Hearing Luxe Pop

Glorification, Glamour, and the Middlebrow in American Popular Music

John Howland

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520971646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critiques de la musique

Hearing Luxe Pop explores a deluxe-production aesthetic thathas long thrived in American popular music, in which popular-music idioms are merged with lush string orchestrations and big-band instrumentation. John Howland presents an alternative music history that centers on shifts in timbre and sound through innovative uses of orchestration and arranging, traveling from symphonic jazz to the Great American Songbook, the teenage symphonies of Motown to the "countrypolitan" sound of Nashville, the sunshine pop of the Beach Boys to the blending of soul and funk into 1970s disco, and Jay-Z's hip-hop-orchestra events to indie rock bands performing with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. This book attunes readers to hear the discourses gathered around the music and its associated images as it examines pop's relations to aspirational consumer culture, theatricality, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and glamorous lifestyles.

ONE

Hearing Luxe Pop

JAY-Z, ISAAC HAYES, AND THE SIX DEGREES OF SYMPHONIC SOUL

THE MUSIC OF JAY-Z, the celebrated rapper, entrepreneur, and producer, has embodied dominant discourses in hip-hop culture from the mid-1990s forward. But Jay-Z’s entertainment career has been celebrated on a number of auspicious occasions through a remarkably conventional sign for musical achievement—that is, his appearance with tuxedo-clad orchestras in celebrated New York concert halls, notably at Radio City Music Hall and Carnegie Hall in 2006 and 2012. In this chapter, I explore a central premise of this book, which is the value of attempting to hear the historical, cultural, and sociological signifiers embedded in popular music production and performance. This first chapter illustrates this premise by sketching out the cumulative musico-cultural associations of production textures and performance practice embedded in a single case study, Jay-Z’s June 25, 2006, Radio City Music Hall concert, which commemorated the ten-year anniversary of his debut album, Reasonable Doubt. This event occurred at a moment when such hip-hop-meets-orchestra spectacles were something of a mini-vogue. As Jay-Z was then president of Def Jam Records, in terms of cultural power and geography, the event was at the very epicenter of period hip-hop. The totemic iconography of New York is of course spread across Jay-Z’s entire recording output, up to and beyond his bid to out-Sinatra Frank Sinatra with a new theme song for the city, 2009’s “Empire State of Mind” (“I’m the new Sinatra, . . . I made it here, I can make it anywhere”). And like his everyday concerts, these bestringed showcases celebrated both what critic Jon Parales characterized as Jay-Z’s “often-told crack-to-riches story” and “old-fashioned showbiz.”¹ This chapter aims to explore the cross-generational entertainment connection between modern hip-hop and traditional “showbiz” entertainment through an examination of the multilayered semiotic associations of certain evocative, historically informed, orchestral textures employed in popular music since the turn of the twenty-first century.

Jay-Z’s aspirational career mythology is built on the bootstrap tale of a one-time drug dealer from the housing projects of Brooklyn mixing company with and being a financial equal of New York high society, a noted philanthropist, part-owner of the Brooklyn Nets, record label president, and husband to a glamorous pop diva. And yet Carnegie Hall still beckoned as the ultimate “high-class” venue. Carnegie Hall mixes with hip-hop culture quite easily, if one views the events hosted there through the legacy of old-fashioned pop entertainment. The lush orchestrations of these Jay-Z events are tied to the deep pop-culture well of symphonic soul, an early 1970s soul, funk, R&B, and proto-disco Black-pop production sound that emerged roughly in tandem with Isaac Hayes’s album Hot Buttered Soul (1969). Though the use of orchestral instruments in soul and R&B recordings predates this moment, the idiom epitomized by Hayes’s landmark release was in short order heard in blaxploitation and cop-show funk film and TV soundtracks, the lush soul of artists ranging from Marvin Gaye to Barry White, and Philly soul.² The modern-day cultural associations of symphonic soul derive from much earlier sonic roots than the 1970s, from both orchestral music in general (“art” music, film and radio orchestra music, concert pops repertory, Broadway show tunes, etc.) and orchestral pop in specific, as well as from the pop-culture reworkings of these sounds long after their heyday. Such high-low/Black-white musical tensions impart an aura of glamour, class, and sophistication via instrumental tonal juxtapositions, a hybrid orchestral-type sound (and live-performance model), not the affectation of actual classical music.

