On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements

By Kai Arne Hansen

On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements comprises eleven essays that explore the myriad ways in which popular music is entwined within social, cultural, musical, historical, and media networks. The authors discuss genres as diverse as mainstream pop, hip hop, classic rock, instrumental synthwave, video game music, amateur ukelele groups, and audiovisual remixes, while also considering the music’s relationship to technological developments, various media and material(itie)s, and personal and social identity. The collection presents a range of different methodologies and theoretical positions, which results in an eclecticism that aptly demonstrates the breadth of contemporary popular music research. The chapters are divided into three major sections that address: wider theoretical and analytical issues (“Broad Strokes”), familiar repertoire or concepts from a new perspective (“Second Takes”), and the meanings to arise from music’s connections with other media forms (“Audiovisual Entanglements”).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Nov 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030180997

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2019

N. Braae, K. A. Hansen (eds.)On Popular Music and Its Unruly EntanglementsPop Music, Culture and Identityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18099-7_1

1. To Begin Untangling Popular Music

Kai Arne Hansen¹   and Nick Braae²  

(1)

Department of Art and Cultural Studies, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Hamar, Norway

(2)

School of Media Arts, Waikato Institute of Technology, Hamilton, New Zealand

Kai Arne Hansen (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Nick Braae

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable, wrote American composer and conductor Aaron Copland in 1959. By wilfully misreading him, we can consider how, 60 years later, music flows unstoppably through our lives—and, indeed, our lives flow unstoppably through music—in ways that would have been unimaginable for Copland at the time. Music is ubiquitous on a day-to-day basis: it pervades urban spaces (cafés, restaurants, shops, street corners, and subway stations) and contemporary broadcasting channels (radio, TV, web), and provides a soundtrack for our commutes, chores, and exercise routines; it can be recorded and produced by anyone using software pre-installed on our devices, and distributed freely through open global platforms; and, it is organized in vast sonic libraries found on smartphones, tablets, and watches, tailored to our specific tastes via complex algorithms. As clichéd as it may sound, music is instantly available with the click of a button (and, often, a small monthly fee).¹ Now more than ever before, it is easy to see (yet, possibly, all the more difficult to fully grasp) the myriad forms that musical experiences take.

On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements presents a selection of essays that aims to capture something of the way in which popular music weaves into our society, culture, and lives. As already implied, one central aspect of this relates to the implications of new media technologies. However, as Henry Jenkins observes (2006, 2–3), our contemporary media culture is defined not only by technological developments, but also by changes in social and cultural practices, in modes of consumption and listening, and in relations between artists and fans. As listeners today, we grapple with making sense of music at a time when new musical forms appear seemingly out of nowhere, bringing with them additional questions with regard to ethics and aesthetics; the boundaries between different genres and styles can appear increasingly fluid, or even non-existent; and music frequently, if not primarily, operates and develops meaning in conjunction with other media and art forms. Put bluntly, the magnitude and velocity of recent technological and cultural developments—in popular music practices and more generally in the Western world—challenge our ability to keep pace with meaning in our time (Richardson and Gorbman 2013, 32). This collection recognizes this issue not as an opportunity for singling out any one aspect or function of popular music that necessitates further study, but, rather, as a platform for mobilizing popular music as the focal point for a plurality of investigations into its various connections, intersections, and entanglements. Yet, while current circumstances put into stark focus the ways in which popular music is entwined with other cultural and social forms, this is not a new or technologically-dependent phenomenon. Many of popular music’s connections are, to be sure, historical or abstract, as some of our authors demonstrate.

Popular music itself, both as a general category and as an object of study, is notoriously difficult to pin down (Moore 2007, xi; Scott 2009, 5). Partly, this is because it never exists in isolation, cannot be encountered outside of discourse, and is invariably produced and consumed in relation to vast networks of meaningful connections and relationships. It follows that, as Richard Middleton points out, the musical worlds that we inhabit are not clear sets, filled with autonomous entities which are foreign to each other and connected only via neutral ‘links’; rather, they are half-way worlds, without clear boundaries, filled with transient knots of variable meaning, practice and status (2000, 10). Middleton’s argument sets the stage for untangling popular music, by shedding light on its entwinement with diverse historical, cultural, and social circumstances and practices, and assessing how it intersects with other idioms and media forms. In undertaking this task, we recognize that popular music is not any one thing, but, rather, can be defined according to a broad range of (admittedly unstable) criteria (see, for example, Tagg 2012, 43ff.).

