Popular Music Studies

This is an introductory lecture about Iranian pop music in diaspora for undergrad students of INTRODUCTION TO POPULAR MUSIC. It is also a workshop to introduce fundamental aspects of Iranian pop music and political dislocation to non-Iranians.

In 2007, the Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS) guru Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan wore an attire similar to calendar image of tenth Sikh guru, Guru Gobind Singh, and performed a ritual baptism, which became controversial. This article will show how this controversy opens up two significant issues: first, questioning the egalitarian ethos of caste equality upheld by the Sikh religion, and second, with regard to authenticity of religious practice – of what is deemed Sikh and non/un-Sikh practices. The controversy became the fulcrum for questions of visuality and material practices around imageries of Sikh gurus in the domain of popular religiosity and visual culture. This historically relates to the much-debated status of images around gurus in contemporary Punjab. The image and ritual become a crucial site of conflict with regard to questions of Sikh identity, religion and caste. Questions of iconoclasm, authenticity and representation have emerged around the images—largely audio-visual in nature--of the Sikh gurus. In this article I will analyse music video/s that engages with the genre of Sikhi (Sikh principles or faith) highlighting crisis in Sikh identity through lyrical and visual references, for instance to the institutions of popular religion, such as Deras. I then mainly argue that the DSS event cannot be grasped without understanding the modes of engagement and ritual practices around images of Sikh gurus. Such an analysis will not only underline contestations around the ‘vexed’ status of images comprising both Sikh and Dera gurus but will also critique the normative understanding of Sikh identity and religion.

En el año 1889 se comercializaron en EEUU los primeros cilindros de cera que contenían grabaciones musicales. Estas grabaciones podían escucharse con auriculares de tubo mediante el fonógrafo de Edison en salones fonográficos y otros espacios urbanos ubicados en las zonas de ocio de numerosas ciudades del país. Sin embargo, fue a partir de 1896 cuando estos reproductores musicales comenzaron a tener un uso doméstico. Aprovechando la presencia de artistas españoles en el continente americano, la National Phonograph Company y la Columbia Phonograph Company realizaron numerosas grabaciones que contienen música extraída de la zarzuela, el género chico,  la canción de salón y el folclore regional.
Con el título De cera y Goma Laca. La producción de música española en la industria fonográfica estadounidense (1896-1914), Kiko Mora, profesor de semiótica audiovisual de la Universidad de Alicante, elabora un estudio preliminar, con entronque cuantitativo e historiográfico, de la producción musical española de carácter comercial en la primera mitad de su etapa acústica en los Estados Unidos de América.
¿Cuál fue el volumen total de producción musical y cuáles fueron los años más relevantes? ¿En qué ciudades se grabaron las piezas musicales y cuáles fueron sus contextos de producción? ¿Quiénes fueron los artistas y los compositores españoles más prolíficos? ¿Qué géneros y piezas musicales fueron los predominantes? Este libro ofrece respuestas a estas preguntas y abre un nuevo itinerario para otros estudios relacionados con la presencia de la música española y su interacción con otras músicas en los inicios de la industria discográfica más más influyente del siglo XX.

David Jones, vagyis maszk nélküli magánember csak a családtagok és a nagyon közeli barátok számára létezett, máskülönben a Bowie néven fellépô előadóművész folytonosan váltogatta az egyes albumokhoz
tematikusan illeszkedő szerepeit. A "persona" középpontjában
a testen és a szexualitáson keresztül megnyilvánuló idegenség állt, ezt a tézist tette változó alakban kézzelfoghatóvá a más bolygóról érkezett idegen (alien) figurája. Megjelent: Színház, 49. évf. (2016)  6-7. sz.

The complex legacy of Mexico's ethnic past and geographic location have shaped the country and its culture. In Music in Mexico, Alejandro L. Madrid uses extensive fieldwork, interviews with performers, eyewitness accounts of performances, and vivid illustrations to guide students through modern-day music practices. Applying three themes-ethnic identity, migration, and media influences-the text explores the music that Mexicans grow up listening to and shows how these traditions are the result of long-standing transnational dialogues. Packaged with a 40-minute audio CD containing musical examples, the text features numerous listening activities that engage students with the music.

