Analyzing Popular MusicAllan F. Moore How do we know music? We perform it, we compose it, we sing it in the shower, we cook, sleep and dance to it. Eventually we think and write about it. This book represents the culmination of such shared processes. Each of these essays, written by leading writers on popular music, is analytical in some sense, but none of them treats analysis as an end in itself. The books presents a wide range of genres (rock, dance, TV soundtracks, country, pop, soul, easy listening, Turkish Arabesk) and deals with issues as broad as methodology, modernism, postmodernism, Marxism and communication. It aims to encourage listeners to think more seriously about the 'social' consequences of the music they spend time with and is the first collection of such essays to incorporate contextualisation in this way. |
Contents
1 | |
ten apothegms and four instances | 16 |
analyzing the words in pop song | 39 |
score sound design and exoticism in The XFiles | 60 |
house music as rhetoric | 80 |
the case of Try a Little Tenderness | 103 |
popular music and urban geography | 131 |
8 Jethro Tull and the case for modernism in mass culture | 158 |
9 Pangs of history in late 1970s newwave rock | 173 |
10 Is anybody listening? | 196 |
popular music and ethnomusicology | 218 |
240 | |
Discography | 258 |
261 | |
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Common terms and phrases
Adorno aesthetic album analytical Arabesk Aretha Aretha Franklin argues band bars bass beat Beatles chord chorus context Cooke Covach critique Crosby cultural dance discussion distinct drum Dylan effect episode ethnography Ethnomusicology example experience film flexible accumulation Franklin French Kiss Frith genre gesture groove guitar harmonic hip-hop sublime house music hypermetric jazz Jethro Tull Kenny G layers listening Little Tenderness London meaning melody modernity music analysis musical styles musicians musicology new-wave Nightswimming notion Otis Redding Oxford patterns performance phrase playing pop song popular music popular music studies postmodern production rap music reality rap recording Redding’s references repetition rhyme rhythm rhythmic rock music Sam Cooke score sense sheet music social sound structure stylistic suggest synth synthesizer Tagg technique television timbre Tin Pan Alley track Try a Little tune understanding University Press urban verbal space verse vocal voice words X-Files