Inquiring into the state, significance, and function of popular music, in its many guises, On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements explores a wide range of music—both recent and older—with an aim to reflect the plurality of potential meanings and understandings that underpins all musical encounters. As such, the collection is informed and shaped by the diversity and eclecticism that has taken hold within the broad academic discipline of popular music research. In following on from the strides made in previous decades by scholars within critical musicology and adjacent fields (see Hawkins 2012; Moore 2007; Scott 2009), we would like to think that the days of disciplinary hand-wringing and the almost-apologetically or defiant justifications of researching popular music are coming to an end. Indeed, while earlier scholars had to grapple with popular music’s seemingly low status as an object of academic study (Moore 1993, 9), the last few decades have seen popular music gain recognition in numerous scholarly fields.²

There remains a strong interest in studying popular music’s relation to different aspects of identity, including age (Bennett 2013; Bennett and Hodkinson 2012; Jennings and Gardner 2012), gender and sexuality (Hawkins 2016, 2017; Lee 2018), race and ethnicity (Maultsby and Burnim 2016; Stoever 2016), and religion (Ingalls 2018; Partridge and Moberg 2017). Recent collections have ambitiously aimed to tackle popular music in its breadth (Bennett and Waksman 2015), have elucidated its articulation in music video (Burns and Hawkins 2019), or have expanded analytical approaches (Burns and Lacasse 2018; Scotto et al. 2018; Spicer and Covach 2010). Scholarship on the production aspects of popular music is proliferating (Bennett and Bates 2018; Frith and Zagorski-Thomas 2012; Zagorski-Thomas 2014). And, not least, popular music is increasingly gaining prominence within the educational context, as evidenced by recent publications (Moir et al. 2019; Smith et al. 2017) as well as the launch of the Journal of Popular Music Education in 2017. Prompted by this diversity of current popular music scholarship, On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements aims to present a range of co-existing and mutually supportive (even if apparently contradicting) approaches to the analysis and study of popular music. By deliberately embracing eclecticism, we hope to foster increased engagement between different specialized approaches, thus countering a potential fragmentation of the field. The chapters are underpinned by two primary objectives:

To challenge, explore, or discuss some of the often taken-for-granted ideas, assumptions, and conventions concerning researching particular repertoires and formats, thus illuminating the permeable and negotiable boundaries between different idioms, media, art forms, eras, and cultural spaces.

To reach into hitherto underexplored musical domains, tease out connections and entanglements that on the surface might appear unlikely, and introduce rich dialogue between different spheres of the musical (and nonmusical) world(s).

Both objectives are intended to function as launching pads for merging analytical dexterity with ardent curiosity. This might be by way of demonstrating wider methodological applicability, or through highlighting resonances, parallels, or other such historical, musical, cultural, or media connections. As such, the contributors of this collection join Allan F. Moore in viewing the study of music as an invitation to engage with or understand music in a particular way (2012, 3), well aware that such an invitation should be dispersed both with careful consideration and with great engagement: engagement with the reader, with the music in question, and not least with the wide variety of discourses and contexts any given musical example mobilizes. The most compelling invitation, then, might well be the one that confronts some of the reader’s comfortable assumptions and thus encourages new ways of thinking about and experiencing music.

On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements is divided into three parts: Broad Strokes, Second Takes, and Audiovisual Entanglements. While there is some evident overlap between the issues taken up across chapters and sections, these distinctions serve to frame the individual contributions vis-à-vis the central objectives of the collection. The first part of the book, Broad Strokes, deals with the breadth of particular concepts in relation to music, as well as issues of broad temporal, cultural, and theoretical significance. Kyle Devine’s chapter looks outside of the musical text to explore questions about music in relation to matters of identity, infrastructures, and industry, as well as the flows of media. In what might be viewed as a bold move, he proposes the viability of a musicology without music, not in an effort to discredit or oppose existing approaches to music analysis, but rather as a way of opening up various politics of exclusion in order to access some of the less investigated ways that music plays a constitutive role in the world. Primarily concerned with what he calls the technosocial conditions of music, Devine demonstrates how a mediatic approach can unveil histories of ecology, industry, war, gender, and labor exploitation. Moving from histories to stories, Alexander C. Harden adds to the growing body of literature on narrative in popular music (Liu-Rosenbaum 2012; Negus 2012; Nicholls 2007; Watson and Burns 2010) by accounting for the ways in which listeners narrativize popular music. Bringing a cognitive conception of narrativization to bear on popular song, Harden engages with a range of theories and methods to think broadly about the sensemaking activities involved in interpreting musical experiences. His chapter provides a starting point for adding further nuance to understandings of musical narrativity, and encourages the continued systematic development of its study.

