Icons of Popular Music – serie

This book provides the first comprehensive musicologically-informed account of Icelandic singer-songwriter Bjork. Bjork is internationally recognized for her unique and innovative musical style, as well as her collaborative working relationship with artists, musicians and sound engineers. Her work crosses the boundaries between club and dance culture and high art. Bjork has won numerous awards, including Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her role in the film Dancer in the Dark, for which she also wrote the music. Nicola Dibben presents an analysis of audio and video tracks, live performances and recorded sound, viewed through the critical reception, interviews and fanzines that surround Bjork's music. This analysis reveals recurrent cultural themes brought into focus by her music: landscape and identity, the relationship between humans and technology, song as a vehicle for emotional expression, and female autonomy. Reference is made to the whole of Bjork's career, but the focus is on her solo career from Debut onwards. Additional chapters on Bjork's compositional process--with newly gathered interview material--and on the critical-musicological approach adopted in the book round out this original study.

It’s likely that, as an icon of pop music, Elvis Costello still looks like the cover of This Year’s Model (1978) and, were he run over by a bus, it’s ‘Oliver’s Army’ (1979) that would be played in surprised and sombre tribute. Here to stay, and recognized by Burt Bacharach as ‘a great survivor’, Costello has produced a large and significant body of work. This is the first book on Costello that sets out to avoid chronological presentation, preferring a thematic approach focused on music and words over the nearly thirty years that separate ‘Radio Sweetheart’ and ‘Country Darkness’. In addition to engaging with the songs Costello has performed as a rock musician, the book will include informed discussion of more recent albums such as Painted from Memory, North, and Il Sogno. There is also discussion of essays Costello has written to support CD reissues of his recordings, a substantial body of writing approaching a critical autobiography. The book may contradict expectation, arguing that on all fronts – music, words, voice, instrumental resource – Costello’s work broadens and deepens, as he sets himself the task of expanding the range of expressive material available.

Finalist, ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Awards 2012, Performing Arts and Music (Adult Non-Fiction) Brian Wilson is a musical genius. Ever since British press agent Derek Taylor launched a publicity campaign with that theme to promote the landmark LP Pet Sounds in 1966, some variation of that claim has been obligatory when discussing the significance of the Beach Boys' founder and chief composer. Originally designed to liberate Wilson from his outmoded image as a purveyor of sun-and-surf teen pop so the symphonic sophistication of his music might be properly appreciated, the assertion has been repeated so often in the forty-plus years since as to render it virtually meaningless. Indeed, if anything, the label today seems an albatross around the man's neck, inasmuch as Wilson's slow-but-steady reemergence as a working musician since 1998 after three decades of mental illness and drug abuse, has been freighted with expectations that he again produce something as epochal as "Good Vibrations" to justify the adoration he inspires in impassioned defenders. Brian Wilson interrogates this and other paradigms that stymie critical appreciation of Wilson's work both with the Beach Boys and as a solo artist. This is the first study of Wilson to eschew chronology for a topical organization that allows discussion of lyrical themes and musical motifs outside of any prejudicial presumptions about their place in the trajectory of his career. The chapter on lyrics explores questions of quality, asking why the words to Wilson's songs are often considered a detriment, before surveying such tendencies as melancholy and introspection, the conceit of childlike wisdom, his depiction of women, and Americana/nostalgia. The section on music focuses on his falsetto, the famous harmonies, the peculiar whiteness of the Beach Boys' sound, as well as song structure. A final chapter on iconicity asks how rock criticism's investment in auteurship both maintains and limits his reputation. Finally, Curnutt examines what Brian Wilson means to his most fervent fans. Together, these issues emphasize the often overlooked point that, despite his status as a "living legend," Brian Wilson does not always fit neatly into the paradigms of taste and value by which critics grant certain artists entry into the pantheon of pop and rock importance.

For ten years between 1965 and 1975, James Brown was the most popular and cutting-edge of any black artist. As one journalist put it, "before Brown, there was music with a beat. After Brown music had found a groove." The drawing out of this "groove," leveraged on "the one," - or the first and third beats of a 4/4 bar, - would provide the key to much of Brown's subsequent musical success and instil within popular music an unprecedented drive that would characterize not only the funk style, but also provide the rhythmic blueprint for dance music up to the present day. This book explores how funk emerged in the mid-1960s at the very apex of the civil rights movement and shows how this music mirrored the broader changes taking place within the African-American community at a crucial political time and continues to this day to underpin remix culture. It traces the extent of the Brown legacy, musically, culturally and otherwise articulating decisive links between Brown's work and the DJ culture that embraced it so emphatically that Brown is now considered to be the most widely sampled African-American recording artist in history; many of Brown's refrains - the screams, the horn stabs, the "funky drummer" breakbeats - have been sampled so often as to have seemingly become part of the public domain. Traversing the past forty years of popular music, the book explores how the ubiquitous presence of Brown's groove, the affective and transformative capacities of a grunt or a well-timed "Good God" or punctuating scream take over where language fails and have made Brown one of the greatest musical innovators of the twentieth century.

