Popular Music最新文献

One of the more annoying aspects of the life of a popular music academic is that we study music that is primarily made and used by people who seem to have no interest at all in what we have to say. Popular musicians and fans are engaged with what we're talking about but not with how we talk about it. When the first volume of our history of live music came out, covering 1950–67 (Frith et al. 2013), I did some non-academic promotional work for it – presenting our book at a literary festival, library events and pensioners’ clubs (these were the people who had lived through what we were describing). Audiences were, like my non-academic friends, sufficiently interested in live music history to discuss our findings with enthusiasm but, at the same time, found the book unreadable. They couldn't be doing with academic research conventions, with the references constantly interrupting the narrative flow, with the painstaking collection and assessment of evidence, the stolid back and forth between the particular (the facts) and the general (the concepts).

German Schlager's simple and static musical form is considered by many authors as an immutable key factor in the genre's overall success. However, the introduction of break routines and pop drops to the genre seem to refute this point of view. Cultural references and musical clichés are also integral parts of Schlager's staging. This paper presents an integrative content analysis of 548 songs from 2009 to 2019 with the aim of observing trends in musical form and the use of both cultural references and musical clichés in contemporary Schlager. Overall, the corpus shows more variability than expected, featuring a growing number of structural parts. Contrary to strong claims, the genre is undergoing a change in musical structure. However, whether this also applies to the reproduction of certain stereotypes in song lyrics remains to be seen: about a quarter of the songs contain cultural references, outnumbering musical clichés by a factor of three.

Based on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo with musicians who perform a musical style known as shaʿbi, this article unravels the complex role that the state-affiliated Musicians’ Syndicate plays in musicians’ working lives in order to investigate the contradictions of state control over music in Egypt. Focusing on moments of encounter between musicians and Syndicate officials, I consider why my interlocutors’ time was split between evading the Syndicate and its restrictions, and embracing the Syndicate by calling for it to implement harsher interventions. Doing so not only sheds light on the reality of cultural production in an authoritarian state, but also prompts a broader reconsideration of scholarly approaches to popular music censorship, requiring us to move beyond dichotomies of ‘state vs. society,’ ‘censors vs. censored,’ and ‘resistors vs. oppressors’ that have tended to dominate scholarship on music censorship.

‘Bayraktar’, a pop/rap song written by a Ukrainian soldier following Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, went viral, spawning various covers, from electronic dance music to hardcore punk. I analyse this digital archive of 19 ‘Bayraktar’ songs, including five that share only the title with Taras Borovok's paradigmatic song, and contextualise it within the broader historical and decolonial frameworks of Ukrainian resistance music, including the protest music of the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan demonstrations, and the anti-war music produced during the Donbas war and in the first six months of the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war. I apply the method of multimodal critical discourse analysis to highlight the ways that sound, image (videos and stills) and text (lyrics and verbal descriptions on YouTube) forge nationalist and global protest rhetorics, and also function pragmatically to raise awareness, fundraise for the armed forces and humanitarian efforts, and boost morale in Ukraine and abroad.