The Library of Essays on Popular Music. General editor, Allan F. Moore. Aldershot, Ashgate, 2012. - Electronica, Dance and Club Music. Edited by Mark J. Butler. 536 pp. ISBN 978-0-754-62965-8 - Roots Music. Edited by Mark F. DeWitt. 502 pp. ISBN 978-0-754-62962-7 - Pop Music and Easy Listening. Edited by Stan Hawkins. 523 pp. ISBN 978-0-754-62952-8 - Non-Western Popular Music. Edited by Tony Langlois. 600 pp. ISBN 978-0-754-62984-9 - Popular Music and Multimedia. Edited by Julie McQuinn. 506 pp. ISBN 978-0-754-62961-0 - Rock Music. Edited by Mark Spicer. 474 pp. ISBN 978-0-754-62956-6 - Jazz. Edited by Tony Whyton. 532 pp. ISBN 978-0-754-62951-1

Popular Music ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-534
Author(s):  
Dave Laing
Author(s):  
Magdalena Fürnkranz

The historical development of Viennese rock and pop music started with rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, continued with beat music and the “dialect wave” in the late 1960s, punk in the 1980s, the popular Viennese electronic music scene in the 1990s, and is currently enjoying a renaissance of the “dialect wave.” Artists like the Rosée Sisters, Austria’s first all-female rock band founded in 1962, Topsy Girl, A-Gen 53, or SV Damenkraft were active in local music scenes. In retrospect, they are considered as exceptions in the historiography of Austrian popular music. This chapter discusses several feminist and queer artists and collectives in Austria, their position in popular culture, and in historical and geographical contexts. The author concentrates primarily on all-female bands, LGBTIQ+ artists, and queerpop projects to illustrate diverse approaches to music, feminism, and their position within the pop and rock music scenes in Vienna.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-72
Author(s):  
James Carter

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.


Popular Music ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Bradby

Bayton (1992) is right to be preoccupied by the mutual blindness between feminism and popular music. For if pop music has been the twentieth-century cultural genre most centrally concerned with questions of sexuality, one would expect more feminist critique and engagement with it. It is undoubtedly true that feminists have often been suspicious of pop music as typifying everything that needs changing for girls in society (McRobbie 1978), and of rock music as a masculine culture that excludes women (Frith and McRobbie 1979). Conversely, those who wished to celebrate the political oppositionality of rock music have often had to draw an embarrassed veil around its sexual politics, and have had good reason to be wary of feminism's destructive potential. Nevertheless, Bayton's own bibliography shows the considerable work that has been done by feminists on popular music, and the problem is perhaps better seen as one of marginalisation of this work within both feminist theory and popular music studies. In addition, I would argue that the work of Radway (1987), Light (1984), Modleski (1984) and others, in ‘reclaiming’ the popular genres of romance reading and soap opera for women, does have parallels in popular music in the work of Greig (1989) and Bradby (1990) on girl-groups, or McRobbie on girls and dancing (1984). Cohen (1992) shows some of the mechanisms through which men exclude women from participation in rock bands, while Bayton's own study of women musicians parallels other sociological work on how women reshape work roles (1990). And the renewed interest in audience research in cultural studies has allowed a re-valorisation of girls' and women's experience as fans of popular music (Garratt 1984; Lewis 1992), and as creators of meaning in the music they listen to (Fiske 1989; Bradby 1990).


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-72
Author(s):  
James Carter

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.


2020 ◽  

This collection of essays explores the development of electronic sound recording in Japanese cinema, radio, and popular music to illuminate the interrelationship of aesthetics, technology, and cultural modernity in prewar Japan. Putting the cinema at the center of a ‘culture of the sound image’, it restores complexity to a media transition that is often described simply as slow and reluctant. In that vibrant sound culture, the talkie was introduced on the radio before it could be heard in the cinema, and pop music adaptations substituted for musicals even as cinema musicians and live narrators resisted the introduction of recorded sound. Taken together, the essays show that the development of sound technology shaped the economic structure of the film industry and its labour practices, the intermedial relation between cinema, radio, and popular music, as well as the architecture of cinemas and the visual style of individual Japanese films and filmmakers.


Popular Music ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Straw

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.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Maxwell

A recent quantitative study (Smith, Choueiti, and Pieper 2018) demonstrates the hegemonic discrimination in today’s popular music scene, particularly but not exclusively in gender and race. This paper builds on that study, taking it not only into a multimodal dimension (where musical and visual performances are taken into account), but also extending it to children’s popular music, here defined as popular music performed by children for an audience and market primarily made up of children and their guardians.  The annual Norwegian popular music competition for children aged 8-15 Melodi Grand Prix Junior (MGP Jr) is the children’s equivalent of the adult competition to be Norway’s entry in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). It has been running since 2004, with 10 entries in each final, and those from 2007 onwards are available for public viewing on the national television channel’s website (tv.NRK.no). The resulting 130 songs thus provide a meaningful corpus from which to study current and recent multimodal gendered presentations of child performers.  Preliminary multimodal gender analyses (cf Maxwell and Mittner 2018) show that the performances are based around traditional gender binaries (i.e. boys and girls). While both presented genders sing, except for rare exceptions it is only boys who play instruments. This both complements and contrasts the study of the ESC (Isaksen forthcoming) which also shows a clear dominance of singing, particularly among female and female-presenting artists (including drag queens).  When these results from children’s pop music and from the ESC are set in relation to Smith, Choueiti, and Peiper 2018 in an interdisciplinary mixed methods approach, it is clear to see that the discrimination in the industry not only begins at a young age, it is also presented as normal, indeed attractive, to child viewers. This is borne out by the decreasing uptake of music tuition at Norwegian kulturskoler (the provider of state-sponsored lessons in the arts), particularly among school-age girls (Utdanningsdirektøret 2017).  In this paper I will present multimodal analyses of a selection of songs from MGP Jr in order to provide both examples of and exceptions to the norms shown by the statistics. In addition, an analysis of the (gendered) presentations of standard Norwegian instrument textbooks (cf Blix 2018) provides background context, with an emphasis on the gendered meanings that surround children in their everyday musical lives.  With thanks to Matilda Maxwell (age 11), aspiring instrumentalist, fan of MGP Jr, and research assistant. 


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 95-117
Author(s):  
Christine Capetola

In 1986, Janet Jackson forever changed the direction of pop music and its music videos with the release of her third and breakthrough album, Control. Working with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, choreographer Paula Abdul, and director Mary Lambert, Jackson created songs and videos that conveyed a new kind of feminist affect that intertwined individual stories of endurance, the forcefulness of relatively new digital music technology, and Black and female collectivity. In this article, I chart how Jackson transmitted this feminist affect through what I call hyperaurality, or sounds and vibrations that work in excess of the limitations of visual representation. Through tracing the affective excesses of Jackson’s visuals, sounds, and movements, I unpack how hyperaurality both intensifies and reintegrates the senses of sight, hearing, and feeling. In the process, I posit that vibration, or sound’s materially felt oscillations, works as a point of connection across these three aspects of hyperaurality. By demonstrating its connective power, I assert that vibration is a source of affective politics within popular music, one with the power of repurposing capitalism's excesses.


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