Top 40 Democracy

Top 40 Democracy PDF Author: Eric Weisbard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022619437X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
If you drive into any American city with the car stereo blasting, you’ll undoubtedly find radio stations representing R&B/hip-hop, country, Top 40, adult contemporary, rock, and Latin, each playing hit after hit within that musical format. American music has created an array of rival mainstreams, complete with charts in multiple categories. Love it or hate it, the world that radio made has steered popular music and provided the soundtrack of American life for more than half a century. In Top 40 Democracy, Eric Weisbard studies the evolution of this multicentered pop landscape, along the way telling the stories of the Isley Brothers, Dolly Parton, A&M Records, and Elton John, among others. He sheds new light on the upheavals in the music industry over the past fifteen years and their implications for the audiences the industry has shaped. Weisbard focuses in particular on formats—constructed mainstreams designed to appeal to distinct populations—showing how taste became intertwined with class, race, gender, and region. While many historians and music critics have criticized the segmentation of pop radio, Weisbard finds that the creation of multiple formats allowed different subgroups to attain a kind of separate majority status—for example, even in its most mainstream form, the R&B of the Isley Brothers helped to create a sphere where black identity was nourished. Music formats became the one reliable place where different groups of Americans could listen to modern life unfold from their distinct perspectives. The centers of pop, it turns out, were as complicated, diverse, and surprising as the cultural margins. Weisbard’s stimulating book is a tour de force, shaking up our ideas about the mainstream music industry in order to tease out the cultural importance of all performers and songs.

Top 40 Democracy

Top 40 Democracy PDF Author: Eric Weisbard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022619437X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
If you drive into any American city with the car stereo blasting, you’ll undoubtedly find radio stations representing R&B/hip-hop, country, Top 40, adult contemporary, rock, and Latin, each playing hit after hit within that musical format. American music has created an array of rival mainstreams, complete with charts in multiple categories. Love it or hate it, the world that radio made has steered popular music and provided the soundtrack of American life for more than half a century. In Top 40 Democracy, Eric Weisbard studies the evolution of this multicentered pop landscape, along the way telling the stories of the Isley Brothers, Dolly Parton, A&M Records, and Elton John, among others. He sheds new light on the upheavals in the music industry over the past fifteen years and their implications for the audiences the industry has shaped. Weisbard focuses in particular on formats—constructed mainstreams designed to appeal to distinct populations—showing how taste became intertwined with class, race, gender, and region. While many historians and music critics have criticized the segmentation of pop radio, Weisbard finds that the creation of multiple formats allowed different subgroups to attain a kind of separate majority status—for example, even in its most mainstream form, the R&B of the Isley Brothers helped to create a sphere where black identity was nourished. Music formats became the one reliable place where different groups of Americans could listen to modern life unfold from their distinct perspectives. The centers of pop, it turns out, were as complicated, diverse, and surprising as the cultural margins. Weisbard’s stimulating book is a tour de force, shaking up our ideas about the mainstream music industry in order to tease out the cultural importance of all performers and songs.

The Isley Brothers' 3+3

The Isley Brothers' 3+3 PDF Author: Darrell M. McNeill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
The Isley Brothers' 3+3, dissects The Isleys' 50-year-old undisputed masterwork, an album that firmly established their music dynasty on a global scale, as well as heralding the boldest run of genre-defiant albums of their 67-year career. The 1973 watershed was their first multiplatinum release and is significant as a rare, crossover record by a Black act that struck a chord with urban, rock, and pop consumers, despite the schisms between audiences due to bias-driven media and industry marketing. The book looks at the album from all angles: from The Isleys' early career to their influence on rock and rollers both Black and White, from the twists and turns of having national hits without national recognition, on to their decision to form T-Neck Records and the group's challenges navigating a music industry that racially codified music and hampered Black artists from universal acclaim and compensations. Finally, a summation of the decades follows The Isleys' run and its ups and downs, with a fast-forward to where the group is now after 67 years.

How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop

How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop PDF Author: Amy Coddington
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520417356
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop examines the programming practices at commercial radio stations in the 1980s and early 1990s to uncover how the radio industry facilitated hip hop's introduction into the musical mainstream. Constructed primarily by the Top 40 radio format, the musical mainstream featured mostly white artists for mostly white audiences. With the introduction of hip hop to these programs, the radio industry was fundamentally altered, as stations struggled to incorporate the genre's diverse audience. At the same time, as artists negotiated expanding audiences and industry pressure to make songs fit within the confines of radio formats, the sound of hip hop changed. Drawing from archival research, Amy Coddington shows how the racial structuring of the radio industry influenced the way hip hop was sold to the American public, and how the genre's growing popularity transformed ideas about who constitutes the mainstream. The author gratefully acknowledges the AMS 75 PAYS Fund of the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Nashville Cats

