Popular MusicPopular Music

The music business is a cruel and shallow trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men lie like dogs. There is also a negative side

- Hunter S. Thompson

The Early 20th century Edison invents the Phonograph in 1878 the primary means of disseminating popular

music until the 1920s remained printed sheet music.

The music-publishing business was centralized in New York City, particularly in an area of lower Manhattan called Tin Pan Alley.

With the rise in live performance space like Vaudeville theatres, Nickelodeons and Minstrel shows came a rise in sheet music.

Scott Joplin and Ragtime Music

one of the most important developers of ragtime music

His most famous pieces were “Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer”.

Ragtime can easily be considered the first form of American Popular music.

Tin Pan’s Golden Age The Golden Age of Tin

Pan Alley occurred during the 1920s and 1930s.

Writers like George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II

And Tin Pan moved from “dives” to broadway!

Technological changes rapid spread of commercial radio (1922).

The development of more affordable and better-quality gramophone discs made recordings more popular than sheet music in sales.

The introduction of amplification and electric recording led to the development of crooning, the intimate vocal style perfected by singers such as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.

By the mid-1920s, almost 100 million records were produced each year in the United States.

The Crooners

Frank Sinatra Bing Crosby

The African American influence on mainstream popular music became stronger during the Jazz Age, which preceded the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Big Band swing dominated pop music!

Popular figures included, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman

Post WWII

Important shifts in popular music tied to social and technological changes.

The massive migration of Southern musicians to urban areas and the introduction of the electric guitar were particularly influential.

These changes set the stage for the hard-edged Chicago blues of Muddy Waters or the honky-tonk, or “hard-country,” style of Hank Williams.

Both of these would, in the mid-1950s, give rise to...

Rock-and-Roll

Blend of “jump band” rhythm and blues.

DJ/Concert Promoter Alan Freed coined the term to describe music recorded by small independent labels.

rock and roll was an unexpected success among a newly affluent teenage audience.

Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” (1955)

Quickly followed by:– Jerry Lee Lewis– Elvis Presley– Buddy Holly– Fats Domino – Little Richard

Match the 50’s music stars!

And these?

With the popularity of Rock n’ Roll, Jazz music was also still popular.

However, in an attempt to distance themselves from the standardized sounds of the 1950’s several jazz musicians began to break the mold.

Miles Davis, John Coltrane & Thelonius Monk were at the vangaurd of the free jazz or modal jazz movement.

Davis would come up with a skeletal basis for songs and invite the best musicians to join him to improvise.

Influencial: Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks

The 1960’s

The early 1960s also saw the development of distinctive regional styles in the United States.

Southern California = Beach Greenwich= Folk Detroit = Motown Suburban America = Garage Rock

The British Invasion Brits raised on the

influences of blues and rhythm and blues invigorated mainstream popular music, in part by reemphasizing long-standing aspects of American music.

1964 with The Beatles others included: The

Who, The Animals, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks & Manfred Mann.

Some of the others...

The late 1960s was a period of corporate expansion and diversification in the American record industry. A new youth-oriented popular market was defined by a broad category of music.

San Francisco psychedelia Guitar heroes such as Jimi Hendrix and Eric

Clapton Southern rock (Allman Brothers & Lynard Skynard) Hard rock (Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath & Deep

Purple) Jazz rock (Frank Zappa and The Mothers of

Invention) Folk rock (The Byrds)

Soul Music covered a wide range of styles

gospel-based (Aretha Franklin)

funk (James Brown) soulful political crooning

of Marvin Gaye Raw Southern Soul of

Otis Redding

The 1970’s

the music industry consolidated its power and once again sought to mass-produce music styles that had originally been highly individualistic.

Corporate rock! Glamorous superstars playing to massive crowds in

sports arenas defined a new mainstream. Although a number of distinctive styles—disco, glam

rock, punk rock, new wave, reggae, and funk—were pioneered by independent labels and marginalized musicians, the music of the 1970s is generally viewed as less individualized.

Glam Rock

Began in London, England

David Bowie T-Rex Roxy Music Slade Influenced Americans

like Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and KISS

Funk With the assination of

JFK, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King…Black Music became militant… deep and aggressive bass lines and lyrics.

James Brown Parliament / Funkadelic even Motown got

aggressive

Disco

Aggressive funk titles like “Black and Proud” were too much for the dance floor.

Producers and session players created dance friendly numbers and business - both record company execs and clubs jumped on board!

Hard Rock

Rock bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple had taken rock to the stadium level.

