Popular MusicPub Date : 2024-09-16DOI: 10.1017/s0261143024000151
Ian MacMillen
{"title":"Fluid revivals: retouring popular songs to restore a hydrological imaginary in the trans-Danube","authors":"Ian MacMillen","doi":"10.1017/s0261143024000151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143024000151","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines emerging practices of popular music revivals that rely on affective commitments other than nostalgia. It uses two Serbian-based singers’ post-war Croatian tours as case studies, analysing musical fluidities in the material and symbolic navigation of post-Yugoslav performance networks and focusing on borderwaters such as the Danube that bridge the region's peoples, centring their interconnected industrial and cultural attachments, yet also physically and politically separating former Yugoslav republics. Reviewing hydrological conceptions of territorial belonging in the late-Yugoslav period and in the 1990s as expressed in their ballads and reception history, it argues that the singers (Đorđe Balašević and Zvonko Bogdan), in attempting to re-establish their interrepublic touring practices with the backing of Serbian tambura bands, engage in an economy of love that, as with revival tours elsewhere in Europe, has proved more efficacious than nostalgia for responding to recent political and socioeconomic changes in the European Union.</p>","PeriodicalId":46171,"journal":{"name":"Popular Music","volume":"54 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142253196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Popular MusicPub Date : 2024-09-16DOI: 10.1017/s0261143024000205
Laura Jordán González
{"title":"Listening to Mapuche sound in Illapu","authors":"Laura Jordán González","doi":"10.1017/s0261143024000205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143024000205","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article studies how Illapu, a prominent Chilean New Song band, deals with Mapuche culture and sound. Through the analysis of four songs, I argue that by first incorporating Mapuche instruments and rhythms (1970s), and then adding engaged lyrics dealing with Mapuche history (1980s), and finally engaging with Mapuche listeners and artists (1990s–2000s), Illapu participates in the transformation of the way in which indigeneity is conceived. I assert that the transformation of their creative processes takes place in parallel with the emergence of a public political Mapuche subject distinctly identified as such. By positioning themselves as ‘brown’ exemplary agents, the members of Illapu get to voice current Mapuche political demands without resorting to supplantation.</p>","PeriodicalId":46171,"journal":{"name":"Popular Music","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142253199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Popular MusicPub Date : 2024-09-16DOI: 10.1017/s0261143024000266
Lee Marshall
{"title":"The Greatest Rock and Soul Band in the World? The Rolling Stones, genre and race","authors":"Lee Marshall","doi":"10.1017/s0261143024000266","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143024000266","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The Rolling Stones played a core role in establishing the generic conventions of rock. A key ideological element of this was the band's reverential dedication to the blues and the importance of the blues to their musical development. However, what is much less recognised is the influence of soul on the band's sound. By looking at the band's repertoire, composition and performing style, this paper explores the influence that soul, particularly Southern soul, had on the band's formative years and argues that, in many ways, they have adopted the aesthetic conventions of soul, rather than rock, for the majority of their career. Rethinking The Stones’ style in this way may help us better understand their position in the rock canon, while also encouraging careful interrogation of the racialised division of rock and soul that emerged in the late 1960s.</p>","PeriodicalId":46171,"journal":{"name":"Popular Music","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142253198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Popular MusicPub Date : 2024-09-16DOI: 10.1017/s0261143024000217
Cynthia J. Cyrus
{"title":"Celtic music, Shakespeare and fandom","authors":"Cynthia J. Cyrus","doi":"10.1017/s0261143024000217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143024000217","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Why would Celtic women performers invoke a dead colonialist English poet in their airs and dance sets? This article provides close readings of Shakespearean elements in the musical compositions of gold- and platinum-selling artists Loreena McKennitt, Ensemble Galilei, and Méav. It assesses the archaicising musical language, structural reshapings, and ekphrastic elements as signals of ‘restitutional creativity’ and trans-temporal collaboration. It also analyses the reception of these works by fans and critics, responses replete with invocations of tradition and of timelessness. Like the fanfic-producing enthusiasts of Johnathan Pope's <span>Shakespeare's Fans</span>, the fans for Celtic music capitalise on their awareness of Shakespearean elements in this music to display personal expertise. In so doing, they enhance their own belonging within the Celtic music community.</p>","PeriodicalId":46171,"journal":{"name":"Popular Music","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142253197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Popular MusicPub Date : 2024-06-05DOI: 10.1017/s0261143024000199
Ozan Eren
{"title":"Kardeş Türküler as ‘art action’: The multiple cultural heritages of Anatolia","authors":"Ozan Eren","doi":"10.1017/s0261143024000199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143024000199","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article focuses on Kardeş Türküler, a band that reflects the multiple cultural heritages of Anatolia in its concerts and albums. Kardeş Türküler has taken a unique stance in choosing to express itself from a culturally pluralistic perspective rather than following a single language or identity. Referring to Kardeş Türküler as ‘art action’, and utilising the non-reductive methods of John Street that focus on the two-way interaction between music and politics, I conducted in-depth interviews in 2017, 2020 and 2021 with the core members and the former coach of the group regarding its intellectual roots and internal modus operandi. There are three main reasons for Kardeş Türküler's deep engagement with music as protest: being against the cultural–artistic policies of the Republican period; the political meaning of making multilingual music in Turkiye; and Kardeş Türküler's engagement with post-neoliberal street protests such as the Gezi Park movement.</p>","PeriodicalId":46171,"journal":{"name":"Popular Music","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141254702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Popular MusicPub Date : 2024-05-06DOI: 10.1017/s0261143024000059
Nick Braae
