Midterm 2 Flashcards
Music and Visuality
- Songs summon visuality
- Many songs evoke images, colours, sensations
- Visuality is tied to music (Live performances, DJs in a club, Music Videos, Digital interfaces)
- The link between sound and vision was not invented by MTV (though music videos are the most obvious place where sound and image collide)
- When visuality was tethered to popular music through the twentieth century, the ‘threat’ to youth via music increased
Visuality before MTV:
- Magazines
- Album covers
“The era of the LP was a critical moment in the visual history of popular music”
Visuality after MTV:
- Digitized and sonic visual files
- Not permanent
- Convenient and mobile
- Music in video games
Music Videos
- Activating visual and sonic literacies, music videos are texts of excess, incorporating thousands of editing cuts within a three-minute period
- Advertisements, promotional materials that accompany a song
Bad times for Rock ‘n’ Roll…
At the end of the 1950s:
- Chuck Berry: conviction for transporting a minor
- Elvis: in the army
- Little Richard: in the ministry
- Jerry Lee Lewis: married his 13 yr old cousin
- Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, The Big Bopper die (The Day the Music Died)
Payola
- “Pay” and “Victrola”
- Producing singles was cheap. A lot of pressure on record labels for songs to become hits - Records get a test run in “break out” cities, promoters paid DJ’s to feature certain songs
- FTC estimated that 250 Djs took payment (bribes)
- Many politicians believed that popularity of rock’n’roll was a conspiracy’
First court case of Payola:
- May 9, 1960: first court case: Alan Freed was indicted for accepting $2500 (died due to alcohol in 1965)
Alan Freed
- playing black popular music to white kids & promoting concerts at which both performers and audiences were integrated
- Career ended by Payola scandal
Dick Clark
- featured virtually all-white audiences and was cautious of integration on the air
- Hosted until 1989
New Form of Rock ‘n’ Roll: Teen Pop
- Designed to please both teens and politicians
- Incorporated aspects of rock’n’roll while reinstating the separate roles of songwriter, instrumentalist, and singer (which were collapsed by folks like Chuck Berry and Little Richard)
American Bandstand (1952-1989)
- Featured the music of “teen idols”:
> “good-looking young people from the Philadelphia area, singing music with a vague resemblance to rock ‘ n ‘ roll” - Teens would often be interviewed about opinions on music
3 Teen Pop Songs
- ) Big Bopper “Chantilly Lace” (1958) – all about visual performance, he lip synced into a phone
- ) The Everly Brothers “Cathy’s Clown” (1960), they started standing in the audience
- ) Chubby Checker “The Twist”, dance craze
Popularity of Clark
- Gave people a pre-sold market
- Did not rely on cash payola, had a more complicated system: Corporate holdings including: interest in 3 record companies, 6 music publishing houses, a record pressing plant, a distributing firm and a management company
- The records and singers involved with his companies were featured on his program,
Hardly played Elvis, Bing Crosby, Sinatra (no stake)
The Brill Building
- Broadway and 49th Street, Manhattan
- Home to music industry offices and studios (labels, publishing companies, studios etc…)
- The building’s name refers to a style and sound of American song writing
- Had a certain sound (Brill Building Sound):
- Influenced by rhythm and blues, latin music
- Commercial success in late 50s, early 60s
Brill Building Approach
- Many songrwriters working to create hits
- Reflects the control of the music industry after the first wave of rock ‘n’ roll
- Singers were many, replaceable
Vocal arrangements of the Brill Building
- Call-and-response approach
- Lyrics often arranged to simulate a dialogue between lead and backing vocals
Song writers of the Brill Building
- Sonny Bono
- Neil Diamond
- Carole King*
- Ellie Greenwich*
- Paul Simon
- Phil Spector*
Singers and Musicians of the Brill Building
- Darlene Love
- Liza Minnelli
- The Ronettes
- The Shangri-Las
- The Shirelles
- Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons
Girl Groups of Motown
- Marvelettes, Martha and the Vandellaas, The Supremes
- 1961-1963
- The emergence and success of numerous “girl groups” marking the first time that female subjectivity had been so widely represented
First Big Girl Group Song
The Shirelles “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”
- Written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin
- First No.1 hit by all-girl groups in U.S.
