Settling The Pop Score

The analysis of popular music forces us to rethink the assumptions that underpin our approaches to the study of Western music. Not least, it brings to the fore an idea that many musicologists still find uncomfortable - that commercial production and consumption can be aligned with artistic authenticity. Reading pop texts takes place through dialogue on many levels, which, as Stan Hawkins argues, deals with how musical events are shaped by personal alliances between the artist and the recipient. The need for a critical approach to evaluating popular music lies at the heart of this book. Hawkins explores the relationships that exist between music, spectatorship and aesthetics through a series of case studies of pop artists from the 1980s and 1990s. Madonna, Morrissey, Annie Lennox, the Pet Shop Boys and Prince represent the diversity of cultures, identities and sexualities that characterised the start of the MTV boom. Through the interpretation of aspects of the compositional design and musical structures of songs by these pop artists, Hawkins suggests ways in which stylistic and technical elements of the music relate to identity formation and its political motivations. Settling the Pop Score examines the role of irony and empathy, the question of gender, race and sexuality, and the relevance of textual analysis to the study of popular music. Interpreting pop music within the framework of musicology, Hawkins helps us to understand the pleasure so many people derive from these songs.

Beginning with the earliest experiments in musical accompaniment carried out in the Edison Laboratories, Kathryn Kalinak uses archival material to outline the history of American music and film. Focusing on the scores of several key composers of the sound era, including Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Captain Blood, Max Steiner’s The Informer, Bernard Herrmann’s The Magnificent Ambersons, and David Raksin’s Laura, Kalinak concludes that classical scoring conventions were designed to ensure the dominance of narrative exposition. Her analyses of contemporary work such as John Williams’ The Empire Strikes Back and Basil Poledouris’ RoboCop demonstrate how the traditions of the classical era continue to influence scoring practices today.

A lively and informative set of perspectives on the key themes that shape modern Britain.

Nick Cave is now widely recognized as a songwriter, musician, novelist, screenwriter, curator, critic, actor and performer. From the band, The Boys Next Door (1976-1980), to the spoken-word recording, The Secret Life of the Love Song (1998), to the recently acclaimed screenplay of The Proposition (2005) and the Grinderman project (2008), Cave's career spans thirty years and has produced a comprehensive (and sometimes controversial) body of work that has shaped contemporary alternative culture. Despite intense media interest in Cave, there have been remarkably few comprehensive appraisals of his work, its significance and its impact on understandings of popular culture. In addressing this absence, the present volume is both timely and necessary. Cultural Seeds brings together an international range of scholars and practitioners, each of whom is uniquely placed to comment on an aspect of Cave's career. The essays collected here not only generate new ways of seeing and understanding Cave's contributions to contemporary culture, but set up a dialogue between fields all-too-often separated in the academy and in the media. Topics include Cave and the Presley myth; the aberrant masculinity projected by The Birthday Party; the postcolonial Australian-ness of his humour; his interventions in film and his erotics of the sacred. These essays offer compelling insights and provocative arguments about the fluidity of contemporary artistic practice.

Queering the Popular Pitch is a new collection of 19 essays that situate queering within the discourse of sex and sexuality in relation to popular music. This investigation addresses the changing debates within gay, lesbian and queer discourse in relation to the dissemination of musical texts -performance, cultural production and sexual meaning - situating music within the broader patterns of culture that it both mirrors and actively reproduces. The collection is divided into four parts: queering borders queer spaces hidden histories queer thoughts, mixed media. Queering the Popular Pitch will appeal to students of popular music, Gay and Lesbian studies. With case studies and essays by leading popular music scholars it provides insightful discourse in a growing field of musicological research.

Music videos promote popular artists in cultural forms that circulate widely across social media networks. With the advent of YouTube in 2005 and the proliferation of handheld technologies and social networking sites, the music video has become available to millions worldwide, and continues to serve as a fertile platform for the debate of issues and themes in popular culture. This volume of essays serves as a foundational handbook for the study and interpretation of the popular music video, with the specific aim of examining the industry contexts, cultural concepts, and aesthetic materials that videos rely upon in order to be both intelligible and meaningful. Easily accessible to viewers in everyday life, music videos offer profound cultural interventions and negotiations while traversing a range of media forms. From a variety of unique perspectives, the contributors to this volume undertake discussions that open up new avenues for exploring the creative changes and developments in music video production. With chapters that address music video authorship, distribution, cultural representations, mediations, aesthetics, and discourses, this study signals a major initiative to provide a deeper understanding of the intersecting and interdisciplinary approaches that are invoked in the analysis of this popular and influential musical form.

The term 'Popular Music' has traditionally denoted different things in France and Britain. In France, the very concept of 'popular' music has been fiercely debated and contested, whereas in Britain and more largely throughout what the French describe as the 'Anglo-saxon' world 'popular music' has been more readily accepted as a description of what people do as leisure or consume as part of the music industry, and as something that academics are legitimately entitled to study. French researchers have for some decades been keenly interested in reading British and American studies of popular culture and popular music and have often imported key concepts and methodologies into their own work on French music, but apart from the widespread use of elements of 'French theory' in British and American research, the 'Anglo-saxon' world has remained largely ignorant of particular traditions of the study of popular music in France and specific theoretical debates or organizational principles of the making and consuming of French musics. French, British and American research into popular music has thus coexisted - with considerable cross-fertilization - for many years, but the barriers of language and different academic traditions have made it hard for French and anglophone researchers to fully appreciate the ways in which popular music has developed in their respective countries and the perspectives on its study adopted by their colleagues. This volume provides a comparative and contrastive perspective on popular music and its study in France and the UK.

Why is gender inseparable from pop songs? What can gender representations in musical performances mean? Why are there strong links between gender, sexuality and popular music? The sound of the voice, the mix, the arrangement, the lyrics and images, all link our impressions of gender to music. Numerous scholars writing about gender in popular music to date are concerned with the music industry’s impact on fans, and how tastes and preferences become associated with gender. This is the first collection of its kind to develop and present new theories and methods in the analysis of popular music and gender. The contributors are drawn from a range of disciplines including musicology, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, philosophy, and media studies, providing new reference points for studies in this interdisciplinary field. Stan Hawkins’s introduction sets out to situate a variety of debates that prompts ways of thinking and working, where the focus falls primarily on gender roles. Amongst the innovative approaches taken up in this collection are: queer performativity, gender theory, gay and lesbian agency, the female pop celebrity, masculinities, transculturalism, queering, transgenderism and androgyny. This Research Companion is required reading for scholars and teachers of popular music, whatever their disciplinary background.