“Sons of Northern Darkness”: Heathen Influences in Black Metal and Neofolk Music1

Numen ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 514-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kennet Granholm
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Black Metal ◽  
Cultural Complex ◽  
Cultural Systems ◽  
Meaning Systems ◽  
Construct Meaning ◽  
Musical Styles

AbstractThe focus of this article is on the influence of heathenism on popular music, specifically on Black Metal and Neofolk. These two genres, or more correctly scenes, are converging — something which is interesting in itself as purely musical similarities are nonexistent. Both scenes are permeated by heathen notions, and have the ability to function as “cultural systems” providing sets of ideology, meanings, and practices for their adherents. Thus, they comprise more than simply “musical styles.” The appeal of heathenism in these scenes can be explained by its status as non-mainstream exotic rejected knowledge, which makes it attractive in the quest for authenticity and rebellion inherent in rock music. At the same time it is precisely the inclusion of heathen elements which provides the possibility to construct meaning systems that can sustain a coherent cultural complex.

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.

Popular Music and the Colloquial Tone in the Posthorn Solos of Mahler’s Third Symphony

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Freeze
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
Sheet Music ◽  
Military Band ◽  
The Third ◽  
Musical Styles

The posthorn solos in the trios of the third movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony have polarised critical and scholarly opinion regarding their stylistic origins. My examination places the posthorn solos in the context of the popular music of Mahler’s day. Drawing on contemporary reviews, sheet music, and military band manuscripts in Austrian and German archives, I uncover palpable references, since forgotten or neglected, both to the genre of sentimental trumpet solos, common in salon music and band concerts, and to posthorn stylisations distinctive to popular music. Mahler demonstrably knew these repertoires, and critics often cited them in reviews. These allusions do not negate the solos’ likenesses to folk song and the sound of actual posthorns. Rather, Mahler’s score refers to multiple musical styles without being reducible to any one of them.

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.

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’.

Adopting imports: new images and alliances in Brazilian popular music of the 1990s

Popular Music ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Magaldi
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Urban Youth ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Electronic Apparatus ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Bossa Nova ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Scene ◽  
Musical Styles

Anyone visiting Brazil today in search of an idealised ‘Brazilian Sound’ might, at first, be disappointed with the popular music scene. The visitor will soon realise that established musical styles such as bossa nova and MPB (Música Popular Brazileira (Brazilian Popular Music)), with their well-defined roles within the Brazilian social and political scene of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, have lost their immediate appeal with some contemporary audiences, and especially with Brazilian urban youth. In the 1990s, Brazilian radio and TV are saturated with a variety of new local genres that borrow heavily from international musical styles of all kinds and use state-of-the-art electronic apparatus. Hybrid terms such assamba-rock, samba-reggae, mangue-beat, afro-beat, for-rock(a contraction of forró and rock),sertaneja-country, samba-rap, andpop-nejo(a contraction of pop andsertanejo), are just a few examples of the marketing labels which are loosely applied to the current infusion of international music in the local musical scene.

Music in Mexico City, 1880–1960

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo Pérez Montfort
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Urban Center ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Music Genres ◽  
The Way ◽  
Musical Styles

From the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, Mexican popular music underwent a significant transformation, thanks to the growth of Mexico City as an urban center and to the influence of both regional and international music genres. At the same time, the Mexican public experienced a profound shift in the way music was consumed. Over the course of five generations, traditional modes of encountering music gave way to a more cosmopolitan enjoyment of new and old musical styles.

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.

Why 1955? Explaining the advent of rock music

Popular Music ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Turning Points ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Road ◽  
Elvis Presley ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Frank Sinatra

At the time, 1929, 1939, 1945 and 1968 all seemed important turning points in the track of our civilisation. By contrast, as anyone alive at the time will attest, 1955 seemed like an unexceptional year in the United States at least. Right in the middle of the ‘middle-of-the-road’ years of the Eisenhower presidency, 1955 hardly seemed like the year for a major aesthetic revolution. Yet it was in the brief span between 1954 and 1956 that the rock aesthetic displaced the jazz-based aesthetic in American popular music. Frank Sinatra, Tommy Dorsey, Patty Page, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, Kay Starr, Les Paul, Eddie Fisher, Jo Stafford, Frankie Lane, Johnnie Ray and Doris Day gave way on the popular music charts to Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, The Platters, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Carl Perkins and the growing legion of rockers.

Scene through the Press: Rock Music and Underground Papers in London, 1966–73

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALESSANDRO BRATUS
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Underground Press ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Alternative Press ◽  
Time Out ◽  
The Press ◽  
Changing Attitudes

AbstractIn the years around 1968 London was home to a sizeable community of writers, musicians, artists, and political activists whose countercultural attitudes are expressed in the publications of the ‘alternative’ or ‘underground’ press – magazines such asInternational Times,OZ,INK,Friends(laterFrendz),Time Out,Gandalf's Garden,The Black Dwarf, andThe Hustler. That most of them had at least some pages devoted to music reflected the crucial role of rock in particular in summing up the community's aspirations, focused less on political or social than on cultural transformation. This article seeks to chart in these underground publications the changing attitudes towards music and its revolutionary potential. Initially the alternative press portrayed popular music as sharing with avant-garde tendencies a basic equation between new creative means and their would-be disruptive effects on society as a whole. However, there soon arose contradictions between the radical social potential of music and its growing commercialization, contradictions stemming not only from the co-optation of rock by market forces and record companies but also from the underground's own lack of a coherent ideological agenda. Paradoxically, it was precisely when popular music began to be considered a form of ‘high’ culture – just as the alternative press advocated – that its perceived effectiveness as part of the revolutionary, countercultural project began to diminish.

Obrazy miasta w utworach polskich grup alternatywnych lat 80. XX wieku

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (53) ◽  
pp. 81-90
Author(s):  
Marek Jeziński
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Alternative Rock ◽  
City Space ◽  
Song Lyrics ◽  
The City

In the paper I analyse the ways in which a city, urbanism, city space and people living in urban environment are portrayed in Polish popular music, especially in the songs of Polish alternative bands of the 80. inthe 20th century. In popular music, the city is pictured in several ways, among which the most important is the use of words as song lyrics that illustrate urban way of life. The city should be treated as an immanent part of the rock music mythology present in the songs and in the names of bands. In the case of Polish alternative rock music of the 80.such elements are found in songs of such artists as Lech Janerka, Variete, Siekiera, Dezerter, Deuter, AyaRL. The visions of urbanism taken from their songs are the exemplifications used in the paper.

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