Switched on Pop

Switched on Pop PDF Author: Nate Sloan
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190056657
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
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.

Switched on Pop

Switched on Pop PDF Author: Nate Sloan
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190056657
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Listen to Pop!

Listen to Pop! PDF Author: James E. Perone
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440863776
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Listen to Pop! discusses the evolution of pop music in America from the 1950s to the present, diving into its impact on American culture, particularly through its association with television, and its enduring legacy. Listen to Pop!: Exploring a Musical Genre provides readers with an overview and a history of the pop music genre. The bulk of the book is devoted to analysis of 50 must-hear musical examples, which include artists, songs, and albums. Additionally, the book contains chapters that analyze the impact of pop music on American popular culture and the legacy of pop music, including how the music is used today in film and television soundtracks and in television commercials. The book deals with all of the various subgenres of pop music from the 1950s to the present. The selection of material discussed reflects the artists, songs, and albums topping the pop music charts of the period, and while the volume examines these items individually, it also discusses how our definition of pop music has evolved over the decades. This combination of detailed examination of specific songs, albums, and artists and discussion of background, legacy, and impact distinguishes it from other books on the subject and make it a vital reference and interesting read for all readers and music aficionados.

How to Listen to Pop Music

How to Listen to Pop Music PDF Author: Nick Bollinger
Publisher: Ginger
ISBN: 9780958250962
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This comprehensive and illuminating guide explores the entire spectrum of pop music, from Beatlemania and the long-playing record to Eminem and the iPod.

Pop Song Piracy

Pop Song Piracy PDF Author: Barry Kernfeld
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226431835
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
The music industry’s ongoing battle against digital piracy is just the latest skirmish in a long conflict over who has the right to distribute music. Starting with music publishers’ efforts to stamp out bootleg compilations of lyric sheets in 1929, Barry Kernfeld’s Pop Song Piracy details nearly a century of disobedient music distribution from song sheets to MP3s. In the 1940s and ’50s, Kernfeld reveals, song sheets were succeeded by fake books, unofficial volumes of melodies and lyrics for popular songs that were a key tool for musicians. Music publishers attempted to wipe out fake books, but after their efforts proved unsuccessful they published their own. Pop Song Piracy shows that this pattern of disobedience, prohibition, and assimilation recurred in each conflict over unauthorized music distribution, from European pirate radio stations to bootlegged live shows. Beneath this pattern, Kernfeld argues, there exists a complex give and take between distribution methods that merely copy existing songs (such as counterfeit CDs) and ones that transform songs into new products (such as file sharing). Ultimately, he contends, it was the music industry’s persistent lagging behind in creating innovative products that led to the very piracy it sought to eliminate.

Can't Slow Down

Can't Slow Down PDF Author: Michaelangelo Matos
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 0306903350
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
A Rolling Stone-Kirkus Best Music Book of 2020 The definitive account of pop music in the mid-eighties, from Prince and Madonna to the underground hip-hop, indie rock, and club scenes Everybody knows the hits of 1984 - pop music's greatest year. From "Thriller" to "Purple Rain," "Hello" to "Against All Odds," "What's Love Got to Do with It" to "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," these iconic songs continue to dominate advertising, karaoke nights, and the soundtracks for film classics (Boogie Nights) and TV hits (Stranger Things). But the story of that thrilling, turbulent time, an era when Top 40 radio was both the leading edge of popular culture and a moral battleground, has never been told with the full detail it deserves - until now. Can't Slow Down is the definitive portrait of the exploding world of mid-eighties pop and the time it defined, from Cold War anxiety to the home-computer revolution. Big acts like Michael Jackson (Thriller), Prince (Purple Rain), Madonna (Like a Virgin), Bruce Springsteen (Born in the U.S.A.), and George Michael (Wham!'s Make It Big) rubbed shoulders with the stars of the fermenting scenes of hip-hop, indie rock, and club music. Rigorously researched, mapping the entire terrain of American pop, with crucial side trips to the UK and Jamaica, from the biz to the stars to the upstarts and beyond, Can't Slow Down is a vivid journey to the very moment when pop was remaking itself, and the culture at large - one hit at a time.