The idea that historical pop sounds, tones, and genre markers carry meaningful accretions of cultural and aural associations is central to what Simon Reynolds has termed “retromania.” Reynolds’s 2011 book of the same name primarily concerns pop music of the 2000s, a decade where he sees “a recombinant approach to music-making that typically leads to a meticulously organized constellation of reference points and allusions, sonic lattices . . . that span . . . decades.”³ While he notes that “retromania” is not at all new to pop, Reynolds takes keen interest in recent “music whose primary emotion is towards other music, earlier music.”⁴ Such music communicates through what musicologists call “musical topics,” meaning textures of music that trigger clear style and culture associations.⁵ Such “recombinant” music communicates through referential musical topics and evocative textures and rhythms, among other stylistic markers, that point “towards other music, earlier music.” Referential music of this sort employs the semiotic power of what Philip Tagg calls musical synecdoche, wherein timbre “relates indexically to a musical style and genre, producing connotations of a particular culture or environment.”⁶ I use the words timbre, tone, and texture in this book to refer to similar musically referential qualities and sounds. For example, beyond the tone color qualities of a detail, moment, or passage of music, I also employ tonal as an analog to this word’s use in linguistics to describe the semantic differences that result from varied intonations of words or syllables with similar sounds. In music, the tonal shadings of how distinct musical elements are performed in specific contexts can similarly convey musical meaning and associations toward other, earlier music.

The music I discuss in this chapter is part of a long tradition of merging Afro-diasporic music idioms with luxe orchestration textures, both orchestral and big band. It should come as no surprise, then, that hip-hop acts have participated in this trend, including Jay-Z, Kanye West, Diddy, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Erykah Badu, and the Roots, among others. By extension, large ensembles like as the daKAH Hip Hop Orchestra and the Wired Strings have also contributed to this trend.⁷ Through the conceit of the notion of “six degrees of separation,” I will sketch a twentieth-century history of American luxe pop. This sonic history—the accretive associations of referential pop production and tonal topics—is ever present, even if not recognized, whenever audiences hear such stylistic recombinations. This luxe-pop outline both illuminates a genealogy and semiotic accretions and suggests the considerable value of closely studying often overlooked ways in which certain practices and aesthetics with broad, lasting appeal can cross genres; generations; communities; cultural, social, and racial distinctions; and eras. The wide-ranging scope of this book—and, in turn, this first chapter—seeks to demonstrate the historiographic rewards and critical insights of considering certain entertainment practices and aesthetics—in this case, American entertainment modes of glamour, glitz, sophistication, and class—across the commonly perpetuated divisions imposed by genre-based studies of popular music from both the jazz and rock-pop eras. The question of how such “constellation[s] of reference points” are produced closely correlates with why these recombinant textures are employed, and that “why” is related to artists and producers as creative consumers of historical popular culture. Jay-Z’s 2006 Radio City concert frames my discussion of this aesthetic, with particular attention to the polysemous textures of the song “Can I Live,” Jay-Z’s invocations of symphonic soul, and specifically the luxe role of strings in such polystylistic productions.

KANYE WEST’S “LATE ORCHESTRATION”

The relevance of the term luxe pop to describe such intersections of lush symphonic soul and hip-hop culture is adumbrated in a 2007 Harper’s Bazaar interview where Kanye West—Jay-Z’s producer and close associate in the 2000s—was asked to describe his lavish lifestyle. He replied: “It’s like . . . pop luxe. . . . Everything about me is pop and luxury.”⁸ The key elements of a “luxe-pop” aesthetic can be seen and heard in West’s 2005 “Late Orchestration” concert at London’s Abbey Road Studios with the all-female Wired Strings Orchestra. Though likely not intentional, the project resembles Barry White’s lavishly produced 1976 Valentine’s Day appearance at Radio City with a sixty-two-woman orchestra.⁹ A second, more likely precedent was the less-opulent 2001 “Jay-Z Unplugged” performance for MTV (see the afterword).¹⁰ West’s 2005 concert, though, was the first full-scale event of this sort, and thus a precedent to Jay-Z’s 2006 show.

