Popular Music Research Articles

Editors’ introduction to the Special Issue on CCM voice

In this Special Issue, the authors describe the popular music education landscape in and from which practice and theory of contemporary commercial music (CCM) voice studies have emerged. They contextualize the discipline within the history of conferences of the Association for Popular Music Education before outlining the article content from all contributing authors.

American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950 by Alec Wilder (review)

American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950 by Alec Wilder (review)

Singing the New Scot: Parody, Contrafacta, and Dainty Protest Songs in Cape Breton

ABSTRACT CJCB Radio’s Cape Breton Songs Contest (1949–1952) solicited new lyric submissions on local themes set to popular songs of the day. Successful entries were recorded and became part of the station’s airplay rotation. The songs would often playfully address contemporary concerns in light of a desire for greater cosmopolitanism. One such theme was the still-nascent reframing of Nova Scotia as “Scottish,” a once maligned ethnic heritage now considered the inherent personification of place. As a means to negotiate this new interpretation of Scottishness, songwriters turned to American pop songs doing similar identity work for the Irish American.

Harmonious learning: songs in English for ESP

Abstract The ubiquitous nature and diffusion of songs sung in English has meant that a great number of EFL and ESP students are listening to English and acquiring some notions about the language almost subconsciously. Such songs have also been incorporated into English as an L2 practice for, probably, almost as long as English has been taught as a foreign language. However, sometimes they are used as filler exercises or only as an exercise to keep the students happy. Slowly, songs have been gaining more acceptance as a valid didactic tool to be used in various moments of the general English L2 lesson and for various functions (Tegg 2018). This article reports on a project to use songs in English for Specific purposes lessons at an Italian university with students of two Master degree courses (Social Work and Social Policy; Sociology and Social Research). During the English modules, songs from various artists were specifically chosen and language-learning exercises devised around them to be used in almost every lesson for different learning objectives: these included introducing a new subject, presenting and revising grammar, learning individual words or short phrases including idiomatic expressions, as lead-ins to discussions. At the end of the course, the students completed a questionnaire aimed at eliciting their opinions about the use of songs in ESP lessons. The results indicate that the use of popular songs is an effective tool in an ESP lesson and that their inclusion can help motivate students as well as help them learn.

Islamic Underground Movement: Islamist Music in the Indonesian Popular Music Scene

Since the fall of the New Order regime in 1998, music has become a site of religio-political resistance among the new Islamist generation in Indonesia. This research examines the emergence of Islamist music on the Indonesian underground music scene to show the deepening influence of the Islamist movement among urban Muslim youth and the shifting strategy of the new Islamist generation from structural politics to cultural politics. The emergence of Islamist music indicates how a new generation of Islamists negotiates an Islamist worldview with contemporary popular culture. By maintaining the aggressive character of underground music, they adopt the Western popular culture as a code of resistance against the secular cultural hegemony. They also use popular music as a cultural approach or a strategy to promote the Islamist ideology to all urban Muslim youth.

Places they remember: Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields.

Three popular songs of enormous cultural significance are ‘In My Life’, ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, all released by the Beatles in the 1960s and all set in the same part of Liverpool. In an original investigation, this article looks into the growth of that part of the city from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1950s, examining the changes to the landscape. This was as the initially rural environment gave way to a typical twentieth-century townscape of houses, roads, parks and schools. The memories of people who resided there are related and these along with old maps, photographs, newspaper articles and census details are examined to give a sense of the lived-in location that inspired the lyrics of Paul McCartney and John Lennon. The phenomenon of palimpsest – ancient features slightly visible underneath modern ones – is applied to this study of the location and a new concept of inverse palimpsest – the old consciously superimposed on the new – is put forward in a novel approach to landscape analysis.

