Popular Music Studies Research Articles

Contemporary post-Soviet popular music: Politics and aesthetics

Popular music is produced, listened to and distributed all over the world. While there is no doubt that popular music studies, as well as popular music histories and the commercial popular music industry is predominantly Anglophone, popular music is not. This might seem like an obvious statement but looking at current discussions in the field of popular music studies it is a statement that needs to be made again. While there are exceptions, popular music studies in general have a problem with pseudo-universalism. As if the Western English-speaking mainstream reflected ‘popular music’ as a whole. This special issue of IASPM Journal focuses on popular music in the post-Soviet space, imagined as located between Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but also all over the world in reproduction of sounds and the diaspora. The contributions challenge the Anglophone centre of popular music studies.

Negotiating national identity against right-wing nationalism: sonic (re)narrations in Poland

This article discusses a set of approaches to national identity that subverted dominant nationalist discourse in Poland during the rule of Law and Justice (2015–2023). Based on a sonic, lyrical, and visual analysis of three popular music case studies, it explores how the populist-enabled mainstreaming of “turbopatriotism” (Napiórkowski 2019) has been criticized and what alternative visions of Polishness have been put forward. I argue that cultural narrations of Polishness as [1] plural, diverse, and cosmopolitan, [2] peripheral, flawed, and complicated, and [3] bygone and mourned, all have unique affective strengths for the continued negotiations of collectivity in post-communist and populist contexts.

Leybl as Tusovka

As in other peripheral music economies, hip-hop music-makers in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, self-organise their artistic labour in a context of “lack” of institutions and public support. This article takes a closer look at Bishkek’s hip-hop leybly, musical collectives that emerged around 2010. In order to highlight the particularities of these social formations and analyse their inner workings, I use the concept of tusovka – a slang term widely used in everyday Russian-speaking cultural communities. Building on previous conceptualisations of this term as a form of meeting-based, organic sociality, and drawing on two examples of hip-hop leybly in Bishkek I argue that the tusovka can make a theoretical contribution to the wider field of popular music studies in an attempt at “ex-centric” theory building.

As though the ’80s never happened – recalibrating value through music

How can we renew awareness of the civic value of the arts and humanities? This article responds to this question mainly with reference to music. It notes the rise since the 1990s of extrinsic criteria of value evident in sociological, economic and psychological arguments for the significance of music and the arts, which risk a profound instrumentalisation. In reaction, recent defences of the arts stage a stand-off against sociological perspectives, in particular, returning to older humanistic defences. Recalling the growth of interdisciplinary popular music and cultural studies from the 1980s, which unveiled the multivalent relationships between aesthetic and social dimensions of music, sets this polarisation into relief, productively shifting the debate. Music emerges as a vital medium for living, active in differentiated lives, an environment that may alone proffer meaning, pleasure, hope and a sense of collective imaginative and public life amid intensifying anxiety, desperation and the denial of collectivity. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)

Listening to Electric Miles

This project considers a case study from the archive of modern recorded jazz—Miles Davis’s Jack Johnson (1971)—as a means to address the collaborative aesthetic, technical, and social dimensions of record production. The release of The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions (2003) contains a number of alternate takes and “inserts” that were cut up and spliced together to create extended tracks on several albums by Davis released from 1971 to 1974. Drawing on recent work in popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and studies in the art of record production, I ask how this studio collaboration affects our notions of authorship and creativity in jazz. In other words, what is the relationship between the countless decisions in the studio and the sound that results? I will study studio practices and interactions in an integrated fashion, bringing together technological, practical, social, and creative/artistic components through a detailed consideration of the construction of a specific track from the album, “Yesternow.” The study of this little-discussed album by a canonical artist allows us to show how a specific approach to recording, as well as changes in recording technology, can be correlated with sonic and formal differences, and social relations.

Stars, Anti-Stars, Anti-Star-Stars

The phenomenon of stars and celebrities in media cultures – and especially in popular music cultures – seems to be omnipresent. At the same time, there is an astounding lack of analysis and research on these media personalities and personas, and international celebrity studies only recently a developing new field. Similarly, these kinds of observations are still very rare especially in German sociology as well as communication, media, culture and popular music studies. In this article, I therefore want to concentrate on the foundations of studying stars and celebrities within the attention economies by undertaking a theoretical transmedia-cultural framing of media personas and suggesting a typology. This ensuing typology of stars, anti-stars, and anti-star stars – especially within popular music cultures – demonstrates how stars and celebrities and their quantities and qualities of success and peer-group specific values coming form programs of (media and music) culture can serve as persona-seismographs of socio-cultural change between tradition and innovation.

