On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements

Nick Braae, Kai Arne Hansen, Nick Braae, Kai Arne Hansen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030180980
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030180997
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements comprises eleven essays that explore the myriad ways in which popular music is entwined within social, cultural, musical, historical, and media networks. The authors discuss genres as diverse as mainstream pop, hip hop, classic rock, instrumental synthwave, video game music, amateur ukelele groups, and audiovisual remixes, while also considering the music's relationship to technological developments, various media and material(itie)s, and personal and social identity. The collection presents a range of different methodologies and theoretical positions, which results in an eclecticism that aptly demonstrates the breadth of contemporary popular music research. The chapters are divided into three major sections that address: wider theoretical and analytical issues ("Broad Strokes"), familiar repertoire or concepts from a new perspective ("Second Takes"), and the meanings to arise from music's connections with other media forms ("Audiovisual Entanglements").

© The Author(s) 2019

N. Braae, K. A. Hansen (eds.)On Popular Music and Its Unruly EntanglementsPop Music, Culture and Identityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18099-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. To Begin Untangling Popular Music

Kai Arne Hansen¹ and Nick Braae²

(1)

Department of Art and Cultural Studies, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Hamar, Norway

(2)

School of Media Arts, Waikato Institute of Technology, Hamilton, New Zealand

Kai Arne Hansen (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Nick Braae

End Abstract

“To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable,” wrote American composer and conductor Aaron Copland in 1959. By wilfully misreading him, we can consider how, 60 years later, music flows unstoppably through our lives—and, indeed, our lives flow unstoppably through music—in ways that would have been unimaginable for Copland at the time. Music is ubiquitous on a day-to-day basis: it pervades urban spaces (cafés, restaurants, shops, street corners, and subway stations) and contemporary broadcasting channels (radio, TV, web), and provides a soundtrack for our commutes, chores, and exercise routines; it can be recorded and produced by “anyone” using software pre-installed on our devices, and distributed freely through open global platforms; and, it is organized in vast sonic libraries found on smartphones, tablets, and watches, tailored to our specific tastes via complex algorithms. As clichéd as it may sound, music is instantly available with the click of a button (and, often, a small monthly fee).¹ Now more than ever before, it is easy to see (yet, possibly, all the more difficult to fully grasp) the myriad forms that musical experiences take.

On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements presents a selection of essays that aims to capture something of the way in which popular music weaves into our society, culture, and lives. As already implied, one central aspect of this relates to the implications of new media technologies. However, as Henry Jenkins observes (2006, 2–3), our contemporary media culture is defined not only by technological developments, but also by changes in social and cultural practices, in modes of consumption and listening, and in relations between artists and fans. As listeners today, we grapple with making sense of music at a time when new musical forms appear seemingly out of nowhere, bringing with them additional questions with regard to ethics and aesthetics; the boundaries between different genres and styles can appear increasingly fluid, or even non-existent; and music frequently, if not primarily, operates and develops meaning in conjunction with other media and art forms. Put bluntly, the magnitude and velocity of recent technological and cultural developments—in popular music practices and more generally in the Western world—challenge our “ability to keep pace with meaning in our time” (Richardson and Gorbman 2013, 32). This collection recognizes this issue not as an opportunity for singling out any one aspect or function of popular music that necessitates further study, but, rather, as a platform for mobilizing popular music as the focal point for a plurality of investigations into its various connections, intersections, and entanglements. Yet, while current circumstances put into stark focus the ways in which popular music is entwined with other cultural and social forms, this is not a new or technologically-dependent phenomenon. Many of popular music’s connections are, to be sure, historical or abstract, as some of our authors demonstrate.