Elvis Presley remains the single most important figure in twentieth century popular music. To many commentators, however, he has simply embodied the benefits and problems of uncritically embracing capitalism. By 2005 the 'Memphis Flash' sold over a billion records worldwide, yet his cultural significance cannot be measured by these extraordinary sales figures alone. He cannot quite be reduced to a placeholder for the contradictions of commerce. As the most prominent performer of the rock'n'roll era, then as a charismatic global superstar, Elvis fundamentally challenged the established relationship between White and Black culture, drew attention to the social needs of women and young people, and promoted the value of Southern creativity. He functioned as a bridge figure between folk roots and high modernity, and in the process became a controversial symbol of American unity. Elvis interprets the image and music of Elvis Presley to reveal how they have evolved to construct a particularly appealing and powerful myth. Following broad contours of Presley's rollercoaster career, the book uses a range of analytical frames to challenge established perspectives on an icon. Its shows that the controversy around Elvis has effectively tested how far a concern for social equality could be articulated through the marketplace, and ultimately challenged how popular music itself should be assessed.

Of all pop music's icons, the Beatles have attracted more attention and generated more discussion than any other performers. The group's transformation from a semi-professional skiffle group in Liverpool to one of the twentieth century's key historical and cultural events has been told and re-told in numerous forms - on the cinema screen, in print, on stage, on TV and radio. Details of their personal and private histories are familiar to audiences and fans around the world. Their songs are among the best known and most critically acclaimed of the rock'n'roll era. The ways in which they dismantled many routine assumptions about the role of 'pop stars' in the 1960s helped to substantially re-direct the structures and cultures of the popular music industry in subsequent decades. Sixty years after their formation, interest in the group and its music remains as strong as ever. Because of the unprecedented nature of their success, their perennial associations with the century's most beguiling decade, the range of their extra-musical activity, and the dramatic postscripts to a career that effectively ended in 1970, many accounts of the Beatles have adopted a tone that veers between the sensational and the reverential. In addition, such accounts often overlook the significance of the professional, geographical, historical and technological constraints within which the Beatles worked, and which shaped their live and recorded musical output. In this book, Ian Inglis provides a succinct critical appreciation of the group that is balanced, informative and objective. It concentrates above all on the music of the Beatles, the context in which it was created, performed and recorded, and its rapid and often startling evolution which, powered by the formidable writing talents of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, moved from early cover versions through the conventions of the two- or three-minute love song to the lyrical variety and musical innovations of their post-touring years. His account separates myth from reality, documents the uneasy relationship between creativity and control that acted as a catalyst for their artistic development, and supplies fresh insights into the aspirations and achievements of the world's most celebrated popular musicians.

Since her death in 2003, Nina Simone has continued to be revered as a cultural icon and role model for scores of fans and fellow musicians. Much of her fame derives from her association with the civil rights movement, for which she wrote such classic songs as 'Mississippi Goddam', 'Four Women' and 'Young, Gifted and Black'. The defiance and affirmation of such anthems was accompanied by an equal dedication to songs of melancholy, yearning and spiritual questing. Placing Simone and her music firmly within the socio-historical context of the 1960s, this book also argues for the importance of considering the artist's entire career and for paying greater attention to her music than is often the case in biographical accounts. Simone defied musical categories even as she fought against social ones and the result is a body of work that draws upon classical and jazz music, country blues, French chanson, gospel, protest songs, pop and rock tunes, turning genres and styles inside out in pursuit of what Simone called "black classical music". The book begins with a focus on the early part of Simone's career and a discussion of genre and style. Connecting its analysis to a discussion of social categorization (with particular regard to race), it argues that Simone's defiance of stylistic boundaries can be seen as a political act. From here, the focus shifts to Simone's self-written protest material, connecting it to her increasing involvement in the struggle for civil rights. The book also provides an in-depth account of Simone's 'possession' of material by writers such as Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Sandy Denny and Judy Collins, while exploring the relationship between the personal and the political. In considering material from the Simone's lesser-known work from the 1970s to the 1990s, the study proposes a theory of the "late voice" in which issues of age, experience and memory are emphasised. The book concludes with a discussion of Simone's ongoing legacy.