During the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West famously interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for "Best Female Video." A year later both performers returned to the VMAs with songs that responded directly to the original incident. In the meantime, the U.S. media and record-buying public had come to interpret the original incident using the stock scripts and characters of what Linda Williams has called “U.S. racial melodrama,” the fact of which both performers seemed aware. In this way, the Swift-West “incident” had come to reflect and mimic larger racial tensions, especially between black men and white women, as they had specifically come to be understood and portrayed during the Obama presidency, which many commentators have hastily and incorrectly identified as a symptom of “post-racialism.” This essay discusses how Kanye West and Taylor Swift reflect on and revise the tropes of racial melodrama, in the latter case to reinforce what Charles Mills calls "the epistemology of ignorance" when it comes to racism in America, and in the former case to challenge it.

La musica si offre al nostro orecchio e al nostro esserne gli interpreti bilanciando sempre quelle che sembrano essere le sue due qualità distintive e contrapposte: l’ineffabilità e la capacità di comunicare sensazioni, atmosfere, storie in maniera chirurgica. La faccenda si complica ulteriormente quando abbiamo a che fare con la musica che ascoltiamo tutti i giorni, attraverso quelli che ci ostiniamo a chiamare dischi. È la musica che chiamiamo registrata e che, però, quasi mai è registrata e basta. La musica rappresenta un problema per la semiotica, che come tale l’ha sempre trattata. Al punto che è forse questo il suo campo di applicazione più trascurato. Il significato della musica è stratificato: ha a che fare tanto con i suoni che essa contiene, e che ci sottopone in presa diretta o in forma mediata, quanto con le parole e le pratiche che costruiamo attorno a questi suoni, e che finiscono per orientarne profondamente il senso. Questo libro si concentra su alcune questioni centrali per una semiotica della musica che voglia comprenderla come fatto comunicativo, proponendo alcuni modelli per provare ad attraversare questo campo con uno sguardo — un orecchio — nuovo: la mediazione e il linguaggio fonografico; l’enunciazione e le sue diverse configurazioni; la nozione di genere e i generi musicali intesi come sistema discorsivo, dove la musica si dà appieno nella sua dimensione sociale e al cui interno tradizione e innovazione finiscono per sciogliersi l’una nell’altra.

Pussy Riot’s surprise punk prayer at the altar of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ Our Savior instigated significant controversy in Russia and resulted in the conviction of three Pussy Riot members on the charge of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” While the Russian Orthodox Church swiftly condemned the performance as blasphemous, Pussy Riot has contended that its punk prayer is consistent with the message of the Gospels. This study investigates the punk prayer controversy in relation to the figure of the holy fool, a radical behavioral model canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church and secularized in Russia’s literary and artistic traditions.

Musicians' drive to be productive on the Internet led to the development of practices that can inform popular music education. Expanding the concept of popular music education to include online participatory culture practices provides inspiration for musicking online relevant not only in times of uncertainty (like during mandated quarantines experienced during the COVID outbreak in 2020), but also during times of prosperity when practices can be explored in classrooms and during leisure time. In this article, the author discusses three dispositions towards online musicking: DIY-disposition (do-it-yourself), DIWO-disposition (do-it-with-others) and DIFO-disposition (do-it-for-others). The development of these dispositions leads to online and musical literacies that help develop the skills needed for online musicking and performance. This text offers a creation theory about approaching online musicking that can be applied to new technologies and media as online platforms appear and fade on the Internet.

Gender & Pop Culture provides a foundation for the study of gender, pop culture and media. This comprehensive, interdisciplinary text provides text-book style introductory and concluding chapters written by the editors, seven original contributor chapters on key topics and written in a variety of writing styles, discussion questions, additional resources and more. Coverage includes:
•Foundations for studying gender & pop culture (history, theory, methods, key concepts)
•Contributor chapters on media and children, advertising, music, television, film, sports, and technology
•Ideas for activism and putting this book to use beyond the classroom
•Pedagogical Features
•Suggestions for further readings on topics covered and international studies of gender and pop culture
Gender & Pop Culture was designed with students in mind, to promote reflection and lively discussion. With features found in both textbooks and anthologies, this sleek book can serve as primary or supplemental reading in undergraduate courses across the disciplines that deal with gender, pop culture or media studies.

At the end of the 1970s a racist rock music movement known as White Power music emerged in Great Britain in connection with political parties of the extreme right and remains a vibrant force in racist social movements today. Throughout the 1990s, White Power music expanded significantly from its origins in a clandestine network of punk-inspired live shows and record promotions into a multi-million dollar, international enterprise of web-pages, radio stations and independent record labels promoting White Power musicians performing a wider range of musical genres. In this article, we view White Power music as a cultural resource created and produced by racist movements and used as a tool to further key movement goals.  Specifically, we examine White Power music’s role when used to 1) recruit new adherents, especially youth, 2) frame issues and ideology to cultivate a White Power collective identity, and 3) obtain financial resources. In doing so we rely upon in-depth interviews with W...

