Making Meaning in Popular Song

Making Meaning in Popular Song
Author: Theodore Gracyk
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2022-06-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350249106

For Theodore Gracyk meaning in popular music depends as much on the context of reception and performer's intentions as on established musical and semantic practices. Songs are structures that serve as the scaffolding for meaning production, influenced by the performance decisions of the performer and their intentions. Arguing against prevailing theories of meaning that ignore the power of the performance, Gracyk champions the contextual relevance of the performer as well as novel messaging through creative repurposing of recordings. Extending the philosophical insight that meaning is a function of use, Gracyk explains how both the performance persona and the personal life of a song's performer can contribute to (or undercut) ethical and political aspects of a performance or recording. Using Carly Simon's “You're So Vain”, Pink Floyd, the emergence of the musical genre of post-punk and the practice of “cover” versions, Gracyk explores the multiple, sometimes contradictory, notions of authenticity applied to popular music and the conditions for meaningful communication. He places popular music within larger cultural contexts and examines how assigning a performance or recording to one music genre rather than another has implications for what it communicates. Informed by a mix of philosophy of art and philosophy of language, Gracyk's entertaining study of popular music constructs a theoretical basis for a philosophy of meaning for songs.

Making Meaning of Loss

Making Meaning of Loss
Author: Richard L. Hayes
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2022-10-31
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1666924512

Making Meaning of Loss: Change and Challenge Across the Lifespan is about how change brings loss to our lives, how we make meaning of loss, and how our experience with loss directs our encounters with loss in the future. Each loss challenges us in this way: to rethink our world view, to ask who we have become, and to reinvent ourselves anew. Taking a lifespan approach, Hayes examines how we make sense of the losses that change brings in each period of our lives and how the way in which we meet the challenge that each loss brings directs our encounters with loss in the future. In addition, he provides suggestions for how earlier losses can become fruitful allies in encounters with change in the present and how caregivers can help others to make meaning of the loss in their lives. Above all, this book is about how caregivers can help others learn from the losses in their lives and to recognize what part of the past to bring along into the present in constructing a more reliable self for meeting the challenges of an uncertain future.

Musicians and their Audiences

Musicians and their Audiences
Author: Ioannis Tsioulakis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2016-12-19
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317091302

How do musicians play and talk to audiences? Why do audiences listen and what happens when they talk back? How do new (and old) technologies affect this interplay? This book presents a long overdue examination of the turbulent relationship between musicians and audiences. Focusing on a range of areas as diverse as Ireland, Greece, India, Malta, the US, and China, the contributors bring musicological, sociological, psychological, and anthropological approaches to the interaction between performers, fans, and the industry that mediates them. The four parts of the book each address a different stage of the relationship between musicians and audiences, showing its processual nature: from conceptualisation to performance, and through mediation to off-stage discourses. The musician/audience conceptual division is shown, throughout the book, to be as problematic as it is persistent.

Putting a Song on Top of It

Putting a Song on Top of It
Author: David W. Samuels
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2006-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780816526017

As in many Native American communities, people on the San Carlos Apache reservation in southeastern Arizona have for centuries been exposed to contradictory pressures. One set of expectations is about conversion and modernizationÑspiritual, linguistic, cultural, technological. Another is about steadfast perseverance in the face of this cultural onslaught. Within this contradictory context lies the question of what validates a sense of Apache identity. For many people on the San Carlos reservation, both the traditional calls of the Mountain Spirits and the hard edge of a country, rock, or reggae song can evoke the feeling of being Apache. Using insights gained from both linguistic and musical practices in the communityÑas well as from his own experience playing in an Apache country bandÑDavid Samuels explores the complex expressive lives of these people to offer new ways of thinking about cultural identity. Samuels analyzes how people on the reservation make productive use of popular culture forms to create and transform contemporary expressions of Apache cultural identity. As Samuels learned, some popular songsÑsuch as those by Bob MarleyÑare reminiscent of history and bring about an alignment of past and present for the Apache listener. Thinking about Geronimo, for instance, might mean one thing, but "putting a song on top of it" results in a richer meaning. He also proposes that the concept of the pun, as both a cultural practice and a means of analysis, helps us understand the ways in which San Carlos Apaches are able to make cultural symbols point in multiple directions at once. Through these punning, layered expressions, people on the reservation express identities that resonate with the complicated social and political history of the Apache community. This richly detailed study challenges essentialist notions of Native American tribal and ethnic identity by revealing the turbulent complexity of everyday life on the reservation. Samuels's work is a multifaceted exploration of the complexities of sound, of language, and of the process of constructing and articulating identity in the twenty-first century.