“Late Orchestration” was designed to maintain West’s career momentum after his multiple Grammy awards in 2005, when he appeared on the broadcast in an old-fashioned showbiz production number built on his hit, “Jesus Walks.” The auratic aspirations of the Abbey Road concert are evidenced in the show’s DVD commentary, which crows that “this was no ordinary concert. Just as . . . Kanye West is no ordinary superstar.” The promotional copy remarks that the event was performed at “one of the most famous music venues in the world. . . . [with a] beautiful . . . all-girl string ensemble in black evening gowns and eye masks of deep red. One DJ. And King Kanye . . . looking extra fly . . . putting diamonds in the sky.” West is further said to have “single-handedly propelled hip-hop to a whole new place, musically, stylistically and politically.”¹¹ This is characteristic West braggadocio, but it captures core elements of the show. An ideal example is the concert opener, “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” also the lead single from West’s 2005 album, Late Registration.¹² This release was produced and arranged by Los Angeles–based pop multi-instrumentalist and film composer Jon Brion. West was attracted to Brion’s film-score work on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Focus Features, 2004) and Brion’s orchestrations and production work for Fiona Apple (Extraordinary Machine, 2005). Brion’s eclectic productions are often informed by “baroque pop” of the 1960s and 1970s. West also wanted Late Registration to have the dark “cinematic” sound of 1990s trip-hop by Massive Attack and Portishead.¹³ He had been a fan of the latter group since its 1994 debut, Dummy, with its string-laden, moody mix of textures from downtempo soul, jazz, 1960s spy-film soundtracks, and hip-hop beats, scratching, and sampling. Late Registration was further inspired by the orchestrations and cover image of Portishead’s 1998 live album, PNYC, which featured “a sea of string players.”¹⁴

The lyric to “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” connects the music industry and Africa’s economic-political crises through the image of “conflict diamonds” (stones mined in African war zones to fund violence). In lines such as “Throw your diamonds in the sky,” “diamonds” is also reference to Roc-A-Fella Records, which is associated with Jay-Z’s “diamond” hand sign (by connecting thumbs and index fingers). Rock is further a slang term for a diamond, an image in the logo for Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s entertainment company. Both versions of “Diamonds”—the original track and a remix featuring Jay-Z—rely on samples from the theme song of the James Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever (United Artists, 1971), by John Barry and sung by Shirley Bassey. The main borrowing uses thirty-four seconds from the song’s introduction. The sound of the repeating eighth-note figure beneath the melody of the intro—an unidentifiable “diamondlike” timbre that seemingly blends harp, harpsichord, and celeste—was unique to a specific electronic organ used in the soundtrack recording.¹⁵ Starting with a quintessential Bond-film, upper-middle-register brass stinger chord, Barry surrounded the eighth-note figure with swelling lower-register string pads, rising harp runs, and discreet guitar wah-wah pedal sighs. As Bassey enters, woodwind responses are heard, while low brass creeps in before an accentuated cadence with Barry’s tightly voiced big-band brass chords. Brion’s production mixes hip-hop synth tones, sampled orchestral hits, textural samples, and drum-machine beats with live drums, harpsichord, piano, and guitars. The live performance added textures of live harp, a sixteen-member string ensemble, and female conductor (Rosie Danvers), along with tympani and brass samples, likely performed by a sampler onstage.

In homage to the main title sequence of Diamonds Are Forever, the concert DVD opens with video of falling lustrous diamonds on a black background. Then curtains rise, as a spotlight scans the masked female orchestra in a blue-lit hall. The original sample is replaced by live strings and a harp (though Bassey is heard). Dressed in white tuxedo pants and a black tuxedo jacket with red kerchief and boutonnière, West appears amid sweeping spotlights and the “diamond”-sparkle of disco-ball reflections. Commenting on the DVD, West gushed that when “we did ‘Diamonds,’ . . . people . . . were so taken aback by the lights and the strings—just how dashingly handsome I was—that . . . they were in awe, like ‘Oh my god, he looks so good’ . . . I was like . . . ‘okay, can you please get over it? . . . Can we clap now?’ ” On the greater show, he recalled

Performing . . . a hip hop show in front of an orchestra . . . was so cutting edge. . . . And to . . . spit true, heartfelt rap lyrics, . . . [with] profanity . . . in front of an orchestra was just like juxtaposing these two . . . totally different forms of music. If you picture someone who listens to classical music . . . you would think they would hate rap music. And with someone who likes rap music, you would think they would hate strings. But it shows you how . . . hip hop brings everything together.¹⁶

West does not mention Portishead here, nor does he acknowledge the ubiquity of string textures in recorded hip-hop (whether generated by sampling or software), but he was right that a “hip-hop show in front of an orchestra” was cutting-edge. These cultural and musical juxtapositions are likewise at the heart of Jay-Z’s Radio...