The Value Of Popular Music

In this book, Alison Stone argues that popular music since rock-‘n’-roll is a unified form of music which has positive value. That value is that popular music affirms the importance of materiality and the body, challenging the long-standing Western elevation of the intellect above all things corporeal. Stone also argues that popular music’s stress on materiality gives it aesthetic value, drawing on ideas from the post-Kantian tradition in aesthetics by Hegel, Adorno, and others. She shows that popular music gives importance to materiality in its typical structure: in how music of this type handles the relations between matter and form, the relations between sounds and words, and in how it deals with rhythm, meaning, and emotional expression. Extensive use is made of musical examples from a wide range of popular music genres. This book is distinctive in that it defends popular music on philosophical grounds, particularly informed by the continental tradition in philosophy.

Who's better? Billie Holiday or P. J. Harvey? Blur or Oasis? Dylan or Keats? And how many friendships have ridden on the answer? Such questions aren't merely the stuff of fanzines and idle talk; they inform our most passionate arguments, distill our most deeply held values, make meaning of our ever-changing culture. In Performing Rites, one of the most influential writers on popular music asks what we talk about when we talk about music. What's good, what's bad? What's high, what's low? Why do such distinctions matter? Instead of dismissing emotional response and personal taste as inaccessible to the academic critic, Simon Frith takes these forms of engagement as his subject--and discloses their place at the very center of the aesthetics that structure our culture and color our lives. Taking up hundreds of songs and writers, Frith insists on acts of evaluation of popular music as music. Ranging through and beyond the twentieth century, Performing Rites puts the Pet Shop Boys and Puccini, rhythm and lyric, voice and technology, into a dialogue about the undeniable impact of popular aesthetics on our lives. How we nod our heads or tap our feet, grin or grimace or flip the dial; how we determine what's sublime and what's "for real"--these are part of the way we construct our social identities, and an essential response to the performance of all music. Frith argues that listening itself is a performance, both social gesture and bodily response. From how they are made to how they are received, popular songs appear here as not only meriting aesthetic judgments but also demanding them, and shaping our understanding of what all music means.

During the last few decades, most cultural critics have come to agree that the division between "high" and "low" art is an artificial one, that Beethoven's Ninth and "Blue Suede Shoes" are equally valuable as cultural texts. In Who Needs Classical Music?, Julian Johnson challenges these assumptions about the relativism of cultural judgements. The author maintains that music is more than just "a matter of taste": while some music provides entertainment, or serves as background noise, other music claims to function as art. This book considers the value of classical music in contemporary society, arguing that it remains distinctive because it works in quite different ways to most of the other music that surrounds us. This intellectually sophisticated yet accessible book offers a new and balanced defense of the specific values of classical music in contemporary culture. Who Needs Classical Music? will stimulate readers to reflect on their own investment (or lack of it) in music and art of all kinds.

The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage examines the social, cultural, political and economic value of popular music as history and heritage. Taking a cross-disciplinary approach, the volume explores the relationship between popular music and the past, and how interpretations of the changing nature of the past in post-industrial societies play out in the field of popular music. In-depth chapters cover key themes around historiography, heritage, memory and institutions, alongside case studies from around the world, including the UK, Australia, South Africa and India, exploring popular music’s connection to culture both past and present. Wide-ranging in scope, the book is an excellent introduction for students and scholars working in musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music studies, critical heritage studies, cultural studies, memory studies and other related fields.

There is a well-developed vocabulary for discussing classical music, but when it comes to popular music, how do we analyze its effects and its meaning? David Brackett draws from the disciplines of cultural studies and music theory to demonstrate how listeners form opinions about popular songs, and how they come to attribute a rich variety of meanings to them. Exploring several genres of popular music through recordings made by Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Hank Williams, James Brown, and Elvis Costello, Brackett develops a set of tools for looking at both the formal and cultural dimensions of popular music of all kinds.

"The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music is a comprehensive, smartly-conceived volume that can take its place as the new standard reference in popular music. The editors have shown great care in covering classic debates while moving the field into new, exciting areas of scholarship. International in its focus and pleasantly wide-ranging across historical periods, the Handbook is accessible to students but full of material of interest to those teaching and researching in the field." - Will Straw, McGill University "Celebrating the maturation of popular music studies and recognizing the immense changes that have recently taken place in the conditions of popular music production, The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music features contributions from many of the leading scholars in the field. Every chapter is well defined and to the point, with bibliographies that capture the history of the field. Authoritative, expertly organized and absolutely up-to-date, this collection will instantly become the backbone of teaching and research across the Anglophone world and is certain to be cited for years to come." - Barry Shank, author of 'The Political Force of Musical Beauty' (2014) The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music provides a highly comprehensive and accessible summary of the key aspects of popular music studies. The text is divided into 9 sections: Theory and Method The Business of Popular Music Popular Music History The Global and the Local The Star System Body and Identity Media Technology Digital Economies Each section has been chosen to reflect both established aspects of popular music studies as well as more recently emerging sub-fields. The handbook constitutes a timely and important contribution to popular music studies during a significant period of theoretical and empirical growth and innovation in the field. This is a benchmark work which will be essential reading for educators and students in popular music studies, musicology, cultural studies, media studies and cultural sociology.

Written specifically for students, this introductory textbook explores the history and meaning of rock and popular music. Roy Shuker's study provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the production, distribution, consumption and meaning of popular music and examines the difficulties and debates which surround the analysis of popular culture and popular music. This heavily revised and updated third edition includes: new case studies on the iPod, downloading, and copyright the impact of technologies, including on-line delivery and the debates over MP3 and Napster new chapters on music genres, cover songs and the album canon as well as music retail, radio and the charts case studies and lyrics of artists such as Robert Johnson, The Who, Fat Boy Slim and The Spice Girls a comprehensive discography, suggestions for further reading, listening and viewing and a directory of useful websites. With chapter related guides to further reading, listening and viewing, a glossary, and a timeline, this textbook is the ideal introduction for students.

Pop music surrounds us - in our cars, over supermarket speakers, even when we are laid out at the dentist - but how often do we really hear what's playing? Switched on Pop is the book based on the eponymous podcast that has been hailed by NPR, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and Entertainment Weekly for its witty and accessible analysis of Top 40 hits. Through close studies of sixteen modern classics, musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding shift pop from the background to the foreground, illuminating the essential musical concepts behind two decades of chart-topping songs. In 1939, Aaron Copland published What to Listen for in Music, the bestseller that made classical music approachable for generations of listeners. Eighty years later, Nate and Charlie update Copland's idea for a new audience and repertoire: 21st century pop, from Britney to Beyoncé, Outkast to Kendrick Lamar. Despite the importance of pop music in contemporary culture, most discourse only revolves around lyrics and celebrity. Switched on Pop gives readers the tools they need to interpret our modern soundtrack. Each chapter investigates a different song and artist, revealing musical insights such as how a single melodic motif follows Taylor Swift through every genre that she samples, André 3000 uses metric manipulation to get listeners to "shake it like a Polaroid picture," or Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee create harmonic ambiguity in "Despacito" that mirrors the patterns of global migration. Replete with engaging discussions and eye-catching illustrations, Switched on Pop brings to life the musical qualities that catapult songs into the pop pantheon. Readers will find themselves listening to familiar tracks in new waysand not just those from the Top 40. The timeless concepts that Nate and Charlie define can be applied to any musical style. From fanatics to skeptics, teenagers to octogenarians, non-musicians to professional composers, every music lover will discover something ear-opening in Switched on Pop.