240 Pages
by
Routledge
240 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
The analysis of popular music forces us to rethink the assumptions that underpin our approaches to the study of Western music. Not least, it brings to the fore an idea that many musicologists still find uncomfortable - that commercial production and consumption can be aligned with artistic authenticity. Reading pop texts takes place through dialogue on many levels, which, as Stan Hawkins argues,... Read more
Contents: General editor's preface; Settling the pop score...: Introduction; Grounding aesthetic and ideological values; Musical codes and compositional design; Identity politics; Modelling identity; Interpreting ironic intent; Further discursions into the pop text; Towards a critical musicology of the popular; Mobilising the pop score; ’I’ll never be an angel’: stories of deception in Madonna’s music: Introduction; Reading musical codes in Madonna’s performance; Hearing, seeing, feeling gender; Spectatorship and seduction; Production and (post)modernist ’Survival’; Final concluding thoughts; Anti-rebel, lonesome boy: Morrissey in crisis?: Introduction; With a thorn in his side; Constructs of male identity in Morrissey; Characterisation and ’star’ depiction; Modelling empathy through vocal ’sound’; Interpreting ironic markers in pop texts; Conclusion; Annie Lennox’s ’Money Can’t Buy It’ - masquerading identity: Introduction; Opting for gender disguise; Questions of musical coding; Visualising sound through videography; Being totally Diva; Conclusion; ’Call it performance, honey’: The Pet Shop Boys: Introduction; Masculinity in the 1980s; Being boring and clever: style as rhetoric; Banality: political discourses of pleasure and power; Musical (dis)pleasures; ’Disco-Tex and the Sexelettes’: satirical musical address; Towards a PSB discourse; Conclusion; Subversive musical pleasures in ’The Artist (Again) Known as Prince’: Introduction; Dialectics of music and imagination; Identity as racial commodity; Stylistic and technical codes in Diamonds and Pearls; Sexing and ’spinning’ gender in musical expression; Carnivalesque musical display: signs of the times?; Conclusion; Bibliography; Discography; Index.
Biography
Stan Hawkins
’The range of case studies provided by Hawkins offers a very real opportunity to engage with the complex array of debates surrounding identity and representation.’ Dr Sheila Whiteley, University of Salford, UK 'Settling the Pop Score should prove a useful tool for the further study of musicians like Morrissey, Annie Lennox and the Pet Shop Boys. For those whose cultural memory does not reach back to the mid-1980s, this is a good introduction to questions of identity raised in videos by Madonna and Prince, whose sexual masquerades continue both to provoke and to proclaim.' Popular Music '... the book offers a set of interpretive approaches to popular music and is a welcome addition to current scholarship on the subject.' Notes '... the author's emphasis on interpreting particular pop musicians and their 'identities' is a valuable and engaging exercise.' Context