Bob Dylan is one of the most important songwriters of our time. His lyrics provided inspiration to countless performers and pointed the popular song in a new direction. With some justification he has been celebrated as a poet, philosopher or seer; his wordplay is the subject of repeated study and analysis. Yet, his lyrics are sung. His songs are music. In this concise profile Keith Negus presents Bob Dylan primarily as musician, focusing on the qualities of his songs that have received little attention, such as melody, rhythm, instrumental texture, and his performing voice. He also explores the way Dylans musical sensibility has been shaped by the blues and folk ballad traditions and highlights how he has frequently created unique musical identities by personalizing borrowed phrases, tunes or riffs. In tracing the various phases of a career that has lasted almost half a century, Negus stresses the centrality of performance to Dylans life as a musician and songwriter, as well as detailing the way he has treated his songs as continually open to change and rearrangement in concert. Through listening to Dylans words as sounds, rhythms and tunes in the air rather than reading them as prose on a page, we can gain an insight into one of the most enigmatic, enthralling, yet unpredictable, of contemporary popular musicians.

Though The Velvet Underground existed for less than three years with its original members, it is considered to be not just the ‘ultimate New York band’ but also the most influential group ever. Artists who have acknowledged such influence include David Bowie, The Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, Joy Division and Nirvana.Witts places the band and its genesis in the cultural context of Manhattan’s beatnik bohemianism, its radical artistic environment, and the city’s negative reaction to California’s ‘Hippie’ counterculture. Lou Reed’s song factory background is also considered, while his Primitives (1964-5) and Velvet Underground songs (1965-70) are examined within the stylistic context of rock music. The band’s sound world is likewise considered in this light. John Cale’s experimental contribution is assessed, especially his work for LaMonte Young (The Theatre of Eternal Music) and what he carried from that experience into the Velvet’s sound.The visual artist Andy Warhol became the band’s manager and producer in 1965. He placed his ‘superstar’ Nico in the line-up (which already included a female drummer). The radical nature of the group’s Warhol period performances are examined, together with those aspects related to issues of gender, sexuality and drugs culture by which the Warhol Factory scene was identified, and contemplated in Reed’s songs.Witts examines the musical influences of the Velvets on punk, post-punk and subsequent rock movements, culminating in the group’s reunion of 1993. He also indexes the variety of media constructions that the group endured through the years and how these affected Cale, Nico and Reed and their attempts to establish solo careers.

Finalist, ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Awards 2012, Performing Arts and Music (Adult Non-Fiction) Brian Wilson is a musical genius. Ever since British press agent Derek Taylor launched a publicity campaign with that theme to promote the landmark LP Pet Sounds in 1966, some variation of that claim has been obligatory when discussing the significance of the Beach Boys' founder and chief composer. Originally designed to liberate Wilson from his outmoded image as a purveyor of sun-and-surf teen pop so the symphonic sophistication of his music might be properly appreciated, the assertion has been repeated so often in the forty-plus years since as to render it virtually meaningless. Indeed, if anything, the label today seems an albatross around the man's neck, inasmuch as Wilson's slow-but-steady reemergence as a working musician since 1998 after three decades of mental illness and drug abuse, has been freighted with expectations that he again produce something as epochal as "Good Vibrations" to justify the adoration he inspires in impassioned defenders. Brian Wilson interrogates this and other paradigms that stymie critical appreciation of Wilson's work both with the Beach Boys and as a solo artist. This is the first study of Wilson to eschew chronology for a topical organization that allows discussion of lyrical themes and musical motifs outside of any prejudicial presumptions about their place in the trajectory of his career. The chapter on lyrics explores questions of quality, asking why the words to Wilson's songs are often considered a detriment, before surveying such tendencies as melancholy and introspection, the conceit of childlike wisdom, his depiction of women, and Americana/nostalgia. The section on music focuses on his falsetto, the famous harmonies, the peculiar whiteness of the Beach Boys' sound, as well as song structure. A final chapter on iconicity asks how rock criticism's investment in auteurship both maintains and limits his reputation. Finally, Curnutt examines what Brian Wilson means to his most fervent fans. Together, these issues emphasize the often overlooked point that, despite his status as a "living legend," Brian Wilson does not always fit neatly into the paradigms of taste and value by which critics grant certain artists entry into the pantheon of pop and rock importance.