Category Archives: Popular music

by | March 6, 2016 · 6:00 am

David Gilmour and Polly Samson

 

In an interview, the Pink Floyd guitarist and singer David Gilmour was asked why, when he could get any lyricist to write for him, he chooses to work with his wife, Polly Samson.

“When you’ve got such a good lyricist so close by, I could not feel the point in going elsewhere” he replied.

“Polly and I are on a working partnership as well as a life partnership and she’s as good as I can get. Other lyricists would be writing more for themselves than for me and they would not know me that well. If I asked Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan to write for me, I love their work but I don’t know these people. So it seems to me more artistically sound to work with someone who I live and breathe with every day.”

Quoted in “Q&A: David Gilmour” by Emmanuel Legrand (Billboard CXVIII/8 [25 February 2006] p. 31).

Today is Gilmour’s 70th birthday! Below, On an island, one of many songs that Gilmour has co-written with Samson.

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by | February 22, 2016 · 6:00 am

Boy bands and the critics

 

While the boy band genre has mutated and evolved, its popular portrayal has altered little since groups like New Edition and New Kids on the Block conquered the charts back in the late 1980s.

Recent critical commentaries suggest that four discourses—youth, exploitation, gender, and fandom— interlock to determine how writers discuss the genre. Collectively their result is a relative stasis in critical commentary that helps to allay wider anxieties about the idea that, in a capitalist society, any of us can actively and pleasurably engage with a musical genre led by its own marketing.

This according to “Multiple damnations: Deconstructing the critical response to boy band phenomena” by Mark Duffett (Popular music history VII/2 [August 2012] pp. 185–97). Below, New Edition in the 1980s.

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by | February 4, 2016 · 6:00 am

Punk’s sacred clowns

In his classic Subculture: The meaning of style (London: Methuen, 1979) Dick Hebdige addressed the first wave of 1970s punk rock aesthetics in Britain, discussing the contours of a movement that was somewhere between a pop fad and a larger political crisis. By violating a set of social codes in their distinctive ways, said Hebdige, punks had the effect of “presenting themselves…as villainous clowns…treated at different times as threats to public order (or) as harmless buffoons.”

Other contemporaneous observers expressed their perceptions in somewhat similar language. In one of her early dispatches on punk, the British rock journalist Caroline Coon described Captain Sensible of The Damned (above) as having “a front as benevolently mad as a village idiot’s” and the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten as “a disgraced Angel Gabriel”. Elsewhere, Tom Carson suggested that we view The Ramones in light of “the attractiveness of the comic loser” who is “the closest thing we have to the idea of the holy fool.”

These ideas are certainly undeveloped, but they are not haphazard. They indicate brief, intuitive flashes by the authors that their subjects of concern bear a resemblance to what one could call the sacred clown—an umbrella term for a cast of cultural archetypes marked by marginalia, shame, and destitution, paradoxically expressing sanctification and profanity, stupidity and sagacity, and menace and mirth.

This according to “Reading early punk as secularized sacred clowning” by Lane Van Ham (Journal of popular culture XLII/2 [April 2009] pp. 318–338).

Above and below, Captain Sensible in action.

More posts about punk rock are here.

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by | January 24, 2016 · 6:00 am

Doug Kershaw’s big break

 

In an interview, Doug Kershaw recalled a turning point in his career, when he received an offer to perform on The Johnny Cash show in 1969.

“They gave me a choice: I could play seven shows, and become one of the studio musicians, or I could be on the premier show and have one big solo spot. I decided that I would go for the solo spot. I knew if I was going to be a solo performer I would have to compete with people like Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, who was also on that show. I gambled and I won.”

“That show introduced me to a whole new audience…I thought I knew what it was like to be a star, but I just had no idea. I went from playing the Opry with Bill Monroe to playing at the Fillmore East with Eric Clapton. And it proved what I always felt, that I could play my music for any audience, not just a country one.”

Quoted in “Doug Kershaw: The real deal in Cajun fiddle” by Michael Simmons (Fiddler magazine X/1 [Spring 2003]).

Today is Kershaw’s 8oth birthday! Below, the turning point itself.

BONUS: That was way too short, right? Here’s Louisiana man.

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by | January 19, 2016 · 6:00 am

Dolly Parton, semiotically speaking

 

dolly parton

Dolly Parton’s signifiers are at variance, allowing for her prismatic sign.

She is a highly visible culture icon who is a rhetorical text; she articulates as an artifact in popular culture, a semiotic sign of meaning. To study her is to perceive and understand a personal and particular imagery, leading to full understanding of her myth and ironic status.

Parton is part of a gendered industry that produces contradictions; furthermore, she is an example of romantic irony and pastiche. Her rags-to-riches narrative is complex, and her romantic signifiers yield to stylistic representation in a postmodern industry.

She is an entrepreneur, an actress, a songwriter, and a songstress, and she is accomplished at all of these roles. She is also very shrewd at presenting her myth; she uses much ironic play in revealing her pastiche. She is a self-parody and a matrix in which many elements are embedded, and all her talents contribute to her semiotic status. Semiotically, Parton exists in an ideological site of struggle where constant tensions exist; including her outrageous costuming versus her spirituality.

