The power ballad

Popular Music ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Metzer
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Culture Media ◽  
The Other ◽  
Music Genres ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThe power ballad has become a mainstay of popular music since the 1970s. This article offers a history of the songs and discusses their place in the larger field of popular music genres. The songs are defined by the use of both a musical formula based on constant escalation and an expressive formula that combines the euphoric uplift created by rousing music with sentimental themes and ploys. Contrary to views that power ballads first appeared in 1980s rock and are primarily rock numbers, the songs emerged in the 1970s pop recordings of Barry Manilow and others, and from early on crossed genre lines, including pop, rock and R&B. These crossings result in an exchange between the fervour of the power ballad and the distinct expressive qualities of the other genres. This article also places the power ballad in the larger history of the ballad. The songs are part of a shift toward more effusive and demonstrative styles of ballads underway since the 1960s. In addition, the emotional excesses of the power ballad fit into a larger change in the expressive tone of works across different popular culture media. With those works, emotions are to be large, ecstatic and immediate.

scholarly journals On the Other Side of the Genre Boundary

Traditiones ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 21-41
Author(s):  
Ljubica Milosavljević
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Music Genres ◽  
Strategic Goals ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Professional Context

The fieldwork conducted in Belgrade during the summer and autumn of 2017 was oriented towards jazz musicians, and their strategies of action, in gist, implied playing other popular music genres through compromise – function work. Such business tactics are a consequence of jazz musicians’ ever-insecure position, but strategic goals have changed over time with the nature of that insecurity. Going beyond the genre boundary first became a means of securing the profession itself after WWII due to (foreign-)political and ideological influences, whereas from the 1960s to date, it has been the economic guaranty of the survival of many jazz musicians. Playing folk music is one of the observed strategies analysed through a broader sociopolitical, socioeconomic and professional context.

Write Your Mother

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda C. Seaman
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Japanese Women ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pregnancy And Childbirth ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Meiji Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second Wave

This chapter traces the literary history of Japanese women writing about pregnancy and childbirth, focusing on two key figures in this development. The first is Meiji-era poet Yosano Akiko whose works explored her experiences as an expectant mother and highlighted the unsettling aspects of pregnancy. While Yosano’s works permitted the literary treatment of formerly taboo issues, later writers rejected her lead, instead treating pregnancy as the prelude to motherhood, as a quasi-sacred moment. This persisted until the 1960s and 70s, when writers influenced by second-wave feminism challenged patriarchal society, rejecting the roles of wife and mother. The second was Tsushima Yuko, whose novels and stories explored alternative, mother-centered family models. Since then, writing about pregnancy rests on these two authors: on one side, treatments of pregnancy that emphasize the alien and the disquieting, and on the other, more ironic works, focusing upon the self-assertive and individualistic nature of childbearing.

Hammer and British Cinema

2016 ◽  
pp. 23-34
Author(s):  
Victoria Grace Walden
Keyword(s):  
Social Responsibility ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Good Taste ◽  
The Press ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the relationship between Hammer Films and British cinema. The history of British cinema has been characterised by a strong dedication to realism, in its many forms. From the documentaries of the 1930s with a focus on social responsibility to the gritty kitchen sink dramas of the 1960s, and even the naturalistic aesthetic of television police dramas, the British moving-image industries have a strong heritage of realism. If this is the case, Hammer horror, despite its international fame as a specifically British brand of filmmaking, does not seem characteristic of British national cinema at all. On one hand, Hammer's horrors are clearly fantastical; on the other hand, they amalgamate infrequent and abrupt moments of gore with a 'neat unpretentious realism'. Moreover, the films were lambasted in the press for not exhibiting 'good taste' or restraint. The chapter then assesses to what extent Hammer horror can be understood as British.

Remembrance of Things Past: Marxism and the Study of Popular Music

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-155
Author(s):  
SIMON FRITH
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Sociology Of Knowledge ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Commercial Music ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Ideology ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThis article considers the role of Marxism in the history of popular music studies. Its approach combines the sociology of knowledge with a personal memoir and its argument is that in becoming a field of scholarly interest popular music studies drew from both Marxist theoretical arguments about cultural ideology in the 1950s and 1960s and from rock writers’ arguments about the role of music in shaping socialist bohemianism in the 1960s and 1970s. To take popular music seriously academically meant taking it seriously politically. Once established as an academic subject, however, popular music studies were absorbed into both established music departments and vocational, commercial music courses. Marxist ideas and ideologues were largely irrelevant to the subsequent development of popular music studies as a scholarly field.

