Book Review: Julliard: A History (Olhmstead); Music in Everyday Life (DeNora); and Rap Music and Street Consciousness (Keyes). (original) (raw)
Music, Culture, and Society: A Reader (review)
Philosophy of Music Education Review, 2003
In this compilation of just over three-dozen essays and extracts, Derek B. Scott proposes to explore "musical meaning and the extent to which it is informed by cultural experience and socially-derived knowledge." 1 In the reader are sections on "Music and Language," "Music and the Body: Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity," "Music and Class," "Music and Criticism," and "Music Production and Consumption," fleshed out with selections by such well-known musicologists and theorists as Eero Tarasti, John Blacking, Lucy Green, and Michel Foucault. Furthermore, included within each section is an introduction contextualizing the individual pieces, as well as a complete list a references. The first section, "Music and Language," addresses the applications of literary criticism to music as a type of language. Two extracts, one by musicologist Harold Powers and another by Leonard Bernstein, detail the various uses of the metaphor as tools in linking music and language. In his piece, Powers recounts the historical origins and development of three such uses: that of making a semantic (affective) connection, phonological (structural) connection, and linguistic connection (connection in meaning). Bernstein, building upon these distinctions, demonstrates their usefulness in answering the aesthetic question of how music "means."
Media Column Rebellious Rhapsody Metal , Rap , Community , and Individuation
2018
Music can be a powerful force and tool in the life of an adolescent. It forms a social context and informs the adolescent about the adult world through the lens of artists' lives, language, and presence as models. Allegiance to a form of music is allegiance to those who make it, a way to friendship and kinship, and a road to personal identity through belonging. In their relationships formed through music, teens can create a sense of community that may be lacking in the life of family. The rebellious music of earlier generations has given rise to complex musical genres, mp and heavy metal, that are strong in defiance and controversial in their violent and sexual content. What do these musical affiliations tell us about certain segments of adolescent development and culture? The authors consider this question by exploring the form and content of the music while using it to illuminate psychodynamic and psychosocial aspects of adolescent development. (Acad Psychiatry 2002; 26:51-59)
Theory, Culture & Society, 1997
He has a musicology PhD. and has published a range of books and articles about rock, alternative movements, youth culture, identity, modernity, media use and cultural theory, including the three 1995 English volumes In Garageland: Rock, Youth and Modernity (with Ulf Lindberg and Ove Sernhede), Youth Culture in Late Modernity (ed. with Göran Bolin) and Cultural Theory and Late Modernity.
Entering the Present: Music Meets Race
2005
and their agents are not liable for any legal actions that may arise involving the article's content, including but not limited to, copyright infringement. The title of this collection, Music and the Racial Imagination, is provocative—and I'll wager that this is intentional. It is a great title because it simultaneously does several things. It brings together " music " and " race, " which have not previously been given equal emphasis in musicology, and then links these two things with imagination. 1 The title creates an imagined space where music and race can begin to co-star in leading roles. As music specialists who feel connected to the world in which we live and wish that music scholarship had been more cognizant of current issues sooner, we read the book's title and think " Finally! Someone is taking this on. " The co-editors of this collection, Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, do not balk and seem to be aware of what they are getti...
RAP MUSIC, AN ARENA FOR SOCIO-CULTURAL DISTINCTION
Rap music is one of the cultural goods that have been developed especially among teenagers and youths in the present decade. This rapid development takes the attention of academic researchers and institutions. The present research is trying to understand the place of Rap music among teenagers and youths who are playing Rap music in Rasht city: Iran, Guilan province. There are two important questions in this research. The first is: whether Rap songs in the studied time/place have resistance aspects? And, the second is: where is the position of distinctive strategies in these songs? For investigating this research, 24 rappers in Rasht (Guilan province) were interviewed by qualitative approach, and three texts of the songs also were analyzed based on qualitative content method. The results showed that Rap music can include resistance and subcultural approach; and more important, it can create arena for discrimination and personification of social/cultural identity among teenagers and youths. Individuals who are attempting to construct their identity based on specific reading of their generation about society, politics, culture, and art. This type of identity in today's pluralistic cultures has collage- like nature.
