Gospel Music in Africa

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florian Carl
Keyword(s):  
Strong Convergence ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Wealth Accumulation ◽  
Conceptual Background ◽  
Music Genre ◽  
Charismatic Christianity

This chapter outlines the development of gospel music in Africa, highlighting particularly its interrelationship with the rise of neoliberalism since the 1980s. Carried by the proliferation of Pentecostal/charismatic Christianity, gospel has become the most pervasive popular music genre in Africa. Authors have noted a strong convergence between neo-Pentecostalism and neoliberalism, both worshipping prosperity, wealth accumulation, and capitalist consumerism as (quasi-)religious devotional acts. The first part of this chapter provides the conceptual background and gives a broader overview of the existing literature on gospel music in Africa. The second part, then, presents a case study of Christian popular music in Ghana, examining more in depth how gospel music features and promotes ideologies of prosperity and consumption, and how it contributes to the making of neoliberal subjectivity and the constitution of neoliberal bodies.

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.

scholarly journals Vera Lynn on Screen: Popular Music and the ‘People's War’

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATE GUTHRIE
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
A Site ◽  
Second World

AbstractBy the outbreak of the Second World War in Britain, critics had spent several decades negotiating the supposed distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, as recent scholarship has shown. What has received comparatively little attention is how the demands of wartime living changed the stakes of the debate. This article addresses this lacuna, exploring how war invited a reassessment of the relative merits of art and popular music. Perhaps the most iconic British singer of the period, Vera Lynn provides a case study. Focusing on her first film vehicle,We'll Meet Again(1942), I explore how Lynn's character mediated the highbrow/lowbrow conflict – for example, by presenting popular music as a site of community, while disparaging art music for its minority appeal. In so doing, I argue, the film not only promoted Lynn's star persona, but also intervened in a broader debate about the value of entertainment for a nation at war.

scholarly journals Musical Practices in the Funeral Context: A Case Study of Cemeteries in the Ljubljana Region in 2016

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 217-241
Author(s):  
Anita Prelovšek
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Instrumental Ensemble ◽  
Vocal Ensemble ◽  
Musical Practices

In Ljubljana and in its surroundings the music at a traditional funeral still consists usually of a vocal ensemble or a trumpet, but in 2016 this has increasingly tended to be replaced by a girl’s vocal and instrumental ensemble. The choice of music depends largely on the wishes of the relatives of the deceased. Folk music predominates, followed by popular music; the music requested least is classical music. The most frequently performed songs of the year 2016 were: Gozdič je že zelen, Lipa zelenela je and Nearer my God to Thee.

Mediating Culture

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martijn Oosterbaan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Electronic Media ◽  
Cultural Backgrounds ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Life Conditions ◽  
The People ◽  
Potential Gain ◽  
The Face

This chapter seeks to show that Pentecostal musicians struggle with both the potential gain and loss of charisma owing to the current mergers between P/e and electronic media, by drawing from the case of a renowned gospel singer, Elaine Martins. Not only have media technologies transformed and expanded the “reproduction of charisma,” but they have also generated controversies about the sincerity of the performers as converts and evangelists. To defend themselves in the face of the commercialization of the gospel music industry, singers integrate prayers and testimonies into their recordings and performances. This chapter thus underscores the need to take seriously the spiritual aesthetic of popular music and its technological (re)mediation, as well as the structural life conditions and cultural backgrounds of the people involved, in understanding the localization and globalization (what some call the “glocalization”) of P/e in settings such as Brazil.

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’.

scholarly journals Artificial Intelligence & Popular Music: SKYGGE, Flow Machines, and the Audio Uncanny Valley

Arts ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Avdeeff
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Markov Models ◽  
Uncanny Valley ◽  
New Era ◽  
Music Production ◽  
Music Generation

This article presents an overview of the first AI-human collaborated album, Hello World, by SKYGGE, which utilizes Sony’s Flow Machines technologies. This case study is situated within a review of current and emerging uses of AI in popular music production, and connects those uses with myths and fears that have circulated in discourses concerning the use of AI in general, and how these fears connect to the idea of an audio uncanny valley. By proposing the concept of an audio uncanny valley in relation to AIPM (artificial intelligence popular music), this article offers a lens through which to examine the more novel and unusual melodies and harmonization made possible through AI music generation, and questions how this content relates to wider speculations about posthumanism, sincerity, and authenticity in both popular music, and broader assumptions of anthropocentric creativity. In its documentation of the emergence of a new era of popular music, the AI era, this article surveys: (1) The current landscape of artificial intelligence popular music focusing on the use of Markov models for generative purposes; (2) posthumanist creativity and the potential for an audio uncanny valley; and (3) issues of perceived authenticity in the technologically mediated “voice”.

scholarly journals “At This Age, This Is Who I Am”: CeCe Winans, Exilic Consciousness, and the American Popular Music Star System

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 475-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela M. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Gospel Music ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
The Self ◽  
Star System ◽  
Christian Women ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
American Popular Music

Abstract My paper addresses the intersections of the American popular music star system, Black female Gospel singers, Gospel Music, and the exilic consciousness of the Sanctified Church with special attention to life and music of Gospelwoman Priscilla Marie “CeCe” Winans Love. I argue that CeCe Winans and the marketing campaign for Winans’ album Let Them Fall in Love, is indicative of the encroachment of American popular music’s star system into self-elected “exiled” Gospel Music and into the lives of “exiled” Gospelwomen. Gospelwomen are 20th and 21st century urban African American Protestant Christian women who are paid for singing Gospel Music and who have recorded at least one Gospel album for national distribution. The self-elected exile of Gospelwomen refers to their decision to live a life based on the values of the Kingdom of God while encountering and negotiating opposing values in American popular culture. Gospelwomen and Gospel Music are impacted by the demands of stardom in America’s celebrity culture which includes achieved success and branding. Gospelwomen negotiate these components of stardom molding them into mechanisms that conform to their beliefs and needs.

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