- Latin influence of rhythm & backbeat (double snare on the two)
- Girl Group sound:
Dense harmonies, expansive orchestra, pensive and evocative lead vocal
Girl Groups and Feminism
- Women are generally not as visible in history of popular music (backup dancers/singers)
- Particularly in regards to certain instruments
- Girl groups as performers versus songwriters and producers
- “Girl Group” refers to singer, not instrumentalists, often dancers as well
- Tend to have finite careers
- Part of success is fashion
Brill Building as a “Production Line”
- Singers at bottom of hierarchy
- Producers could pick from the talent pool of singers hoping to succeed, find a way out of poverty (often recorded for very little compensation)
- The Raindrops: faces just to put on an album and lip-sync for performances they weren’t the actual recording artists
Phil Spector
- One of the most “widely celebrated” figures connected to this genre and era (highlighting imbalance of power)
- Assumed complete power and economic control over the female artists who were featured on his productions
- Long history of violence, treating performers unfairly, releasing songs without the recording artists knowledge -now in jail for murder
“Wall of Sound”
- A dense, reverberant texture filled with instruments that were often difficult to separate from one another
- A number of instruments performing the same parts at the same time
- Fit for AM radio, jukeboxes
The Crystals “He’s a Rebel”
- Credited to Crystals
- Actually sung by Darlene Love, recorded by the Blossoms (Crystals were on Tour)
- Produced by Phil Spector
- The Wrecking Crew (session musicians)
1960’s: Surf and Urban Folk
Surf: Brian Wilson and Production
Urban Folk: Bob Dylan and the Electric Guitar
Surf Music and Southern California
- California becomes the most populous and economically important state
- Rapidly growing suburbs
- Surf emerges from this context, beaches
- Initially instrumental
- The Ventures “Walk, Don’t Run” (1960/1964)
- Guitarist Dick Dale “Misirlou” (1962)
The Beach Boys
- The band most strongly associated with surf
- A distinct, contrapuntal, falsetto-led vocal style
- Multipart harmonies, Chuck Berry riffs, trebly guitar timbres, lyrics about the beach and middle-class white teenagers
- Wilson brothers (Brian, Carl, Dennis), Mike Love (cousin), Al Jardine (friend)
Surfin’ USA
1963 -
- You can hear Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” (Berry eventually awarded songwriting credit)
- Produced by Brian Wilson
- The “California Sound”
- Lyrics make reference to many surfing spots
Pet Sounds (album)
1966
- One of the first “concept” albums (theme connecting all the songs together)
- Features a lot of studio experimentation (overdubbing, mixing, *looping, unusual instruments including dog whistles, Theremin)
- Brian influenced by the Spector sound, adding harmonies and vocal techniques
- Not as financially successful as earlier albums, though received critical praise (psychedelic rock, art rock)
- Concept in mixing instruments together to combine as one sound (continuity of the production)
Folk
- Long history before its resurgence in late 1950s/early 1960s
- A lot of debate about its politics and use (left vs. right, authenticity vs. change, preservation vs. transformation)
5 Characteristics of Folk (Ronald Cohen)
- ) Origins in particular culture/region
- ) Authorship has historically been unknown
- ) Traditionally performed by non-professionals
- ) Simple composition, communal
- ) Songs historically passed down through oral transmission
Woody Guthrie
- Added social commentaries and protest to popular music
- “This Land is Your Land” (1944/45)
Pete Seeger
- Support for union organizations in the 1930s and 1940s
- Member of the Communist Party
- Father of 1960’s progressive and civil rights movement
- Influential both politically and musically
- Infused folk music with the imperative for social justice
Bob Dylan
- Arrives in Greenwich Village (NYC) in 1961
- Songs fell into the protest genre, though they were more abstract, use of allusions rather than straight forward description, moreso focused on cultural assumptions of Western society rather than specific political causes
Bob Dylan (album) 1962
- Robert Shelton review (NYT)
- Contract from Colombia Records
- Folk Revival, relied on pre-existing material
- Influence by Woody Guthrie
Bob Dylan and the Newport Folk Festival (1965)
- Takes place during “folk-rock” craze
- Use of a rock’ n’ roll band seemed to embody the very commercial forces to which the folk revival had seen itself in revolt
- Dylan’s first live, plugged in performance
- Dylan plays with Butterfield Blues Band
- Controversy following Dylan’s “defection”
- Folk purists against use of electric guitar, the use of a rock ‘n’ roll band, and the
- performance of a single –> “Maggie’s Farm”
Electric Folk
- Dylan’s move to the electric guitar reinforced the value and meaning of the guitar for the rock decade
- Agitated the easy authenticity and politics that had been tethered to folk music
- Shifted the relationship between sound and noise, lyric and rhythm, and what was acceptable to a listening audience
- Easier transition between acoustic and electric instruments
Folk impact on Rock
- Folk had a profound impact on rock’s interpretation of itself, it allowed rock to gain some semblance of authenticity and separation from pop music
- Also granted rock a political integrity and edge
- When there is a moment of pop protest, folk history returns to us
Soul Music
“Southern music”
- Much more than geography
- Ideology of disconnection, history of displacement and oppression
- More community oriented and organized
- Close ties with gospel and blues, database of samples for rap
- Creating, singing, dancing to narratives of black America
- Yearning for change
- Impossible to understand without grasping the impact of civil rights movement (political)
- “Soul Music” – a term that enters mainstream usage
- Ties cut with 1950s rhythm and blues, a distinct sixties “soul” genre emerges
- Added hope, texture and density to music