Dialectic of Pop

Dialectic of Pop PDF Author: Agnes Gayraud
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1913029603
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
A philosophical exploration of pop music that reveals a rich, self-reflexive art form with unsuspected depths. In the first major philosophical treatise on the subject, Agnès Gayraud explores all the paradoxes of pop—its inauthentic authenticity, its mass production of emotion and personal resonance, its repetitive novelty, its precision engineering of seduction—and calls for pop (in its broadest sense, encompassing all genres of popular recorded music) to be recognized as a modern, technologically mediated art form to rank alongside cinema and photography. In a thoroughgoing engagement with Adorno's fierce critique of "standardized light popular music," Dialectic of Pop tracks the transformations of the pop form and its audience over the course of the twentieth century, from Hillbilly to Beyoncé, from Lead Belly to Drake. Inseparable from the materiality of its technical media, indifferent and intractable to the perspectives of high culture, pop subverts notions of authenticity and inauthenticity, original and copy, aura and commodity, medium and message. Gayraud demonstrates that, far from being the artless and trivial mass-produced pabulum denigrated by Adorno, pop is a rich, self-reflexive artform that recognises its own contradictions, incorporates its own productive negativity, and often flourishes by thinking "against itself." Dialectic of Pop sings the praises of pop as a constitutively impure form resulting from the encounter between industrial production and the human predilection for song, and diagnoses the prospects for twenty-first century pop as it continues to adapt to ever-changing technological mediations.

Girls Can Kiss Now

Girls Can Kiss Now PDF Author: Jill Gutowitz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982158506
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A "collection of personal essays exploring the intersection of queerness, relationships, pop culture, the Internet, and identity, introducing one of the most undeniably original new voices today. Jill Gutowitz's life--for better and worse--has always been on a collision course with pop culture, [including] ... the pivotal day when Orange Is the New Black hit the airwaves and broke down the door to Jill's own sexuality. In these honest examinations of identity, desire, and self-worth, Jill explores perhaps the most monumental cultural shift of our lifetimes: the mainstreaming of lesbian culture"--

Listen Again

Listen Again PDF Author: Eric Weisbard
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822340416
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
DIVCollection of essays on the history of pop music./div

Listen Again

Listen Again PDF Author: Eric Weisbard
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390558
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Arguing that pop music turns on moments rather than movements, the essays in Listen Again pinpoint magic moments from a century of pop eclecticism, looking at artists who fall between genre lines, songs that sponge up influences from everywhere, and studio accidents with unforeseen consequences. Listen Again collects some of the finest presentations from the celebrated Experience Music Project Pop Conference, where journalists, musicians, academics, and other culturemongers come together once each year to stretch the boundaries of pop music culture, criticism, and scholarship. Building a history of pop music out of unexpected instances, critics and musicians delve into topics from the early-twentieth-century black performer Bert Williams’s use of blackface, to the invention of the Delta blues category by a forgotten record collector named James McKune, to an ER cast member’s performance as the Germs’ front man Darby Crash at a Germs reunion show. Cuban music historian Ned Sublette zeroes in on the signature riff of the garage-band staple “Louie, Louie.” David Thomas of the pioneering punk band Pere Ubu honors one of his forebears: Ghoulardi, a late-night monster-movie host on Cleveland-area TV in the 1960s. Benjamin Melendez discusses playing in a band, the Ghetto Brothers, that Latinized the Beatles, while leading a South Bronx gang, also called the Ghetto Brothers. Michaelangelo Matos traces the lineage of the hip-hop sample “Apache” to a Burt Lancaster film. Whether reflecting on the ringing freedom of an E chord or the significance of Bill Tate, who performed once in 1981 as Buddy Holocaust and was never heard from again, the essays reveal why Robert Christgau, a founder of rock criticism, has called the EMP Pop Conference “the best thing that’s ever happened to serious consideration of pop music.” Contributors. David Brackett, Franklin Bruno, Daphne Carr, Henry Chalfant, Jeff Chang, Drew Daniel, Robert Fink, Holly George-Warren, Lavinia Greenlaw, Marybeth Hamilton, Jason King, Josh Kun, W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Greil Marcus, Michaelangelo Matos, Benjamin Melendez, Mark Anthony Neal, Ned Sublette, David Thomas, Steve Waksman, Eric Weisbard

Glitter Up the Dark

Glitter Up the Dark PDF Author: Sasha Geffen
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 147731878X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Why has music so often served as an accomplice to transcendent expressions of gender? Why did the query "is he musical?" become code, in the twentieth century, for "is he gay?" Why is music so inherently queer? For Sasha Geffen, the answers lie, in part, in music’s intrinsic quality of subliminal expression, which, through paradox and contradiction, allows rigid gender roles to fall away in a sensual and ambiguous exchange between performer and listener. Glitter Up the Dark traces the history of this gender fluidity in pop music from the early twentieth century to the present day. Starting with early blues and the Beatles and continuing with performers such as David Bowie, Prince, Missy Elliot, and Frank Ocean, Geffen explores how artists have used music, fashion, language, and technology to break out of the confines mandated by gender essentialism and establish the voice as the primary expression of gender transgression. From glam rock and punk to disco, techno, and hip-hop, music helped set the stage for today’s conversations about trans rights and recognition of nonbinary and third-gender identities. Glitter Up the Dark takes a long look back at the path that led here.