Matthew Bannister looks broadly at a practice that is under-represented in popular music scholarship, namely amateur music-making. Bannister brings an ethnographic survey of ukulele groups into contact with theories of musical participation, making new incursions into a sphere of music that has received little scholarly attention.³ He raises questions regarding the purposes of musical performance for its participants, and the connections between amateur musicians and broader social and musical worlds. Furthermore, he provides us with a reminder that for many musicians, there are a variety of ways of knowing a text, whether in terms of technical details (structure, harmonic language), an experiential state, or simply imitation of others, with all of these providing equal opportunities for participants to create personal and musical meanings. In the final chapter of the section, Nick Braae investigates notions of temporality as pertaining to popular music, with a specific focus on linear or goal-directed time. These enquiries are prompted by discussions with contemporary performance, songwriting, and composition students, in which such ideas are often informally invoked, but with little precision as to how they relate to musical techniques. This is unsurprising given scholars have been divided over the articulation and relevance of linear time in a popular music context, especially vis-à-vis the classical idiom, in which this temporal state has been extensively addressed. Braae’s chapter points to a variety of different performance techniques that may foster a sense of linear narratives in popular music, thereby offering a fresh perspective on both the nature of popular music, and indeed its underlying connections with the practice of storytelling.

The chapters in the next part of the book, Second Takes, present new perspectives on familiar material, or question commonly held assumptions about researching particular idioms, genres, and texts. The former approach is demonstrated by Susanna Välimäki’s investigation into the representation of war and trauma in the songs of Bruce Springsteen. Välimäki identifies, in existing research on Springsteen’s war songs (Harde 2013; Neiberg and Citino 2016; Schneider 2014, 2018), a lack of engagement with the musical elements that contribute to the representation of trauma. She redresses the balance by focusing on the musical means that contribute to constructing a discourse of trauma in Springsteen’s songs, illustrating that popular music can serve as a shared sonic space of collective mourning. The following chapter, written by Erik Steinskog, is also concerned with shared concepts and frames of reference, exploring connections between Richard Wagner and Jimi Hendrix through the lens of the thingness of sound. Embedded in Steinskog’s proposition that listening to Hendrix might teach us how to listen to Wagner, is a statement about the significance of technologies and resources for the production (and reception) of musical sound. In different ways, Steinskog argues, Wagner and Hendrix contribute to sound becoming material, which in turn facilitates new perspectives on music and its place in the world.

The two remaining chapters of this section argue for alternative ways of addressing the musical persona (Auslander 2006, 2009; Hansen 2019; Moore 2012), albeit with very different foci and outcomes. Engaging with the complexities of musical expressivity, and providing an alternative to scholarship primarily studying the persona as articulated through vocals and lyrics (e.g. Gelbart 2003; Moore 2012; Tagg 2012), Andrei Sora proposes a model for assessing the persona in instrumental synthwave music. Building on existing models, Sora prioritizes technique over meaning in unpacking the musical means that construct the instrumental persona. Decentering the role of the voice in popular music, his approach opens up new analytical avenues for investigating musical expressivity through the lens of the persona. Contrasting Sora’s approach, Steven Gamble focuses on the reception of the persona as a gateway for investigating empowerment in music listening. Merging perspectives from the ecological approach to perception and embodied cognition, Gamble applies psychological theories of power and empowerment to music analysis. He discusses a range of empowering affordances which emerge through the listening process, explicating new connections between popular music personae and the listener.

