The past couple of weeks have seen a huge spike in “spiking the football” analogies. Ever since the above ad was posted online, the president’s one-year-old statement that “we don’t need to spike the football” after the death of Osama Bin Laden has been quoted and embellished ad nauseam. 1 Republican politicians and FOX News lashed out in predictable form after the ad was debuted, and a group called Veterans For A Strong America quickly produced a “response ad.” Even left-leaning Arianna Huffington went on record calling the ad “despicable.” But the spot has its supporters as well, and they’ve been equally passionate in defending the ad’s validity and/or maintaining that it merely fights fire with fire. Either way, it’s Mission Accomplished for the unnamed producers of “One Chance” given that it was a talking point for several news cycles.
Why did this political ad evoke such a powerful emotional response for many viewers? Besides the content of the ad itself, could there be other factors that helped make it the political pseudo-event of the moment? More generally, how might certain production techniques be used to sway voters in the span of ninety seconds? And, more to the point for a music blog, what role does music play in this and other political ads? Given the unprecedented flow of money into the negative-ad bonfire so far this election cycle, not to mention the floods still to come—mixing metaphors just feels right in the wake of Citizens United—these are questions worth asking. [Read the full post…]
In its original context, President Obama was responding to calls for the release of gruesome Bin Laden death photos. In whatever context, football metaphors are usually a sign that the political stakes have been raised. You don’t have to understand the sport very well to understand the potency of such analogies (politics is football is war without bloodshed) in American politics. ↩
Since the death of Adam Yauch a week and a half ago, a number of excellent tributes and reflections have been written about the Beastie Boy. Hua Hsu, writing for Grantland, sharply captures the difficulty many Beastie Boys and hip hop fans faced in wrapping their heads around Yauch’s death. It wasn’t shocking, as we all knew Yauch had been battling cancer. And while he certainly died young, MCA enjoyed a music career that stretched over four different decades, so while we may all think about what the Beastie Boys could have produced in the coming years, we still have a lot of music to enjoy. Hsu nicely captures the paradox of a group of bad boys turning into humdrum adults and the hints at why we may process his death differently than the untimely passing of other pop stars.
When Adam Yauch passed away on Friday after a two-year battle with cancer, it seemed that everyone around me took the loss personally. Not in the sense that we usually mourn death-too-soon by wondering what could have been, if only as occasion to reflect on our own mortality. There was something different about the Beastie Boys, and the pensive, mild-mannered Yauch in particular. Some of my friends worked with Yauch (MCA), Mike Diamond (Mike D), and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) on side projects, went on tour with them, played basketball with them. Others never got closer than that cherished CD ofIll Communication that survived high school, college, Napster, various apartments, and now adulthood. But the death of Yauch — and, one supposes, the end of the group — struck all these communities of fans in an unusually heartfelt way.1 There was something that felt proximate about them. As their fame accumulated, they only came to seem more down-to-earth. They were a version of growing older that didn’t seem so bad.
Our friends at the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame have submitted a feature on Yauch that reflects on his career and also offered a rundown of ten Beastie greats a month ago to mark the group’s Rock Hall induction.
Last week, Amanda Palmer began a kickstarter campaign – something she’s done before – to raise money for her new solo album. She asked supporters for $100K and set the deadline at 30 days. After seven hours, Palmer had her money, and a week in, she’s just shy of $600K. She’s also initiated the Loanspark Collective, a setup for big-money investors to provide interest-free loans for her projects and tours.
Last night, Chris Hayes, sitting in for Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, crowned Palmer the “best new thing in the world,” and her husband, Neil Gaiman, rather sweetly posted the video at his tumblr.
Hayes’ first statement is absolutely true: Amanda F. Palmer is a rock star. She has a sizeable fan base that is eager to give her money, and she pays them back with all manner of art. Plus she totally looks like a rock star, which never hurts.
But I’m not sure the tag quite works. While it seems that Palmer “has turned the model of the music business upside down” by sidestepping a label and receiving patronage directly from fans, it isn’t an entirely new road she’s treading. Radiohead, of course, famously offered In Rainbows without a label and allowed fans to pay whatever they wanted for the digital download. And in the comedy world, Louis CK has blazed a trail (quickly followed by Jim Gaffigan and Aziz Ansari) that allows him to sell his own show from his website without a formal distribution plan.1 [Read the full post…]
Academic Charts Online: International Popular Music – is now live….