Popular music itself, both as a general category and as an object of study, is notoriously difficult to pin down (Moore 2007, xi; Scott 2009, 5). Partly, this is because it never exists in isolation, cannot be encountered outside of discourse, and is invariably produced and consumed in relation to vast networks of meaningful connections and relationships. It follows that, as Richard Middleton points out, the musical worlds that we inhabit “are not clear sets, filled with autonomous entities which are foreign to each other and connected only via neutral ‘links’; rather, they are half-way worlds, without clear boundaries, filled with transient knots of variable meaning, practice and status” (2000, 10). Middleton’s argument sets the stage for untangling popular music, by shedding light on its entwinement with diverse historical, cultural, and social circumstances and practices, and assessing how it intersects with other idioms and media forms. In undertaking this task, we recognize that popular music is not any one thing, but, rather, can be defined according to a broad range of (admittedly unstable) criteria (see, for example, Tagg 2012, 43ff.).

Inquiring into the state, significance, and function of popular music, in its many guises, On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements explores a wide range of music—both recent and older—with an aim to reflect the plurality of potential meanings and understandings that underpins all musical encounters. As such, the collection is informed and shaped by the diversity and eclecticism that has taken hold within the broad academic discipline of popular music research. In following on from the strides made in previous decades by scholars within critical musicology and adjacent fields (see Hawkins 2012; Moore 2007; Scott 2009), we would like to think that the days of disciplinary hand-wringing and the almost-apologetically or defiant justifications of researching popular music are coming to an end. Indeed, while earlier scholars had to grapple with popular music’s seemingly “low” status as an object of academic study (Moore 1993, 9), the last few decades have seen popular music gain recognition in numerous scholarly fields.²

There remains a strong interest in studying popular music’s relation to different aspects of identity, including age (Bennett 2013; Bennett and Hodkinson 2012; Jennings and Gardner 2012), gender and sexuality (Hawkins 2016, 2017; Lee 2018), race and ethnicity (Maultsby and Burnim 2016; Stoever 2016), and religion (Ingalls 2018; Partridge and Moberg 2017). Recent collections have ambitiously aimed to tackle popular music in its breadth (Bennett and Waksman 2015), have elucidated its articulation in music video (Burns and Hawkins 2019), or have expanded analytical approaches (Burns and Lacasse 2018; Scotto et al. 2018; Spicer and Covach 2010). Scholarship on the production aspects of popular music is proliferating (Bennett and Bates 2018; Frith and Zagorski-Thomas 2012; Zagorski-Thomas 2014). And, not least, popular music is increasingly gaining prominence within the educational context, as evidenced by recent publications (Moir et al. 2019; Smith et al. 2017) as well as the launch of the Journal of Popular Music Education in 2017. Prompted by this diversity of current popular music scholarship, On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements aims to present a range of co-existing and mutually supportive (even if apparently contradicting) approaches to the analysis and study of popular music. By deliberately embracing eclecticism, we hope to foster increased engagement between different specialized approaches, thus countering a potential fragmentation of the field. The chapters are underpinned by two primary objectives:

• To challenge, explore, or discuss some of the often taken-for-granted ideas, assumptions, and conventions concerning researching particular repertoires and formats, thus illuminating the permeable and negotiable boundaries between different idioms, media, art forms, eras, and cultural spaces.
• To reach into hitherto underexplored musical domains, tease out connections and entanglements that on the surface might appear unlikely, and introduce rich dialogue between different spheres of the musical (and nonmusical) world(s).

Both objectives are intended to function as launching pads for merging analytical dexterity with ardent curiosity. This might be by way of demonstrating wider methodological applicability, or through highlighting resonances, parallels, or other such historical, musical, cultural, or media connections. As such, the contributors of this collection join Allan F. Moore in viewing the study of music as an invitation to engage with or understand music in a particular way (2012, 3), well aware that such an invitation should be dispersed both with careful consideration and with great engagement: engagement with the reader, with the music in question, and not least with the wide variety of discourses and contexts any given musical example mobilizes. The most compelling invitation, then, might well...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. To Begin Untangling Popular Music
• Part I. Broad Strokes
• Part II. Second Takes
• Part III. Audiovisual Entanglements
• Back Matter