In the final part, Audiovisual Entanglements, authors inquire into the blurred boundaries between popular music and other media phenomena. Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen turns her attention to new musical forms afforded by digital technologies, more specifically what she characterizes as user-generated audiovisual remixes, and the role of humor within this domain. Applying humor theories developed within the fields of philosophy, linguistics, and psychology to the study of audiovisual texts, she navigates a range of interrelated aesthetic, ethical, and political issues that are raised by remix culture. Ambiguity, Brøvig-Hanssen argues, is a characteristic feature of remixes which results from their multiple functions, and which opens up a space within which audiences can take pleasure in negotiating various meanings. In a chapter that analyzes the music of the video game Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Megan Lavengood details the intertextual associations afforded by the musical parameter timbre.⁴ Working from an understanding of the soundtrack as polystylistic (whereby diverse and seemingly incongruous styles are juxtaposed), she demonstrates how the varied choices of musical style relate to the different settings of the game’s levels through a rich web of genre associations that pertain to both musical and cultural factors. Lavengood demonstrates that such intertextual associations stem primarily from manipulations of timbre, thereby adding to the fledgling number of studies of popular music that examine this parameter in close technical detail.⁵ Ultimately, her study shows that the integration and juxtaposition of musical and visual codes can function to communicate complex meanings.

In the final chapter of the section, Kai Arne Hansen employs an intermedial approach to investigate the identity politics entailed in representations of violence in popular music. Supplementing scholarship on the role of music and sound in violent contexts (Daughtry 2015; Gilman 2016; Pieslak 2009), he addresses the audiovisual aestheticization of violence. Casting a wide net, Hansen demonstrates that the representation of violence in music video is entangled with the aesthetic conventions of other media, as well as a broader cultural fascination for taboo themes. Closing the collection, Allan F. Moore reflects on some of the broader issues raised by the contributors and the collection as a whole. Given that many of the chapters implicitly or explicitly tell stories about people, one of Moore’s concerns is with musical narratives. He also raises issues of sonic quiddity, and ponders the purposes of studying popular music. The collection thus closes with a contemplation of the philosophies and objectives that underpin popular music scholarship.

For many of us as writers, teachers, and practitioners, our lives are intertwined in different types and contexts of music, each cascading from the other. From a scholarly, institutional, and, indeed, personal perspective, it would appear that we increasingly are engaged with music as a multifaceted, multidimensional, and malleable concept. While the singular chapters, in and of themselves, cannot adequately document the richness of these experiences, we hope that the collection, as a whole, will capture some of this spirit and mode of engagement with music that frequently brings us so much enjoyment and stimulation. At the very least, we hope that readers of On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements will discover a new appreciation for an area of the musical landscape that had previously eluded their scholarly grasp, whether in terms of the people or materials involved in creating music, the connections between idioms, or the complementary relationships between music as represented in different media forms. And this may, in turn, encourage readers to reflect on their own entanglements—socially, culturally, virtually, technologically, musically—with the sounds around them.

References

Auslander, Philip. 2006. Musical Personae. The Drama Review 50 (1): 100–119.

———. 2009. Musical Persona: The Physical Performance of Popular Music. In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott, 303–315. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Bennett, Andy. 2013. Music, Style, and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully? Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Bennett, Andy, and Paul Hodkinson, eds. 2012. Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity. London: Bloomsbury.

Bennett, Andy, and Steve Waksman, eds. 2015. The Sage Handbook of Popular Music. London: Sage.

Bennett, Samantha, and Eliot Bates, eds. 2018. Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound. New York: Bloomsbury.

Blake, David K. 2012. Timbre as Differentiation in Indie Music. Music Theory Online 18 (2).

Burns, Lori, and Stan Hawkins, eds. 2019. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Burns, Lori, and Serge Lacasse, eds. 2018. The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Burns, Lori, and Alyssa Woods. 2018. Rap Gods and Monsters; Words, Music, and Images in the Hip-Hop Intertexts of Eminem, Jay-Z, and Kanye West. In The Pop Palimpsest, ed. Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse, 215–251. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Butler, Mark. 2003. Taking it Seriously: Intertextuality and Authenticity in Two Covers by the Pet Shop Boys. Popular Music 22 (1): 1–19.

Copland, Aaron. 1959. The Pleasures of Music. The Saturday Evening Post. http://​www.​saturdayeveningp​ost.​com/​wp-content/​uploads/​satevepost/​the_​pleasures_​of_​music_​by_​aaron_​copeland.​pdf

Covach, John. 1995. Stylistic Competencies, Musical Humor and This Is Spinal Tap. In Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytic Studies, ed. Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann, 399–421. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.

