American Popular Music Research Articles

Rockin’ the Regime: Mormon Missionaries, American Popular Music, and the Fading of Spanish Fascism

ABSTRACT In 1972 a group of Mormon missionaries in Spain formed a band known as Los Salt Lake City. Playing primarily folk and rock music, they toured the country, gave radio and press interviews, and released two albums and an EP. Their experience is recounted and assessed in relation to the musical context of Spain at the time, including the social, religious, and political implications of the musical context.

Feature-Based Structures of Opportunity: Genre Innovation in the American Popular Music Industry, 1958 to 2016

We offer a new perspective on how cultural markets are structured and the conditions under which innovations are more likely to emerge. We argue that in addition to organization- and producer-level factors, product features—the locus of marketplace interaction between producers and consumers—also structure markets. The aggregated distribution of product features helps producers gauge where to differentiate or conform and when consumers may be more receptive to the kind of novelty that spawns new genres, our measure of innovation. We test our arguments with a unique dataset comprising the nearly 25,000 songs that appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 chart from 1958 to 2016, using computational methods to capture and analyze the aesthetic (sonic) and semantic (lyrical) features of each song and, consequently, the market for popular music. Results reveal that new genres are more likely to appear following markets that can be characterized as diverse along one feature dimension while homogenous along the other. We then connect specific configurations of feature distributions to subsequent song novelty before linking the aesthetic and semantic novelty of individual songs to genre emergence. We replicate our findings using industry-wide data and conclude with implications for the study of markets and innovation.

Consciousness and Commodity: Towards A Critical Theory of Genre in American Popular Music

Genre, particularly in the popular music industry, can be understood as a perpetual cycle – from the origin of a new sound or ‘scene,’ recognition by critics and tastemakers, commercialization as a canonized genre, and finally its rejection and/or reinvention by a new generation of artists seeking to establish their own new forms. In America, these musical communities have been most often grounded in racial, regional, or sexual preference identities, as these ties have been the most meaningful to listeners. Over time, the reactionary resistance of these artistic communities and practices produces music that is itself codified as a new product line, confirming the relentless cycle of genre. In this paper, I utilize three case studies ranging from the fabrication of ‘hillbilly’ music in the 1920s, Disco Demolition Night and resistance to the popularity of disco in the late 1970s, and the rise and popularization of hip hop in the 1980s help show different moments on the cycle of genre creation and the resistance that emerges. Finally, this paper will point to indications that the advent of streaming music is leading to the obsolescence of the traditional production of genre.
 We are witnessing the rapid rise and fall of new musical non-genres, epitomized by hyperpop, a ‘genre’ that lacks any core common attributes. If genre is a tool to construct the self and, at times, enable communities of resistance, a world without lasting musical genres presents implications and challenges for the future of identity and social change.

Making Miami’s History and Present More Accessible

This is a work-in-progress report of Miami Studies, a curricular, research, and collections-focused initiative housed at the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab (WPHL) at Florida International University (FIU). Miami Studies represents a unique approach to Latina/o/x studies in the Greater Miami region and at one of the largest Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) in the country. The rationale, framework, and historical context for a Miami Studies school of urbanism is described in detail. This is followed by an explanation of the WPHL’s digitally focused initiatives: the digitization of a now-defunct newspaper titled Miami Life and the Mellon Foundation-funded Community Data Curation post-custodial project. Also referenced is the Díaz Ayala Collection of Cuban and Latin American Popular Music, housed at FIU Libraries.

Summer of Soul

Summer of Soul

“You Gotta Accentuate the Positive”: Japanese American Affirmation and Resilience in The Camp Dance: The Music and the Memories

“You Gotta Accentuate the Positive”: Japanese American Affirmation and Resilience in <i>The Camp Dance: The Music and the Memories</i>

Repertoire Communities in American Popular Music, 1900–1949

What are the social factors shaping musical repertoires? This paper analyzes repertoires as social relations among performers, refracted through factors such as the organization of industry, genres, race, and gender. Using data from American popular music recordings, performers and songs are treated as a two-mode network and repertoire communities are operationalized as bicliques. The production of culture perspective, the sociology of genres, and theories of race and gender imply hypotheses that are tested diachronically. Analysis finds support for the first two, with genres becoming the strongest basis of repertoire community membership while race and gender are surprisingly weak. Importantly, these factors worked in tandem as reflexive mechanisms for each other. The repertoire community system documents the rise of genre as the primary means of categorizing American popular music in the early twentieth century and mediated the effect of other factors.

Poor Man’s Copyright: Intellectual Property and Cultural Depictions of the White Working Class in American Popular Music

Poor Man’s Copyright: Intellectual Property and Cultural Depictions of the White Working Class in American Popular Music

Eric Weisbard, Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music

Eric Weisbard, Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music

Review: Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music, by Eric Weisbard

Review: <i>Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music</i>, by Eric Weisbard

Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music. By Eric Weisbard. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 530 pp. 9781478014089.

Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music. By Eric Weisbard. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 530 pp. 9781478014089.

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Nashville’s Songwriting Sweethearts: The Boudleaux and Felice Bryant Story. American Popular Music Series. By Bobbie Malone and Bill C. Malone

<i>Nashville’s Songwriting Sweethearts: The Boudleaux and Felice Bryant Story</i>. American Popular Music Series. By Bobbie Malone and Bill C. Malone

Make Mine Pop Music: Walt Disney Films and American Popular Music, 1940–1955

Make Mine Pop Music: Walt Disney Films and American Popular Music, 1940–1955

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Blackface Nation: Race, Reform, and Identity in American Popular Music, 1812-1925, by Brian Roberts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

<i>Blackface Nation: Race, Reform, and Identity in American Popular Music, 1812-1925</i>, by Brian Roberts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Songbook Historiography: Phases and Stages in the Literature of American Popular Music

Songbook Historiography: Phases and Stages in the Literature of American Popular Music

Prison and the Law in Modern American and British Popular Music

From politics to commerce, the influence of music on behaviour is acknowledged. Whether it is calypso music which for centuries has been used in the Caribbean to provide sociopolitical commentary, or the Hungarian folk music that promoted liberal communism in the late Cold War era, the importance and impact of contemporary music are evident. Likewise in the United States, the blues music of the 1920s and 1930s graphically and authentically narrated the harsh reality of the lives of its singers and outed its effects. In particular, it addressed the experiences of conflict with the justice system and incarceration through the eyes and voices of its creators. It seems reasonable, therefore, to expect that American and British rock and pop music would similarly have provided a candid narrative on contemporary social issues over the last 60 years. In particular one would assume that it would have reflected in a straightforward way on the engagement of its proponents with the justice system. Rock music is often referred to as “blues with a backbeat”. However, when it comes to the lyrics of modern popular American and British music of the last 60 years, the direct challenge of those directly affected by conviction and punishment appears be sanitised. Even when addressing the issues of crime and imprisonment, commercial acceptability seems to trump authentic reportage and heartfelt protest. In contrast, the themes of oppression, poverty and violence that blues musicians shared in their songs find themselves front and centre in hiphop. A brief overview of the field suggests that unlike pop and rock performers who put the cynical targeting of commercial opportunities before personal integrity, hiphop like the blues before it, is context driven ‘freedom music’. The distinction and reasons are worth exploring.

Review of I’m Not Like Everybody Else: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music by Jeffrey Nealon (University of Nebraska Press)

In I’m Not Like Everybody Else, Nealon is like everybody else (i.e., a poptimist), but rather dissects position of popular music in American society and culture in present moment. The title of book comes from a performance by Ray Davies (former singer for Kinks) at Austin City Limits Music Festival in 2006. In a YouTube video of performance, Nealon notes that when “the song’s titling chorus returns, hipster ‘Keep Austin Weird’ audience is shown, all in unison, chanting 'I’m Not Like Everybody Else.'(68) It is in this example that he sees the mass individuality logic of biopolitics in one concise screenshot: I’m ironically just like everybody else in and through my axiomatic self-assurance that I’m like everybody else. (68) This passage perfectly sums up Nealon's thesis: through a capitalism that aims to make everyone a mass individual, people reaffirm their identity not being like everyone else, while at same time failing to produce their identity positively.

Yoga’s Entry Into American Popular Music Is Racialized (1941–67)

This study unearths 20th-century U.S. music histories to demonstrate that racism accompanied the entry of yoga into American “belonging” and domestication, while “Indians” were excluded. There are three yoga song sites in this study; each presents a composite of racial constructions that utilize Othering tropes long deployed to affirm White supremacy and legitimize colonial power. I analyze the sound world, lyrics, and films of (1) the 1941 popular song “The Yogi Who Lost His Will Power,” by Orrin Tucker and His Orchestra; (2) the 1960 chart-topper “Yogi,” which catapulted the Ivy Three to one-hit-wonder status; and, (3) the 1967 Elvis Presley song “Yoga Is as Yoga Does, ” from the movie Easy Come, Easy Go. Questions that guide this study include: How does racist displacement appear in historic contexts of sonic productions and U.S. proliferation in yoga? What racial stereotypes accompanied yoga’s entry into American cultural discourse? I argue the evidence supports three key findings: (1) yoga’s movement into American popular culture is inextricably tied to racism and Othering; (2) widely circulating stereotypes of Indians, yoga, and yogis in American popular music include classic racist tropes, such as the grinning Sambo, and (3) the logic of elimination operates to hide U.S. music histories of racialized yoga. I conclude that U.S. yoga and its musical and cultural productions, branded as peaceful and flexible, camouflage the settler nation and White supremacy. The article concludes with a forecast for the importance of music studies to the nascent field of critical yoga studies.