Prison Overcrowding and the Law

1985 ◽  
Vol 478 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLAUDIA ANGELOS ◽  
JAMES B. JACOBS
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Extended Period ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
The Other ◽  
Court Decisions ◽  
Prison Overcrowding ◽  
History Of ◽  
Supreme Court Decisions ◽  
Constitutional Right ◽  
The 1960S

This article traces and analyzes the history of prison- and jail-crowding litigation in the federal courts since the 1960s. While prisoners and pretrial detainees have won many victories, the doctrinal basis for a constitutional right to uncrowded incarceration facilities remains unclear and is still evolving. Despite several recent Supreme Court decisions unfavorable to inmates, there has been no rejection of the principles (1) that the totality of conditions in prison—including crowding—must not amount to cruel and unusual punishment and (2) that jail crowding cannot be permitted to impose genuine privations over an extended period of time. In order to enforce the decrees outlawing overcrowding, judges have had to search for creative enforcement techniques. Many of these techniques are controversial and their effectiveness is disputed. The courts have forced the other branches of government to face up to crowded prisons and jails, and they have helped to ameliorate the suffering and deprivations that the overcrowding crisis has caused.

Notation and identity in contemporary popular music

Popular Music ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 215-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Stith Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Term Changes ◽  
Western European ◽  
Rock N Roll

Popular music, like all manifestations of popular culture, lives on in spite of recurring criticisms that cast it as somehow inauthentic. In fact, defences against this discounting are built into popular music (for example, the Rolling Stones' classic: ‘It's only rock 'n' roll but I like it’) and built in, as well, to the identities of those who make the music a part of their lives, be they players, producers, consumers or critics. On the other hand, so-called classical music, not unlike other manifestations of Western European art culture, lives on in spite of popular music and provides the touchstone of authenticity that creates the defensive popular response. The ideas I am advancing here are intended to allow the players in this authenticity contest to be recognised as evidence of unique historical circumstances: recognised, that is, not only as stock dramatists of ethnocentrism, but as indicators of long-term changes in music cultures in all parts of the world.

scholarly journals Film and the "Other" Singaporean

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edna Lim
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
The Other ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Air Film ◽  
Second Period

COMING UP FOR AIR: FILM AND THE "OTHER" SINGAPOREAN The history of Singapore's film industry is marked by two distinct periods. The first period, which lasted from the 1950s to the 1960s, is considered the golden age of Singapore films due to the prolific outpouring of primarily Malay films produced by the local Cathay and Shaw studios. The second period, which began in the 1990s, constitutes a revival of sorts for Singapore film, and is marked by the recent spate of local productions that began with Medium Rare in 1991 and continues to the present. What is interesting about this current "resurgence" of local films is that while these films have resuscitated the previously dormant film industry in Singapore, and can, therefore, be considered a "revival," they are in fact very different kinds of films from the ones that were made during the golden age, just as the current...

Inclusive Popular Music Education?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis A. Kallio ◽  
Lauri Vakeva
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Nordic Countries ◽  
Education Policies ◽  
Music Genres ◽  
History Of

This chapter surveys the history of popular music education in Nordic countries and explores scenarios for possible interpretations, resulting in a rich and informed critique of the field. The chapter offers a comparative overview of approaches to popular music education in the Nordic countries, focusing on the rationales for including popular music in the curriculum. A dominant rationale has been that popular music has unique democratic potentials. The analysis brings nuance to the situation, arguing that popular music genres “are not necessarily democratic in and of themselves.” Popular music education policies can, in fact, be instruments of social exclusion.

Marschak and Utility Measurement at Yale

2018 ◽  
pp. 239-246
Author(s):  
Ivan Moscati
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Expected Utility ◽  
Expected Utility Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Percent Correct ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Experimental Findings

Chapter 14 continues the history of the experimental attempts to measure utility by discussing two further experiments performed at Yale University in the early 1960s, one by Trenery Dolbear and the other by Jacob Marschak in association with Gordon Becker and Morris DeGroot. Like the experiments conducted in the 1950s, these were also based on expected utility theory (EUT) and aimed at measuring the utility of money of individuals on the basis of their preferences between gambles where small amounts of money were at stake. There are some differences in the designs of the experiments of the 1950s and those of the 1960s. Like the experimenters of the 1950s, however, Dolbear, Marschak, Becker, and DeGroot also confidently assessed their experimental findings as validating EUT: the theory was not 100 percent correct, but in an approximate sense, it appeared to be an acceptable descriptive theory of decision-making under risk.

Education for the creative act

2000 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-66
Author(s):  
Robert Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Architectural Education ◽  
Building Performance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

Architects are, with few exceptions, ‘school trained’. This paper traces the history of the relationship between architectural education and practice. It describes the approaches developed at Cambridge and the Bartlett in the 1960s - and the theories that each embodied: one based on architecture as a cultural manifestation and the other governing the science of building. The paper concludes with the view that we need to be more realistic in our attitude to artistic aspiration as a component of studying architecture while strengthening the ways by which building performance can be tested.

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