Interpreting popular music

In this book David Brackett demonstrates that there is no one way of interpreting popular music but that different types of popular music use different types of rhetoric, refer to different arguments about musical complexity and familiarity and draw upon different senses of history and tradition. He crosses the disciplines of contemporary cultural studies and music theory to demonstrate how listeners form their evaluations of popular songs and how they come to attribute a rich variety of meanings to them. Issues such as authorship, reception, musical codes, and different modes of representing and describing music are explored in the context of recordings made by Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Hank Williams, James Brown, and Elvis Costello. In analyzing their music and lyrics. David Brackett shows how interpretations of songs develop in specific cultural and historical contexts.

First sentence: In 1965, a recording by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, "This Diamond Ring," shot up the popularity charts shortly after its release, eventually reaching the number one position in February.

Year

1995

Language

English

Publisher

University of California Press

Editions

2

Pages

260

ISBN

9780520225411

Data source: Wikidata