Dylan Goes Electric

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-50
Author(s):  
Kathryn Lofton
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Electric Guitar ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Moment

Within the study of rock music, religion appears as a racial marker or a biographical attribute. The concept of religion, and its co-produced opposite, the secular, needs critical analysis in popular music studies. To inaugurate this work this article returns to the moment in singer-songwriter Bob Dylan’s career that is most unmarked by religion, namely his appearance with an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Dylan’s going electric became, through subsequent years of narrative attention, a secularizing event. “Secularizing event” is a phrase coined to capture how certain epochal moments become transforming symbols of divestment; here, a commitment writ into rock criticism as one in which rock emerged by giving up something that had been holding it back. Through a study of this 1965 moment, as well as the history of electrification that preceded it and its subsequent commentarial reception, the unreflective secular of rock criticism is exposed.

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.

Songbooks

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Weisbard
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
American Music ◽  
Theodore Dreiser ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Village Voice

In Songbooks, critic and scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded. Drawing on his background editing the Village Voice music section, coediting the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and organizing the Pop Conference, Weisbard connects American music writing from memoirs, biographies, and song compilations to blues novels, magazine essays, and academic studies. The authors of these works are as diverse as the music itself: women, people of color, queer writers, self-educated scholars, poets, musicians, and elites discarding their social norms. Whether analyzing books on Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, and Madonna; the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Gayl Jones, and Jennifer Egan; or varying takes on blackface minstrelsy, Weisbard charts an alternative history of American music as told through its writing. As Weisbard demonstrates, the most enduring work pursues questions that linger across time period and genre—cultural studies in the form of notes on the fly, on sounds that never cease to change meaning.

Introduction

Bossa Mundo ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
K. E. Goldschmitt
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mediation Processes ◽  
Brazilian Politics

This Introduction elaborates the theoretical frameworks that shape the book, with a focus on meeting points of mediation, attention, and branding. It features a critique of prevailing discourses of listener attention and distraction in popular music studies in favor of relational and trans-human conceptions of attention, which are more appropriate for a study that interrogates mediation processes. It points to the long history of US and British interference in Brazilian politics and situates the present study through a transnational framework. It outlines the historical connection between Brazil’s myth of racial democracy and the perpetuation of racial stereotypes in the country’s brand. The Introduction also outlines the chapters in the rest of the book.

scholarly journals The Parents' Music Resource Center: from information to censorship

Popular Music ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claude Chastagner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
The Public ◽  
Resource Center ◽  
History Of

My purpose in this paper is to recount the history of the Parents' Music Resource Center, an American organisation founded in 1985 whose main concern has been to denounce the obscenity and violence of rock music on the grounds that it is partly responsible for the numerous ills that plague the United States. The PMRC claimed that it only wished to inform the public but my suggestion here is that the actions of the organisation resulted in a de facto censorship of popular music. I shall accordingly describe the various steps of the process that led from information to censorship as well as probe the deeper reasons that may have motivated the action of the Center.

scholarly journals Like a Prophet - On Christian Interpretations of a Madonna Video

1996 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 151-174
Author(s):  
Andreas Häger
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Positive Message ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Discourse ◽  
A Current

Throughout the history of Christianity, its relationship to art has been a complicated one, concerning the use of art in worship as well as the views on "secular" art. This article deals with a current example of the latter. More specifically, the article examines some examples of Christian views on popular music. The best-known reactions to pop and rock music' by Christians are likely to be negative ones, probably because these are usually the most loudly declared. But there is also another aspect to the Christian discourse on popular music. Some Christians try to emphasise what is perceived as a positive message in "secular" rock music. This part of the debate is the main concern in this paper.The examples used deal with one of the most controversial pop artists, Madonna, and one of her most discussed works, the video `Like a Prayer'. Madonna Louise Ciccone, born 1958, has been one of the most successful, most imitated and certainly most talked about popular artists of the past decade. She has — at least to a certain degree quite consciously — stirred up controversy with several of her videos. Raised a Catholic, her use of religious themes and images is one aspect that has caught special attention.

