situates raï within Algerian family life, moral codes, and broader power relations.
Schade-Poulsen did his research in the 1990s, in clubs, recording studios, at weddings, and with street musicians. He describes the history of raï, which emerged in the late 1970s and spread throughout North Africa at the same time the Islamist movement was growing to become the most potent socio-political movement in Algeria.
Outsiders consider raï to be Western in origin, but Schade-Poulsen shows its Islamic roots as well. The musicians do use Western instruments, but the music itself mixes Algerian popular songs and rhythms with the beat of American disco, Egyptian modalities, Moroccan wedding tunes, and the songs of Julio Iglesias. The lyrics deal with male-female relationships but also with generational relationships and the problems of youth, as they struggle to find a place in a conflicted society.
The study, in its innovative approach to music as a template of society, helps the reader understand the two major movements among today's Algerian youth: one toward the mosque and the other toward the West.
Macías conducted numerous interviews for Mexican American Mojo, and the voices of little-known artists and fans fill its pages. In addition, more famous musicians such as Ritchie Valens and Lalo Guerrero are considered anew in relation to their contemporaries and the city. Macías examines language, fashion, and subcultures to trace the history of hip and cool in Los Angeles as well as the Chicano influence on urban culture. He argues that a grass-roots “multicultural urban civility” that challenged the attempted containment of Mexican Americans and African Americans emerged in the neighborhoods, schools, nightclubs, dance halls, and auditoriums of mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles. So take a little trip with Macías, via streetcar or freeway, to a time when Los Angeles had advanced public high school music programs, segregated musicians’ union locals, a highbrow municipal Bureau of Music, independent R & B labels, and robust rock and roll and Latin music scenes.
Yet glam was as much about substance as style, and Performing Glam Rock delves into the many ways glam paved the way for new explorations of identity in terms of gender, sexuality, and performance. Philip Auslander positions glam historically and examines it as a set of performance strategies, exploring the ways in which glam rock-while celebrating the showmanship of 1950s rock and roll-began to undermine rock's adherence to the ideology of authenticity in the late 1960s.
In this important study of a too-often-overlooked phenomenon, Auslander takes a fresh look at the genius of the glam movement and introduces glam to a new generation of performance enthusiasts and scholars alike.
Philip Auslander is Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology and author of numerous books, including Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture and Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance. He is editor of the major reference work Performance: Critical Concepts and coeditor, with Carrie Sandahl, of Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance.
Who's better? Billie Holiday or P. J. Harvey? Blur or Oasis? Dylan or Keats? And how many friendships have ridden on the answer? Such questions aren't merely the stuff of fanzines and idle talk; they inform our most passionate arguments, distill our most deeply held values, make meaning of our ever-changing culture. In Performing Rites, one of the most influential writers on popular music asks what we talk about when we talk about music. What's good, what's bad? What's high, what's low? Why do such distinctions matter? Instead of dismissing emotional response and personal taste as inaccessible to the academic critic, Simon Frith takes these forms of engagement as his subject--and discloses their place at the very center of the aesthetics that structure our culture and color our lives.
Taking up hundreds of songs and writers, Frith insists on acts of evaluation of popular music as music. Ranging through and beyond the twentieth century, Performing Rites puts the Pet Shop Boys and Puccini, rhythm and lyric, voice and technology, into a dialogue about the undeniable impact of popular aesthetics on our lives. How we nod our heads or tap our feet, grin or grimace or flip the dial; how we determine what's sublime and what's "for real"--these are part of the way we construct our social identities, and an essential response to the performance of all music. Frith argues that listening itself is a performance, both social gesture and bodily response. From how they are made to how they are received, popular songs appear here as not only meriting aesthetic judgments but also demanding them, and shaping our understanding of what all music means.
Njelle W. Hamilton's Spotify playlist to accompany Phonographic Memories: https://spoti.fi/2tCQRm8
This is the first scholarly volume to focus on popular music in Leeds. It delves into the rich musical history of Leeds and its long tradition of vibrant venues, nightclubs, dance halls, pubs, and other sites of musical entertainment. The contributors use the popular music of Leeds to exemplify and inform understandings of broader cultural and urban changes, the social and historical significance of music as mass media; music and migration; music, racialization, and social equity; and industrial decline, deindustrialization, neoliberalism, and the rise of the twenty-four-hour city. Charting moments of stark musical politicization and de-politicization, while also tracing arguments about heritagizing popular music within discussions about music’s place in museums and in the urban economy, this book contributes to debates about why music matters, has mattered, and continues to matter in Leeds and beyond.
Given the explosion in recent years of scholarship exploring the ways in which disability is manifested and performed in numerous cultural spaces, it’s surprising that until now there has never been a single monograph study covering the important intersection of popular music and disability. George McKay’s Shakin’ All Over is a cross-disciplinary examination of the ways in which popular music performers have addressed disability: in their songs, in their live performances, and in various media presentations.
By looking closely into the work of artists such as Johnny Rotten, Neil Young, Johnnie Ray, Ian Dury, Teddy Pendergrass, Curtis Mayfield, and Joni Mitchell, McKay investigates such questions as how popular music works to obscure and accommodate the presence of people with disabilities in its cultural practice. He also examines how popular musicians have articulated the experiences of disability (or sought to pass), or have used their cultural arena for disability advocacy purposes.
