Category Archives: Popular music

by | February 12, 2015 · 6:00 am

Journal of world popular music

Journal of world popular music

Launched by Equinox in 2014, Journal of world popular music is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes research and scholarship on recent issues and debates surrounding international popular musics, also known as world music, global pop, world beat, or, more recently, world music 2.0.

The journal provides a forum for exploring the manifestations and impacts of post-globalizing trends, processes, and dynamics surrounding these musics today. It adopts an open-minded perspective, including in its scope any local popularized musics of the world, commercially available music of non-Western origin, musics of ethnic minorities, and contemporary fusions or collaborations with local traditional or roots musics with Western pop and rock musics.

Placing specific emphasis on contemporary, interdisciplinary, and international perspectives, the journal’s special features include empirical research and scholarship on the global creative and music industries, the participants of world music, the musics themselves, and their representations in all media forms today, among other relevant themes and issues, alongside explorations of recent ideas and perspectives from popular music, ethnomusicology, anthropology, musicology, communication, media and cultural studies, sociology, geography, art and museum studies, and other fields with a scholarly focus on world music.

Along with regular articles that focus on the study of world music in all its forms from a variety of academic and other perspectives, the journal also features alternative means of representing research and scholarship through creative and visual means such as photography, poetry, and artwork, and audio and video means through an accompanying website. It also includes reviews of relevant books, special issues, magazines, CDs, websites, DVDs, online music releases, exhibitions, artwork, radio programs, and world music festivals.

Below, a performance by Yothu Yindi, the subject of one of the articles in the inaugural issue.

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by | February 6, 2015 · 6:00 am

Bob Marley’s œuvre

Throughout Bob Marley’s life, and perhaps even more since his death at the age of 36, his music has demonstrated a unique ability to combine with almost any cultural setting, no matter how different the elements might at first appear. Through his adaptable yet enduring musical messages, he represents an especially articulate type of singer-songwriter.

Marley released a large quantity of introspective, autobiographical material at the height of his success, providing a deep understanding of who he was and what he hoped to achieve through his life and music. Salient themes include protest, revolution, love, hate, biblical concepts, and Rastafari culture.

This according to The words and music of Bob Marley by David Vlado Moskowitz (Westport: Praeger, 2007).

Today would have been Marley’s 70th birthday! Above, a photo by Ueli Frey from 1980, a year before Marley’s death; below, performing with The Wailers the same year.

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by | January 22, 2015 · 6:00 am

Mashup aesthetics

grey album

The aesthetics of musical mashups lie in a particular kind of technical virtuosity and set of listening skills, rather than in the creation of something entirely new or original. The art is to succeed in finding two tracks that fit together musically, resulting in successful songs in their own right.

Mashups are characterized by two underlying principles: contextual incongruity of recognizable samples and musical congruity between the mashed tracks.

Contextual incongruity often creates a humorous effect, which explains why many listeners react with smiles and laughter when hearing a new mashup. In successful mashups, the combination of musical congruity and contextual incongruity results in the paradoxical response: “these two songs should definitely not work together…but they do!”

This according to “Contextual incongruity and musical congruity: The aesthetics and humour of mash-ups” by Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen and Paul Harkins (Popular music XXXI/1 [January 2012] pp. 87–104).

Above, DJ Danger Mouse’s The grey album from 2004; below, The Evolution Control Committee’s The whipped cream mixes from 1994. Both are analyzed in the article.

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by | January 8, 2015 · 6:00 am

Elvis and boogification

 

Most rock critics view Elvis Presley’s career as a progressive sell-out to the music industry, a transition from folk authenticity (the Sun singles of 1954–55) to a sophisticated professionalism epitomized by the ballads and movies of the 1960s.

This Faustian view is in essence just as romantic as the rags-to-riches American success legend—its apparent obverse—but there are major problems with such an analysis. In reality, the processes of creation, production, and consumption in modern mass societies are too dynamic and interactive to permit rigid historical, typological, or evaluative dividing lines.

In post-war America, a pure “folk” role, untouched by commercial influences, had become impossible. The performers that the young Elvis heard and learned from—gospel singers, bluesmen, and country and western stars—were commercial artists. Presley was a commercial artist from the start, and the continuities in his vocal style are more important than any rupture. His two most notable contributions to the language of rock and roll singing are the assimilation of romantic lyricism and a technique referred to here as boogification.

Contrary to most blues singers, Presley’s tone is full and rich, his intonation is precise, and his phrasing is legato. However, this lyrical continuity is subverted by boogification—producing syncopation and cross-rhythms—where he adds extra off-beat notes not demanded by words or vocal lines, splits up syllables or even consonants, and slurs words together, disguising the verbal sense.

This according to “All shook up? Innovation and continuity in Elvis Presley’s vocal style” by Richard Middleton, an essay included in Elvis: Images and fancies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1979, pp. 151–161).

Today is Presley’s 80th birthday! Below, live in his home town in 1956.

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by | January 6, 2015 · 6:00 am

Heavy metal cookbooks

hellbent4cooking

Heavy metal, a genre once considered a dangerous and transgressive force in popular culture, is now increasingly constructed as a light-hearted source of fun, comedy, and entertainment in a growing number of popular cultural forms.

