In the sound of the 1960s and 1970s, nothing symbolized the rift between black and white America better than the seemingly divided genres of country and soul. Yet the music emerged from the same ...songwriters, musicians, and producers in the recording studios of Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama--what Charles L. Hughes calls the "country-soul triangle." In legendary studios like Stax and FAME, integrated groups of musicians like Booker T. and the MGs and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section produced music that both challenged and reconfirmed racial divisions in the United States. Working with artists from Aretha Franklin to Willie Nelson, these musicians became crucial contributors to the era's popular music and internationally recognized symbols of American racial politics in the turbulent years of civil rights protests, Black Power, and white backlash.Hughes offers a provocative reinterpretation of this key moment in American popular music and challenges the conventional wisdom about the racial politics of southern studios and the music that emerged from them. Drawing on interviews and rarely used archives, Hughes brings to life the daily world of session musicians, producers, and songwriters at the heart of the country and soul scenes. In doing so, he shows how the country-soul triangle gave birth to new ways of thinking about music, race, labor, and the South in this pivotal period.
Krautrockis a catch-all term for the music of various white German rock groups of the 1970s that blended influences of African American and Anglo-American music with the experimental and electronic ...music of European composers. Groups such as Can, Popol Vuh, Faust, and Tangerine Dream arose out of the German student movement of 1968 and connected leftist political activism with experimental rock music and, later, electronic sounds. Since the 1970s, American and British popular genres such as indie, post-rock, techno, and hip-hop have drawn heavily on krautrock, ironically reversing a flow of influence krautrock originally set out to disrupt.Among other topics, individual chapters of the book focus on the redefinition of German identity in the music of Kraftwerk, Can, and Neu!; on community and conflict in the music of Amon Düül, Faust, and Ton Steine Scherben; on "cosmic music" and New Age; and on Donna Summer's and David Bowie's connections to Germany. Rather than providing a purely musicological or historical account,Krautrockdiscusses the music as being constructed through performance and articulated through various forms of expressive culture, including communal living, spirituality, and sound.
During the early 1970s, the nation’s turbulence was keenly reflected in Austin’s kaleidoscopic cultural movements, particularly in the city’s progressive country music scene. Capturing a pivotal ...chapter in American social history, Progressive Country maps the conflicted iconography of “the Texan" during the ’70s and its impact on the cultural politics of subsequent decades. This richly textured tour spans the notion of the “cosmic cowboy," the intellectual history of University of Texas folklore and historiography programs, and the complicated political history of late-twentieth-century Texas. Jason Mellard analyzes the complex relationship between Anglo-Texan masculinity and regional and national identities, drawing on cultural studies, American studies, and political science to trace the implications and representations of the multi-faceted personas that shaped the face of powerful social justice movements. From the death of Lyndon Johnson to Willie Nelson’s picnics, from the United Farm Workers’ marches on Austin to the spectacle of Texas Chic on the streets of New York City, Texas mattered in these years not simply as a place, but as a repository of longstanding American myths and symbols at a historic moment in which that mythology was being deeply contested. Delivering a fresh take on the meaning and power of “the Texan" and its repercussions for American history, this detail-rich exploration reframes the implications of a populist moment that continues to inspire progressive change.
Positioned between the psychedelic and counter-cultural music of the late 1960s and the punk and new wave styles of the late 1970s, early 1970s British popular music is often overlooked in pop music ...studies of the late 20th century, but it was, in fact, highly diverse with many artists displaying an eclecticism and flair for musical experimentation. 'Progressive pop' artists such as Roxy Music, David Bowie, the early Queen, the Electric Light Orchestra, 10cc and Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel successfully straddled the album and singles markets, producing music that often drew on a variety of different musical styles and traditions. Similarly, such artists often set new benchmarks for songwriting and production, utilizing the full potential of the rapidly expanding studio technology of the era to produce albums of highly diverse material featuring, in some cases, special studio-crafted effects and soundscapes that remain unique to this day. This book considers the significance of British progressive pop in the early 1970s as a period during which the boundaries between pop and rock were periodically relaxed, providing a platform for musical creativity less confined by genre and branding.
British Rock Modernism, 1967-1977 explains how the definitive British rock performers of this epoch aimed, not at the youthful rebellion for which they are legendary, but at a highly self-conscious ...project of commenting on the business in which they were engaged. They did so by ironically appropriating the traditional forms of Victorian music hall. Faulk focuses on the mid to late 1960s, when British rock bands who had already achieved commercial prominence began to aspire to aesthetic distinction. The book discusses recordings such as the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour album, the Kinks' The Village Green Preservation Society, and the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, and television films such as the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus that defined rock's early high art moment. Faulk argues that these 'texts' disclose the primary strategies by which British rock groups, mostly comprised of young working and lower middle-class men, made their bid for aesthetic merit by sampling music hall sounds. The result was a symbolically charged form whose main purpose was to unsettle the hierarchy that set traditional popular culture above the new medium. Rock groups engaged with the music of the past in order both to demonstrate the comparative vitality of the new form and signify rock's new art status, compared to earlier British pop music. The book historicizes punk rock as a later development of earlier British rock, rather than a rupture. Unlike earlier groups, the Sex Pistols did not appropriate music hall form in an ironic way, but the band and their manager Malcolm McLaren were obsessed with the meaning of the past for the present in a distinctly modernist fashion.