Soda Goes Pop investigates these and other vital questions around the evolving relationships between popular music and corporate advertising. Joanna K. Love joins musical analysis, historical research, and cultural theory to trace parallel shifts in these industries over eight decades. In addition to scholarly and industry resources, she draws on first-hand accounts, pop culture magazines, trade press journals, and other archival materials. Pepsi’s longevity as an influential American brand, its legendary commercials, and its pioneering, relentless pursuit of alliances with American musical stars makes the brand a particularly instructive point of focus. Several of the company’s most famous ad campaigns are prime examples of the practice of redaction, whereby marketers select, censor, and restructure musical texts to fit commercial contexts in ways that revise their aesthetic meanings and serve corporate aims. Ultimately, Love demonstrates how Pepsi’s marketing has historically appropriated and altered images of pop icons and the meanings of hit songs, and how these commercials shaped relationships between the American music business, the advertising industry, and corporate brands.
Soda Goes Pop is a rich resource for scholars and students of American studies, popular culture, advertising, broadcast media, and musicology. It is also an accessible and informative book for the general reader, as Love’s musical and theoretical analyses are clearly presented for non-specialist audiences and readers with varying degrees of musical knowledge.
Contributors. Marié Abe, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Paola Iovene, Nisha Kommattam, Jennifer Lindsay, Kaley Mason, Anna Schultz, Hyunjoon Shin, C. J. W.-L. Wee, Hon-Lun (Helan) Yang, Christine R. Yano, Qian Zhang
"A variety of approaches are brought to bear on fascinating repertoire, but with the underlying aim of better understanding some brilliant music. There’s nothing more exciting in music writing than something which entices you to listen to what’s familiar to you in a new way, and this collection brings such excitement in abundance."
---Allan Moore, author of Jethro Tull: Aqualung and Rock: The Primary Text
"These essays bring together a remarkable range of tools and perspectives to such diverse topics and contexts as the behind-the-scenes collaborations of composers, performers, arrangers, producers and engineers; pop culture; narratology; and race, politics and gender. The reader continuously benefits from a complementary lineup of sensitive ears that discover novelty in the familiar, exposing the heart of many rock and pop classics through imaginative and authoritative prose."
---Walter Everett, author of The Foundations of Rock and The Beatles as Musicians
The nine essays in Sounding Out Pop work together to map the myriad styles and genres of the pop-rock universe through detailed case studies that confront the music from a variety of engaging, thought-provoking perspectives---from historical to music-analytic, aesthetic to ethnographic, with several authors drawing liberally from ideas in other disciplines. The range of bands and artists covered is as vast and varied as the more than fifty-year history of pop and rock music, from the Coasters and Roy Orbison to Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, Radiohead, Beck, Genesis, Tori Amos, and the Police. Together these diverse essays cover a broad spectrum of studies ideally suited for classroom use and for other readers interested in gaining a deeper knowledge of the way popular music works.
Mark Spicer is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His writings have appeared in Contemporary Music Review, Gamut, Music Theory Online, twentieth-century music, and other scholarly journals and essay collections.
John Covach is Professor of Music at the University of Rochester and Professor of Theory at the Eastman School of Music. He is the author of the college textbook What's That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and Its History and the coeditor of Understanding Rock, American Rock and the Classical Music Tradition, and Traditions, Institutions, and American Popular Music.
Cover art credit: © iStockphoto.com/Aleksandar Dickov
With a cross-cultural emphasis, the contributors focus on movies that use popular songs from a variety of genres, including country, bubble-gum pop, disco, classical, jazz, swing, French cabaret, and showtunes. The films discussed range from silents to musicals, from dramatic and avant-garde films to documentaries in India, France, England, Australia, and the United States. The essays examine both “nondiegetic” music in film—the score playing outside the story space, unheard by the characters, but no less a part of the scene from the perspective of the audience—and “diegetic” music—music incorporated into the shared reality of the story and the audience. They include analyses of music written and performed for films, as well as the now common practice of scoring a film with pre-existing songs. By exploring in detail how musical patterns and structures relate to filmic patterns of narration, character, editing, framing, and mise-en-scene, this volume demonstrates that pop music is a crucial element in the film experience. It also analyzes the life of the soundtrack apart from the film, tracing how popular music circulates and acquires new meanings when it becomes an official soundtrack.
Contributors. Rick Altman, Priscilla Barlow, Barbara Ching, Kelley Conway, Corey Creekmur, Krin Gabbard, Jonathan Gill, Andrew Killick, Arthur Knight, Adam Knee, Jill Leeper, Neepa Majumdar, Allison McCracken, Murray Pomerance, Paul Ramaeker, Jeff Smith, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi
From Bill Clinton playing his saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show to Barack Obama referencing Jay-Z’s song “Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” politicians have used music not only to construct their personal presidential identities but to create the broader identity of the American presidency. Through music, candidates can appear relatable, show cultural competency, communicate values and ideas, or connect with a specific constituency. On a less explicit level, episodes such as Clinton’s sax-playing and Obama’s shoulder brush operate as aural and visual articulations of race and racial identity. But why do candidates choose to engage with race in this manner? And why do supporters and detractors on YouTube and the Twittersphere similarly engage with race when they create music videos or remixes in homage to their favorite candidates?
With Barack Obama, Ben Carson, Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump as case studies, Tracks on the Trail: Popular Music, Race, and the US Presidency sheds light on the factors that motivate candidates and constituents alike to articulate race through music on the campaign trail and shows how the racialization of sound intersects with other markers of difference and ultimately shapes the public discourse surrounding candidates, popular music, and the meanings attached to race in the 21st century. Gorzelany-Mostak explores musical engagement broadly, including official music in the form of candidate playlists and launch event setlists, as well as unofficial music in the form of newly composed campaign songs, mashups, parodies, and remixes.
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