Solo Artist Research Articles

K-POP에서 활용되는 샘플링 기법 분석 - 한국 4대 기획사 출신 아이돌 음악을 중심으로

In this study, we analysed the sampling techniques used in K-pop music. The songs of 3rd generation idol groups and solo artists from the four Korean major agencies were selected by referring to the data registered on whosampled.com, a UK-based sampling music database site. Sampling techniques were analysed by dividing them into material, technique, and content elements. The result showed that various sampling techniques were used, but certain techniques stood out in terms of sample length, editing techniques, overall proportion of sample parts in the song, and genre changes. In addition, we found that the sampling techniques in BTS's music were particularly prominent, correlated sampling techniques with the hip-hop genre, and identified the prevalence of classical music sampling in certain years. Through this study, it can be inferred that music sampling is used as a tool for genre convergence between pop and hip-hop in idol music, and furthermore, music sampling is used as a narrative part of the album. Through these findings, this study analyses how music sampling is being used in the K-pop genre, and it is significant to examine the past and present aspects of music sampling in K-pop.

Integrated Marketing Communication Solo Art Market Untuk Membangun Brand Awareness

The study aims to find the most effective Integrated Marketing Communication strategy for increasing brand recognition in the Solo Art Market. This study focuses on understanding target audiences' requirements and preferences and the most successful channels and techniques for reaching them. It also investigates the function of storytelling and emotional appeal in developing brand recognition for solo artists. This research is qualitative applied research, which tries to address issues such that the research results may be utilized to benefit individuals or organizations as well as for industrial goals, and it focuses on items whose outcomes can be applied to present and future situations. According to the study's findings, the Solo Art Market's Integrated Marketing Communication approach is a solid platform for raising brand recognition in the community. Due to the absence of instruments employed by Solo Art Market to reach a larger market, Solo Art Market's brand awareness is limited to brand recognition. Brand awareness is the amount of brand awareness that requires help, such as a brand list, image list, or brand stamp. Due to brand recognition, consumers need assistance with the items on sale; yet, Solo Art Market's ingenuity in developing appealing messaging can increase public brand awareness of the market's presence.

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.

Drawing from virtual travel: Regret, danger and magic

This article explores the experiential qualities of drawing from the world of Google Maps. It will consider the possibilities of drawing from digital geographies and the potential of virtual travel to offer newfound perspectives. Notions of regret, danger and magic are investigated to support the concept of the artist-cyberflâneur as the practice of observing, revealing and reclaiming parts of the internet space through artistic endeavours. Regret: How does drawing from the Google Map reality incite comparisons and feelings of longing? Danger: What are the rules of copyright and the restrictions of edited, curated online spaces? Magic: What can the artist’s work from Google Maps reveal about our world as distanced observers, and what transportive qualities can Google Maps inspire? This article will bring in personal experience of drawing from virtual travel as a solo artist and drawing with others, reflecting on social drawing from Google Maps as part of artistic practice.

The West Coast Maximalist Lightshow and the History of Art*

ABSTRACT This investigation of the immersive West Coast lightshow considers its place within a larger trajectory of light art and argues that the lightshow was a significant force in the evolution of light-based art. Examining how lightshow artists were interfacing with Modern art concepts as well as establishing new multimediated manifestations, the West Coast lightshow is viewed as an interface between embodied performance and a total mediated environment. As art, performance, and happening it represents a crossroad of artistic intermedia and the somatic experience. The collaborative nature of the artform as well as its distinct practitioners are considered as both countering and applying the modernist mythos of the heroic solo artist. These artistic collectives embodied the counterculture spirit of collaboration, even involving the audience as an essential collaborative element. Possibly due to its countercultural associations, as well as its West Coast origins, the maximalist lightshow has been largely ignored within the history of art. Its prominence and seminal role is argued here.

For those about to rock… is stability a determinant of rock bands success?

