Interpreting Popular Music
- Author: Brackett, David
With this book, David Brackett takes his place among the handful of musicologists who are leading the development of a critical musicology for popular music. In clear prose, through a thoughtful,...
Interpreting Popular Music
- Author: Brackett, David
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With this book, David Brackett takes his place among the handful of musicologists who are leading the development of a critical musicology for popular music. In clear prose, through a thoughtful,...
About
There is a well-developed vocabulary for discussing classical music, but when it comes to popular music, how do we analyze its effects and its meaning? David Brackett draws from the disciplines of cultural studies and music theory to demonstrate how listeners form opinions about popular songs, and how they come to attribute a rich variety of meanings to them. Exploring several genres of popular music through recordings made by Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Hank Williams, James Brown, and Elvis Costello, Brackett develops a set of tools for looking at both the formal and cultural dimensions of popular music of all kinds.
Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- Prelude
- I. Codes and competences
- II. Who is the author?
- III. Musicology and popular music
- IV. Postlude
- 2 Family values in music? Billie Holiday's and Bing Crosby's
- "I'll Be Seeing You"
- I. A tale of two (or three) recordings
- II. Critical discourse
- III. Biographical discourse
- IV. Style and history
- V. Performance, effect, and affect
- 3 When you're lookin' at Hank (you're looking at country)
- I. Lyrics, metanarratives, and the great authenticity debate
- II. Sound, performance, gender, and the hanky-tonk
- III. "A feeling called the blues"
- IV. The emergence of "country-western"
- 4 James Brown's "Superbad" and the double-voiced utterance
- I. The discursive space of black music
- II. Signifyin(g)-words and performance
- III. Musical signifyin(g)
- 5 Writing, music, dancing, and architecture in Elvis Costello's
- "Pills and Soap"
- I. The "popular aesthetic"
- II. Style and aesthetics
- III. Interpretation and (post)modern pop
- IV. A question of influence
- 6 Afterword: the citizens of Simpleton
- Appendix
- A. Reading the spectrum photos
- B. Registral terminology
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Select discography
- Index
Awards and reviews
Notes: Journal of the Music Library Association
With this book, David Brackett takes his place among the handful of musicologists who are leading the development of a critical musicology for popular music. In clear prose, through a thoughtful, engaging authorial voice, Brackett offers six essays that are unified by his desire to create and refine ways of talking about how popular music works. . . . [Brackett's book] is not only much more illuminating and theoretically sophisticated than nearly all of its predecessors, but also more so than most of what has appeared subsequently