We’re pleased to confirm that the ACO: International Popular Music resource is now live! You are invited to access through the month of May and log-in with the details below.
The login details for immediate access you can share with colleagues and faculty. We can offer IP trials should you wish to set one up for your institution so faculty and students can view the resource over your network during the trial period.
The table of contents (and the schedule for completing upload of the early adopter data set during May) can be viewed on the Content tab.
The beta icon will be removed at the end of May when the launch content set is complete – as well as linking to journals including Cambridge University Press ‘Popular Music’ and Wiley’s ‘Journal of Popular Music Studies’ and links to the listening resource Naxos Music Library. Our developers will also be continuing work on many aspects of the resource to incorporate feedback from librarians and academics as we deliver an ongoing programme of enhancements.
Early adopters are able to place orders at any time before the 30th June and we look forward to you joining us in due course as we embark on this product journey, bringing analytical tools to the study of popular culture.
The IASPM-US website is launching an ongoing series of posts featuring interviews with popular music scholars.
At the center of the series will be interviews with authors of recently released books. We’re coordinating with several presses to receive review copies of these books as they’re released. This is where you come in. We need volunteers to read these books and interview their authors for publication on the website.
I have one book I’d like to assign as soon as possible:
If you would like to read either of these books and interview the author, email me at justindburton@gmail.com or iaspmus@gmail.com. I’ll be updating the list of available books in the coming weeks.
If you’d like to add your name to a list of potential interviewers who I can contact periodically when the book list updates, you can also email me at either of those addresses. When you do email, please include your areas of expertise so that we can best match interviewers to authors. And, if you’d like to interview an author not listed in any of the updates, let me know. If no one else has been assigned to the interview, I’ll contact the press and set everything up for you.
The first installment of this series was actually posted several months ago and provides a good template for future interviews. Karl Hagstrom-Miller interviewed Kevin Fellezs via email about Fellezs’s fusion book, Birds of Fire. Email is a convenient way to conduct these interviews, though you’re also welcome to interview via phone or skype. If you and the author agree, we would be more than happy to post an audio version of the interview alongside the transcription. When you interview the author, you may also discuss potential audio or video clips to include in the post.
Finally, if you’d like to conduct an interview with a popular music scholar that doesn’t revolve around a recently released book, we welcome that, too. Simply contact me at one of the addresses above, and we can discuss possibilities.
As I was waiting to check-in with Delta for my JFK-bound flight, day-dreaming about my impending two week New York adventure, I could overhear the conversation playing out right behind me: ‘Purpose of your visit sir?’ ‘Oh – I’m attending a conference – I’m an academic!’ A fellow Pop Conference attendee was already by my side, so in a sense the networking whirlwind of my first few days in the Big Apple began at Heathrow Departures. However, airport coincidences aside, the conference really kicked off on Thursday evening at the Opening Keynote with Ann Powers, Esperanza Spalding, Santigold, Angelique Hidjo, and Heems of Das Racist. An artistically accomplished panel whose insightful, humorous and sparkling discussions adroitly opened up the dialogue for ‘Sounds of the City’ 2012.
Many of the thoughts and themes that were raised by the panel were echoed and continued in the many papers and round-tables that followed, and for me this served perfectly to connect up the dots between the conference’s diverse line-up. Just as most music can be seen to link up in some way, there was much continuity between the discussions that were had throughout the conference.
