Interpreting popular music / David Brackett ; with a new preface by the author.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brackett, David.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Popular music--History and criticism.

Popular music.

Popular music--Analysis, appreciation.

Physical Description:

xv, 260 pages : music ; 23 cm

Edition:

First California paperback.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, 2000.

Summary:

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 the cultural dimensions of popular music of all kinds.

Contents:

Prelude 1

I. Codes and competences 9

II. Who is the author? 14

III. Musicology and popular music 17

IV. Postlude 31

2 Family values in music? Billie Holiday's and Bing Crosby's "I'll Be Seeing You" 34

I. A tale of two (or three) recordings 35

II. Critical discourse 38

III. Biographical discourse 44

IV. Style and history 54

V. Performance, effect, and affect 58

3 When you're lookin' at Hank (you're looking at country) 75

I. Lyrics, metanarratives, and the great authenticity debate 77

II. Sound, performance, gender, and the honky-tonk 89

III. "A feeling called the blues" 96

IV. The emergence of "country-western" 99

4 James Brown's "Superbad" and the double-voiced utterance 108

I. The discursive space of black music 109

II. Signifyin(g)

words and performance 119

III. Musical signifyin(g) 127

5 Writing, music, dancing, and architecture in Elvis Costello's "Pills and Soap" 157

I. The "popular aesthetic" 159

II. Style and aesthetics 163

III. Interpretation and (post)modern pop 171

IV. A question of influence 195

6 Afterword: the citizens of Simpleton 199

A. Reading the spectrum photos 203.

Notes:

Originally published: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 237-248) discography (pages 249-250), and index.

ISBN:

0520225414

OCLC:

44174261