Daughtry, J.Martin. 2015. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Eisentraut, Jochen. 2013. The Accessibility of Music: Participation, Reception, and Contact. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Finnegan, Ruth. 2007. The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Frith, Simon, and Simon Zagorski-Thomas. 2012. The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field. Farnham: Ashgate.

Gelbart, Matthew. 2003. Persona and Voice in the Kinks’ Songs of the Late 1960s. Journal of the Royal Musical Association 128 (2): 200–241.

Gilman, Lisa. 2016. My Music, My War: The Listening Habits of U.S. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Hansen, Kai Arne. 2019. (Re)Reading Pop Personae: A Transmedial Approach to Studying the Multiple Construction of Artist Identities. Twentieth-Century Music 16 (3): 501–529.

Harde, Roxanne. 2013. Living in Your American Skin: Bruce Springsteen and the Possibility of Politics. Canadian Review of American Studies 43 (1): 125–144.

Hawkins, Stan. 2012. Great, Scott! In Critical Musicological Reflections: Essays in Honour of Derek B. Scott, ed. Stan Hawkins, 1–20. Farnham: Ashgate.

———. 2016. Queerness in Pop Music: Aesthetics, Gender Norms, and Temporality. New York and London: Routledge.

———, ed. 2017. The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender. New York: Routledge.

———. 2018. Performative Strategies and Musical Markers in the Eurythmics’ I Need a Man. In The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music, ed. Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse, 252–270. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Heidemann, Kate. 2016. A System for Describing Vocal Timbre in Popular Song. Music Theory Online 22 (1).

Holm-Hudson, Kevin. 2001. The Future is Now … and Then: Sonic Historiography in Post-1960s Rock. Genre 34 (3–4): 243–264.

Ingalls, Monique M. 2018. Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Jennings, Ros, and Abigail Gardner, eds. 2012. Rock On: Women, Aging and Popular Music. Farnham: Ashgate.

Kassabian, Anahid. 2013. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lee, Gavin, ed. 2018. Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music. London: Routledge.

Liu-Rosenbaum, Aaron. 2012. The Meaning in the Mix: Tracing a Sonic Narrative in When the Levee Breaks. Journal on the Art of Record Production 7.

Maultsby, Portia K., and Mellonnee V. Burnim, eds. 2016. Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation. New York: Routledge.

Middleton, Richard. 2000. Introduction. In Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music, ed. Richard Middleton, 1–19. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Moir, Zack, Bryan Powell, and Gareth Dylan Smith, eds. 2019. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education: Perspectives and Practices. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Moore, Allan F. 1993. Rock: The Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press.

———. 2007. Introduction. In Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, ed. Allan F. Moore, ix–xxii. Aldershot: Ashgate.

———. 2012. Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song. Farnham: Ashgate.

Negus, Keith. 2012. Narrative Time and the Popular Song. Popular Music & Society 35 (4): 483–500.

Neiberg, Michael S., and Robert M. Citino. 2016. A Long Walk Home: The Role of Class and the Military in the Springsteen Catalogue. BOSS: The Biannual Online-Journal of Springsteen Studies 2 (1): 41–63.

Nicholls, David. 2007. Narrative Theory as an Analytical Tool in the Study of Popular Music Texts. Music & Letters 88 (2): 297–315.

Partridge, Christopher, and Marcus Moberg, eds. 2017. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Pieslak, Jonathan. 2009. Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Quiñones, Marta García, Anahid Kassabian, and Elena Boschi, eds. 2013. Ubiquitous Musics: The Everyday Sounds That We Don’t Always Notice. Farnham: Ashgate.

Richardson, John, and Claudia Gorbman. 2013. Introduction. In The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, 3–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schneider, Jason. 2014. Another Side of Born in the U.S.A.: Form, Paradox, and Rhetorical Indirection. BOSS: The Biannual Online-Journal of Springsteen Studies 1 (1): 9–35.

———. 2018. Bring ‘em home!: The Rhetorical Ecologies of Devils & Dust. In Bruce Springsteen and Popular Music: Rhetoric, Social Consciousness, and Contemporary Culture, ed. William I. Wolff, 163–177. London: Routledge.

Scott, Derek B. 2009. Introduction. In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott, 1–21. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Scotto, Ciro, Kenneth Smith, and John Brackett, eds. 2018. The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches. London: Routledge.

