popular music
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Notes On Paul Morley’s “Words and Music”
“Music is merely a form of guesswork about consciousness.” “Music is careful attention paid to ongoing experience.” – Paul Morley, Words and Music (16, 134). It was with much delight that a few weeks after finishing Bob Stanley’s Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I read Paul Morley’s exhaustive, masterfully strange, and revelatory history of popular music, Words Continue reading
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On Lip Syncing And Musical Authenticity
Like a lot of folks, I watched the music acts perform at the Obama presidential inauguration. The Brooklyn Tabernacle choir, singing “Battle Hymn Of The Republic” sounded fantastic; American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson, singing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” sounded smooth and polished; James Taylor’s “America The Beautiful” was a reassuring presence; and megastar Beyonce sounded Continue reading
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On Grateful Sound: Thinking Through “Dark Star”
I have a secret: over the past few weeks while riding the subway with headphones on I’ve been listening to the Grateful Dead. And maybe not coincidentally, I haven’t shaved in about two weeks. So as I write this I’m wondering–Are these twin facts somehow related? Do they point to a strange metamorphosis taking place Continue reading
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On Sounding A Bigger Energy: Mumford And Sons
When I first saw Mumford and Sons on Saturday Night Live recently I wasn’t sure what to make of them–which is my fault not theirs. They seem like a throwback to an acoustic bluegrass-folk-rock sound. No synthesizers, sequencers or drum machines, just acoustic guitar and bass, piano/organ, banjo and dobro, a horn section, sing-song group Continue reading
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On Voice, Authenticity, And Not Being Fake
In a recent online interview excerpted in The Guardian, musician and Portishead member Geoff Barrow discusses the idea of singing with a “fake” voice. Leading the pack in Barrow’s view is the late Amy Winehouse, a white singer who sang, some people say disparagingly, like a black jazz or soul singer from an earlier era–or Continue reading
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Content, Form, And Versioning A Song Everybody Knows: Gotye’s “Somebody I Used To Know”
Sometime not overly long ago, Gotye’s song “Somebody I Used To Know” went very viral–becoming a song meme that was (and still is) hard to escape, whose video on YouTube has been viewed an astonishing 259 million times (or by some 518 million ears!). At least two or three of those views were mine, the Continue reading
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Musical Appropriation Or Just A Shoe That Fits? : Dirty Loops’ Pop Reversioning
“Hey, we’re on to so much knowledge and the music industry won’t let us use it in a creative way.” — Aaron, drummer for Dirty Loops “Could you please make a cover of every song in existence?” – Dirty Loops YouTube viewer comment There’s a lot that’s interesting going on when you watch and listen Continue reading
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On The Trickle-Down Of Electronic Dance Music Aesthetics IV: Usher And Diplo’s “Climax”
“We are in a place now where fans don’t have conviction to one sound.” – Diplo This song caught my ear the first time I heard it: I recognized Usher’s R&B falsetto singing, of course, but what really got me was the sparse electronic backing track comprised of little more than a sequenced bassline, kick, Continue reading
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On Pop Music Production Geneologies: Ester Dean’s Compositional Process
In his recent New Yorker article “The Song Machine”, John Seabrook explores the songwriting process behind contemporary pop music. Today’s Top Forty hit, says Seabrook, “is almost always machine made: lush sonic landscapes of beats, loops, and synths in which all the sounds have square edges and shiny surfaces, the voices are Auto-tuned for pitch, Continue reading
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On Recorded Music’s Last Gasp: More On Evanescent Materials In Solid Containers
Walking the aisles of a neighborhood drugstore I came upon a strange sight: a small, sad rack of CDs. From top to bottom were eight different releases I could identify (see pic above), including works by Santana, Aerosmith, Hall and Oats, Sade, Earth, Wind & Fire, Elvis, Bob Dylan, AC-DC, and a Michael Jackson compilation Continue reading
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