Arrays of metaphors were played with during the conference in an attempt to grasp and make tangible the mystical role that music plays in our lives – from Ann Powers’ reference to Duke Ellington’s Harlem Air Shaft and the notion of music providing glimpses into others’ lives just as the snatches of sounds that travel through the city’s air shafts manage to, to Mark Coleman’s analogy of music assuming the role of a Greek chorus in one’s life – ever ready to motivate, question and mock your protagonist – in his ‘‘I Hear Music in the Streets’: New York’s Postdisco Boombox Democracy’ paper. [Read the full post…]
Once a month, IASPM-US brings you an exclusive piece from the vaults of Rock’s Backpages, the online library of music journalism and pop writing – as used by teachers and students at institutions from Harvard to Berklee College of Music. For info on group subscriptions and free trials, go to http://www.rocksbackpages.com/group.html or email subscriptions@rocksbackpages.com
We kick off with “A Brief Survey Of The State Of Metal Music Today,” a protopunk-gonzoid overview of the genre by Mike Saunders from the April 1973 issue of Phonograph Record Magazine. [HISTORICAL NOTE: "Metal Mike" it was who first accurately applied the William Burroughs term "Heavy Metal" in a 1971 Rolling Stone review of Sir Lord Baltimore's Kingdom Come. He later fronted the extremely snotty and very funny L.A. punk band Angry Samoans]
*****
WHEN YOU GET RIGHT DOWN TO IT, the story of heavy metal rock has been the tale of Led Zeppelin. As indicated by its name, Heavy Metal has been an evolution of heavy rock – you know, the stuff that emerged back in 1967.
Heavily revved-up bass, long guitar solos, deluges of fuzzbox and wah-wah. From Cream to Blue Cheer; Jimi Hendrix to the Hook; Jeff Beck to Ten Years After…
The groundwork for this stuff had previously been laid by stunning 1965 second-wave English groups like the Yardbirds and the Who. Pete Townshend and Jeff Beck had been the first guitarists to achieve idol stature in Sixties while rock ‘n’ roll. But somehow, in the interim, the idea of hard, heavy rock had disintegrated into amphetamine blues technology and the wounded elephant guitar shrieks of Iron Butterfly. Worse yet, 1967-8 was the year of Cream.
Cream were monstrously popular among both critics and their myriad of fans. I even remember reading praises of their monochordic, so-called improvisations in Downbeat, the rationale I guess being that rock had grown up, become serious music. My most indelible memory of 1968 is that of being exposed to Wheels Of Fire some 300 times, which would have been enough to send one running for Blue Cheer except for the fact that early Blue Cheer were really just about as bad in their own inimitable way.
What I’m getting at is that Led Zeppelin did not meet with the same sort of audience/critic response as Cream. Led Zeppelin were absolutely slagged by the press. For the first time, a risible chasm had opened in the previously monolithic rock audience (a chasm that was to continue to deepen with Grand Funk, Black Sabbath, and to a lesser extent, Alice Cooper); a gap between, if you will, what was Good Music and what the kids were actually listening to.
THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF HEAVY METAL
It’s easy to note the changes in rock structure that heavy metal groups have employed: increased song length, for one. Five minutes has been about the average metal song duration, often even without any extended solos. Some stompers, like Dust’s ‘From A Dry Camel’ and Led Zep’s ‘When The Levee Breaks’, run upwards of seven minutes, and are none the worse for it. [Read the full post…]
Phoebe Jacobs, who lived a life in the music business and jazz world that will not be seen again, passed away this past week at 93. She recently appeared to a packed room of admirers and the curious at the IASPM/EMP pop con, where her stories and sense of humor won over everyone. She was gracious, sharp and still passionate about her musical heroes and friends, and much too modest about her own achievements during her long career. Most will remember her for her work on behalf of Louis Armstrong’s legacy, but she had a hand in all aspects of the business from her time as a teenage fan until her last years. Personally, I felt lucky to have spent a couple of days with her some years ago, and was so glad to see her again at EMP – it was the highlight of the conference for me. When she finished her hour plus conversation with historian Judith Tick, she asked, “Are we done? Good.”
Feedback Press has just rolled out the first five installments of a new line of short publications called Pop Papers. Before handing the full description over to Feedback, I should direct your attention to the blue book on the far right of the picture above.
See it? Yup, that’s “Intense Encounters,” by Luis-Manuel Garcia, an essay he originally wrote for the IASPM-US website, where a Feedback editor caught site of it and asked him to include it in the Pop Papers series.
First off, congratulations to Luis! Second, thanks to Feedback for accepting his work on a non-exclusive basis so that we can keep it here on this site, too.