The Panama Songs: Colonial Structures in US Popular Music between 1900 and 1920

Abstract The Panama Canal was officially opened on 15 August 1914. At this point, the United States had been the builder of a difficult and controversial project for ten years and was to be the operator of the most important link between the Atlantic and the Pacific. To do this, it first helped Panama to independence, immediately annexing the canal zone. Thus, the construction of the canal is a classic lesson in colonial, (inter-)national politics and its interdependencies in the early twentieth century. At the same time, Panama was a fairly widespread topic of US popular music. This article investigates the effects of politics on cultural life, using the example of popular music referring to Panama. Applying a postcolonial approach, it will study the musical ways in which the United States constructed its pseudo-colony Panama as an Other in order to exercise power there and continue to form its own national identity.

‘The Chief Preservers of Ballad Poetry’: Revisiting the Ballad Traditions of Scottish Women

The eighteenth century saw an increasing interest in oral narrative ballad poetry, whose perceived decline prompted major efforts among antiquarians and collectors to find and preserve all that remained of the old popular songs. Women, long associated with oral tradition, were seen as the preservers of ballad poetry, transmitting their songs orally across generations. Yet while male collectors acknowledged female singers’ contributions, they obscured the broader realities of women’s engagement with print ballad culture. This article revisits the ballad traditions of Scottish women, exploring how the male-dominated scholarly discourse of the era shaped perceptions of women’s involvement in ballad culture. While collectors emphasised the role of female singers as preservers of purely oral tradition, they downplayed women’s broader engagement with ballads as printed literature, including their participation in the commercial broadside industry as sellers and consumers. This study reveals a more nuanced picture of women's involvement in balladry, challenging traditional narratives that align women singers exclusively with oral ballad tradition. By acknowledging the diverse ways in which women participated in ballad culture, this research sheds light on the complexities of gender dynamics within the ballad tradition, highlighting the need for a re-evaluation of women’s reception and transmission of ballads historically.

Between Koenji and Brooklyn: Tokyo, New York, and the Circulations of Experimental Musics in a Global World

Using a group of Japanese‐born experimental musicians who make their lives in Tokyo and New York as a case study, this article examines how new musical genres are created, shared, and mediated through layers of circulations, identities, and locations. The author argues that these musicians’ lives and music have a kind of “noisy” quality, complicating genre boundaries and identity binaries in their wake. Through ethnographic “thick descriptions” and the words of the musicians themselves, the author shows the web of musical genres, languages, geopolitical identities, and gender relations that combine to make up the texture of musical performances. This article is also thinking through and with a sea change in the study of Japanese music. In recent years, building on the work of scholars of Japanese cultural studies, ethnomusicologists have critiqued how monocultural and mono‐ethnic mythologies have influenced the study and production of Japanese music. Ethnomusicology and area studies are Cold War enterprises, designed to create research that would help maintain that world order, educate Americans as global leaders, and change hearts and minds in foreign lands, leading to a cultural conservatism that often led scholars to focus on “traditional” Japanese music. Recently, however, research on Japanese music has increasingly focused on popular and experimental musics and examines how Japanese contemporary identity is created and maintained through music. Thus this article gives readers a view of how US‐based Japanese music scholarship is moving away from such Cold War paradigms and contributes to this shift in studies of Japanese music and culture.

Joshua McCarter Simpson's Songs and Mid-Nineteenth Century Antislavery Activism

AbstractThe Ohio-based Black songwriter, Joshua Simpson, published two books of antislavery songs in the mid-nineteenth century, Original Anti-Slavery Songs in 1852 and Emancipation Car in 1854. Unlike most other known songsters, which were compilations of poetry from several authors, Simpson authored original lyrics for borrowed melodies, and he did so with extraordinary care, engaging the original song to enhance his activist messages. Employing the rhetorical practice of signification, his linkage of new lyrics with preexisting songs sometimes builds upon meaning from the original text, reusing it to add weight to the moral and political arguments against slavery. He also extends nature imagery and lyrics about the comforts of home and family in traditional ballads and contemporary sentimental songs to his new lyrics, but more often his signifying practice is ironic. He inverts the original song's sentimentality in deliberately discomforting ways that could persuade Americans to assist self-emancipating people and work toward wholescale abolition of slavery. Simpson's most radical songs talk back irreverently to the originals, especially minstrel tunes containing degrading caricatures and proslavery propaganda as well as patriotic anthems proclaiming hypocritical platitudes. Simpson did not simply write new songs; he transformed some of the most popular and beloved songs of his era, harnessing their renown to sharpen his activist messages.

