Interpreting Popular Music

Contents

• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Prelude
• I. Codes and competences
• II. Who is the author?
• III. Musicology and popular music
• IV. Postlude
• 2 Family values in music? Billie Holiday's and Bing Crosby's
• "I'll Be Seeing You"
• I. A tale of two (or three) recordings
• II. Critical discourse
• III. Biographical discourse
• IV. Style and history
• V. Performance, effect, and affect
• 3 When you're lookin' at Hank (you're looking at country)
• I. Lyrics, metanarratives, and the great authenticity debate
• II. Sound, performance, gender, and the hanky-tonk
• III. "A feeling called the blues"
• IV. The emergence of "country-western"
• 4 James Brown's "Superbad" and the double-voiced utterance
• I. The discursive space of black music
• II. Signifyin(g)-words and performance
• III. Musical signifyin(g)
• 5 Writing, music, dancing, and architecture in Elvis Costello's
• "Pills and Soap"
• I. The "popular aesthetic"
• II. Style and aesthetics
• III. Interpretation and (post)modern pop
• IV. A question of influence
• 6 Afterword: the citizens of Simpleton
• Appendix
• A. Reading the spectrum photos
• B. Registral terminology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Select discography
• Index