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Spicer, Mark. 2009. Strategic Intertextuality in Three of John Lennon’s Late Beatles Songs. Gamut 2 (1): 347–375.

———. 2018. The Electric Light Orchestra and the Anxiety of the Beatles’ Influence. In The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music, ed. Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse, 106–136. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Spicer, Mark, and John Covach, eds. 2010. Sounding out Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. 2016. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York: New York University Press.

Tagg, Philip. 2012. Music’s Meanings: A Modern Musicology for Non-Musos. New York and Huddersfield: The Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press.

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Van Elferen, Isabella. 2018. Dark Timbre: The Aesthetics of Tone Colour in Goth Music. Popular Music 37 (1): 22–39.

Watson, Jada, and Lori Burns. 2010. Resisting Exile and Asserting Musical Voice: The Dixie Chicks Are Not Ready to Make Nice. Popular Music 29 (3): 325–350.

Williams, Justin. 2018. Intertextuality and Lineage in the Game’s We Ain’t and Kendrick Lamar’s M.A.A.D. City. In The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music, ed. Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse, 291–312. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Zagorski-Thomas, Simon. 2014. The Musicology of Record Production. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zagorski-Thomas, Simon. 2018. Timbre as Text: The Cognitive Roots of Intertextuality. In The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music, ed. Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse, 273–290. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Footnotes

1

For more on the ubiquity of music in contemporary culture, see Kassabian (2013) and Quiñones et al. (2013).

2

This is not to say that the study of popular music, or the humanities more broadly, lack for antagonists. Even within the broad field of popular music studies, battles are still being fought for disciplinary boundaries, the validity of various approaches, and over the purposes and obligations of music research. See Moore’s Afterword in this collection for further reflections on the significance of changing ontologies and paradigms for the study of music.

3

Recent studies that address aspects of amateur music-making include Finnegan (2007), Eisentraut (2013), and Turino (2008), the latter of which forms the impetus for Bannister’s research.

4

Intertextuality has long been a central concept for popular music analysts: there exist many studies that richly demonstrate how artists frequently reference previous works through lyrical, compositional, and sonic qualities, whether for purposes of critique and commentary, alignment with musical traditions, or creating a web of aesthetic associations (Butler 2003; Covach 1995; Holm-Hudson 2001; Middleton 2000; Spicer 2009, 2018). Such investigations have expanded outwards to place further emphasis on visual and extramusical media as part of the intertextual equations, with authors revealing the richly layered artistic meanings that can emerge from a confluence of audiovisual references (Burns and Woods 2018; Hawkins 2018; Williams 2018).

5

See Blake (2012), Heidemann (2016), Van Elferen (2018), and Zagorski-Thomas (2018).

Part IBroad Strokes

© The Author(s) 2019

N. Braae, K. A. Hansen (eds.)On Popular Music and Its Unruly EntanglementsPop Music, Culture and Identityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18099-7_2

2. Musicology Without Music

Kyle Devine¹  

(1)

Department of Musicology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

Kyle Devine

Email: [e-mail]

Whosoever is able to hear or see the circuits in the synthesized sound of CDs … finds happiness.

—Friedrich Kittler

Musicology is supposed to be deep. The goal is to discover how meaningfully patterned sounds work in relation to one another (formally), to expose how these patterns are articulated to senses of self and community (socially), to unearth how these patterns arise as coefficients of particular times and places (historically). The assumption is that paying close attention to patterned sounds—digging deeply into their textual and contextual associations—is an effective way of understanding how music works, what it means, why it matters.

This chapter is not about such patterns of sound—whether those sounds exist as notes printed on a page or as sound waves stored in a playback medium. Nor is it about those patterns as conceived in the mind of a composer, realized in the interpretation of a performer, or received in the ears of a listener. In place of these sound patterns and instead of textual analysis, I address the textured surface noises of recording formats: the sizzle of shellac, the crackle of vinyl, the slosh of MP3. These textures stem from the technical capacities and limitations of a given recording format and its media channels. Such textures are of course themselves patterned in particular ways, while their characteristics can certainly be made meaningful in both listening experiences and production practices.¹ Yet these textures also exist as pre-textual conditions of possibility that underwrite all of a given format’s musically patterned sounds. The argument in this chapter is that we can learn as much from seemingly meaningless textures as from evidently meaningful