I make use of the characteristics of more than 6000 rock bands to empirically analyze if and how the stability of their members helps them to get a higher level of success. Bands cover all genres of Rock music (from Country to Punk), and their performance is assessed by having a song ranked in Billboard 100. Analyzing how the turn-over of members of a band affects their performance, it appears that the total number of musicians that left the band (compared to the actual number of musicians) – used as an indicator of instability –positively impacts the probability of a success. This may reveal that more talented musicians tend to be recruited after the departure of founding members, or that new members bring fresh ideas. The latter interpretation is supported by another result, showing that solo artists have a higher probability of success than bands. Finally, I also show that bands that come back to the stage after a split do not perform better.

Large scale analysis of gender bias and sexism in song lyrics

We employ Natural Language Processing techniques to analyse 377,808 English song lyrics from the “Two Million Song Database” corpus, focusing on the expression of sexism across five decades (1960–2010) and the measurement of gender biases. Using a sexism classifier, we identify sexist lyrics at a larger scale than previous studies using small samples of manually annotated popular songs. Furthermore, we reveal gender biases by measuring associations in word embeddings learned on song lyrics. We find sexist content to increase across time, especially from male artists and for popular songs appearing in Billboard charts. Songs are also shown to contain different language biases depending on the gender of the performer, with male solo artist songs containing more and stronger biases. This is the first large scale analysis of this type, giving insights into language usage in such an influential part of popular culture.

Lead-vocal level in recordings of popular music 1946–2020

Lead vocals constitute the central element of popular music. Here, the lead-vocal-to-accompaniment level ratio (LAR) was estimated from representative recordings of popular music. Measuring the LAR from 1946 to 2020, two distinct phases were observed: the average LAR decreased from around 5 dB to 1 dB until around 1975 but remained static from thereon. Comparing the LAR across musical genres, positive values were observed for Country, Rap, and Pop, values around zero for Rock, and negative values for Metal. Solo artists featured consistently higher LAR values compared to bands. These results establish a baseline for a central aspect of music mixing.

Picturing, Pledges and Other Scripted Acts: Performance (In) Art

This essay re-examines several examples of non-performance based artworks from the perspective and history of performance art. For instance, the photomontages I produced as an undergrad art student were based on repeated acts of stealing posters from their public sites on the street between my house and the college. Later, while working collaboratively with Mark Hutchinson in Manchester and London, we made photograms and paintings of scenes that we enacted on the street (striking a match, taking a flag for a walk). Years later, as a solo artist again, I produced a body of work in the form of slide presentations that consisted of photographs of me dressed in homemade costumes that cast me as a monster. In my work with the Freee art collective, we used slogans, our own bodies, costumes and props to give material reality to slogans that we treated as scripts. We wrote manifestos and staged events in which participants read. So, while the forms of my work are image based, the rationale is typically tied to the techniques and values of performance.

Holding the Future

Rasheedah Phillips is a queer housing advocate, parent, writer, interdisciplinary artist, and cultural producer. Phillips' writing and artwork has appeared in The Funambulist Magazine, e-flux Architecture, Flash Art Magazine, Philadelphia Inquirer, Recess Arts, and more. Phillips is the founder of The AfroFuturist Affair, founding member of Metropolarity Queer Speculative Fiction Collective, co-founder of Black Quantum Futurism, co-creator of the award winning Community Futures Lab, and creator of the Time Zone Protocols, Black Women Temporal Portal, and Black Time Belt projects. As part of BQF and as a solo artist, Phillips has been awarded a CERN Artists Residency, Vera List Center Fellowship, A Blade of Grass Fellowship, and a Velocity Fund Fellowship, among others. Phillips has exhibited, presented, been in residence, and performed at Institute of Contemporary Art London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Serpentine Gallery, Red Bull Arts, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Akademie Solitude, Manifesta 13 Biennale, documenta fifteen, and more.

