Results by title
58 books match the query 'Pop Vocal' and 3 start with o
Old Town Road
A Song by Lil Nas X with Billy Ray CyrusChris Molanphy
Duke University Press, 2023
In Old Town Road, Chris Molanphy considers Lil Nas X’s debut single as pop artifact, chart phenomenon, and cultural watershed. “Old Town Road” was more than a massive hit, with the most weeks at No. 1 in Billboard Hot 100 history. It is also a prism through which to track the evolution of popular music consumption and the ways race influences how the music industry categorizes songs and artists. By both lionizing and satirizing genre tropes—it’s a country song built from an alternative rock sample, a hip-hop song in which nobody raps, a comical song that transcends novelty, and a queer anthem—Lil Nas X troubles the very idea of genre. Ultimately, Molanphy shows how “Old Town Road” channeled decades of Americana to point the way toward our cultural future.
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One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount
Popular Music on Early TelevisionMurray Forman
Duke University Press, 2012
Elvis Presley's television debut in January 1956 is often cited as the moment when popular music and television came together. Murray Forman challenges that contention, revealing popular music as crucial to television years before Presley's sensational small-screen performances. Drawing on trade and popular journalism, internal television and music industry documents, and records of audience feedback, Forman provides a detailed history of the incorporation of musical performances into TV programming during the medium's formative years, from 1948 to 1955. He examines how executives in the music and television industries understood and responded to the convergence of the two media; how celebrity musicians such as Vaughn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Fred Waring struggled to adjust to television; and how relative unknowns with an intuitive feel for the medium were sometimes catapulted to stardom. Forman argues that early television production influenced the aesthetics of musical performance in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly those of emerging musical styles such as rock and roll. At the same time, popular music helped to shape the nascent medium of television—its technologies, program formats, and industry structures. Popular music performances were essential to the allure and success of TV in its early years.
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Out of Sync
Ventriloquism in Popular Media from Vinyl to TikTokSarah Rebecca Kessler
Duke University Press, 2026
Ventriloquism, or the art of “throwing the voice,” has outdated and even unsettling connotations to many, associated with vaudeville and the nefarious talking dolls of so many horror movies. Despite this, ventriloquism remains a popular performance art, filling theaters and concert venues with audiences eager to hear puppets voice what humans, in an increasingly polarized present, want to say but feel they can’t. In Out of Sync, Sarah Rebecca Kessler explores ventriloquism’s persistence in, and relevance to, the contemporary moment, examining performances by recent and current practitioners such as Richard Sandfield, Nina Conti, Jeff Dunham, and Terry Fator while also tracing ventriloquism’s travels across media including vinyl records, documentary films, music videos, and social media platforms such as TikTok. Kessler argues that ventriloquism and its many remediations amplify a cultural politics of synchronization that positions not just sounds and images, but voices and bodies, as more and less out of sync along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality. Looking closely at the art and its outgrowths, Out of Sync gives insight into the operations of race, gender, and sexuality as distinctly audiovisual processes.
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