Popular Music Genres

Popular Music Genres
Author: Stuart Borthwick
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2020-04-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1136733809

An accessible introduction to the study of popular music, this book takes a schematic approach to a range of popular music genres, and examines them in terms of their antecedents, histories, visual aesthetics, and sociopolitical contexts. Within this interdisciplinary and genre-based focus, readers will gain insights into the relationships between popular music, cultural history, economics, politics, iconography, production techniques, technology, marketing, and musical structure.

Genre in Popular Music

Genre in Popular Music
Author: Fabian Holt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2009-10-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0226350401

The popularity of the motion picture soundtrack O Brother, Where Art Thou? brought an extraordinary amount of attention to bluegrass, but it also drew its share of criticism from some aficionados who felt the album’s inclusion of more modern tracks misrepresented the genre. This soundtrack, these purists argued, wasn’t bluegrass, but “roots music,” a new and, indeed, more overarching category concocted by journalists and marketers. Why is it that popular music genres like these and others are so passionately contested? And how is it that these genres emerge, coalesce, change, and die out? In Genre in Popular Music, Fabian Holt provides new understanding as to why we debate music categories, and why those terms are unstable and always shifting. To tackle the full complexity of genres in popular music, Holt embarks on a wide-ranging and ambitious collection of case studies. Here he examines not only the different reactions to O Brother, but also the impact of rock and roll’s explosion in the 1950s and 1960s on country music and jazz, and how the jazz and indie music scenes in Chicago have intermingled to expand the borders of their respective genres. Throughout, Holt finds that genres are an integral part of musical culture—fundamental both to musical practice and experience and to the social organization of musical life.

Major Labels

Major Labels
Author: Kelefa Sanneh
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2021-10-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0525559604

One of Oprah Daily's 20 Favorite Books of 2021 • Selected as one of Pitchfork's Best Music Books of the Year “One of the best books of its kind in decades.” —The Wall Street Journal An epic achievement and a huge delight, the entire history of popular music over the past fifty years refracted through the big genres that have defined and dominated it: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music, and pop Kelefa Sanneh, one of the essential voices of our time on music and culture, has made a deep study of how popular music unites and divides us, charting the way genres become communities. In Major Labels, Sanneh distills a career’s worth of knowledge about music and musicians into a brilliant and omnivorous reckoning with popular music—as an art form (actually, a bunch of art forms), as a cultural and economic force, and as a tool that we use to build our identities. He explains the history of slow jams, the genius of Shania Twain, and why rappers are always getting in trouble. Sanneh shows how these genres have been defined by the tension between mainstream and outsider, between authenticity and phoniness, between good and bad, right and wrong. Throughout, race is a powerful touchstone: just as there have always been Black audiences and white audiences, with more or less overlap depending on the moment, there has been Black music and white music, constantly mixing and separating. Sanneh debunks cherished myths, reappraises beloved heroes, and upends familiar ideas of musical greatness, arguing that sometimes, the best popular music isn’t transcendent. Songs express our grudges as well as our hopes, and they are motivated by greed as well as idealism; music is a powerful tool for human connection, but also for human antagonism. This is a book about the music everyone loves, the music everyone hates, and the decades-long argument over which is which. The opposite of a modest proposal, Major Labels pays in full.

Banding Together

Banding Together
Author: Jennifer C. Lena
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2012-02-12
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0691150761

Covering the grown of twentieth-century American popular music, this work explores the question of why some music styles attain mass popularity while others thrive in small niches.

Music Genres and Corporate Cultures

Music Genres and Corporate Cultures
Author: Keith Negus
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2013-07-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134688210