Nowhere is this development clearer than in the recent phenomenon of the heavy metal cookbook, whereby domestic cookery is (sometimes seriously, sometimes comically) reimagined as part of a metal identity. Such cookbooks reveal not only how transgressive cultural forms can become incorporated and domesticated by the mainstream, but also how transgression can be repurposed to suit the changing lives of music fans as they age.

This according to “Hamburgers of devastation: The pleasures and politics of heavy metal cooking” by Michelle Phillipov (International journal of community music VII/2 [2014] pp. 259–72).

Above, the cover of Hellbent for cooking; below, the members of Warrant discuss a popular dessert with a friend.

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by | December 31, 2014 · 6:00 am

Umm Kulṯūm, voice of the people

Umm Kulthum

The virtuoso Egyptian singer Umm Kulṯūm (أم كلثوم) has been acclaimed as representing the voices of the people throughout the Arab world.

Following a long historical tradition of well-known, respectable female singers, Umm Kulṯūm’s repertoire revolved around Arabic poems with historic themes and colloquial Egyptian Arabic songs. Performed during a time of rejection of all things colonial in favor of all things Egyptian, her songs, both textually and melodically, reflected this emphasis.

The role of listeners is crucial in constructing the identity of her voice and their usage of live and recorded performances for their own purposes. Songs from Umm Kulṯūm’s repertory illustrate how social identity may be embedded in music using specific musical cues understood by the performer and her audience.

This according to “Voices of the people: Umm Kulthūm” by Virginia Danielson, an essay included in Women’s voices across musical worlds (Boston: Northeastern University, 2004, pp. 147–165).

Today is Umm Kulṯūm’s 110th birthday! Below, Baeed anak (Away from you) at the Olympia Théâtre in Paris, November 1967.

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by | December 25, 2014 · 6:00 am

“White Christmas” goes viral

 

When Irving Berlin first conceived the song White Christmas he envisioned it as a throwaway—a satirical novelty number for a vaudeville-style stage revue; but after Bing Crosby introduced it in the film musical Holiday inn (1942) it evolved into something far grander: the stately yuletide ballad that would become (by some estimations) the world’s all-time top-selling and most widely recorded song.

Berlin, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, had written his magnum opus, a timeless song that resonates with some of the deepest themes in American culture: yearning for a mythic New England past, belief in the magic of the Christmas season, and longing for the havens of home and hearth.

Today the song endures not just as an icon of the national Christmas celebration but as the artistic and commercial peak of the golden age of popular song, a symbol of the values and strivings of the World War II generation, and of the saga of Jewish-American assimilation. It has been recorded by everyone from Crosby to Elvis Presley to *NSYNC.

This according to White Christmas: The story of an American song by Jody Rosen (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 2002). Below, the classic Crosby clip followed by a memorable version by The Drifters.

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by | December 16, 2014 · 6:00 am

Songs in the key of Los Angeles

songs in the key of l.a.

Songs in the key of Los Angeles: Sheet music from the collection of the Los Angeles Public Library (Santa Monica: Angel City, 2013) presents historical popular songs, including facsimiles of sheet music covers and original manuscripts, in hardcover and e-book form.

The book is an outgrowth of Songs in the key of Los Angeles, a multi-platform collaboration between the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Public Library, and USC professor Josh Kun that brings to life the Library’s extraordinary Southern California Sheet Music Collection.

Comprising sheet music pieces that range from the 1840s through the 1950s, the Collection offers a singular portrait of Los Angeles history and culture rendered in music and visual art.

Below, Lupe Vélez performs Chiapanecas, one of the songs included in the collection.

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by | December 4, 2014 · 6:00 am

Girl groups

ronettes

Bands such as The Chantels, Rosie and the Originals, The Shirelles, The Marvelettes, Little Eva, and The Chiffons were commonly referred to as girl groups.

The girl-group style flourished between 1958 and 1965 and reached its height with the Phil Spector-produced groups—The Crystals, The Ronettes, and Darlene Love backed by the Crystals—and with the blazing teen morality plays of The Shangri-Las.

Although the girl-group sound was producer-driven, with songs written by Brill Building songwriters and aimed at a female teen audience, the music that came out of this collaborative process is considered some of the best of an otherwise fallow period for rock ’n’ roll. The best of the girl groups’ songs are filled with an epic sense of emotional intensity that may have stemmed in part from discord between the singers—mostly young black girls—and white male producers.

This according to “The girl groups” by Greil Marcus, an essay included in The Rolling Stone illustrated history of rock & roll [New York: Random house, 1976] pp. 154–57). Above and below, The Ronettes in their heyday.

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by | November 30, 2014 · 6:00 am

Allan Sherman’s legacy

 

Allan Sherman was the Larry David, the Adam Sandler, the Sacha Baron Cohen of 1963.

Sherman led Jewish humor and sensibilities out of ethnic enclaves and into the American mainstream with explosively funny parodies of classic songs that won him extraordinary success and acclaim across the board, from Harpo Marx to President Kennedy.

Sherman’s legacy represents a touchstone of postwar humor and a turning point in Jewish American cultural history. He was a manic, bacchanalian, and hugely creative artist who sold three million albums in just 12 months, yet died in obscurity a decade later at the age of 49.

This according to Overweight sensation: The life and comedy of Allan Sherman by Mark Cohen (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2013).

Today would have been Sherman’s 90th birthday! Below, My son, the folk singer, the album that started it all.

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