This according to Dolly Parton: A semiotic study of her life and lyrics by Maureen Cecile Modesitt, a dissertation accepted by Ohio University in 2001.

Today is Parton’s 70th birthday! Below, her signature hit Jolene in 1988.

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by | December 19, 2015 · 6:00 am

Édith Piaf’s persona

 

Édith Piaf’s is probably the best-known voice that France has produced, yet there has been little insightful analysis of her either in terms of her identity as a star or her gendered identity. This lack may be attributed to the scant amount of work done on French stars in France from a star studies perspective, and the tendency of French feminism to focus on a psychoanalytic rather than a cultural studies approach.

A gender-and-society–based analysis fruitfully focuses on the lyrics and background to her songs, as well as on the myths that have grown around her life and the role of nostalgia in her reception,  drawing in particular upon Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as a possible pre- or intertext for her star persona that is likewise rooted in an image of vulnerable womanhood.

This according to “Flaubert’s sparrow, or the Bovary of Belleville: Édith Piaf as cultural icon” by Keith Reader, an essay included in Popular music in France from chanson to techno: Culture, identity and society (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, pp. 205–223).

Today would have been Piaf’s 100th birthday! Below, performing La foule, one of the songs discussed in the essay.

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by | December 12, 2015 · 6:00 am

Dancing to Sinatra

 

The notion of “dancing to Sinatra” immediately calls to mind images of World War II-era GIs and their sweethearts dancing cheek-to-cheek to the crooner’s ballads or couples jitterbugging to Five minutes more.

A provocative presence among social dance musicians of the swing era, Sinatra’s songs have also inspired the dancing of professional choreographers in ballet and modern dance. Perhaps the most important choreography created for the concert stage to Sinatra’s music is Twyla Tharp’s Sinatra suite, which was choreographed in 1983 for American Ballet Theatre’s Mihail Baryšnikov and Elaine Kudo.

This according to “Dancing to Sinatra: The partnership of music and movement in Twyla Tharp’s Sinatra suite” by Lisa Jo Sagolla, an essay included in Frank Sinatra: The man, the music, the legend (Rochester: University of Rochester, 2007, pp. 117–23).

Today is Sinatra’s 100th birthday! Above, recording dance music for the kids; below, an excerpt from Tharp’s work.

BONUS: Sit back and enjoy the entire suite.

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by | December 3, 2015 · 6:00 am

Pranksta rap

 

Humor provides a means of navigating the race and gender politics of hip hop culture in several ways.

The Beastie Boys, a trio of white Jewish rappers, relied heavily on humor to mark their outsider status while mitigating claims of racial inauthenticity.

The triumphant career of Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott shows how her humor—especially when aimed at the rapper herself—has functioned as an artistic expression of old-school legitimacy and as a means of empowerment for a businesswoman in the male-dominated music industry.

While the proliferation of hip hop parody relies on racial and gender stereotypes for much of its humor, it also offers outsiders the possibility to negotiate otherwise prohibitive social differences from within hip hop culture.

This according to “Pranksta rap: Humor as difference in hip hop” by Charles Hiroshi Garrett, an essay included in Rethinking difference in music scholarship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 315–337).

Below, Missy Elliott performs Work it, her classic send-up of sexual stereotypes.

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by | December 1, 2015 · 6:00 am

Bette Midler’s persona

 

The 1988 California court decision favoring Bette Midler over Ford Motor Company’s advertising agency left legal commentators wondering less about performance rights than what might be called persona rights.

After a number of performers, including Nancy Sinatra in Sinatra v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. (1970), had been unsuccessful in their attempts to make a proprietal claim on an identifiable vocal style, Midler v. Ford Motor Co. reversed the trend.

The Ninth Circuit Court, overruling the trial court, concluded that Midler’s brassy belting of the 1972 hit Do you want to dance? was hers alone. In hiring a singer to imitate the Midler style in a Mercury Sable television commercial, the judge said that Ford’s agency was “pirating an identity”.

This according to “Bette Midler and the piracy of identity” by Jane M. Gaines, an essay included in Music and copyright (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993, pp. 86–98).

Today is Midler’s 70th birthday! Below, singing Do you want to dance? in 1993.

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by | November 28, 2015 · 6:00 am

Happy 90th to the Grand Ole Opry!

ernest tubb

On 28 November 1925 a white-bearded man sat down before one of the Nashville radio station WSM’s modern carbon microphones to play some old-time fiddle tunes. Uncle Jimmy Thompson played on the air for an hour that night, and throughout the region listeners took notice.

In Nashville the response at the offices of National Life and Accident Insurance Company, which owned radio station WSM, was dramatic. It was not long before the station manager was besieged by pickers and fiddlers of every variety, all wanting their shot at the Saturday night airwaves.

By 1940 the Grand Ole Opry had found its national audience and was poised to become the legendary institution that it remains to this day.

This according to A good-natured riot: The birth of the Grand Ole Opry by Charles K. Wolfe (Nashville: Country Music Foundation, 1999). Above, Ernest Tubb at the Opry. Below, a show from the early 1960s.

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