Listen to This stands out as the first book exclusively dedicated to Davis’s watershed 1969 album, Bitches Brew . Victor Svorinich traces its incarnations and inspirations for ten-plus years before ...its release. The album arrived as the jazz scene waned beneath the rise of rock and roll and as Davis (1926–1991) faced large changes in social conditions affecting the African-American consciousness. This new climate served as a catalyst for an experiment that many considered a major departure. Davis’s new music projected rock and roll sensibilities, the experimental essence of 1960s’ counterculture, yet also harsh dissonances of African-American reality. Many listeners embraced it, while others misunderstood and rejected the concoction.
Listen to This is not just the story of Bitches Brew . It reveals much of the legend of Miles Davis—his attitude and will, his grace under pressure, his bands, his relationship to the masses, his business and personal etiquette, and his response to extraordinary social conditions seemingly aligned to bring him down. Svorinich revisits the mystery and skepticism surrounding the album, and places it into both a historical and musical context using new interviews, original analysis, recently found recordings, unearthed session data sheets, memoranda, letters, musical transcriptions, scores, and a wealth of other material. Additionally, Listen to This encompasses a thorough examination of producer Teo Macero’s archives and Bitches Brew’s original session reels in order to provide the only complete day-to-day account of the sessions.
How can we account for the persistent appeal of glossy commercial pop music? Why do certain performers have such emotional power, even though their music is considered vulgar or second rate? In The ...Persistence of Sentiment, Mitchell Morris gives a critical account of a group of American popular music performers who have dedicated fan bases and considerable commercial success despite the critical disdain they have endured. Morris examines the specific musical features of some exemplary pop songs and draws attention to the social contexts that contributed to their popularity as well as their dismissal. These artists were all members of more or less disadvantaged social categories: members of racial or sexual minorities, victims of class and gender prejudices, advocates of populations excluded from the mainstream. The complicated commercial world of pop music in the 1970s allowed the greater promulgation of musical styles and idioms that spoke to and for exactly those stigmatized audiences. In more recent years, beginning with the “Seventies Revival” of the early 1990s, additional perspectives and layers of interpretation have allowed not only a deeper understanding of these songs' function than when they were first popular, but also an appreciation of how their significance has shifted for American listeners in the succeeding three decades.
This book examines the birth of punk in the UK and its transformation, within a short period of time, into post-punk. Deploying innovative concepts of ‘critical mass’, ‘social networks’ and ‘music ...worlds’, and using sophisticated techniques of ‘social network analysis’, it teases out the events and mechanisms involved in punk’s ‘micro-mobilisation’, its diffusion across the UK and its transformation in certain city-based strongholds into a variety of interlocking post-punk forms. Nick Crossley offers a detailed review of prior work in this area, a rich exploration of new empirical data and a highly innovative and robust approach to the study of ‘music worlds’. Written in an accessible style, this book is essential reading for anybody with an interest in either UK punk and post-punk or the impact of social networks on cultural life and the potential of social network analysis to explore this impact.
The forceful music that rolled out of Muscle Shoals in the 1960s
and 1970s shaped hits by everyone from Wilson Pickett and Aretha
Franklin to the Rolling Stones and Paul Simon. Christopher M.
Reali's ...in-depth look at the fabled musical hotbed examines the
events and factors that gave the Muscle Shoals sound such a potent
cultural power. Many artists trekked to FAME Studios and Muscle
Shoals Sound in search of the sound of authentic southern Black
music-and at times expressed shock at the mostly white studio
musicians waiting to play it for them. Others hoped to draw on the
hitmaking production process that defined the scene. Reali also
chronicles the overlooked history of Muscle Shoals's impact on
country music and describes the region's recent transformation into
a tourism destination.
Multifaceted and informed, Music and Mystique in Muscle
Shoals reveals the people, place, and events behind one of
the most legendary recording scenes in American history.
In Working Class Heroes, David Simonelli explores the influence of rock and roll on British society in the 1960s and '70s. At a time when social distinctions were becoming harder to measure, rock ...musicians appeared to embody the mythical qualities of the idealized working class by perpetuating the image of rebellious, irreverent, and authentic musicians.
