Category Archives: Popular music

by | April 8, 2016 · 6:00 am

Yip Harburg, the Lemon-Drop Kid

 

Born Isidore Hochberg, the lyricist changed his name to Edgar Yipsel “Yip” Harburg when he married in 1923. In spite of a close childhood friendship—and some collaboration—with the Gershwin brothers, he did not consider making a living with poetry until the stock market crash in 1929 wiped out his profits as an industrial inventor and entrepreneur.

His first hit song was Brother, can you spare a dime?, with music by Jay Gorney. Although radio networks tried to ban the song for being sympathetic to the unemployed, Harburg was not discouraged from political commitment: He wrote one of the first antiwar musicals (Hooray for what!, 1937); the first all-black Hollywood musical for general audiences (Cabin in the sky, 1943); the first musical about feminism (Bloomer girl, 1944); and the first stage song about the emerging civil rights movement (The eagle and me from Bloomer girl). He was also the first to mount a fully integrated Broadway musical (Finian’s rainbow, 1947).

Harburg is best remembered for his collaboration on 111 songs with Harold Arlen, including those for The wizard of Oz.

This according to “The lemon-drop kid” by John Lahr (The New Yorker LXXII/29 [30 September 1996] pp. 68–74).

Today is Harburg’s 120th birthday! Below, Pete Seeger sings Brother, can you spare a dime?

BONUS: The classic Harburg wit.

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by | April 6, 2016 · 6:00 am

Finnish nationalism and neotraditional music

 

Music has played a critical role in the shifting spaces between the Finnish national imagination and the global marketplace.

The ways in which neotraditional musicians think and talk about past and present practices, the role of music in the representation of national identity, and the interactions of Finnish musicians with performers from around the globe illuminate the multilayered processes that have shaped and are shaped by new traditional music in Finland, illuminating the connections between music, place, and identity.

This according to Ilmatar’s inspirations: Nationalism, globalization, and the changing soundscapes of Finnish folk music by Tina K. Ramnarine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Below, JPP—the group serves as one of the book’s case studies.

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by | March 31, 2016 · 6:00 am

The roots of Goa trance

DJ Laurent

To understand how a menagerie of Western misfits, searchers, junkies, and fugitives ended up dancing to a mutant strain of proto-techno on a beach on the Arabian sea, you have to go back to the all-night psychedelic rock jams played over massive beachside sound systems during the 1970s.

By the late 1980s electronic music and DJs had taken over the Goa dance scene. With the dust and heat of the coastal setting, vinyl was not a viable option for deejaying. Instead, DJs used cassette tapes played on professional Walkmans, which allowed for pitch manipulation and precise edits (vocals were often cut out of songs and hypnotic trance-like sections extended).

The key player in the early Goa trance scene was DJ Laurent. Playing to a crowd tripping on LSD and charas, he was a master at weaving eclectic musical sources into an organic progression that could last from dusk until dawn; from ominous twilight grooves to blissed-out, sun-kissed climaxes.

This according to “Unveiling the secret: The roots of trance” by Dave Mothersole (Dancecult: Journal of electronic dance music culture IV/1 [2012]). Above and below, DJ Laurent in action.

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by | March 28, 2016 · 6:00 am

Lady Gaga’s “Bad romance”

 

Performances by Lady Gaga, particularly her music video Bad romance, exemplify postmodern America’s preoccupation with spectacle. They expose how the gaze, as a public-driven or self-imposed zone of terror and destruction, inscribes potentialities of renewal, wherein the subject’s authenticity is reasserted through the very process of commodification, or a kind of singeing of the image.

Such crossings constitute what Baudrillard calls “a [postmodern] materialization of aesthetics where…art mime[s] its own disappearance”; they also expose the complex dystopias underpinning America’s bad romance with its own renewal.

This according to “Doing the Lady Gaga dance: Postmodern transaesthetics and the art of spectacle in Don DeLillo’s The body artist” by Pavlina Radia (Canadian review of American studies XLIV/2 [summer 2014] pp. 194–213).

Today is Lady Gaga’s 30th birthday! Below, the video in question.

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by | March 8, 2016 · 6:00 am

Indie pop and kitsch

 

Indie pop has had a complicated relationship with mass culture—it simultaneously depends upon and deconstructs notions of authenticity and truth, and it is especially adept at generating personal authenticity.

It is useful to turn to the concept of kitsch, understood as an aesthetic and not a synonym for bad. Kitsch functions to cultivate personal attachment in the face of impersonal mass culture; it is this aesthetic that indie pop has cultivated through its lo-fi and often nostalgic sound world and through its dissemination, which has relied upon dedicated collectors.

The honesty of indie pop does not arise from an illusion of unmediated communication, but instead from the emphasis on the process of mediation, which stresses the materiality of the music and the actual experience of listening.

This according to “‘…This little ukulele tells the truth’: Indie pop and kitsch authenticity” by Emily I. Dolan (Popular music XXIX/3 [October 2010] pp. 457-469).

Below, Stephin Merritt, whose music and career serve as a case study in the article.

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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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