Note: You will be able to access most of the reading online. However, you will need to get the login and password from your professor.
Themes: What is popular music? Culture history in America: A unique setting, minstrelsy, class, race
A. What is it about American society that has allowed so many styles of popular music to thrive? This week we discuss the basic themes, issues, and goals of the class, and we will begin to examine the origins of American popular music. In section and class we will also introduce a basic vocabulary necessary for talking about music as culture.
B. The popular music of the 20th century must be understood in terms of its relationship to the popular music of the 19th century. The most popular form of musical entertainment in 19th century America was the Minstrel show. How did Minstrelsy shape America music from jazz to hip-hop?
Readings:
Stuessy, Joe and Scott Lipscomb. "Musical Close-Up: The Elements of Music" in Rock and Roll: Its History and Stylistic Development. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1999. Pp. 12-18
Selected Terminology. Partially culled and adapted from The New Harvard Dictionary of Music. Don Michael Randel, ed. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986.
Themes: Mistrelsy, cont., vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, oldtime, appropriation, race in America and popular music
In this unit we will continue with the discussion of minstrelsy as well as looking at other forms of musical theater that developed after minsterlsy, including vaudeville and Broadway musicals. We will continue to look at the issue of appropriation. How has the issue of cultural appropriation reappeared throughout the 20th century? Is appropriation a manifestation of admiration or exploitation?
Readings:
Garofalo, Reebee. 2002. Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the USA. 2nd edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Chapter 1.
Malone, Bill C. 1979. Southern Music, American Music. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Pp. 4-17.
Listening: Unit 1
Video: The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson (1927)
Monday, January 19th there is NO CLASS!! Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Themes: Race vs. Hillbilly music, the beginnings of jazz, rural musics
Popular music forces us to confront issues of race and ethnicity in American society. In this unit we continue to probe cultural politics as defining characteristics in popular music. We will examine how record companies in the early 20th Cen. created musical genres based on racial distinctions and explore how various artisits and audiences transcended those divisions.
Readings:
Feld, Steven. 1994. "Notes on 'World Beat'" in Music Grooves. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 238-246.
Negativland. 1995. "Fair Use" In Sounding Off!: Music as Subversion/Resistance
/Revolution. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Pp. 91-94
Listening: Unit 2
Video: Times Ain't What They Used to Be: Early Rural & Popular American Music. (Yazoo Video, 1992)
The 20th century saw many new technologies that have revolutionized the way music is appreciated. This week we will discuss the way that the evolution of recording technology has paralleled changes in popular music. We will also discuss the way technology has changed the way audiences listen to music.
Readings:
Negus, Keith. 1996. "Audiences." In Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Pp. 7-35.
Listening: Unit 3
Essay 1 due Monday, April 19, 11am, in class, no exceptions.
The advent of "youth culture" suggests that each generation protests their parent's generation and music is a big part of this. But in this unit we look at larger political protests and the music that gave voice to these movement, starting in the Depression Era 1930s and ending with contemporary hip-hop.
Readings:
Garofalo, Reebee. 1992. "Popular Music and the Civil Rights Movement." In Rockin' the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements. Boston: South End Publishing Press. Pp. 231-240.
Berry, Venise T. and Looney, Harold Jr. 1996. "Rap Music, Black Men, and the Police." In Mediated Messages and African American Culture. Edited by Venise T. Berry and Carmen L. Manning-Miller. Pp. 263-277.
Listening: Unit 4
Friday, April 30 th: MIDTERM EXAM!!
The explosion in popularity of the music we call rock n' roll was seen at the time as a potentially dangerous youth revolution, yet today this music of the 1950s often seems innocent and tame. Was rock n' roll simply a new expression of musical styles that had been around for decades? What are the social and sonic changes that led to rock n' roll? What is the relationship between minstrelsy and rock n' roll? How was this "dangerous" music tamed by the music industry?
Readings:
Frith, Simon. 1996. "Rhythm, Race, Sex and the Body" In Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. 123-144.
Listening: Unit 5
Monday, February 16th, NO CLASS!!!, President's Day
The rock n' roll revolution of the 1950s made an impact on American popular music that is still felt today, but by 1959 rock n' roll had lost much of its power. What were some of the factors that led to the "Death of Rock n' Roll?" A number of other popular music genres filled the void left in the music industry at the end of the 1950s. In this unit we examine the varieties of popular music that emerged in the late 50s and early 60s, leading up to the arrival of the Beatles in America, an event that had profound implications for music in the rest of the 20th century.
Listening: Unit 6
In this unit we examine subculture and the cultural theories that have developed around the description and analysis of two seemingly very different musical genres: punk and hip-hop. In this unit we will explore the following questions: How do subcultures arise? How does one define a subculture? What are some of the social theories that have been used to analyze subculture?
Readings:
Monk, Noel and Jimmy Guterman. 1990. "Across the Sea" Chapter 1 in 12 Days on the Road: The Sex Pistols and America. New York: William Morrow, Inc. Pp. 13-31.
Rose, Tricia. 1996. "A Style Nobody Can Deal With: Politics, Style, and the Postindustrial City in Hip Hop." In Mapping Multiculturalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pp. 424-444.
Listening: Unit 7
The variety of music available to us today is greater than in any previous era. Not only has rock divided into many sub-genres, but the availability of music from around the world is also having an increasing, if self-conscious, influence on popular music. In this extended unit we examine the many voices of popular music. We will how MTV and the advent of music videos have drastically changed the way popular music is consumed. We will also consider some of the music that was considered to be "alternative" to the mainstream at this time and examine how "alternative" musics are utilized by the music industry.
Readings: Parsons, Patrick R. 1992. "The Business of Popular Music: A Short History." In America's Musical Pulse: Popular Music in Twentieth-Century Society. Kenneth J. Bindas, Ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. Pp. 137-147.
Lewis, Lisa A. 1990. "The Making of a Preferred Address." In Gender Politics and MTV. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Pp. 27-42.
Essay 2 Due Monday, May 24th, 11am, in class, no exceptions.
This final unit is driven by the individual tastes and inquisitiveness of you, the enrolled students. Reading and listening assignments will be derived from student proposals.
FINAL EXAM: Thursday, June 10 th, 12pm-3pm