The Beatles and the 1960s: Reception, Revolution and Social Change

The Beatles and the 1960s: Reception, Revolution and Social Change

The Boubou and Post-Colonial African Musical Performances: Ami Koïta, Bi Kidude, and Sibongile Khumalo

Fashion and music share a relationship as mediums used to project the identities of post- colonial female vocalists. When viewed from post-colonial African contexts, the boubou is an item used to express these identities. Using the performances of Ami Koïta, Bi Kidude, and Sibongile Khumalo between 1995 and 2013, this article analyzes their use of the boubou. My research shows that Koïta’s use of the boubou coincides with her innovative and controversial musical composition, argued herein, and works to express her “solo artist” status. Kidude’s garb demonstrates her attempt to show her Zanzibari and African artist identity. Khumalo’s garb expresses a South African and African musician identity and projects South Africa as a “new nation.” These findings suggest that when used in various locales, the boubou holds context- specific meanings that align with each country’s socio-cultural and socio-political contexts. While this clothing item has been affiliated with fashion designers and tailors and their contribution to the African fashion and clothing system, this article’s contribution is the role played by female vocalists. These women show their identities through fashion and music and cement the boubou’s position as an important item of the African clothing and fashion system.

Ragnar Kjartansson and the Art of Pleasure

Ragnar Kjartansson and the Art of Pleasure

Brian Wilson’s Song Cycles

ABSTRACT In the Beach Boys’ eleventh studio album, Pet Sounds (1966), the group’s primary creator, Brian Wilson, set forth a compelling flow of lyrical themes across a shimmering soundscape to create what has been described as one of the earliest concept albums. Its eleven songs and two instrumentals in fact constitute a “song cycle” as conventionally defined, with a transparent narrative and artful progression of interwoven musical ideas. Further, Pet Sounds was but one of several explorations of multisong narrative and musical structures in Wilson’s work on Beach Boys albums, extending back to side two of their Today album (1965) and continuing in later years through the unfinished Smile (1967), Wild Honey (1967), and The Beach Boys Love You (1976). Since Brian Wilson began recording as a solo artist in the late 1980s, he has continued to conceive albums as unified artistic statements, achieving his goals with special clarity on That Lucky Old Sun (2008) and on the reunited Beach Boys’ That’s Why God Made the Radio (2012). Each of his song cycles is a unique realization of principles of organic unity found in the art-song tradition and makes its own important contribution to the history and development of the concept album in pop and rock music.

“The Time of Our Lives”: An Interview with Peter Hammill

Peter Hammill is a British singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist who formed Van der Graaf Generator in the late 60s. Over a fifty-plus year period, as both a solo artist and member of Van d...

Beyond the Crew: Hip-Hop and Professionalization in Mexico City

In recent years profesionalización – professionalization – has become an increasingly influential concept in the hip-hop scene in Mexico City. This term can refer to a variety of changing practices relating to artistic presentation, the organization of hip-hop events, and the hip-hop scene’s model of creative production. The influence of professionalization relates to the rising specialization of hip-hop production and the increasing importance of the digital circulation of music and images; increasingly, success is made on YouTube and Spotify. It also relates to new sources of income, such as freestyle rap battles with corporate sponsorship, and to nascent spaces for hip-hop within adult education. Above all, professionalization relates to a series of structural changes connected to the declining influence of crews, oriented around something akin to Spillman’s ‘non-strategic solidarity’: fraternity, informality, and shared identity. In some cases, crews are giving way to more formal ‘teams’, oriented around the solo artists that now dominate the hip-hop scene. This article builds on ongoing ethnographic research since 2012 and a series of interviews with over 40 local hip-hop artists, to explore professionalism and professionalization as emergent, negotiated values within Mexico City’s hip-hop scene. It offers a frame through which different ideas of the ‘professional’ may be considered: object-forming (relating to the creation of a ‘professional’ music object) and subject-forming (relating to the formation of a ‘professional’ subject). Profesionalización cannot be understood in a functionalist sense, nor may the hip-hop ‘professional’ be conceptualized as a straightforward antonym of ‘amateur’. This article instead shows different ways that ‘object-forming’ and ‘subject-forming’ professionalization both incorporate and texture the ‘non-strategic’ and distinguish hip-hop ‘professionalism’ from the same texture the ‘non-strategic’, and distinguish hip-hop professionalism from it.