Ethnomusicology, Folklore, and Social Relevance. By Josep Martí. Translated by Peter Collins

This article raises the need for (Spanish) ethnomusicology to replace rigid nineteenth century approaches with renewed anthropological and sociological concepts and analytical tools, Through the notion of “social relevance,” the author responds to this need and advocates for the study of horizontal influence (dynamic, meaningful), rather than vertical roots (ancestral, quasi-sacred) in a musical repertoire. “Social relevance” would be the academic opposite to “cultural paternity” (as ethnic ascription), prioritizing the importance that a song, instrument, or dance has for a community in a specific moment. Therefore, the main task of an ethnomusicologist is to understand the musical life of a society, because the relevance does not depend on music itself, but on its context. Consequently, the concept of social relevance rejects perceptions of popular music studies as marginal, and instead accepts the study of popular music as a discipline that deserves full scholarly attention, eliminating mythologized hierarchies of elite groups. The article discusses how social relevance manifests in three interrelated dimensions: meaning, or how a musical piece is perceived; the uses to which it is put; and its social functions. These analyses apply to different genres such as opera, jazz, rock, folk, classical, and avant-garde music, and point out the universal attributes they all share according to the principle of their social relevance.
 Citation:
 Originally published in Spanish as “Etnomusicología, folklore y relevancia social.” In Actas del I Congreso de la Sociedad Ibérica de Etnomusicología, edited by Jordi Raventós, 11-22. Barcelona: La mà de Guido, 1996.

‘Resonating across Oceanic Currents’: Special edition editorial

Preoccupied with the historical contradictions of seawater as manifested in the early to mid-twentieth century popular music history surrounding Japan, the Introduction to the Special Issue: ‘Resonating Across Oceanic Currents: Maritime Histories of Popular Music in and from Japan, 1920s-60s’ addresses a potentiality of the maritime frame as a method for moving away from historical periodization in popular music studies, and for reconsidering the approaches to ‘the global music history’. Above all, by contributing to the growing scholarship that engages with the oceanic frames as methods ripe for deconstructing music histories, it argues for the potencies of the maritime frame that, in many respects, brings to centre personal narratives, shifting geopolitical positionalities and subjectivities of musicians, listeners and creators in the study of popular music history.

Jacques Greene’s Aging Temporalities

By way of a close reading of Quebec electronic dance music producer and DJ, Jacques Greene (né Philippe Aubin-Dionne), this article offers ways to think through and with aging studies, popular music studies and the notion of the career—which remains largely missing in studies of music scenes. Particular attention is devoted to Greene’s musical releases (two LPs, many EPs, singles and remixes), as well as his performance practice as a DJ and solo artist. To cut against dominant understandings of a career as a linear trajectory, developed in iterative stages of progress and decline, I consider the varied temporalities Greene experiences simultaneously and how his position in dance music scenes changes in relation to the contingencies of time. I argue that this temporal mode of analysis provides a generative theoretical tool kit for connecting studies of popular music with studies of aging.

An Ever Present Past

This article explores age in the work of Paul McCartney. It investigates how McCartney’s ongoing engagement with his own youth has shaped his musical output and accompanying visuals at key points throughout his career. It focuses specifically on the extended trilogy of self-titled McCartney albums, which culminate in two of his most recent releases, McCartney III (Capitol 2020) and McCartney III Imagined (Capitol 2021). Concentrating specifically on Paul McCartney’s voice in his music and image in music videos, from a popular music studies perspective, this article explores the McCartney albums as a distinct statement on the role of age in popular music.

Introduction: Gender and Popular Music Knowledge

ABSTRACT This special issue of Popular Music and Society on gender and popular music knowledge considers feminized ways of listening to and knowing about popular music that have occupied the margins of media representations and popular music studies. By way of introduction, we consider classic and recent work on gender and popular music, the traditional confines of popular music knowledge-making, and how centering the knowledge of women and girls broadens our understanding of popular music.

Modernizing music programmes in higher education with popular music: Students’ preparation for music employment

This qualitative study explored the need to modernize music programmes in higher education with popular music to prepare graduates for twenty-first-century employment. Researchers agreed that popular music studies will allow students to gain valuable knowledge and use their degree in complex systems in various music professions. This study utilized Tyler’s Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction Rationale Model to discover what students need to be successful in a music career, with consideration of modern-day influences and popular music. Ten interviews were conducted with professionals in various music careers to raise awareness of music employment and the need for change in higher education to support life post-graduation. The findings showed a consensus that popular music should be added to the music curriculum. Future research recommendations include surveying students regarding their musical interests and influences, implementing popular music within the traditional curriculum and application-based learning.