{"title":"Musical humour and caricatures in The Book of Mormon","authors":"Nick Braae","doi":"10.1017/s0261143024000059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143024000059","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the musical techniques used to create humour in the contemporary Broadway musical <jats:italic>The Book of Mormon</jats:italic>. Drawing on existing theories of parody, I argue that most songs initially rely on ‘straight’ and accurate imitations of other Broadway composers and pop-rock artists to set up an incongruity with the characters’ words or actions. There is a tendency then for these intertextual references to be layered or exaggerated, giving the joke in question an overblown quality. I adopt the novel label of a ‘musical caricature’ to describe such instances. This analysis thus presents a new methodological tool for studying musical humour; it also offers insights into <jats:italic>The Book of Mormon</jats:italic>'s critical success as well as the writers’ ability to evade censure for the crude and potentially offensive thematic content.","PeriodicalId":46171,"journal":{"name":"Popular Music","volume":"64 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140925566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Popular MusicPub Date : 2024-04-29DOI: 10.1017/s0261143024000138
Simon Frith
{"title":"Lives in Music","authors":"Simon Frith","doi":"10.1017/s0261143024000138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143024000138","url":null,"abstract":"<p>One of the more annoying aspects of the life of a popular music academic is that we study music that is primarily made and used by people who seem to have no interest at all in what we have to say. Popular musicians and fans are engaged with <span>what</span> we're talking about but not with <span>how</span> we talk about it. When the first volume of our history of live music came out, covering 1950–67 (Frith <span>et al</span>. 2013), I did some non-academic promotional work for it – presenting our book at a literary festival, library events and pensioners’ clubs (these were the people who had lived through what we were describing). Audiences were, like my non-academic friends, sufficiently interested in live music history to discuss our findings with enthusiasm but, at the same time, found the book unreadable. They couldn't be doing with academic research conventions, with the references constantly interrupting the narrative flow, with the painstaking collection and assessment of evidence, the stolid back and forth between the particular (the facts) and the general (the concepts).</p>","PeriodicalId":46171,"journal":{"name":"Popular Music","volume":"101 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140810963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Popular MusicPub Date : 2024-04-18DOI: 10.1017/s0261143024000102
Felix Christian Thiesen
{"title":"Taking stock of a discourse: An integrative content analysis of musical structures and cultural stereotypes in top-10 German Schlager songs from 2009 to 2019","authors":"Felix Christian Thiesen","doi":"10.1017/s0261143024000102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143024000102","url":null,"abstract":"<p>German Schlager's simple and static musical form is considered by many authors as an immutable key factor in the genre's overall success. However, the introduction of break routines and pop drops to the genre seem to refute this point of view. Cultural references and musical clichés are also integral parts of Schlager's staging. This paper presents an integrative content analysis of 548 songs from 2009 to 2019 with the aim of observing trends in musical form and the use of both cultural references and musical clichés in contemporary Schlager. Overall, the corpus shows more variability than expected, featuring a growing number of structural parts. Contrary to strong claims, the genre is undergoing a change in musical structure. However, whether this also applies to the reproduction of certain stereotypes in song lyrics remains to be seen: about a quarter of the songs contain cultural references, outnumbering musical clichés by a factor of three.</p>","PeriodicalId":46171,"journal":{"name":"Popular Music","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140617643","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Popular MusicPub Date : 2024-04-02DOI: 10.1017/s0261143024000035
Sophie Frankford
{"title":"The Musicians’ Syndicate and the contradictions of state control over music in Egypt","authors":"Sophie Frankford","doi":"10.1017/s0261143024000035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143024000035","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Based on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo with musicians who perform a musical style known as <span>shaʿbi</span>, this article unravels the complex role that the state-affiliated Musicians’ Syndicate plays in musicians’ working lives in order to investigate the contradictions of state control over music in Egypt. Focusing on moments of encounter between musicians and Syndicate officials, I consider why my interlocutors’ time was split between evading the Syndicate and its restrictions, and embracing the Syndicate by calling for it to implement harsher interventions. Doing so not only sheds light on the reality of cultural production in an authoritarian state, but also prompts a broader reconsideration of scholarly approaches to popular music censorship, requiring us to move beyond dichotomies of ‘state <span>vs.</span> society,’ ‘censors <span>vs.</span> censored,’ and ‘resistors <span>vs.</span> oppressors’ that have tended to dominate scholarship on music censorship.</p>","PeriodicalId":46171,"journal":{"name":"Popular Music","volume":"50 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140585971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Popular MusicPub Date : 2024-03-19DOI: 10.1017/s0261143023000521
Joseph Coughlan-Allen
{"title":"Unknown Pleasure: interpretations of the mystery hiss in Feist's 2017 album","authors":"Joseph Coughlan-Allen","doi":"10.1017/s0261143023000521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143023000521","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the critical reception of Feist's 2017 album <jats:italic>Pleasure</jats:italic>, and interpretations by reviewers of the mysterious hiss that permeates most of the album's tracks. I firstly contextualise <jats:italic>Pleasure</jats:italic> in relation to the aesthetics of record production. I then examine interviews with Feist and her collaborators to identify the source of the hiss, and explain its presence on <jats:italic>Pleasure</jats:italic>. Lastly, I examine a corpus of 20 reviews, showcasing how critics (mis)identified and (mis)interpreted the sound, as well as the effect of this on their overall understanding of the album. To explain the relationship between the hiss and accompanying music, I assume a semiotic perspective. Following Poyatos, I regard these two kinds of sound as part of distinct yet related cosystems of signs, loosely analogous to the relationship between verbal utterances and nonverbal behaviours in face-to-face communication. Through this lens, I analyse how <jats:italic>Pleasure'</jats:italic>s hiss was heard to modify, support, emphasise and undermine the meaning of the music by reviewers.","PeriodicalId":46171,"journal":{"name":"Popular Music","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2024-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140168844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}