Rock revolution or time-no-changes: visions of change and continuity in rock music

Popular Music ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 97-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Durant
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Remarkable Change ◽  
The One ◽  
Underlying Processes

Discussions of rock or contemporary popular music are very often suffused with suggestions of massive and remarkable ‘change’ (in musical style, in surrounding fashions, etc.). Just as often, however, they are filled with virtually opposite visions of endless repetition, or continual ‘sameness’ (the music all merely sounding alike). Diverging in this way, views of change in popular music tend towards extreme polarisation – so much evidently depending upon the scale and scope of comparison, and indeed much of the problem centring on the domain or level in music isolated as the one most likely to offer explanation of the underlying processes.

Music and Revolution in the Long 1960s

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-471
Author(s):  
ODED HEILBRONNER
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Protest Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

When discussing the relationship between popular music and social-political change in the long 1960s, historians and critics have tended to fluctuate between two opposing poles. On the one hand, there is Arthur Marwick's approach, echoed in Jon Savage's recent book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded. In Marwick's cross-national survey, he examines social change in the West during the ‘Long Sixties’ (1958–72), when a ‘cultural revolution’ occurred in which protest music played a major role. On the other hand, there are Peter Doggett's and Dominic Sandbrook's observations that the top-selling albums of the 1960s and 1970s did not include some masterpiece by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Queen, or other leading figures in rock music, but rather the soundtrack of The Sound of Music. Sandbrook writes that it ‘projected a familiar, even conservative vision of the world, based on romantic love and family life. In a period of change it offered a sense of reassurance and stability, not only in its plot but also in its musical style . . . [T]hese were the values of millions . . . in the Swinging Sixties’. Doggett similarly points to the popularity of Julie Andrews and the soundtracks of Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. These soundtracks ‘made no attempt to alter the culture or educate the listener’ he suggests, and that is why they have been relegated ‘to a footnote in the history of popular music’ even while being the top-selling records of 1965 and 1966.

Yes, ‘Awaken’, and the progressive rock style

Popular Music ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN R. PALMER
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
Progressive Rock ◽  
The One ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Further Development ◽  
Musical Styles

Going for the One was a good rebirth of Yes at that time, to find its feet and really know what it wanted to do. And we made ‘Awaken’ . . . (Morse 1996, p. 58).Since the release of their third recording, The Yes Album, in March 1971, the music of the English band Yes has been associated with the rock music substyle called ‘progressive rock’. The first two Yes albums showcase a very capable, inventive group of musicians who drew freely from the multitude of sounds around them, emulating aspects of the various musical styles they found engaging. However, it was not until they composed the works appearing on The Yes Album that the band coupled this eclecticism with a quest for originality to develop a voice highly idiosyncratic when judged against prevailing popular music styles. Subsequent albums reveal a predeliction for experimentation and expansion, and successful record sales in both the UK and US encouraged further development in the same direction. Although not members of the ‘first wave’ of progressive rock bands, Yes became ‘codifiers’ and for many, especially later detractors, the flagship of the ‘progressive' fleet. Before I go on to describe and illustrate, through the analysis of a particular song, aspects of Yes's musical language, I will briefly describe the environment in which it appeared and flourished.

Jaco Pastorius, the Electric Bass, and the Struggle for Jazz Credibility

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 121-138
Author(s):  
Brian F. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Electric Bass ◽  
Public Persona

This article explores Jaco Pastorius’s efforts to legitimize himself as a jazz electric bassist. Even though the instrument had existed at the margins of jazz for decades, by the 1970s it was overwhelmingly associated with rock and funk music and therefore carried with it the stigmatized connotations of outsider status. Building on the work of Bill Milkowski, Kevin Fellezs, Lawrence Wayte, and Peter Dowdall, I situate Pastorius’s career within the broader context of 1970s jazz fusion. I then analyze how he deliberately used his public persona, his virtuosic technical abilities, the atypical timbre of his fretless electric bass, and his work as a composer and bandleader to vie for acceptance within the jazz tradition. As I argue, Pastorius specifically attempted to establish his jazz credibility through his first two solo albums, initially by disassociating himself from his own instrument, and then by eventually abandoning the musical style that had made him famous. Ultimately, Pastorius’s story serves as a useful case study of the tangible ramifications of authenticity disputes and the complicated ways in which musicians have attempted to navigate contested musical spaces within popular music.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

Pop and the Nation-State: towards a theorisation

Popular Music ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Cloonan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
State Level ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
The One

Recent years have seen two noticeable trends in Popular Music Studies. These have been on the one hand a series of works which have tried to document the ‘local’ music scene and, on the other, accounts of processes of globalisation. While not uninterested in the intermediate Nation-State level, both trends have tended to regard it as an area of increasingly less importance. To state the matter more boldly, both trends have underplayed the continually important role of the Nation-State.

