Popping the question: the function and effect of popular music in cinema

Popular Music ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Lapedis
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Conventional Practice ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Claudia Gorbman, in her afterword to Unheard Melodies, looks forward to the ‘new’ phenomenon of the increased use of recorded popular music in the movies. She questions whether the contemporary use of popular music is essentially different from its use in the traditional Hollywood musical, wherein conventional practice permits a musical number to disrupt the narrative flow, and answers that ‘a hybrid is emerging, unlike diegetic music which is normally not listened to, and also not as focused as musical numbers issuing from the magic world of the musical’ (Gorbman 1987, p.162). Certainly, the music video, as Gorbman admits, in its ‘kaleidoscope of forms’ (ibid.) is changing the relationship between visuals and music, so that there is no longer a habitual hierarchy of sound supporting image, or vice versa. It is this shifting relationship and the way in which pop music specifically operates upon the narrative structure of cinema that I wish to explore here.

Standing Out While Fitting In

2020 ◽  
pp. 204-224
Author(s):  
Sean Bellaviti
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
The Common ◽  
Fitting In ◽  
International Success ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Individual Style ◽  
The Way

Chapter 6 extends the discussion of the previous two chapters by examining the musical choices música típica musicians make to forge an identifiable individual style that is the key to establishing a career, distinguishing the sound of individual conjunto musicians, and achieving a coveted region-based following. This focus on specific musical strategies through which musicians draw creative inspiration—whether from renown música típica performers and/or genres that have achieved broad international success—allows the author to explore música típica’s development as a form of cutting edge popular music that is, at the same time, firmly tethered to sentiments of tradition, regionalism, and populist nationalism. The technical approaches for developing the all-important original sound described by the musicians who are featured in this chapter opens the way for the author to theorize the relationship between style and genre as well as to discuss issues involving the common usages of these terms and concepts in ethnomusicological discourse.

Drawing listener attention in popular music: Testing five musical features arising from the theory of attention economy

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hubert Léveillé Gauvin
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Information Age ◽  
Technological Changes ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Attention Economy ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Voice ◽  
The Way

Technological changes in the last 30 years have influenced the way we consume music, not only granting immediate access to a much larger collection of songs than ever before, but also allowing us to instantly skip songs. This new reality can be explained in terms of attention economy, which posits that attention is the currency of the information age, since it is both scarce and valuable. The purpose of these two studies is to examine whether popular music compositional practices have changed in the last 30 years in a way that is consistent with attention economy principles. In the first study, 303 U.S. top-10 singles from 1986 to 2015 were analyzed according to five parameters: number of words in title, main tempo, time before the voice enters, time before the title is mentioned, and self-focus in lyrical content. The results revealed that popular music has been changing in a way that favors attention grabbing, consistent with attention economy principles. In the second study, 60 popular songs from 2015 were paired with 60 less popular songs from the same artists. The same parameters were evaluated. The data were not consistent with any of the hypotheses regarding the relationship between attention economy principles within a comparison of popular and less popular music.

Music as Product

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dr Daragh O’Reilly ◽  
Dr Gretchen Larsen ◽  
Dr Krzysztof Kubacki
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Production ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The Us ◽  
Sales Success ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

n order to develop a more holistic and integrated understanding of the relationship between music and the market, and consequently of music production and consumption, it is necessary to examine the notion of music as a product. The very act of exploring the relationship between music, markets and consumption immediately frames music as a ‘product’. In the marketplace, music is ‘produced’ and ‘consumed’ rather than made and heard. But the language and practices of the market and of marketing go far beyond the labelling of music making and listening in this way. They are pervasive and, as such, mediate our everyday engagement with music, regardless of the role we play in the market. The way the quality of music is evaluated is dominated by measures of sales success: songs ‘top the charts’, artists ‘sell out’ stadiums and tours, and recording companies sign ‘the next big thing’ to contracts in the expectation of future sales. Even a particular market can be held up as measure of success: in popular music, many bands, such as the Beatles, have been deemed to be successful only after they have ‘broken America’ by reaching high positions on the US music charts.

Campus Rock

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-72
Author(s):  
James Carter
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
College Campuses ◽  
College Campus ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Acid Rock ◽  
Radio Stations ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The Relationship

During 1967-8, The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Animals, The Who, Richie Havens, Jefferson Airplane and the Iron Butterfly, performed in the gymnasium at the small, liberal arts Drew University in suburban New Jersey. Turns out, this experience was not unique to Drew. College campuses across the country were essential for the growth of popular music, and of rock music in particular in the mid- to late-sixties. The music industry took notice as booking agents, record shops, pop music promoters, radio stations, and industry magazines and newspapers all began to place more emphasis on the opportunities provided by the nation’s colleges. While we know a great deal about activism on college campuses during the sixties, we know little about that same environment and its relationship to the growth and development of rock culture. This essay will explore the relationship between the growth of rock culture, the college campus, and the broader sixties experience. The college campus proved crucial in the development of rock music as student tastes determined “rock culture.” Folk, pop, soul/R&B, folk rock, hard rock, and psychedelic/acid rock, thrived simultaneously on the college campus from 1967 to 1970, precisely the period of significant change in popular music.