For those of you interested in Feedback, check out their website. In the meantime, here’s more info on Pop Papers, in their words:
Pop Papers is a series of short, incisive discussions, narratives, works of scholarship, and pieces of criticism published by Feedback Press. Our “pop” is more verb than noun: we are interested in work that treats music and its cultures as part of popular culture no matter what the style, genre, or contexts may be.
The series welcomes original papers and essays hereto commercially unpublished on musical topics and cultures throughout the world as approached from innovative writerly and theoretical approaches. We expect a high standard of research, writing, and editing. We provide payment, a thorough editorial process including a rigorous peer edit, and high quality publication with letterpress print edition and well-designed electronic versions.
Be sure to check out the full line of Pop Papers and the other publications from Feedback Press!
Thursday afternoon. March 22nd. The Bronx. Even though I had said I would attend that night’s opening keynote with Angelique Kidjo, Santigold, Heems, Esperanza Spalding, and Ann Powers, I was still debating whether to go. It was 4:00 pm and I was already dressed, but I still was unsure about heading into the city. I was tired: days before my trip to New York I had finished revising my dissertation draft. After revisions, I packed up my daughter’s and my things and flew to New York City to spend time with family before the conference. That Thursday was the first Thursday in a long time where I could just sit and be. It wasn’t just the exhaustion of months of nonstop working. It was also nerves. The EMP Pop Conference was the first conference I would present at after a two-year hiatus from conferences, and I was a little concerned. I felt like I had returned to middle school again, and my nerves were getting the best of me.
Eventually I left the apartment, hopped on the 4 train, and made my way downtown. I didn’t make it to the Opening Reception at Le Poisson Rouge, but I arrived at the Kimmel Center in time for the keynote. I registered, walked to the Eisner and Lubin Auditorum, and put my game face on. From what I had heard, EMP was the conference for the cool pop music folks, a conference I had longed to go to ever since my mentor had first suggested I attend after I wrote a paper for her class several years ago. After that last year of coursework, I had fallen down the rabbit hole of my dissertation, but here I was, years later, and presenting on the same topic I had written for that course years ago. I had decided to pick up the material again because I still loved it very much. Presenting would be an excuse to continue working on the topic. But I still felt unsure about whether I was at the right place at the right time. [Read the full post…]
“The Art of War: American Popular Music and Sociopolitical Conflict, 1860-1945” Call For Papers: AMS Popular Music Study Group New Orleans, LA November 1-4, 2012 The AMS Popular Music Study Group selection committee announces its second annual paper panel, to be held at the 2012 joint meeting of SMT/SEM/AMS. We welcome AMS, SMT and SEM [...]
The first Charles Hamm Award for career-long contribution to the study of popular music is awarded to Reebee Garofalo. Reebee Garofalo has just retired from his post as professor at the College of Public and Community Service at University of Massachusetts at Boston, where he taught from 1978 until this past year. Throughout that period, [...]
In the next few weeks, in the follow-up to the IASPM-US/POP Conference in NYC March 22-25, we’ll be posting several round-ups from those who attended. The goal is to provide a mosaic of several different experiences instead of a single, authoritative account. So each of these will be subjective, focusing on one person’s navigation of [...]
IASPM-US is proud to award the David Sanjek Prize for Best Student Paper at the annual meeting for 2012 to Kathryn Ostrofsky’s “Taking Sesame to the Streets: Young Children’s Interactions with Pop Music in the Urban Classrooms of 1970s New York.” Ostrofsky is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of [...]
Karl Hagstrom Miller has been named the winner of the 2011 Woody Guthrie Award for Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Duke University Press, 2010). This award recognizes the most distinguished English language monograph in popular music studies published during the past year. Segregating Sound was the unanimous [...]
Last week, Amanda Palmer began a kickstarter campaign – something she’s done before – to raise money for her new solo album. She asked supporters [...]
The IASPM-US website is launching an ongoing series of posts featuring interviews with popular music scholars. At the center of the series will be interviews [...]
As I was waiting to check-in with Delta for my JFK-bound flight, day-dreaming about my impending two week New York adventure, I could overhear the [...]
Once a month, IASPM-US brings you an exclusive piece from the vaults of Rock’s Backpages, the online library of music journalism and pop writing – [...]
Feedback Press has just rolled out the first five installments of a new line of short publications called Pop Papers. Before handing the full description [...]
