The present study investigated how the gender distribution of the United Kingdom’s most popular artists has changed over time and the extent to which these changes might relate to popular music ...lyrics. Using data mining and machine learning techniques, we analyzed all songs that reached the UK weekly top 5 sales charts from 1960 to 2015 (4,222 songs). DICTION software facilitated a computerized analysis of the lyrics, measuring a total of 36 lyrical variables per song. Results showed a significant inequality in gender representation on the charts. However, the presence of female musicians increased significantly over the time span. The most critical inflection points leading to changes in the prevalence of female musicians were in 1968, 1976, and 1984. Linear mixed-effect models showed that the total number of words and the use of self-reference in popular music lyrics changed significantly as a function of musicians’ gender distribution over time, and particularly around the three critical inflection points identified. Irrespective of gender, there was a significant trend toward increasing repetition in the lyrics over time. Results are discussed in terms of the potential advantages of using machine learning techniques to study naturalistic singles sales charts data.
Drawing primarily from unpublished archival data, this article reconstructs the Musicians’ Union long embargo on library recording in Britain (1965–1978), retracing the immediate as well as ...long-lasting implications of the ban for the shaping of library music practices and discourses. The article demonstrates how crucial relations with the Union were in shaping the nascent library music industry as well as the working lives of the many individuals and groups involved in it, including London-based session musicians and music publishers. More theoretically, the article argues for a horizontal, ecological approach to library music culture, acknowledging its many intermediaries and prompting us to consider (musical) history in its unfinishedness, heterogeneity and ambiguity. The methodological challenges of researching ephemeral or ‘secondary’ music are also highlighted.
Ballads are often among the bestselling songs of heavy metal and hard rock bands. Within these genres, ballads represent a way to address emotions such as love that are not part of the primary ...self-understanding of those genres. Still, “genre ideals and style” often seem to be at odds with the sentimental aesthetics of the ballad and its emotional expression and experience. In this article, we take a close look at the sonic, textual, performative, visual, and emotional-somatic articulation of love and the generation of sentimentality in three selected metal ballads. Even if the term “power ballad,” which is often used in reference to hard rock and metal ballads, refers to the simultaneity of “heaviness” in the sound and the thematization of love in the lyrics, sentimental ballads in the stereotypically more masculine-connotated genres nevertheless create friction and skepticism in their discursive evaluation, as they generate aesthetic discrepancies between concrete songs and genre conventions. Their quantitative popularity contrasts with their qualitative evaluation. Therefore, in a second step, we analyze the reception of the selected ballads, in particular their discursive evaluations in music reviews, in order to point out the ways of argumentation through which frictions are established. As a result, we show that evaluations are related to how love is addressed in the songs and to the extent of proximity of the ballads to genre rules.
Why do you value recorded popular music? How does popular music sticks to our lives through time? This article presents the concept of Plasticine Music to explore the way music becomes an assemblage ...through our individual embodied history with it. The concept intends to expand on recent developments on the value of recorded popular music outside capital and production systems. By following scholarship from Music Sociology and Feminist Materialism it invites to consider how pieces of music become part of our biographies through emotional forces, embodied actions and affects that transform the way we relate to music; the music change and we change with it. It focuses on the materiality of music with modifiable qualities, flexibility, resistance and non fixity, which lead to multiple new shapes. Plasticine music is a form of changeling traditional conceptions of meaning and cultural consumption, as well as considering the affective force of cultural objects.
Charges of "selling out" and debates about the boundaries of cultural autonomy have played a pivotal role in the development of popular music as a legitimate and "serious" art form. With promotional ...strategies and commercial business practices now practically inseparable from the core activities previously associated with music making, the relevance of such concepts and the values that underpin them are questioned by industry experts, musicians, and fans. In this article, we explore how popular music making and perspectives on selling out have been shaped by digitalization, promotionalism, and globalization.
Standardized cross-cultural databases of the arts are critical to a balanced scientific understanding of the performing arts, and their role in other domains of human society. This paper introduces ...the Global Jukebox as a resource for comparative and cross-cultural study of the performing arts and culture. The Global Jukebox adds an extensive and detailed global database of the performing arts that enlarges our understanding of human cultural diversity. Initially prototyped by Alan Lomax in the 1980s, its core is the Cantometrics dataset, encompassing standardized codings on 37 aspects of musical style for 5,776 traditional songs from 1,026 societies. The Cantometrics dataset has been cleaned and checked for reliability and accuracy, and includes a full coding guide with audio training examples (
On the programme tonight Bennett, Andy
Popular music history,
11/2020, Volume:
12, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
British popular music television series The Old Grey Whistle Test (OGWT) was a regular feature on BBC2 between 1971 and 1987. The show enjoyed its greatest popularity during the early 1970s when, as ...a programme synonymous with the term album-orientated rock (AOR), it was responsible for introducing British popular music audiences to a different range of music than was generally featured on national television and radio at the time. Despite its iconic and relatively unique status during the early 1970s, however, little has been written about OGWT. The purpose of this article is to examine and assess the significance of OGWT in terms of its critical role as a tastemaker for British AOR audiences during an era where opportunities to listen to AOR on British television and radio were limited. The article also considers the legacy of OGWT in the digital age where its significant archival footprint on YouTube has given the show a renewed level of importance as a comprehensive retrospective guide to the AOR music of the early 1970s.
Narco-Rap Goßen, Christiane M
2021, 20211020, Volume:
55
eBook
Der mexikanische Narco-Rap entstand im Jahr 2008 innerhalb des Drogenkriegs in den Städten entlang der US-amerikanischen Grenze. Er dokumentiert die bewaffneten Auseinandersetzungen, welche die ...Grenzstädte fast täglich erschüttern. Gleichzeitig wird er vom organisierten Verbrechen zu Propagandazwecken instrumentalisiert, wodurch er sich von anderen Rap-Genres abhebt. Christiane M. Goßen zeigt, wie durch diese Instrumentalisierung im Narco-Rap aus einer ungewöhnlichen Perspektive soziale und existenzielle Räume, Imaginarien und urbane Identitäten inklusive bestimmter Rollenerfüllungen (re-)präsentiert werden. Damit bietet ihre Studie einen Einblick in die Bedeutung der Drogenkriminalität für das Leben in den Grenzstädten Mexikos.
To say a poem is like music is to say it is like a process or performance, an event happening in time, and therefore fugitive. To judge from the number of books and articles on the two subjects, ...criticism finds it easier to discuss poetry’s relationship to visual art than its relationship to music, although, in the primacy it gives to sound and the way it unfolds in time, poetry has demonstrably more in common with music than with visual art. Stevens scholarship is not an exception, having been more focused over the years on the poet’s relationship to modern painting and visual art than on his relationship to music. Before we place too much stress on Picasso’s Old Guitarist as the source for “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” we should remember that Stevens played the guitar himself.
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