Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music

by Richard Middleton (Editor)

Overview

Why do we enjoy pop songs (or not)? Why do they mean so much to us? What do they mean? Is it the sounds, the rhythms, or the words? Is it the singing, the personae of the stars, or the messages and images that the songs conjure up?

Plenty of people have written about pop personalities, the music industry, or about their own tastes, but serious analysis of the songs themselves is still rare. This collection of essays, all previously published in the leading journal Popular Music, brings together key studies by many of the leading scholars studying pop music today. Together they add up to the first substantial anthology to focus on musical "texts." Collecting a wide range of approaches, and looking at songs by performers as varied as Irving Berlin, Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Peter Gabriel, Jimi Hendrix, John Mellencamp, David Bowie, James Brown, Randy Newman, and John Zorn, the book marks out a distinctive new territory characterized by the fusion of cultural studies and pop musicology.

Reading Pop will be required reading for all serious students and lovers of popular music.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198166115
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	09/07/2000
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Richard Middleton is Professor of Music at the University of Newcastle.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: Locating the Popular Music Text, Richard Middleton
Part 1: Analyzing the Music
1. Randy Newman's Americana, Peter Winkler
2. Prince: Harmonic Analysis of "Anna Stesia", Stan Hawkins
3. Analyzing Popular Music: Theory, Method, and Practice, Philip Tagg
4. Popular Music Analysis and Musicology: Bridging the Gap, Richard Middleton
5. James Brown's "Superbad" and the Double-Voiced Utterance, David Brackett
6. Maybellene: Meaning and the Listening Subject, Sean Cubitt
Part 2: Words and Music
7. His Name was in Lights: Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode", Timothy Taylor
8. Listening to Peter Gabriel's "I Have the Touch", Umberto Fiori
9. Three Tributaries to "The River", David Griffiths
10. Pity Peggy Sue, Barbara Bradby and Brian Torode
Part 3: Modes of Representation
11. Progressive Rock and Psychedelic Coding in the Work of Jimi Hendrix, Sheila Whiteley
12. The Hieroglyphics of Love: The Torch Singers and Interpretation, John Moore
13. Genre, Performance, and Ideology in the Early Songs of Irving Berlin, Charles Hamm
14. "Everybody's Lonesome for Somebody": Age, the Body, and Experience in the Music of Hank Williams, Richard Leppert and George Lipsitz
15. Postcolonialism on the Make: The Music of John Mellencamp, David Bowie, and John Zorn, Ellie Hisama
16. Structural Relationships of Music and Images in Music Video, Alf Bjórnberg
Select Bibliography