Nashville Cats PDF Author: Travis D. Stimeling
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197502822
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
The Nashville Cats bounced from studio to studio along the city's Music Row, delivering instrumental backing tracks for countless recordings throughout the mid-20th century. Music industry titans like Chet Atkins, Anita Kerr, and Charlie McCoy were among this group of extraordinarily versatile session musicians who defined the era of the "Nashville Sound," and helped establish the city of Nashville as the renowned hub of the record industry it is today. Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City is the first account of these talented musicians and the behind-the-scenes role they played to shape the sounds of country music. Many of the genre's most celebrated artists-Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, Floyd Cramer, and others immortalized in the Country Music Hall of Fame and musicians from outside the genre's ranks, like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, heard the call of the Nashville Sound and followed it to the city's studios, recording song after song that resonated with the brilliance of the Cats. Author Travis D. Stimeling investigates how the Nashville system came to be, how musicians worked within it, and how the desires of an ever-growing and diversifying audience affected the practices of record production. Drawing on a rich array of recently uncovered primary sources and original oral histories,Âinterviews with key players, and close exploration of hit songs, Nashville Cats brings us back into the studios of this famous era, right alongside the remarkable musicians who made it happen.

Shine Bright

Shine Bright PDF Author: Danyel Smith
Publisher: Roc Lit 101
ISBN: 0593132734
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
American pop music is arguably this country’s greatest cultural contribution to the world, and its singular voice and virtuosity were created by a shining thread of Black women geniuses stretching back to the country’s founding. This is their surprising, heartbreaking, soaring story—from “one of the generation’s greatest, most insightful, most nuanced writers in pop culture” (Shea Serrano) “Sparkling . . . the overdue singing of a Black girl’s song, with perfect pitch . . . delicious to read.”—Oprah Daily ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, The Root, Variety, Esquire, The Guardian, Newsweek, Pitchfork, She Reads, Publishers Weekly SHORTLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD A weave of biography, criticism, and memoir, Shine Bright is Danyel Smith’s intimate history of Black women’s music as the foundational story of American pop. Smith has been writing this history for more than five years. But as a music fan, and then as an essayist, editor (Vibe, Billboard), and podcast host (Black Girl Songbook), she has been living this history since she was a latchkey kid listening to “Midnight Train to Georgia” on the family stereo. Smith’s detailed narrative begins with Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved woman who sang her poems, and continues through the stories of Mahalia Jackson, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, and Mariah Carey, as well as the under-considered careers of Marilyn McCoo, Deniece Williams, and Jody Watley. Shine Bright is an overdue paean to musical masters whose true stories and genius have been hidden in plain sight—and the book Danyel Smith was born to write.

Categorizing Sound

Categorizing Sound PDF Author: David Brackett
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520291611
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
"Categorizing Sound addresses the relationship between categories of music and categories of people: in other words, how do particular ways of organizing sound become integral parts of whom we perceive ourselves to be and of how we feel connected to some people and disconnected from others? After an introduction that discusses the key theoretical concepts to be deployed, Categorizing Sound presents a series of case studies that range from foreign music, race music, and old-time music in the 1920s up through country and rhythm and blues in the 1980s. Each chapter focuses not so much on the musical contents of these genres as on the process of 'gentrification' through which these categories are produced."--Provided by publisher.

Music Radio

Music Radio PDF Author: Morten Michelsen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150134322X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Why is music so important to radio? This anthology explores the ways in which musical life and radio interact, overlap and have influenced each other for nearly a century. One of music radio's major functions is to help build smaller or larger communities by continuously offering broadcast music as a means to create identity and senses of belonging. Music radio also helps identify and develop musical genres in collaboration with listeners and the music industry by mediating and by gatekeeping. Focusing on music from around the world, Music Radio discusses what music radio is and why or for what purposes it is produced. Each essay illuminates the intricate cultural processes associated with music and radio and suggests ways of working with such complexities.

Democracy Against Domination

Democracy Against Domination PDF Author: K. Sabeel Rahman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019046853X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
How do realize democratic values in a complex, deeply unequal modern economy and in the face of unresponsive governmental institutions? Drawing on Progressive Era thought and sparked by the real policy challenges of financial regulation, Democracy Against Domination offers a novel theory of democracy to answer these pressing questions.

Record Cultures

Record Cultures PDF Author: Kyle Barnett
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047203877X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Tracing the cultural, technological, and economic shifts that shaped the transformation of the recording industry

God Rock, Inc.

God Rock, Inc. PDF Author: Andrew Mall
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520343425
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Popular music in the twenty-first century is increasingly divided into niche markets. How do fans, musicians, and music industry executives define their markets’ boundaries? What happens when musicians cross those boundaries? What can Christian music teach us about commercial popular music? In God Rock, Inc., Andrew Mall considers the aesthetic, commercial, ethical, and social boundaries of Christian popular music, from the late 1960s, when it emerged, through the 2010s. Drawing on ethnographic research, historical archives, interviews with music industry executives, and critical analyses of recordings, concerts, and music festival performances, Mall explores the tensions that have shaped this evolving market and frames broader questions about commerce, ethics, resistance, and crossover in music that defines itself as outside the mainstream.