Pop Idols and Pirates

Pop Idols and Pirates
Author: Dr Charles Fairchild
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2013-01-28
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1409493814

The music industry has been waging some very significant battles in recent years, reacting to numerous inter-related crises provoked by globalization, digitalization and the ever more extensive commercialization of public culture. These struggles are viewed by many as central to the survival of the central mediators in the consumption of popular music. These battles are not just against piracy and the sharing of digital song files on the internet. The music industry is also struggling to find ways to compete or integrate with many other forms of entertainment, including films, television programmes, mobile phones, DVDs and video games in an extremely crowded communications environment. The battles currently being fought by the music industry are about nothing less than its continued ability to create and maintain specific kinds of profitable relationships with consumers. This book presents two inter-related cases of crisis and opportunity: the music industry's epic struggle over piracy and the 'Idol' phenomenon. Both are explicit attempts to control and justify the particular ways in which the music industry makes money from popular music through specific kinds of relationships with consumers. The battles over piracy have been fought with a remarkable collection of campaigns consisting of advice, coercion and argument about what is or is not the best way to consume music. From these complicated and often contradictory campaigns we form an unusually clear picture of what many within the music industry imagine their industry to be. In a complementary way, 'Idol' works to demonstrate the joy and pleasure of consuming popular music the 'right' way. By creating a series of intertwined relationships with consumers around multiple sites of consumption, incorporating television, radio, live performance, traditional print media campaigns, text messaging and all manner of internet-based systems of communication and 'fan management,' the producers of 'Idol' present an ideal relationship between musicians and audiences. Instead of focusing on selling CDs, the music industry's digital Achilles' heel, 'Idol' has given the music industry an integrated platform for displaying its expanded palette of products and venues for consumption. When understood in specific relation to the battle against piracy, Fairchild's analysis of 'Idol' and the emerging promotional cultures of the music industry it exhibits shows how multiple sites of consumption, and attempts to mediate and control the circulation of popular music, are being used to combat the foundational challenges facing the music industry.

Applying Aesthetics to Everyday Life

Applying Aesthetics to Everyday Life
Author: Lisa Giombini
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2023-09-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1350331775

Applying Aesthetics to Everyday Life surveys current debates in the field of everyday aesthetics, examining its history, methodology and intersections with cognate research areas. Lisa Giombini and Adrián Kvokacka bring together an international team of renowned scholars who are shaping the present and future of the discipline. They demonstrate how the historical origins of everyday aesthetics emerges across the history of Western aesthetic thought, from Renaissance thinkers to the modern German philosophers Baumgarten, Kant and Heidegger. Chapters shed light on the field's methodological underpinnings, tracing its theoretical foundations back to epistemology and ethics and assess the potential of everyday aesthetics as a theoretical tool. They reveal its interdisciplinary nature and how it assists various fields of inquiry, including environmental and urban aesthetics, conservation ethics and the philosophy of art. Through fresh explorations of its origins, background and contemporary developments, this collection advances a new definition of everyday aesthetics and provides a cutting edge reflection on the world we inhabit today.

Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location

Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location
Author: Vanessa Knights
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2016-04-29
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317091604

How are national identities constructed and articulated through music? Popular music has long been associated with political dissent, and the nation state has consistently demonstrated a determination to seek out and procure for itself a stake in the management of 'its' popular musics. Similarly, popular musics have been used 'from the ground up' as sites for both populist and popular critiques of nationalist sentiment, from the position of both a globalizing and a 'local' vernacular culture. The contributions in this book arrive at a critical moment in the development of the study of national cultures and musicology. The book ranges from considerations of the ideological focus of cultural nationalism through to analyses of musical hybridity and musical articulations of other kinds of identities at odds with national identity. The processes of global homogenization are thereby shown to have brought about a transitional crisis for national cultural identities: the evolution of these identities, particularly with reference to the concept of 'authenticity' in music, is situated within broader debates on power, political economy and constructions of the self. Theorizations of practice are employed after the manner of Bourdieu, Gramsci, Goffman, Gadamer, Habermas, Bhabha, Lacan and Zizek. Each contribution acts as a case study to characterize the strategies through which differing modes of musical discourse engage, critique or obscure discourses on national identity. The studies include discussions of: musical representations of Irishness; the relationship between Afropop and World Music; Norwegian club music; the revival of traditional music in Serbia; resistance to cultural homogeneity in Brazil; contemporary Uyghur song in Northwest China; rap and race in French society; technobanda from the barrios of Los Angeles, and Spanish/Moroccan raï. In this way, the book seeks to characterize the ideological configurations that help to activate and sustain hegemonic, amb

