During his service from 2004 to 2009 as the Minister of Tourism for his native Panama, the singer-songwriter, actor, and political activist Rubén Blades largely refrained from his many pursuits in the entertainment world.
But before diving headlong back into his salsa career, Blades finished a project several years in the making: a collection of 11 of his original salsa compositions re-imagined as tangos. Carlos Franzetti, a Grammy-winning pianist from Argentina, arranged and produced Tangos, which was recorded in Buenos Aires using the veteran tango musicians of Leopoldo Federico’s orchestra.
This according to “Rubén Blades: Tango storyteller” by Thomas Staudter (DownBeat LXXXI/9 [September 2014] p. 16).
Today is Blades’s 70th birthday! Above, performing at the 2014 Latin Grammy Awards, where Tangos won the award for Best Tango Album; below, an excerpt from the record.
Danse électro originated in France at the beginning of the 2000s. Inspired by other European dance movements, danse électro went on to become a global phenomenon.
Tecktonik, registered as a trademark in France in 2002, played an important role in the spread of the movement. The Tecktonik trademark branded nightclubs, compilation albums, and various tie-in products, including clothes (above) and alcoholic and energy drinks.
While danse électro was one of several movements involving dancing to electronic music, it maintained its identity through brand placement, the involvement of pre-teenagers, and information technologies, particularly Web 2.0 applications.
This according to “Tecktonik and danses électro: Subculture, media processes, and Web 2.0” by Anne Petiau, an essay included in Made in France: Studies in popular music (New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 203–15).
Below, Alive by Mondotek, a danse électro hit from 2007.
One of the main aims of this journal, especially initially, is iteratively to define the parameters of the field and disciplines of its readership and contributors (especially with regard to other journals in popular music, and music education), this being an emerging field of scholarship and practice.
The other principal aim is to disseminate excellent critique and other forms of scholarship (e.g., phenomenological) in and related to the field. The journal aims to have an inclusive, global reach. Education and popular music are terms that the editors are glad to see stretched and problematized through rigorous examination from multiple international perspectives.
Below, 我和你 (You and me), a song discussed in the inaugural issue.
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Few musicians have been as acutely conscious of their images as Prince, or as dedicated to presenting themselves with such teasing complexity.
Prince transformed his visual identity with each album he released. The pompadoured rock god of Purple rain was followed by the beatific flower child of Around the world in a day and the louche sensualist of Parade. Each record carefully maintained its own distinctive palette, most obviously with Purple rain, but also with the peach-and-black color scheme of Sign o’ the times and the black, white, and red of Lovesexy.
The cover of one of his earliest albums, Dirty mind (1980), depicted a sexually charged, ambiguously gendered Prince, complete with a thong and thigh-high boots. He continued to blur boundaries between male and female, straight and gay, chaste and libidinous, through much of his career.
Queercore is a loose community of like-minded individuals who have developed a culture of fanzines, films, art, and music. Initiated in Canada and the U.S. during the mid-1980s, queercore spread throughout North America and Europe during the 1990s and 2000s.
The movement was inspired by feminist, postmodern, and queer theories that rejected binary understandings of sexual identity as homosexual/heterosexual and gender identity as man/woman. These theories were put into punk practice to confront heterosexist society.
Central to queercore are all-girl bands whose music confronts lesbian invisibility, misogyny, homophobia, and sexual violence, and who create vital spaces and communities for different ways of doing and being queer. These bands and artists draw on discourses of girlhood, femininity, womanhood, lesbianism, and queerness within radical music-making, lyrics, and performances affiliated with DIY queer culture.
This according to “Queercore: Fearless women” by Val Rauzier, an essay included in Women make noise: Girl bands from Motown to the modern (Twickenham: Supernova books, 2010, pp. 238–58). Above, Team Dresch, one of the bands discussed in the article, in the 1990s; below, the band in 2012.
In his four Music box revues (1921–24), Irving Berlin introduced a series of songs that were widely construed as jazz. That view has not prevailed, but the jazz label becomes more intelligible through efforts to restore its original milieu, including the songs’ distinctive musical and linguistic elements, their theatrical context, and the cultural commentary surrounding Berlin and his work in that period.
At a time when the term jazz had only recently entered public discourse, and when its meaning, content, and value remained in flux, Berlin deployed a variety of ragtime and blues figures and combined them in such a way as to produce a jazz trope, a musical construct created by juxtaposing disparate or even contradictory topics. When repeatedly set to lyrics that celebrate illicit behavior, the music gained further associations with things that jazz was thought to abet.
Theatrical setting further reinforced the songs’ links to jazz. Berlin wrote many of the numbers for a flapper-style sister act, often placed them in a climactic program position, and juxtaposed them with sentimental and nostalgic songs that lacked jazz flavor and whose lyrics, in some cases, pointedly denied jazz’s attractions.
