Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music

Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music Review

The much-anticipated paperback edition of Arthur Kempton's story on the art, influence, and commerce of Black American popular music

Praise for Boogaloo:

"From Thomas A. Dorsey and gospel to Sam Cooke and the classic age of boogaloo ('soul') to George Clinton and hip hop, this comprehensive analysis of African-American popular music is a deep and gorgeous meditation on its aesthetics and business."
---Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard

"Surpassingly sympathetic and probing. . . . a panoramic critical survey of black popular music over seventy-five years. . . .There is no book quite like it."
---New York Review of Books

". . . moving, dense, and fascinating. . . ."
---New Yorker

". . . a grand and sweeping survey of the history of soul music in America. . . . one of the best books of music journalism. . . ."
---Publisher's Weekly

". . . a fascinating and often original addition to the extensive literature. . . . an astute and witty account. . . . there is plenty in Boogaloo to set the mind and heart alight, as well as some flashes of brilliance and originality rare in music writing today."
---Times Literary Supplement

American Popular Music: Readings From the Popular Press Volume I: The Nineteenth-Century Tin Pan Alley

American Popular Music: Readings From the Popular Press Volume I: The Nineteenth-Century Tin Pan Alley Review

Beginning with the emergence of commercial American music in the nineteenth century, Volume 1 includes essays on the major performers, composers, media, and movements that shaped our musical culture before rock and roll. Articles explore the theoretical dimensions of popular music studies; the music of the nineteenth century; and the role of black Americans in the evolution of popular music. Also included—the music of Tin Pan Alley, ragtime, swing, the blues, the influences of W. S. Gilbert and Rodgers and Hammerstein, and changes in lyric writing styles from the nineteenth century to the rock era.

Popular Music in Contemporary France: Authenticity, Politics, Debate (French Studies)

Popular Music in Contemporary France: Authenticity, Politics, Debate (French Studies) Review

While music lovers from all over the world have tried to recreate the ambience of French cafés by playing music from stars such as Piaf, Trénet and Chevalier, intellectuals, sociologists and policy makers in France have been embroiled in passionate debate about just what constitutes 'real' French music. In the late 1950s and 1960s a wave of Anglo-American rock 'n' roll and pop hit Europe and disrupted French popular music forever. The cherished sounds of the chanson were sidelined, fragmented or merged with pop styles and instrumentation. From this point on, French music and music culture have been splintered into cultural divides - pop culture vs high culture; mass culture vs 'authentic' popular culture; national culture vs Americanization. This book investigates the exciting and innovative segmentation of the French music scene and the debates it has spawned. From an analysis of the chanson as national myth, to pop, rap, techno and the State, this book is the first full-length study to make sense of the complexity behind the history of French popular music and its relation to 'authentic' cultural identity.

Rockin Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (5th Edition)

Rockin Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (5th Edition) Review

Rockin' Out offers a comprehensive social history of popular music in the United States that takes the reader from the invention of the phonograph to the promise of the Internet, from the heyday of Tin Pan Alley to the present day sounds of singer-songwriters, pop country crossovers, rock, and contemporary hip hop. It offers an analysis and critique of the music itself as well as how it is produced and marketed, including such recent phenomena as the rise of television idols, the introduction of reggaeton, and the return of protest music. 

 

Accessibly written, this text is organized chronologically and thematically around particular genres/styles of music and addresses such dimensions as race, class, gender, ethnicity, technology, copyright and the structure of the music industry as they affect the development of the music.

The Voices that Are Gone: Themes in Nineteenth-Century American Popular Song

The Voices that Are Gone: Themes in Nineteenth-Century American Popular Song Review

The Voices that Are Gone: Themes in Nineteenth-Century American Popular Song Feature

• ISBN13: 9780195113822
• Condition: Used - Like New
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In this unique and readable study, Jon Finson views the mores and values of nineteenth-century Americans as they appear in their popular songs. The author sets forth lyricists' and composers' notions of courtship, technology, death, African Americans, Native Americans, and European ethnicity by grouping songs topically. He goes on to explore the interaction between musical style and lyrics within each topic. The lyrics and changing musical styles present a vivid portrait of nineteenth-century America. The composers discussed in the book range from Henry Russell ("Woodman, Spare That Tree"), Stephen Foster ("Oh! Susanna"), and Dan Emmett ("I Wish I Was in Dixie's Land"), to George M. Cohan and Maude Nugent ("Sweet Rosie O'Grady"), and Gussie Lord Davis ("In the Baggage Coach Ahead"). Readers will recognize songs like "Pop Goes the Weasel," "The Yellow Rose of Texas," "The Fountain in the Park," "After the Ball," "A Bicycle Built for Two," and many others which gain significance by being placed in the larger context of American history.