REVIEW | Collective Participation and Audience Engagement in Rap Music
2020
This monograph also arrives in a meaningful time in which live music has started to attract scholarly research. This includes Simon Frith et al.'s two volumes (and a third in its way) on the history of live music in Britain (2013; 2019), Chris Anderton's research on festivals (2019), Robert Edgar et al.'s book on arena concerts (2015) and Angela Cresswell-Jones and Rebecca Jane Bennett's edited collection on live music in the digital era (2015), to name a few. The aim of the author, very clear from the outset and constantly reminded throughout this book, is to provide evidence to understand rap as a live-oriented form of music. Drawing from previous research (much of which relies on oral history) and the analysis of paradigmatic recordings, Diallo examines the way rap music constantly uses an interlocutor (physical or virtual) as a strategy to generate collective participation. To do so, he carefully and cleverly examines how lyricsthrough call and response, intertextuality, and other rhetorical strategies such as addressing the audience in present tense-stimulate audience engagement. Overall, the argument of the book is that collective participation is to be found throughout the various changes in rap's history, from live music to recorded, from party lyrics to social lyrics, and from solo performances to competitive or "battle" shows. His division of rap's history into periods 1974-1978 (formative period), 1979-1992 (craftmanship period) and 1993-2010 (celebrity period), gives a structured way to present chapters and, most of all, provides a helpful tool for the non-specialist to follow his historical arguments quite easily, making this an accessible reading for
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2016
Loren Kajikawa's Sounding Race in Rap Songs provides a first-of-its-kind introduction to how rap music works. As the title suggests, the book focuses on identity-work and how racial meaning gets produced through a combination of lyrics, imagery, and instrumentation (i.e., "beats"). Whereas critical explorations of rap music often deal with the first two, it is the last category-the aesthetic priorities governing the production and reception of hip-hop beats-where Sounding Race makes an original and important contribution to popular music scholarship. Sounding Race is foremost a piece of historical research. Kajikawa's timeline starts in the late 1970s, with an examination of live performances that immediately preceded hip hop's transition to a music commodity, and concludes with reflections on Chinese American rapper Jin's 2004 efforts to cultivate mainstream success. Yet the formula Kajikawa puts forth-carefully considering song production practices and meticulously unpacking musical arrangements-can be utilized to examine more recent developments in rap's racialized sounding, for example, the twenty-first century ascendance of southern rap. Such an approach calls for a fresh methodology. Building on previous scholarship by musicologists like Joseph Schloss, Mark Katz, and the late Adam Krims, Kajikawa eschews conventional music notation, instead employing an assortment of transcription modes, which showcase hip-hop producers' skillful manipulation of breakbeats. There are a few key places in the book-for example, the discussion of how Grandmaster Flash's "quick mix theory 'Africanizes' any slice of sound" (27) or how the "lack of rhythmic density and absence of syncopation" in Eminem's "My Name Is" creates a "rhythmic parody of whiteness" (132)-where racialized meanings seem to emerge directly out of the musical tracks. But Kajikawa is careful not to overstate this. His formal instrumental analyses take on racial connotations via the broader context of each song's appearance, including lyrical content, images represented in videos, and the sociopolitical situation at the time. In fact, citing sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant's (1994) concept of "racial formations," which argues that racial meanings evolve through a series of political projects, Kajikawa presents rap music as its "musical analogue" (79), both reflecting and affirming transforming notions of race during the late twentieth century. Emphasizing the importance of elusive qualities like "vibe" and timbre, Kajikawa details a number of techniques employed by hip-hop producers in their relentless pursuit of the perfect sound. These include employing studio musicians to interpolate drums, bass lines, and guitar riffs; programing classic percussion patterns on drum machines; and using digital sampler-sequencers to capture and reconfigure drum "breaks." Fascinatingly, the evolution of these approaches is not linear but circles back as different aesthetic and sonic priorities are sought. Sounding Race's four substantive chapters, all named after classic rap songs, each cover a specific era of hip-hop musical innovation. Chapter 1, "Rapper's Delight," compares a bootlegged recording of a 1978 Grandmaster Flash performance with the classic 1979 Sugarhill Gang song for which the chapter is titled. In one of several revelatory passages in the book, Kajikawa masterfully illustrates how the stability and symmetry of the latter's musical track-which featured studio musicians playing the same bass line "for fifteen minutes without stopping or making mistakes" (37)empowered emcees to construct more complex narratives, consistent themes, and extended exhibitions of their poetic prowess. Hip hop's transformation from activity to song-something to be played on the radio and bought in record stores-caused its practitioners to radically re-conceptualize how they pursued their creative craft.
Music Asylums: Wellbeing Through Music in Everyday Life
Music Asylums: Wellbeing Through Music in Everyday Life, 2016
Reviewed by Jonathan Still The idea that music has mystical powers-to heal, to soothe, to cause depravity, to promote political unrest or intelligence-has a long history that persists to the present day. Yet even scientific research into music and health often focuses on effects rather than causes, leaving vital questions unanswered. By contrast, Music Asylums, part of Ashgate's Music and Change: Ecological Perspectives series, sets out to explore "how, where and when music makes a difference. " It is the first volume in a triptych devised by Tia DeNora and Gary Andsell, based on their six-year study of community music therapy in a center for mental health in England. The focal point of the three-part work is the recently published co-authored volume Musical Pathways for Recovery (Ansdell and DeNora 2016), with DeNora's Music Asylums and Andsell's (2014) How Music Helps envisaged as side panels that support and reflect on the topic from the authors' respective specializations of music sociology and music therapy. DeNora's contribution can be seen as a logical continuation of her longstanding interest in how music "gets into" society, through microsociological studies of "music in everyday life, " the title of one of her most well-known books (DeNora 2000). She defines herself as a music sociologist who aspires, as she explained in After Adorno, to draw "musicology and sociology more closely together into a new type of interdisciplinary project that transcends the traditional boundaries of both" (Denora 2003, 154). This is motivated on the one hand by a dissatisfaction with the kind of sociology that, when it deals with music, leaves out what is specifically musical about it, and on the other with the kind of musicology that represents the social as a static backdrop against which music is created and performed, or as something that is "reflected" in music. What is missing in such accounts, she has argued, is the understanding that music might be involved in co-producing the society which it is simultaneously supposed to reflect. Yet it is not enough to make such a claim in only general terms, she says: what is needed is an empirical music sociology that operates at the "right level of generality, " where assertions about music's power or influence are supported by documentation of how such effects are realized, "the actual mechanisms through which music plays a mediating role in social life" (DeNora 2003, 40).