I Don’t Give a Damn About Your Bad Reputation: Taylor Swift, Beyoncé Knowles, and Performance

This article compares and examines Reputation and Homecoming, two long-form videos of 2018 performances by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé Knowles, respectively. The videos have much in common, as both were released via Netflix in 2019, and both document important milestones in the career success of two female solo artists. Moreover, the subjects of these videos have risen to the top of an industry that has not traditionally rewarded their gender, nor allowed them to headline at these types of events—a stadium in the case of Swift; a multi-day/act festival, in the case of Beyoncé. In Homecoming, Beyoncé uses her headliner status at Coachella to pay homage to deep cultural traditions of a non-white world; when considered alongside it, Reputation reveals inconsistencies in Swift’s presentation of herself as an authentic artist in charge of her own creative and career choices, and these cracks are complicated by a second documentary, Miss Americana, in which her thralldom to a conservative ideology becomes even more visible and problematic, even to herself. Viewed together, the films provide a prism through which we can reflect on serious changes regarding both race and gender in America, and the ways that they are exhibited in live performance and popular culture.

Take A Look At Me Now: Consecration and the Phil Collins Effect

Consecration is the process by which producers in creative fields become canonized as “greats”. However, is this the end of the story? Research on consecration focuses on the drivers of consecration, but pays little attention to the post-consecration period. Furthermore, the research ignores the dynamics of consecration. To address these gaps, we examine the changing fortunes of a consecrated artist – the musician Phil Collins. We identify the ways in which three actors (fans, critics, and peers) assemble for consecration, disassemble for deconsecration, and reassemble for reconsecration. Examining the changing public image and commercial fortunes of Collins as a solo artist between 1980-2020, we identify a N-shaped process of rise-fall-rise that we call the Phil Collins Effect (PCE). This effect offers a new way of thinking about how cultural producers gain, lose and regain status in their fields.

“Hey Man, What’s Your Style?” Persona Creation, Closet Humanism and Artistic Legitimation in Lou Reed’s 1970s Work

Dans le contexte d’une décennie qui cherche à établir son identité culturelle face à des sixties sur-signifiantes, cet article montre que Lou Reed, inspiré par les techniques de modelage de soi de Warhol et en quête d’une double légitimité (littéraire et rock), a conquis un statut de star en tant qu’artiste solo, grâce à la création d’une persona à l’iconicité très aboutie (le « rock and roll animal ») qui relie les esthétiques et l’ethos rock et l’univers alors émergent du punk. Chemin faisant, la fascination de Lou Reed pour un milieu culturel (le New York marginal) et son attirance pour les expériences limites (déviances et extases) sont analysées dans le contexte de la philosophie de la transgression de Georges Bataille. Nous interrogeons la création de personae sexuellement et moralement ambiguës comme un moyen d’atteindre ce que Bataille appelait « l’homme total » et de manifester la « part maudite » de l’humanité, si bien que le gardien de la « wild side » et parrain du punk propose en sous-main un humanisme véritable. Pour mener à bien nos analyses, nous considérons le concept de « star » à la fois comme artefact textuel et comme objet de transfert collectif, et la musique rock comme une forme d’art qui intègre un théâtre lyrique autofictionnel, particulièrement apparent dans l’art scénique de Lou Reed.

Eight Artist-Level Violinists Performing Unaccompanied Bach: Are There Consistent Tuning Patterns?

This study was designed to explore the intonation performances of highly regarded concert violinists in an unaccompanied context. I chose eight solo artists representing different generations of performers (Heifetz, Grumiaux, Milstein, Perlman, Hahn, Midori, Barton Pine, and Shaham). Pitch performances were analyzed in commercial recordings spanning 65 years of two unaccompanied pieces composed by Bach, one in d minor and one in E major. I investigated whether similarities in intonation tendencies would occur among these respected artists, and whether the displayed patterns would approximate the theoretical tuning systems that have been studied previously: Just, Pythagorean, or equal temperament. The artists appear to have their own individual tendencies, and none of them conformed consistently to any theoretical tuning system. Although there are average tendencies on isolated intervals that approximate one tuning or the other, multiple repetitions show a wide range both between and within individual performers. However, performances of the thirds and sixths in the major key and less so in the minor key (intervals that illustrate the largest differences in tuning between systems) did display a propensity toward Pythagorean tuning of these scale degrees. Deviations away from all three tuning systems are common, and these artists never play exactly in one tuning or another.