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 musics 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 musics connections with other media forms (Audiovisual Entanglements).
Introduction; Nick Braae and Kai Arne Hansen.- Section I: Broad
Strokes.-
1. Scratching the Surface: Texts and Textures in Music Studiesor,
Musicology without Music; Kyle Devine.-
2. From Music Analysis to Narrative
Reading: A Case Study of Recorded Popular Song; Alex C. Harden.-
3. Kristeva
and Popular Music; Nathan Wiseman-Trowse.-
4. The Shape of the Voice:
Analyzing Vocal Gestures in Irish Traditional Music and Popular Song;
Blįithķn Duggan.-
5. Its a Dark Philosophy: The Weeknd, Intermediality, and
the Aestheticization of Provocative Themes; Kai Arne Hansen .- Section II:
Second Takes.-
6. Treating Cultural Trauma with Music: The Representation of
War in the Music of Bruce Springsteen; Susanna Välimäki.-
7. Linear
Temporality in Popular Song; Nick Braae.-
8. To Prepare a Face to Meet the
Faces that you Meet: The Instrumental Retrowave Persona; Andrei Sora.-
9.
Electric Affinities: Wagner, Hendrix, and the Thingness of Sound; Erik
Steinskog.- Section III: Entanglements.-
10. Timbre, Genre, and Polystylism
in Video Game Music; Megan Lavengood.-
11. A Musical Exploration of
Incongruity and its Humorous Effects; Ragnhild Brųvig-Hanssen.-
12. The
Empowerment of the Listener in Kendrick Lamars Backseat Freestyle; Steven
Gamble.-
13. Psychedelic Ways of Listening: A Gothic Case Study; Claire
Rebecca Bannister.-
14. Taken by Strum: Ukulele Jamming as Musical
Experience; Matthew Bannister.- Afterword; Allan F. Moore.
Nick Braae is an academic staff member in Music at the Waikato Institute of Technology, New Zealand.
Kai Arne Hansen is Associate Professor of Music in the Department of Art and Cultural Studies, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences.