Between 1995 and 1996, The Beatles released the three volume, six-disc Anthology, a sprawling audio set issued to coincide with a televised documentary of the same name. One of the first major releases of its kind, the Anthology albums curated and compiled previously unreleased demos, studio recordings, and live performances, under the auspices of giving listeners insight into the band's creative process. Beyond the appeal of new Beatles product however, the Anthology albums are unique in exploiting particular manifestations of musical intimacy that ultimately serve to further cultivate the group's well-established pop cultural mythos.

Taiwan’s influence on popular music and culture in the Sinophone world is significant. This lecture series will introduce Taiwan’s popular music— with a particular focus on popular music after the 1970s to recently— to the students while examining the social, political and cultural influences on the production and consumption of music, as well as how popular music shapes society, locally, regionally and transnationally. Every lecture will include at least one case study of artists or groups to enhance the student’s understanding of Taiwan’s popular music scenes.

This paper has as main goal to understand the importance of performance inside a process of crowdfunding, from the video produced by the independent musician Amanda Palmer, for the platform Kickstarter, to promote the project for launching her album, Theater is Evil. One of Kickstarter's main requirements are audiovisual productions that assist in the dissemination of artists and their projects. Such videos seem to be the leading engagement products to attract "backers". However, the hypothesis is that this is not the ultimate persuasion of this model. Resorting to Reception Studies as methodological basis and using internet ethnographic as inspiration, comments relating the video of Palmer's project, present at the Youtube and Kickstarter platforms, were analyzed. Thus, it was possible to observe that not only the audiovisual performance is important to move "backers", but also there's a need of previous knowledge of the artist by these financiers.

In this article I consider musical and other sonic constructions of queer identity in the television film, Angels in America (HBO, 2003).  I outline various queer strategies in the music and sound of the film, demonstrating how music and sound contribute to unfixed and unstable identities. The readings of the selected scenes in the film reveal the ways in which queer strategies operate, and how film music symbolises identity in flux.

TVÅ SIDOR AV SAMMA MYNT? Tabell 2. Söktryck efter namn på folkhögskolan, Ht 2009 Folk-Antal Antal N Profiler Söktryck St. d högskola sökande platser(medelvärden) Fridhem 450 25 1 Jazz 18, 0 Skurup 340 20 1 Jazz 17, 0 Billströmska 230 20 1 Blandad 11.5 Furuboda ...

Poster presentation based on the Ph.D. study "Folkelige og distingverte fellesskap: Gentrifisering av countrykultur i Norge – en festivalstudie" [Popular and distinguished communities: Gentrification of country music culture in Norway – a festival study] (Vestby, 2017).

Constructed spatiality and perceived imagery in popular music recordings has been in evidence since the 1930s as " a fundamentally pictorial tradition (…) reverb and echo effects deployed in combination with certain lyrics to render aural vistas " (Doyle, 2004: 32). Spatiality underwent a transformation in the 1950s with echo and reverberation increasingly employed as timbral and rhythmic enhancement to music. By the 1960s, with advances in recording technologies and the emergence of psychedelic music, sound environments openly challenged notions of spatial reality, providing a perceptual bridge between auditory and visual realms. This practice-led enquiry focuses upon the experience of spatio-temporal suspension in popular music recordings. Through praxical engagement with consumer audio technologies, it aims to define a timeless, suspended aesthetic in music and sound, by drawing on neuroscientific research into dynamic forms of vitality in the time-based arts (Stern, 2010) and demonstrating the multimodal nature of these recordings.

May 2018; presented at MUTE 3: Fani, przeboje sceny, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Kraków