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.

Musical identity, pedagogy, and creative dispositions: Exploring the experiences of popular musicians during their postgraduate teacher education in a changing Welsh education landscape

Much has been written on the different learning paths of classical and popular musicians and the view that popular musicians can be marginalized within the musical hegemony. Adopting Lucas, Claxton, and Spencer’s creative dispositions model, this article explores the extent to which this might occur when popular musicians learn to become secondary classroom music teachers. Data were collected through a series of semi-structured interviews from three popular musicians on a Post-Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) Secondary Music program. Utilizing a qualitative approach, the findings suggest that popular musicians innately demonstrate imaginative, inquisitive, and collaborative creative musical capacities. However, learning to teach seems to significantly impact their pedagogic identity as they experience underlying performativity cultures and hierarchical relationships in schools. This article considers the risks associated with undervaluing the creative dispositions of popular musician teachers, including minimizing their potential to reconceptualize pedagogic expertise at a time of significant education reform in Wales.

Anatomy of a Song

Anatomy of a Song

‘Types’ of Popular Musicians: From Musical to Professional Styles: Some Epistemological Reflections Based on the Case of French-Speaking Swiss Musicians

In academic research on popular music, the framing by musical genres and styles such as ‘Rock’, ‘Jazz’, and ‘Electro’ often seems obvious to social sciences scholars. The history, aesthetic features, and boundaries of musical idioms are major concerns for cultural studies, and the notion that musical styles shape the professional musical landscape is commonly accepted. This article is based on a survey involving 125 respondents in French-speaking Switzerland. It combines network analysis based on musical pairings during the year before the survey, with a typical socio-economic approach to understanding the features and resources of musicians. We demonstrate that the conventional approach of classifying musicians by ‘musical styles’ is not the most effective way to understand the structure of the musical occupational group. Instead, work pairings in music, and more broadly, sub-networks that emerge within our population, effectively group musicians according to their ‘professional style’ rather than their ‘musical style’. The focus is not on playing ‘Rock’, ‘Pop’, or ‘Jazz’, but rather on performing original compositions or covers, and whether one is a unique creative artist playing concerts or a service provider performing for entertainment gigs.

‘You Never Stop Working’

Abstract Theological analysis of the most popular worship song lyrics reflects that American Christians may be singing the American work ethic to the God who rested. Employing Brueggeman’s Sabbath as Resistance and Heschel’s The Sabbath alongside current discussions in evangelical liturgical studies, this article seeks to answer the following: 1) do the current most utilized congregational songs in America reveal a God who rests, and 2) what lyrical or musical possibilities exist to embody a theology of Sabbath rest. This analysis highlights liturgical and theological dissonance, while exploring musical and lyrical models that display a God who rests in an overworked culture.

CLUSTERING OF POPULAR SPOTIFY SONGS IN 2023 USING K-MEANS METHOD AND SILHOUETTE COEFFICIENT

The rapid advancement of technology and globalization in this era has brought about comprehensive and easily accessible music streaming services, one of which is Spotify. According to Kompas.com, Spotify has experienced a rise in subscribers up to 130 million, as a platform that offers various features besides music streaming. Spotify also provides a better user experience and has the ability to compete with other music streaming platforms. The mission of this research is to classify popular Spotify song data in 2023, which can aid in a deeper understanding of listener preferences or music trends. Based on the test results, there were 2 clusters obtained with cluster 0 containing 863 data and cluster 1 containing 90 data. From the testing results conducted in the K-Means analysis, a Silhouette Coefficient of 0.81 was obtained, which falls into the category of Strong Structure. From these results, it can be suggested that cluster formation was done very well to provide more personalized and relevant music recommendations to Spotify platform users. By understanding the preferences and patterns of listeners revealed through clustering, streaming services can enhance user experience by providing more tailored content.