Circles Disturbed

2012 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Mathematics History ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Concrete World ◽  
The Way

This book brings together important thinkers in mathematics, history, and philosophy to explore the relationship between mathematics and narrative. “Circles disturbed” reflect the last words of Archimedes before he was slain by a Roman soldier—“Don't disturb my circles”—words that seem to refer to two radically different concerns: that of the practical person living in the concrete world of reality, and that of the theoretician lost in a world of abstraction. Stories and theorems are, in a sense, the natural languages of these two worlds—stories representing the way we act and interact, and theorems giving us pure thought, distilled from the hustle and bustle of reality. Yet, though the voices of stories and theorems seem totally different, they share profound connections and similarities. This book delves into topics such as the way in which historical and biographical narratives shape our understanding of mathematics and mathematicians, the development of “myths of origins” in mathematics, the structure and importance of mathematical dreams, the role of storytelling in the formation of mathematical intuitions, the ways mathematics helps us organize the way we think about narrative structure, and much more.

From Boy Band to Man Band

2021 ◽  
pp. 154-178
Author(s):  
Kai Arne Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Gender Norms ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The Relationship

The chapter begins by considering descriptions of aging boy bands as “man bands.” Taking an interest in the discouraging rhetoric that describes aging masculinities as in a state of decline, the author focuses on the post-reunion career of Take That. Two distinct events in the band’s history serve as the chapter’s focal points: 1) the 2010 release of Progress, the only album to see the whole group reunited since Robbie Williams’ first departure from the band in 1995; and 2) the 2017 release of Wonderland, which was the second album offered by the group as a trio following the departure of Jason Orange and Williams (for the second time). In promoting Progress, the group pursued contemporary trends in pop production and musical style while simultaneously aligning themselves to “rockist” ideas of authenticity and musicianship (even if certain boy band conventions were upheld). Following the release of Wonderland, and in the music video New Day (2017), Take That demonstrated how boy band clichés can be mobilized to signal dissent from gender norms. During this period, the group appeared to embrace banality and self-irony as a means for resisting stagnation and assimilation. By comparing these two moments in the band’s history, the chapter accounts for Take That’s contrasting approaches to navigating the multiplicity of meanings attached to the concepts of age and aging, thus providing new insights into the relationship between masculinity and maturation in pop music.

scholarly journals The gendered carnival of pop

Popular Music ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Railton
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Gender And Genre ◽  
Predominantly Female ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Female Audience ◽  
The Way

One of the ironies of popular music studies is that the music that is the most popular, in terms of contemporary chart success, is rarely discussed by academics writing in the field. In this article I want to suggest that this is because some forms of ‘mainstream’ chart pop music, and the discourse of the magazines that promote this type of music, pose a threat to the certainties of both gender and genre that underpin ‘serious’ popular music. The music I am concerned with here is that provided by ‘boy bands’ like Boyzone, Westlife or Five, and ‘girl groups’ like The Spice Girls, Atomic Kitten or Precious, as well as mixed-sex groups such as Steps, SClub7 and Hear'Say, and singers such as Britney Spears and Billie – music that is the mainstay of magazines such as the UK publications Smash Hits, Top of the Pops and Live and Kicking. I shall argue that this music, and the way of enjoying music promoted by the magazines that support it, can best be understood in terms of a carnivalesque disruption that challenges all stable ideas about what makes music good, and what popular music should be about. Furthermore, I shall argue that, just as this music is perhaps the only form of popular music to have a predominantly female audience, the threat that it poses is the threat of the feminine, and of female encroachment into what is still predominantly a male, and masculine, world.

Auto-Tune, Labor, and the Pop-Music Voice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Provenzano
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
General Public ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Special Effect ◽  
Acoustic Performance ◽  
The Relationship

Long used in popular music to smooth vocal imperfections, Auto-Tune has become a much-discussed production tool since the early 2000s through artists including Cher, Daft Punk, and Kanye West. This chapter examines the relationship among artist skill, Auto-Tune, and reception. Artist T-Pain overtly used Auto-Tune to give his voice a synthetic, often robotic quality. Through T-Pain, overt use of Auto-Tune became associated with black music and was often reviled by the general public. T-Pain’s acoustic performance on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series redeemed him in the eyes of many listeners whose disdain for Auto-Tune arises from a belief that the technology erodes authenticity by making skillful singing irrelevant. In contrast, Taylor Swift’s producers also use Auto-Tune as well, but rather than treating it as a special effect, they use it to correct intonation and amplify desirable vocal timbre. This use is also controversial, as Swift’s recordings are often considered disingenuous.

Narratives of popular music heritage and cultural identity: The affordances and constraints of popular music memories

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arno van der Hoeven
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Narrative Approaches ◽  
The Past ◽  
Local Diversity ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Depth Interviews ◽  
The Way

This article examines the relationship between popular music, memory and cultural identity. It draws upon narrative approaches to memory and identity in order to explore how engagement with music from the past can both afford and constrain identity construction. On the basis of in-depth interviews with, among others, heritage practitioners and audience members, I discuss how practices in the cultural and heritage industries affect the way in which popular music’s past is narrated. Although those narratives offer a sense of belonging and identity through their connection to experiences of time and place, there are also factors that compromise this potential. The article discusses limits to the accuracy of memories and impediments to representations of local diversity. Furthermore, I argue that copyright regulation affects which stories about popular music’s past can be told.

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