Historia muzyki popularnej pokazuje, że bardzo często ogromne znaczenie w jej rozwoju miały konkretne, lokalne sceny artystyczne. Poprzez swoje innowacyjne rozwiązania, bardzo wyraźnie osadzone w danym kontekście kulturowym, inspirowały i wpływały na artystów z całego świata, przyczyniając się do powstania nowych, innowacyjnych trendów, stylistyk, estetyk, zjawisk artystycznych lub nawet całych gatunków. Nie sposób pominąć tak znaczących ośrodków jak sceny z Liverpoolu, Nashville, San Francisco, Dunedein, Minneapolis, czy nawet naszych własnych lokalnych centrów muzycznych jak Kraków, Katowice, czy Trójmiasto. Jednakże, w momencie kiedy dany badacz muzyki chce zmierzyć się z analizą takich scen, istnieje duże prawdopodobieństwo pojawienia się zasadniczego problemu, związanego z pytaniem o odpowiednią metodologię do tego typu badań. W dziedzinie studiów nad muzyką popularną (lub muzykoznawstwa) często wykorzystywane są podejścia kulturoznawcze, muzykologiczne, literaturoznawcze lub inne. Analizowanie danej sceny muzycznej wymaga jednak szczegółowej staranności w doborze metodologii, gdyż takie studium wykracza poza czynniki czysto artystyczne, wkraczając w inne, postronne obszary badawcze, które umożliwiają lepsze zrozumienie charakterystyki tych wielowymiarowych zjawisk.
Celem mojego wystąpienia będzie zatem wskazanie konkretnych ścieżek, które badacz muzyki popularnej może obrać, podejmując się zadania analizy lokalnych scen muzycznych jako złożonych zjawisk kulturowych. Moje obserwacje będą w dużej mierze oparte na doświadczeniu własnych badań, prowadzonych w ramach pracy nad rozprawą doktorską, omawiającą lokalną scenę muzyczną w Minneapolis. Co więcej, rozważania na temat konkretnych metodologii, które mogą być korzystne dla tego typu badań, zostaną także oparte na przeglądzie literatury specjalistycznej, która wskazuje wady i zalety naukowego sposobu analiz muzyki i jej uprzestrzennienia. Najwięcej uwagi poświęcone zostanie jednak metodologiom, reprezentowanym przez studia nad muzyką popularną, geografię muzyki, lokalną historię, studia regionalne (ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem amerykanistyki) oraz, łączące elementy ich wszystkich, kulturoznawstwo. Poruszony zostanie także problem innych, pobliskich podejść naukowych jak etnomuzykologia, socjomuzykologia, sound studies, ekomuzykologia, czy nawet urbanistyka.
Wynikiem wystąpienia będzie podkreślenie faktu jak bardzo złożonym zjawiskiem są sceny muzyczne, zwłaszcza te o lokalnym lub miejskim charakterze – jak wiele czynników należy wziąć pod uwagę, aby móc lepiej zrozumieć ich charakter. Należy jednak zawsze pamiętać, że metodologia powinna być elementem podległym danemu problemowi badawczemu, a jej wybór musi być uzależniony od tego, co najlepiej będzie służyć samemu naukowcowi. Niemniej, tak samo jak w przypadku badań nad muzyką popularną, w czasie analiz scen muzycznych powinno się kierować nie tylko zasadą interdyscyplinarności, jak również interkulturalizmu i interprofesjonalizmu, o których pisał Philip Tagg. Biorąc także pod uwagę fakt, że scena muzyczna łączy w sobie elementy badań konkretnej lokalizacji i jej kulturowych uwarunkowań z analizą zjawiska muzycznego, nieodłącznym elementem każdego rodzaju takich działań powinna być świadomość metodologii geografii muzycznej i kulturoznawczej. W końcu, za zrozumieniem konieczności mnogości podejść badawczych powinna bezwzględnie podążać postawa metodyczna, zakładająca systematyczność, skrupulatność i wiarygodność przeprowadzanych analiz.

Coaching a Popular Music Ensemble is a comprehensive guide for the music teacher striving to meet the changing needs of their students, the university music educator examining our current music education paradigm, and the band director trying to expand their school’s music program. Using his experiences as an educator and Memphis musician, Holley details the approaches and methods he used to create this one-of-a-kind, award-winning, student-driven music program. Some of the concepts described include the roles of the musicians in a popular music ensemble, explanations of a variety of rehearsal techniques, and how to go about creating a leaner-center rehearsal environment. Whether you believe the goal of music education is to produce more professional musicians or nurture more musical professionals, this book will help you and your students achieve that aspiration.

Edited by Gareth Dylan Smith
Foreword by John Kratus

La banda británica sacó nuevo disco compilatorio, comenzó una gira mundial y publicó un grueso libro de fotografías personales que acaba de llegar a Chile. Además en el marco del Inedit se estrenarán dos documentales que narran dos momentos claves de su carrera: cuando lanzaron "(I can´t get no) Satisfaction" y la trágica clausura de la utopía sesentera en Altamont.