Music as Magic

Music as Magic

Editorial

We discuss the ways popular music studies, and then dance studies, has engaged with the theme of protest. We hope that this discussion not only provides a starting point for scholars from both disciplines to begin to engage with key texts in the other field, but also that it facilitates conversations and dialogue across these two domains. In many ways, both dance studies and popular music studies have been marginalised in the academy, and yet both fields offer vital tools to understanding how we engage with and make sense of popular culture. How does the music we listen to, the movements we gather through, and the combined expressions we manifest help us create a sense of identity, a mode of distinction from others, a community? Both dance studies and popular music studies can help us answer these important questions.

Any Sound You Can Imagine: Then and now

During the 25 years since the publication of my book, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology, a number of technological developments and theoretical trends have emerged: among them, the integration of music production within Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) platforms, and the rise of social media as a means for information sharing among musicians, on the one hand; and the emergence, in popular music studies, of practice-based and community-oriented forms of music research and pedagogy, on the other. In addition, new technologies and applications of artificial intelligence (AI) have begun to have an impact on music-making and listening at every level. These developments are discussed in relation to theoretical issues of innovation, production, consumption and gender found in my previous work and, more specifically, in relation to concerns raised in a number of articles in the present volume, using them as a springboard for further reflection and theorizing.

“All I Do Is Think of You”

Research Article| June 01 2023 “All I Do Is Think of You” Michael Boyce Gillespie Michael Boyce Gillespie Michael Boyce Gillespie is an associate professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. His research interests include black visual and expressive culture, film theory, visual historiography, popular music, and contemporary art. He is the author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Duke University Press, 2016) and co-editor with Lisa Uddin of Black One Shot, an art criticism series on ASAP/J. His recent writing has appeared in Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, liquid blackness, and Ends of Cinema. He was the consulting producer on The Criterion Collection releases of Deep Cover and Shaft. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Popular Music Studies (2023) 35 (2): 5. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.5 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael Boyce Gillespie; “All I Do Is Think of You”. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 June 2023; 35 (2): 5. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.5 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search This dossier, a gathering of five essays, is devoted to distinct concentrations on the affective registers of songs. Each paper enacts a generative sense of the politics and pleasures of music, demonstrating the work of listening to and thinking with/through this music. These essays evince critical adjacencies and crucial consequences of music by considering the resonances and textures of the sonic. What began as a panel for the 2022 Pop Conference has expanded to consider a range of inquiries that center music’s meaning-making capacities. In total, this work explores issues of historiography, gender, melancholy, culture, performativity, mnemonic relations, memorialization, and becoming. Together, Miriam Petty and Joshua Chambers-Letson share their mutual and respective identification with “Everything’s Alright” from Jesus Christ Superstar. Brittnay L. Proctor examines the black womanist abundance of Minnie Riperton’s vocal performance on Come to My Garden (1970). Julie Beth Napolin focuses on the poignancy of Barbara Lewis’s... You do not currently have access to this content.

Review: The Real Ambassadors: Dave and Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong Challenge Segregation, by Keith Hatschek

Book Review| June 01 2023 Review: The Real Ambassadors: Dave and Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong Challenge Segregation, by Keith Hatschek Keith Hatschek. The Real Ambassadors: Dave and Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong Challenge Segregation. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2022. 298 pages. Pierangelo Castagneto Pierangelo Castagneto American University in Bulgaria Pierangelo Castagneto taught American History at the American University in Bulgaria. He has been an F. Ross Johnson-Connaught Distinguished Visitor at the University of Toronto, a Fulbright Scholar, and has worked at the Rockefeller Archive Center and at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies. Among his publications: L’oceano dei suoni. Migrazioni, musica e razze nella formazione delle società euroatlantiche (2007); Old and New Republics: The Diplomatic Relations Between the Republic of Genoa and the US (2010); Hostilities against Malaria. The Rockefeller Foundation in Bulgaria (2013); Ambassador Dizzy: Jazz Diplomacy in the Cold War Era (2014). He is the editor of Frederick Douglass, L’età delle immagini (2020). Email: pcastagneto60@gmail.com Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Email: pcastagneto60@gmail.com Journal of Popular Music Studies (2023) 35 (2): 113–115. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.113 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Pierangelo Castagneto; Review: The Real Ambassadors: Dave and Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong Challenge Segregation, by Keith Hatschek. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 June 2023; 35 (2): 113–115. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.113 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search In an oft-quoted Life magazine editorial published in February 1941, founder Henry R. Luce famously predicted the coming of the American Century while pressuring the United States to enter World War II in order to forsake the virus of isolationism and defend freedom and democracy from tyranny. He invited his country to envision a postwar future by embracing the logic of internationalism and being “the Good Samaritan of the entire world.” In order to transform the 20th century into the American Century, the United States could have surely relied upon its economic and military power. But according to Luce, the U.S. was already a world power without knowing it: “American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products, are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common.”1 A few years later, at the height of the... You do not currently have access to this content.

Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden

Research Article| June 01 2023 Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden Brittnay L. Proctor, PhD Brittnay L. Proctor, PhD School of Media Studies, The New School Brittnay L. Proctor is a Mellon post-doctoral fellow/assistant professor of race and media in the School of Media Studies at The New School. Her research interests include black studies; black popular music, black feminist theory, sound studies, visual culture, and performance. Her work has been published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, American Literature, Sounding Out!, Feminist Formations, Hyped on Melancholy, African American Review, Reviews in Digital Humanities, and ASAP/Journal. She is the author of Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden (Bloomsbury Press: 33 1/3 Series). She is also working on a second book manuscript, which draws on LP records and Compact Discs to trace the sonic and visual discourses of gender and sexuality in funk music. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Popular Music Studies (2023) 35 (2): 6–9. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.6 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Brittnay L. Proctor; Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 June 2023; 35 (2): 6–9. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.6 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search If the garden can be used as a metaphor for Black women’s creativity and self-preservation, Minnie Riperton’s sonic garden reminds us that black womanhood is not merely self-evident but produced through praxis engendered by creating, cultivating, and tending, in this instance, to one’s garden. We might consider how Riperton’s vocal performance of the place of the garden and its figurative use throughout the album pose an antagonism to genre: both as a technique for taxonomizing black music and the codification of gender as the collapse between sex as biology and gender (the production of gender dimorphism as the discrete categories of “man” and “woman”). Against “genre” and toward the place of the garden, the black avant-garde tenets of Come to My Garden are rooted in Riperton’s blurring of Charles Stepney’s “written” composition and her own improvisational ad libs. The “phonic substance” of her vocal performance becomes a “visual manifestation” of... You do not currently have access to this content.

Review: God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the California Myth, by David Leaf

Book Review| June 01 2023 Review: God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the California Myth, by David Leaf David Leaf. God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the California Myth. London: Omnibus Press, 2022. 480 pages. Grant Wong Grant Wong University of South Carolina Grant Wong is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of South Carolina specializing in the study of twentieth-century American pop culture and consumerism. Email: gwwong@email.sc.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Email: gwwong@email.sc.edu Journal of Popular Music Studies (2023) 35 (2): 127–129. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.127 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Grant Wong; Review: God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the California Myth, by David Leaf. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 June 2023; 35 (2): 127–129. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.127 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search Brian Wilson concerts are strange affairs. The 80-year-old rock virtuoso, for all of his skill as a producer, composer, and vocalist, never truly has been comfortable as a live performer. His bandmates sound fantastic. What else to expect from Beach Boys Al Jardine and Blondie Chaplin? The real allure of a Brian Wilson concert is not the music, but the artist’s presence. During most shows, Brian sits solitary at his piano, flubbing lyrics in an aging baritone distant from the angelic falsetto of his youth. The crowds cheer anyway. They give him standing ovations and yell for encores. This past July, at the Jones Beach Theater on Long Island, I know I did. He’s Brian Wilson. And he deserved all of the love we gave him. This love drives God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the California Myth, the latest edition of music writer... You do not currently have access to this content.

Editors’ Note

Editorial| June 01 2023 Editors’ Note Journal of Popular Music Studies (2023) 35 (2): 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Editors’ Note. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 June 2023; 35 (2): 1–4. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search As the upheavals of 2023 continue unabated in popular music, we bring you our second issue with hope for what scholarship and criticism can do to shift the cultural conversation. While this issue will be published just a few weeks before the biannual meeting of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music in Minneapolis, we write this introduction just a few weeks after the 2023 Grammy Awards. This year was remarkable in many ways. If you consider both the Latin Grammys (broadcast November 17, 2022) and the main show (broadcast February 5, 2023), two openly trans women took home trophies: Liniker and Kim Petras, respectively. In another remarkable feat, Beyoncé surpassed conductor Georg Solti’s record for the artist with the most Grammys while once again being passed over in the top categories. These landmark achievements can be a balm for some as we all reel from news of... You do not currently have access to this content.