You can't rid a song of its words: notes on the hegemony of lyrics in Russian rock songs

Popular Music ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yngvar B. Steinholt
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
The Core ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
National Characteristics

From the mid-1980s, rock music emerged as the leading musical culture in the major cities of the Soviet Union. In writings and research on this ‘Soundtrack of Perestroika’, attention has been primarily paid to the words rather than the sounds. Russian rock critics and academics, as well as those who participate in Russian rock culture, persistently emphasise the literary qualities of Russian rock music and most still prefer to approach rock as a form of musical poetry - ‘Rok poèziya’. This seems out of step with the growing emphasis on an interdisciplinary approach within popular music studies. The aim of this article is to investigate and discuss some of the core arguments that underpin notions of Russian rock music's literary qualities. This may help to uncover some specific national characteristics of rock in Russia, whilst at the same time questioning the need for, and value of, a literary approach to the study of Russian rock.

Sampling sexuality: gender, technology and the body in dance music

Popular Music ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Bradby
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
The Body ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Audience Research ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Rock Bands ◽  
Considerable Work

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).

Music and Revolution in the Long 1960s

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-471
Author(s):  
ODED HEILBRONNER
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Protest Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

When discussing the relationship between popular music and social-political change in the long 1960s, historians and critics have tended to fluctuate between two opposing poles. On the one hand, there is Arthur Marwick's approach, echoed in Jon Savage's recent book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded. In Marwick's cross-national survey, he examines social change in the West during the ‘Long Sixties’ (1958–72), when a ‘cultural revolution’ occurred in which protest music played a major role. On the other hand, there are Peter Doggett's and Dominic Sandbrook's observations that the top-selling albums of the 1960s and 1970s did not include some masterpiece by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Queen, or other leading figures in rock music, but rather the soundtrack of The Sound of Music. Sandbrook writes that it ‘projected a familiar, even conservative vision of the world, based on romantic love and family life. In a period of change it offered a sense of reassurance and stability, not only in its plot but also in its musical style . . . [T]hese were the values of millions . . . in the Swinging Sixties’. Doggett similarly points to the popularity of Julie Andrews and the soundtracks of Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. These soundtracks ‘made no attempt to alter the culture or educate the listener’ he suggests, and that is why they have been relegated ‘to a footnote in the history of popular music’ even while being the top-selling records of 1965 and 1966.

Background and Rock Aesthetics

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-14
Author(s):  
Joseph Church
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Folk Art ◽  
Musical Theatre ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance

Chapter 1 gives historical and aesthetic context to the topic at hand. It begins with a brief description of the long-standing relationship between popular song and theatre song, and places both popular music and musical theatre in the realm of folk art. There is a brief review of the history of modern popular song and of musical theatre, and specification of the changes that the advent of rock music heralded in both industries. Next is a brief survey of rock music in the theatre, and the sometimes uncomfortable relationship between rock music and theatrical content and performance. Last is a discussion of rock aesthetics, which helps the reader understand the artistic basis of rock music and begin to apply this understanding to performance.

The state of rock: a history of Finland’s cultural policy and music export

Popular Music ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janne Mäkelä
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Basis ◽  
High Level

AbstractThe Finnish government has historically been active in regulating the practices of popular music. At the same time, the music industry, rock media and musicians have traditionally insisted on markets free from state intervention. This article focuses on the history of the interrelationship between cultural policy and popular music, especially rock exports, in Finland. It argues that the high level of organised forms of culture and the lure of internationalism form the historical basis for the nation-state–popular music relationship in Finland. Following the demands for ‘competitive society’ in the 1990s and the international breakthroughs of Finnish pop and rock music performers after 2000, this relationship has intensified. Contemporary policy is in many ways healthier than in the past, yet it also raises crucial questions about hierarchies and identity relationships in popular music and society.

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