Interpreting Popular Music

by David Brackett

There is a well-developed vocabulary for discussing classical music, but when it comes to popular music, how do we analyze its effects and its meaning? David Brackett draws from the disciplines of cultural studies and music theory to demonstrate how listeners form opinions about popular songs, and how they come to attribute a rich variety of meanings to them. Exploring several genres of popular music through recordings made by Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Hank Williams, James Brown, and Elvis Costello, Brackett develops a set of tools for looking at both the formal and cultural dimensions of popular music of all kinds.

Genres: Music

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 26, 1996

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for academic inquiries into pop music, and this book is one of the best, giving explicitly close readings of single recordings by Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Hank Williams, James Brown, and Elvis Costello, with shorter readings of "This Diamond Ring" by Gary Lewis and the Playboys and "Mayor of Simpleton" by XTC. Brackett is masterful at investigating the relationship between form and function both in the actual record under consideration and in the records role within the artists career and the specific milieu of its time. He's got me paying closer attention to what I'm hearing (even if, once again, I had to kind of gloss over the extremely technical bits about pitches and harmony which I understand vicariously more than completely). It's a shame he hasn't updated it to realize that within a short time of the books release in 1996, teen idols would come back in a big way, and that over the next 20 years, country music would change significantly. But that's just me being greedy - I would actually love to read more of this guy just talking about music.

[Luke Echo]

about halfway through and its quite a good read.

[Paulio · Rating 4 out of 5]

I highly recommend the chapter on James Brown, from which I learnt a great deal.