Music Genres and Corporate Cultures explores the seemingly haphazard workings of the music industry, tracing the uneasy relationship between economics and culture; `entertainment corporations' and the artists they sign. Keith Negus examines the contrasting strategies of major labels like Sony and Polygram in managing different genres, artists and staff. How do takeovers affect the treatment of artists? Why has Polygram been perceived as too European to attract US artists? And how did Warner's wooden floors help them sign Green Day? Through in-depth case studies of three major genres; rap, country, and salsa, Negus explores the way in which the music industry recognises and rewards certain sounds, and how this influences both the creativity of musicians, and their audiences. He examines the tension between raps public image as the spontaneous `music of the streets' and the practicalities of the market, and asks why country labels and radio stations promote top-selling acts like Garth Brooks over hard-to-classify artists like Mary Chapin-Carpenter, and how the lack of soundscan systems in Puerto Rican record shops affects salsa music's position on the US Billboard chart. Drawing on over seventy interviews with music industry personnel in Britain and the United States, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures shows how the creation, circulation and consumption of popular music is shaped by record companies and corporate business styles while stressing that music production takes within a broader culture, not totally within the control of large corporations.

Categorizing Sound

Categorizing Sound
Author: David Brackett
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2016-07-19
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0520965310

Categorizing Sound addresses the relationship between categories of music and categories of people, particularly how certain ways of organizing sounds becomes integral to how we perceive ourselves and how we feel connected to some people and disconnected from others. Presenting a series of case studies ranging from race music and old-time music of the 1920s through country and R&B of the 1980s, David Brackett explores the processes by which genres are produced. Using in-depth archival research and sophisticated theorizing about how musical categories are defined, Brackett has produced a markedly original work.

1965

1965
Author: Andrew Grant Jackson
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2015-02-03
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1466864974

“For music lovers who were there and for those who wish they were, the book is a well-researched cultural history that leaves no rolling stone unturned.” —Huffington Post Friendly rivalry between musicians turned 1965 into the year rock evolved into the premier art form of its time and accelerated the drive for personal freedom throughout the Western world. The Beatles made their first artistic statement with Rubber Soul. Bob Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone, arguably the greatest song of all time, and went electric at the Newport Folk Festival. The Rolling Stones’s “Satisfaction” catapulted the band to world-wide success. New genres such as funk, psychedelia, folk rock, proto-punk, and baroque pop were born. Soul music became a prime force of desegregation as Motown crossed over from the R&B charts to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Country music reached new heights with Nashville and the Bakersfield sound. Musicians raced to innovate sonically and lyrically against the backdrop of seismic cultural shifts wrought by the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, psychedelics, the Pill, long hair for men, and designer Mary Quant’s introduction of the miniskirt. In 1965, Andrew Grant Jackson combines fascinating and often surprising personal stories with a panoramic historical narrative. “Jackson has a better ear than a lot of music writers, and one of the best parts of this book is his many casual citings of songs that echo others . . . [He] show[s] us the familiar through fresh eyes, as . . . he returns us to a year when a lot of us were young and poor and not as happy as we thought we were, yet there was always a great song on the radio.” —Washington Post

Modern Noise, Fluid Genres

Modern Noise, Fluid Genres
Author: Jeremy Wallach
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2008-12-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0299229033

What happens to “local” sound when globalization exposes musicians and audiences to cultural influences from around the world? Jeremy Wallach explores this question as it plays out in the eclectic, evolving world of Indonesian music after the fall of the repressive Soeharto regime. Against the backdrop of Indonesia’s chaotic and momentous transition to democracy, Wallach takes us to recording studios, music stores, concert venues, university campuses, video shoots, and urban neighborhoods. Integrating ground-level ethnographic research with insights drawn from contemporary cultural theory, he shows that access to globally circulating music and technologies has neither extinguished nor homogenized local music-making in Indonesia. Instead, it has provided young Indonesians with creative possibilities for exploring their identity in a diverse nation undergoing dramatic changes in an increasingly interconnected world. Ultimately, he finds, the unofficial, multicultural nationalism of Indonesian popular music provides a viable alternative to the religious, ethnic, regional, and class-based extremism that continues to threaten unity and democracy in that country.

What Is Post-Punk?

What Is Post-Punk?
Author: Mimi Haddon
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2023-02-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0472039210

Is post-punk a genre? Where did it come from? And what does it mean?

All Music Guide

All Music Guide
Author: Vladimir Bogdanov
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
Total Pages: 1508
Release: 2001
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780879306274

Arranged in sixteen musical categories, provides entries for twenty thousand releases from four thousand artists, and includes a history of each musical genre.