Settling the Pop Score: Pop Texts and Identity Politics

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Contents: General editor's preface
Settling the pop score...: Introduction
Grounding aesthetic and ideological values
Musical codes and compositional design
Identity politics
Modelling identity
Interpreting ironic intent
Further discursions into the pop text
Towards a critical musicology of the popular
Mobilising the pop score
'I'll never be an angel': stories of deception in Madonna's music: Introduction
Reading musical codes in Madonna's performance
Hearing, seeing, feeling gender
Spectatorship and seduction
Production and (post)modernist 'Survival'
Final concluding thoughts
Anti-rebel, lonesome boy: Morrissey in crisis?: Introduction
With a thorn in his side
Constructs of male identity in Morrissey
Characterisation and 'star' depiction
Modelling empathy through vocal 'sound'
Interpreting ironic markers in pop texts
Conclusion
Annie Lennox's 'Money Can't Buy It' - masquerading identity: Introduction
Opting for gender disguise
Questions of musical coding
Visualising sound through videography
Being totally Diva
Conclusion
'Call it performance, honey': The Pet Shop Boys: Introduction
Masculinity in the 1980s
Being boring and clever: style as rhetoric
Banality: political discourses of pleasure and power
Musical (dis)pleasures
'Disco-Tex and the Sexelettes': satirical musical address
Towards a PSB discourse
Conclusion
Subversive musical pleasures in 'The Artist (Again) Known as Prince': Introduction
Dialectics of music and imagination
Identity as racial commodity
Stylistic and technical codes in Diamonds and Pearls
Sexing and 'spinning' gender in musical expression
Carnivalesque musical display: signs of the times?
Conclusion
Bibliography
Discography
Index.

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The analysis of popular music forces us to rethink the assumptions that underpin our approaches to the study of Western music. Not least, it brings to the fore an idea that many musicologists still find uncomfortable - that commercial production and consumption can be aligned with artistic authenticity. Reading pop texts takes place through dialogue on many levels, which, as Stan Hawkins argues, deals with how musical events are shaped by personal alliances between the artist and the recipient. The need for a critical approach to evaluating popular music lies at the heart of this book. Hawkins explores the relationships that exist between music, spectatorship and aesthetics through a series of case studies of pop artists from the 1980s and 1990s. Madonna, Morrissey, Annie Lennox, the Pet Shop Boys and Prince represent the diversity of cultures, identities and sexualities that characterised the start of the MTV boom. Through the interpretation of aspects of the compositional design and musical structures of songs by these pop artists, Hawkins suggests ways in which stylistic and technical elements of the music relate to identity formation and its political motivations. Settling the Pop Score examines the role of irony and empathy, the question of gender, race and sexuality, and the relevance of textual analysis to the study of popular music. Interpreting pop music within the framework of musicology, Hawkins helps us to understand the pleasure so many people derive from these songs.

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Popular Music

Settling the Pop Score should prove a useful tool for the further study of musicians like Morrissey, Annie Lennox and the Pet Shop Boys. For those whose cultural memory does not reach back to the mid-1980s, this is a good introduction to questions of identity raised in videos by Madonna and Prince, whose sexual masquerades continue both to provoke and to proclaim

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