Others followed: The Eagles RUSH Emerson, Lake and

Palmer KISS

Punk (NYC)

Annoyed by the $$$ behind popular music a revolt started in NYC in the mid 1970’s

The New York Dolls The Ramones The Talking Heads Patti Smith Richard Hell Television

Punk (London)

Within no time the British are bringing over NYC punk bands to play in London and a new musical revolution is underway.

The Sex Pistols The Clash Buzzcocks Exploited

New Wave

Several bands started to change punk music, but kept the ethics.

This new style forged the way for New Wave in the 1980’s

The Jam Elvis Costello Madness The Undertones

A new urban sound Young African Americans

in NYC combine toasting (speaking over music) with the creative recycling of prerecorded material, later known as sampling.

Gil-Scott Heron (Beat Poets)

Afrika Bambaataa Kool Herc

The 1980’s

A number of factors contributed to an economic revival in the music industry during the mid-1980s.

The Music Video MTV The Compact Disc The Walkman

Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”

As the biggest selling album up until that time it established a pattern by which record companies relied upon a few big hits to generate profits

Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”

Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”

Prince’s “1999”

Rap Continues to rise Grandmaster Flash and

the Furious Five The Sugarhill Gang Both crack the billboard

top 40! But it would take Public

Enemy to use Rap as an important medium in explaining describe in stark terms the way of life in America’s minority-dominated inner cities

Rapping sometimes conveys a stronger message than singing.

Public Enemy release “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back” in 1988

Rap is now a political medium

Others followed with angry attacks on Urban America

NWA, ICE - T & Tribe Called Quest

What happened to it?

Then a split occurred. On one side: Vanilla Ice

& MC Hammer - The commodification of Rap.

On the other side: The emergence of Gangsta Rap - or what has been called The Ghettoization of Black Culture.

The 1990’s By the end of the 20th century it had become

almost impossible to discern the difference between the center and the periphery of American popular music.

Peripheral music always ends up at the centre… Nirvana - First album and EP released on Sub Pop Within three short years they are the centre of a

modern rock phenomenon revolution after revolution taken and commodified

to sound like a cheap fabrication of itself.

The 1990’s – Major artists, but few things that are groundbreaking…

The best-selling recording artists of the 1990s included:

Mariah Carey Garth Brooks Boyz II Men Snoop Doggy Dogg Metallica Red Hot Chili Peppers Britney Spears NSYNC Alanis Morissette Oasis

Today’s music The corporate

commodification of music to a “product” continues.

The Medium is truly the message!

Celebrity

The re-emergence of the independent

Perhaps in reaction to the over commercialization of modern-pop music the “industry” and fans have begun to focus on the anti-thesis of this…the independent musician.

Radiohead

Radiohead’s OK Computer experimented with song structures and incorporated some ambient, avant garde and electronic influences.

Without any “hits” the band went on to be one of the biggest in the world

Then, they left EMI and released their 2007 album “In Rainbows” directly through their website.

The Arcade Fire Debut album

“Funeral” sold 650 000 copies

Opened for David Bowie and U2

2011 Grammy for Album of the Year The Suburbs.

The Biggest band in the world?

Democratization of music The internet means that even unknown

artists can market themselves and gain notoriety.

OK Go

Perhaps more recently…

Selling out? It used to be that musicians could rely

on record sales and live music attendance.

Now, in the era of downloading and expanding promotion prices artists need to find other ways to make money.

Allowing the use of their songs in commercials, films and TV shows prove financially rewarding for most bands.

Feist - 1234

Little known Toronto artist becomes “overnight sensation” after Apple pick up this song to market the iPod

Janelle Monae - Tightrope Still (officially

independent) her latest album The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III) gained popularity through the marketing of her songs to products like Chevy.

Auto tuning Used to correct pitch in vocal and instrumental performances. Thus, you no longer have to be able to sing to be a star.

It is used to disguise off-key inaccuracies and mistakes, and has allowed singers to perform perfectly tuned vocal tracks without needing to sing in tune

Mash ups and copyright laws

A mashup is a song or composition created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs.

Legal? The idea here is to juxtapose portions of

other works in order to draw new meaning not contained in the originals.

Rip: A Remix Manifesto

Important technical questions Digital technologies has raised legal and

technological questions which will no doubt shape the course of American popular music for years to come

What kind of rights does a consumer purchase when they buy a copy of a recording?

Is streaming the answer? How will the transformation of music into pure

information affect musicians and how they are compensated?

What will the music industry of tomorrow look like?

The identification of musical styles with complex patterns of social identity—age, race, and class—also continues to shape American musical tastes.