All That Glitters: Country Music in America (Popular Music Series)

All That Glitters: Country Music in America (Popular Music Series) Review

This collection of essays examines modern country music in America, from its roots to today’s music. Contributors look at aspects of the music as diverse as the creation of country culture in the honky tonk; the development of the Nashville music industry; and why country music singers are similar to the English romantic poets. Historians, sociologists, musicologists, folklorists, anthropologists, ethnographers, communication specialists, and journalists are all represented.

Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music (Cornell East Asia, Vol. 57) (Cornell East Asia Series Number 57)

Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music (Cornell East Asia, Vol. 57) (Cornell East Asia Series Number 57) Review

The first comprehensive study of Chinese popular music in a Western language. Drawing on extensive interviews with singers, songwriters and critics, as well as cultural, sociological, musical, and textual analysis, the book portrays the disparate ways in which China's state-run popular music industry and burgeoning underground rock music subculture represented by Cui Jian have been instrumental to the cultural and political struggles that culminated in the Tienanmen democracy movement of 1989. It also examines the links between popular music and contemporary debates about cultural identity and modernization, as well as the close connections between rock music, youth culture, and student protest.

Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music

Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music Review

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.

Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography

Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography Review

The prolific creator of such classic popular works as Romeo and Juliet, Peter and the Wolf, and Cinderella, Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) was one of the most important and influential composers of the twentieth century.

Drawing on unprecedented access to previously unknown or unavailable Russian-language sources, including extensive archival material, Harlow Robinson traces Prokofiev's extraordinary life from the fairy-tale world of Czarist Russia, through his many years abroad in America and Europe, to his perlexing permanent return to Moscow in 1936 under the Soviet Regime. That Prokofiev died on the very day as Josef Stalin, his principal persecutor, was the final irony of his intense and enigmatic career.

Analyzing Popular Music

Analyzing Popular Music Review

How do we "know" music? We perform it, compose it, sing it in the shower; cook, sleep and dance to it. Eventually we think and write about it. This book represents the culmination of such shared processes. Portraying a wide range of genres (rock, dance, TV soundtracks, country, pop, soul, easy listening, Turkish Arabesk), the essays cover methodology, modernism, postmodernism, Marxism and communication.

Taking Popular Music Seriously (Ashgate Contemporary Thinkers on Critical Musicology)

Taking Popular Music Seriously (Ashgate Contemporary Thinkers on Critical Musicology) Review

As a sociologist Simon Frith takes the starting point that music is the result of the play of social forces, whether as an idea, an experience or an activity. The essays in this important collection address these forces, recognising that music is an effect of a continuous process of negotiation, dispute, and agreement between the individual actors who make up a music world. The collection includes nineteen essays, some of which have had a major impact on the field, along with an autobiographical introduction.

The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music

The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music Review

" Winner of the 2004 ARSC Award for Best Research in Recorded Rock, Rhythm & Blues or Soul The Holy Profane explores the strong presence of religion in the secular music of twentieth-century African American artists as diverse as Rosetta Tharpe, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Tupac Shakur. Analyzing lyrics and the historical contexts which shaped those lyrics, Teresa L. Reed examines the link between West-African musical and religious culture and the way African Americans convey religious sentiment in styles such as the blues, rhythm and blues, soul, funk, and gangsta rap. She looks at Pentecostalism and black secular music, minstrelsy and its portrayal of black religion, the black church, "crossing over" from gospel to R&B, images of the black preacher, and the salience of God in the rap of Tupac Shakur. Traditionally, west European culture has drawn distinct divisions between the secular and the sacred in music. Liturgical music belongs in church, not on pop radio, and artists who fuse the two are guilty of sacrilege. In the West-African worldview, however, both music and the divine permeate every imaginable part of life -- so much so that concepts like sacred and secular were entirely foreign to African slaves arriving in the colonies. The Western influence on African Americans eventually resulted in more polarization between these two musical forms, and black musicians who grew up singing in church were often lamented as hellbound once they found popular success. Even these artists, however, never completely left behind their West-African musical ancestry. Reed's exploration of this trend in African American music connects the work of today's artists to their West-African ancestry -- a tradition that over two-hundred years of Western influence could not completely stamp out.

I Hear America Singing: An Introduction to Popular Music

I Hear America Singing: An Introduction to Popular Music Review

The first edition of American Popular Music introduces the history and influence of American music within the broader context of American culture. It reveals how the history of American music connects to contemporary popular music through specific examples showing how past styles and performers have influenced current musical styles. Presents a balanced, accurate, and comprehensive portrayal of American popular music within a narrative, conversational style while discussing various musical styles and performers in a larger social and historical context that provides a larger perspective on American cultural history. The book relates the development of each musical genre to its historical period and places individual performers and styles within their larger social or artistic context. It includes numerous excerpts from literary works that reveal the tremendous influence popular music has had on American culture. It also presents over 300 photos and illustrations, including album covers, posters, sheet music illustrations, and song lyrics. An important reference for any reader interested in the history of American popular music.