Beyond the stage, the songs and their theatrical presentation flourished within an emerging perspective that identified Jewish Americans, such as Berlin and George Gershwin, as the key figures in jazz and musical theater. Berlin’s Broadway jazz stands as an influential and revealing intersection of musical, linguistic, theatrical, and social elements in the early 1920s.
This according to “Everybody step: Irving Berlin, jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s” by Jeffrey Magee (Journal of the American Musicological Society LIX/3 [fall 2006] pp. 697–732).
Today is Berlin’s 130th birthday! Below, Alice Faye sings his Everybody step, an example from the article.
Bengawan Solo (Solo River) was written by the kroncong singer Gesang Martohartono (above) in September 1940. A tribute to the beauty and significance of the river for the common people, the song subsequently assumed national importance, symbolizing the struggle for independence during the Japanese occupation of Java (1942–45).
The first widely popular song by an Indonesian composer written in Bahasa Indonesia, the Malay-based national language adopted by independent Indonesia, Bengawan Solo now evokes images of Indonesian revolutionary fighters to whom homage must be given. The song has spread throughout Southeast Asia, and it has even become popular in Japan and China, making it a potent symbol of pan-East/Southeast Asian identity.
This according to “The pan-East/Southeast Asian and national Indonesian song Bengawan Solo and its Javanese composer” by Margaret J. Kartomi (Yearbook for traditional music XXX [1998] pp. 85–101).
Below, a recording featuring the voice of the composer.
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The Gangbé Brass Band’s Alladanou makes specific historical, linguistic, and musical references to Benin’s precolonial, colonial, and postindependence histories. These references can serve as a point of departure for exploring the song’s relationship to the royal court style adjògàn.
The Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe’s concept of multiple temporalities illuminates the historical flexibility at play in Gangbé’s album Togbé, and an analytical framework for analyzing Alladanou proceeds from an interest in audience, relationality, the Fon concept of gbè (voice or sound), and resonance.
This according to “‘People of Allada, this is our return’: Indexicality, multiple temporalities, and resonance in the music of the Gangbé Brass Band of Benin” by Sarah Politz (Ethnomusicology LXII/1 [winter 2018] pp. 28–57).
Black Sabbath draws upon gods who are older than Satan. Dionysus and Apollo, pagan gods from ancient Greece, were there with Black Sabbath at the birth of heavy metal.
Nietzsche wrote about the importance of the satyr chorus in ancient Greek tragedies. Wild, horny goat men, satyrs became the Christian model for Satan. Heavy metal iconography invites us to see past those satanic images to the lustful satyrs of long ago.
If Nietzsche had been a Black Sabbath fan he would have written lines like “What good is heavy metal that does not carry us beyond all heavy metal?”
This according to “Gods, drugs, and ghosts: Finding Dionysus and Apollo in Black Sabbath and the birth of heavy metal” by Dennis Knepp, an essay included in Black Sabbath & philosophy: Mastering reality (Malden: Blackwell, 2013, pp. 96–109). Above and below, the group’s Grammy Award-winning God is dead?
Since it emerged as a distinct genre in the late 1960s and early 1970s funk has played an important role in American music and culture, in its foregrounding of polyrhythmic interplay, improvisation, and community formation, and in addressing issues of discrimination and marginalization.
Recent scholarship has examined funk from a feminist perspective, highlighting female musicians’ participation in the creation of black feminist thought and in rejecting externally defined roles and identities. An expansion on these feminist approaches focuses on the particular ways that sound organization helps to address the gendered nature of funk performance and discourse; the concept of Afro-sonic feminist funk demonstrates how female musicians use the sonic and performative tenets of funk to complicate the gendered politics and discourses surrounding funk music.
This according to “Janelle Monáe and Afro-sonic feminist funk” by Matthew Valnes (Journal of popular music studies XXIX/3 [September 2017]).
The main entrance to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’s exhibition Lou Reed: Caught between the twisted stars opens up on Lincoln Plaza, directly adjacent to the The Metropolitan Opera house. On a sunny day, the Met’s … Continue reading →
Seven strings/Сім струн (dedicated to Uncle Michael)* For thee, O Ukraine, O our mother unfortunate, bound, The first string I touch is for thee. The string will vibrate with a quiet yet deep solemn sound, The song from my heart … Continue reading →
Introduction: Dr. Philip Ewell, Associate Professor of Music at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, posted a series of daily tweets during Black History Month (February 2021) providing information on some under-researched Black … Continue reading →
For it [the Walkman] permits the possibility…of imposing your soundscape on the surrounding aural environment and thereby domesticating the external world: for a moment, it can all be brought under the STOP/START, FAST FOWARD, PAUSE and REWIND buttons. –Iain Chambers, “The … Continue reading →