Intermediality

Intermediality
Author: Ladislaus Semali
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2018-02-02
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0429979355

With the ever-growing proliferation of electronic and other popular media, the complexity of relationship between what students see and hear, what they believe and how they interact with one another underscores now, more than ever, the need for across-the-curriculum teaching of critical thinking, critical reading, and critical viewing skills. The emerging consensus is that teaching critical viewing skills bolsters students' abilities in traditional disciplines, combats problems of youth apathy, violence, and substance abuse, and improves students', parents, and teachers' attitudes' toward school.Intermediality: Teachers' Handbook of Critical Media Literacy challenges the practice of teaching the classics and the canon of acceptable literary works far removed from students' experiences, with emphasis on learning environment over the presentation of any specific or specified content. The authors, Ladislaus Semali and Ann Watts Pailliotet, present literacy education as ?intermedial? in nature?it entails constructing connections among varying conceptions and sign systems. Reading printed texts requires more than simply decoding letters into words or sounds; it involves finding meaning, motive, structure, and affect. The same goes for reading the electronic text. The authors argue for the discourse of literacy to take up a critical stance by examining a whole wide array of texts that form the meaning-making process of the looming information age.Intermediality examines, extends, and synthesizes the existing literary definitions, texts, theories, processes, research and contexts. It brings into focus the possibilities of working with media texts to address questions adapted from linguists and literary educators. Thus, in this book, critical media literacy becomes a competency to read, interpret, and understand how meaning is made and derived from print, photographs and other electronic and graphic visuals.

Listening for America: Inside the Great American Songbook from Gershwin to Sondheim

Listening for America: Inside the Great American Songbook from Gershwin to Sondheim
Author: Rob Kapilow
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
Total Pages: 737
Release: 2019-11-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1631490303

Finalist • The Marfield Prize [National Award for Arts Writing] “Not since the late Leonard Bernstein has classical music had a combination salesman-teacher as irresistible as Kapilow.” —Kansas City Star “If you want to understand American history, listen to its popular music,” writes renowned NPR host Rob Kapilow. “If you want to understand America’s popular music, listen to its history.” Through the songs of eight legendary American composers—Kern, Porter, Gershwin, Arlen, Berlin, Rodgers, Bernstein, and Sondheim—Kapilow listens for the history not just of musical theater, but of America itself. Combining close readings of Broadway hits like “Summertime” and “Stormy Weather” with a wide-angled historical point of view, Listening for America shows us how we too can listen along as America discovered its identity through the epochal transformations of the twentieth century.

The Poetry of Pop

The Poetry of Pop
Author: Adam Bradley
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2017-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300165021

From Tin Pan Alley to the Beatles to Beyoncé, "Mr. Bradley skillfully breaks down a century of standards and pop songs into their elements to reveal the interaction of craft and art in composition and performance." (The Wall Street Journal) Encompassing a century of recorded music, this pathbreaking book reveals the poetic artistry of popular songs. Pop songs are music first. They also comprise the most widely disseminated poetic expression of our time. Adam Bradley traces the song lyric across musical genres from early twentieth-century Delta blues to mid-century rock 'n' roll to today's hits. George and Ira Gershwin's "Fascinating Rhythm." The Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Rihanna's "Diamonds." These songs are united in their exacting attention to the craft of language and sound. Bradley shows that pop music is a poetry that must be heard more than read, uncovering the rhythms, rhymes, and metaphors expressed in the singing voice. At once a work of musical interpretation, cultural analysis, literary criticism, and personal storytelling, this book illustrates how words and music come together to produce compelling poetry, often where we least expect it.