American Popular Music: The Rock Years

American Popular Music: The Rock Years Review

Rock, country, pop, soul, funk, punk, folk, hip-hop, techno, grunge--it's all here. In American Popular Music: The Rock Years, Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman take readers on a fascinating journey through the rich historical and stylistic landscape of American rock. An abridged version of the authors' acclaimed American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV, this volume includes chapters 8-14 of the longer book along with new introductory and concluding chapters.
American Popular Music: The Rock Years traces the development of rock from its roots in the mid-1940s to its current state in the twenty-first century, integrating in-depth discussions of the music itself with solid coverage of the attendant historical, social, and cultural circumstances. It strikes a balance between musical analysis and social context, showing how rock and American culture have continuously influenced each other over time. Using well-chosen examples, insightful commentaries, and an engaging writing style, the authors highlight the contributions of diverse groups to the development of rock music, explain the effects of advancements in recording technology, and chronicle the growth of rock music as an industry. The book is enhanced by a rich illustration program; boxed inserts on significant individuals, recordings, and intriguing topics; and well-organized listening charts for recordings that are discussed in detail in the text. Remarkably accessible, American Popular Music: The Rock Years is ideal for introductory courses in the history of rock and roll and will encourage readers to become more critically aware listeners of rock music.

Hip-Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

Hip-Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason (Popular Culture and Philosophy) Review

Is there too much violence in hip-hop music? What’s the difference between Kimberly Jones and the artist Lil' Kim? Is hip-hop culture a "black" thing? Is it okay for N.W.A. to call themselves niggaz and for Dave Chappelle to call everybody bitches? These witty, provocative essays ponder these and other thorny questions, linking the searing cultural issues implicit — and often explicit — in hip-hop to the weighty matters examined by the great philosophers of the past. The book shows that rap classics by Lauryn Hill, OutKast, and the Notorious B.I.G. can help uncover the meanings of love articulated in Plato's Symposium; that Rakim, 2Pac, and Nas can shed light on the conception of God's essence expressed in St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica; and explores the connection between Run-D.M.C., Snoop Dogg, and Hegel. Hip-Hop and Philosophy proves that rhyme and reason, far from being incompatible, can be mixed and mastered to contemplate life's most profound mysteries.

The Lyrics of Civility (Garland Studies in American Popular History and Culture)

The Lyrics of Civility (Garland Studies in American Popular History and Culture) Review

This book is the first comprehensive scholarly study of religious images in popular music. Examining bestsellers from 1906 to 1971, the work explores the role religious images have in the secularization of American culture. Popular music lyrics that express an adherence to a sacred order are couched in inoffensive, content-less language. These lyrics of civility reflect and shape the increasing secularization of American culture in the twentieth century. The analysis focuses primarily on the way these lyrics reduce the meaning of the terms and theology of the Biblical faith. The aesthetic of civility carries over into theology, the narratives, and the accompanying instrumental arrangements of songs that adhere to the Biblical sacred order. On the other hand, lyrics that reject the Biblical tradition use content-filled, offensive language. The result is that displaced adherents withdraw from the Biblical tradition and turn to alternative cultural religions, or idols of attraction, including popular music, that offer meaning to fill a void in the individual. The secularization of American society, therefore, is not a withdrawal from the idea of religion itself. The analysis focuses on the two dominant themes in songs that include religious images: prayer and heaven. The author explores the songs of the two world wars, the hit parade era, the rhythm and blues and doo-wop of the 1950s, the new folk singer movement, soul music and rock music of the 1960s, and the revival rock of the early 1970s. The work demonstrates the capacity of one form of popular culture to separate adherents from a subculture through diluting the meaning of the language of the subculture's elemental thought.

Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album: How to Disappear Completely (Profiles in Popular Music)

Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album: How to Disappear Completely (Profiles in Popular Music) Review

How the British rock band Radiohead subverts the idea of the concept album in order to articulate themes of alienation and anti-capitalism is the focus of Marianne Tatom Letts's analysis of Kid A and Amnesiac. These experimental albums marked a departure from the band's standard guitar-driven base layered with complex production effects. Considering the albums in the context of the band's earlier releases, Letts explores the motivations behind this change. She places the two albums within the concept-album/progressive-rock tradition and shows how both resist that tradition. Unlike most critics of Radiohead, who focus on the band's lyrics, videos, sociological importance, or audience reception, Letts focuses on the music itself. She investigates Radiohead's ambivalence toward its own success, as manifested in the vanishing subject of Kid A on these two albums.

(2011)