Music video in its contexts: popular music and post-modernism in the 1980s

Popular Music ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Straw
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Surrounding Rock ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Post Modernism ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
Music Experience ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Individual

Writing on music video has had two distinctive moments in its brief history. The first wave of treatments tended to come from the culture surrounding rock music and from those who were primarily interested in music video as something which produced effects on that music. Here, two claims were most common, and generally expressed in the terms and the contexts of rock journalism:(1) that music video had made ‘image’ more important than the experience of music itself, with effects which were to be feared (for example, the potential difficulties for artists with poor ‘images’, the risk that theatricality and spectacle would take precedence over intrinsically ‘musical’ values, etc.);(2) that music video would result in a diminishing of the interpretative liberty of the individual music listener, who would now have visual or narrative interpretations of song lyrics imposed on him/her, in what would amount to a semantic and affective impoverishment of the popular music experience.

Diversity As A Unique Constellation of Superimposing Network Logics

2012 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-14
Author(s):  
Alain Thierstein ◽  
Anne Wiese
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Industrial Sites ◽  
Individual Site ◽  
Scale Levels ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The City ◽  
Underlying Processes

In the context of the European city, the regeneration of former industrial sites is a unique opportunity to actively steer urban development. These plots of land gain strategic importance in actively triggering development on the city scale. Ideally, these interventions radiate beyond the individual site and contribute to the strengthening of the location as a whole. International competition between locations is rising and prosperous development a precondition for wealth and wellbeing. This approach to the regeneration of inner city plots makes high demands on all those involved. Our framework suggests a stronger focus of the conceptualization and analysis of idiosyncratic resources, to enable innovative approaches in planning. On the one hand, we are discussing spatially restrained urban plots, which have the capacity and need to be reset. On the other hand, each plot is a knot in the web of relations on a multiplicity of scales. The material city is nested into a set of interrelated scale levels – the plot, the quarter, the city, the region, potentially even the polycentric megacity region. The immaterial relations however span a multicity of scale levels. The challenge is to combine these two perspectives for their mutual benefit. The underlying processes are constitutive to urban space diversity, as urban form shapes urban life and vice versa.

Riot grrrls and shredder bros: Punk ethics, social justice and (un)popular popular music at School of Rock

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kayla Rush
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Frame Analysis ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Music Teaching ◽  
Riot Grrrl ◽  
Cultural Status

This article presents a case study of riot grrrl music in a School of Rock franchise in the Midwestern United States. It presents the school as a place in which gender is bound up in specific notions of what it is to play rock music, notions that directly inform what constitutes popular popular music within this context. The article examines the Riot Grrrl project using frame analysis, presenting and discussing three frames through which riot grrrl was taught: as music, punk ethics and social justice. It examines a case of frame conflict as played out in a disagreement between the programme’s two male instructors. It suggests that multi-frame approaches to popular music teaching, including clashes that may arise from conflicting frames, are effective in disrupting the musical-cultural status quo and in creating spaces in which students may productively and empathetically encounter the unpopular popular music of marginalized musical ‘Others’.

Nordic Modernity and the Structure of the Musical Landscape

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabian Holt
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Geography ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Global Modernity

This chapter outlines macro structural changes in the Nordic music landscape, drawing from sociological theory of modernity. The chapter identifies popular music in wider tensions in Nordic modernity, particularly in relation to shifting hegemonic cultures to uncover the underlying dynamics of tensions between shifting mainstream formations and their alternatives. Following this logic, musical style and taste involve positionings in relation to issues of capitalism, nationalism, and mass media. The chapter analyzes changes in the region’s music landscape within the region’s evolving modernity, particularly in the transition from a national to a more global modernity. This is illustrated by the declining status of Stockholm’s Anglo pop music industry as the region’s center into a more decentralized and networked transnational cultural geography.

Processes of institutionalisation and ‘symbolic struggles’ in the ‘independent music’ field in Italy

Modern Italy ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Magaudda
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
National Level ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
Independent Music ◽  
Field Of Cultural Production ◽  
National Music

Over the last fifteen years, independent rock music has become a wider field of cultural production and consumption in Italy. Indeed, while during the 1970s and 1990s the production of independent music was connected predominantly to political movements, alternative subcultures and the antagonistic attitude of the ‘centri sociali’, in the present decade, independent popular music has moved towards the centre of the national music industry and the mass media of the musical mainstream. This article describes the phases of this process of institutionalisation, showing how the politically based culture of independent music is today at the centre of a symbolic struggle occurring between the values of authenticity, rooted in political youth cultures, and the strategic and pragmatic tendency towards integration into the mainstream of the national music industry. This analysis is carried out applying the Bourdieian concepts of ‘field of cultural production’ and ‘cultural capital’, together with their evolutions into the notion of ‘subcultural capital’. This theoretical framework is applied in order to show both the process of institutionalisation this cultural field is undergoing, and the symbolic struggle taking place between the original values of the political and cultural autonomy of music and the commoditisation of musical objects in the mainstream mass media and national industrial sector. Finally, it is shown how new agents who represent the independent popular music industry at the national level need to deal with claims for authenticity raised by the alternative and extreme wings of the independent music scene.

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