Elevator music as a tool for the quantitative characterization of reward.

While certain musical genres and songs are widely popular, there is still large variability in the music that individuals find rewarding or emotional, even among those with a similar musical enculturation. Interestingly, there is one Western genre that is intended to attract minimal attention and evoke a mild emotional response: elevator music. In a series of behavioral experiments, we show that elevator music consistently elicits low pleasure and surprise. Participants reported elevator music as being less pleasurable than music from popular genres, even when participants did not regularly listen to the comparison genre. Participants reported elevator music to be familiar even when they had not explicitly heard the presented song before. Computational and behavioral measures of surprisal showed that elevator music was less surprising, and thus more predictable, than other well-known genres. Elevator music covers of popular songs were rated as less pleasurable, surprising, and arousing than their original counterparts. Finally, we used elevator music as a control for self-selected rewarding songs in a proof-of-concept physiological (electrodermal activity and piloerection) experiment. Our results suggest that elevator music elicits low emotional responses consistently across Western music listeners, making it a unique control stimulus for studying musical novelty, pleasure, and surprise.

The role of popular music in Montenegro’s national propaganda: from referendum to the “Litije” movement (2006–20)

ABSTRACT This article explores the uses of popular music as a propaganda tool during political events in Montenegro’s recent past. The ruling Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) employed music as part of their propaganda campaign during the 2006 referendum to gain support for Montenegro’s independence. Patriotic songs, disseminated through state-controlled media and paid advertisements, celebrated a modern, multicultural, independent Montenegrin state. However, after the referendum, important political issues remained unresolved (especially the role of the Serbian Orthodox Church and Serbian–Montenegrin relations in general). Tensions over these culminated after the adoption of the Law on Freedom of Religion at the very end of 2019, which triggered protests throughout Montenegro known as the “Litije.” In 2020, with the ample assistance of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the opposition won the parliamentary elections that ended the rule of the DPS. The propaganda that surrounded the Litije movement relied on music as an essential medium. This time, it conveyed messages calling for a stronger role of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro and closer political ties with Serbia. By analyzing both periods’ most influential popular songs, the author highlights the intricate interplay between music, popular culture, national narratives, and the ever-evolving political climate in Montenegro.

Dubbed in patois: Musical mimicry involving the Chinese in wartime Japanese popular songs

This article examines the politics of cultural differentiation in wartime Japan, especially from the viewpoint of linguistic imperialism and musical mimicry, by researching official documents, newspapers and magazines, as well as investigating popular songs. Various sources from this period demonstrate that Japanese critics, musicians and musicologists were conscious of the cultural difference between Asian regions, even while the government propagated a unified East Asia. Different actors pursued contradictory objectives of cultural assimilation and dissimilation, reflecting tensions and contradictions in both popular attitudes and official policy. On the other hand, the boundary was distorted in musical practices, as seen in the way different languages were selected and used in the lyrics of wartime popular songs. This article analyses two cases as examples of this phenomenon: (1) popular songs sung by Chinese singers, mostly female, in Japanese patois, and (2) songs by Japanese singers in broken and role language. Even during the Second Sino-Japanese War, Chinese and Japanese singers visited each other’s countries on the pretext of ‘goodwill’ to record songs and participate in shows or radio broadcasts for local audiences.

Editorial

This editorial is an overview of this edition of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture (EAJPC). In celebration of our tenth anniversary, it features a guest-edit by Yuiko Asaba and Amane Kasai on ‘Resonating Across Oceanic Currents’. Six articles share a focus on the trans-oceanic circulation of popular music to and from Japan during the 1920s to the 1960s. Themes include Japanese tango musicians in Manchuria, interpretations of Chinese popular song in wartime Japan, trans-Pacific circulations of Japanese popular songs in Cold War South Korea and among American military personnel in East Asia. One general paper complements this issue with an analysis on the linguistic nuances of the lyrics of Japan’s top-selling female idol groups. The book reviews section features commentary on recently published works that relate to themes discussed in the research articles.