This week in pop music saw a number of highly-anticipated releases. Olivia Rodrigo dropped her debut album Sour , Lil Nas X shared a more personal tune, and Lana Del Rey offered a taste of her upcoming LP.
Breakout star Olivia Rodrigo released her buzzyworthy album Sour this week after her debut single “Drivers License” made her one of the biggest stars to watch in 2021. The eclectic effort boasts a number of dancey tunes, but it also features a handful of lovelorn tracks like “Enough For You.” The acoustic number allows for Rodrigo’s radical honesty and showcases her soaring vocal range as she sings of finally realizing her self-worth in a relationship.
Ever since the Jonas Brothers released their 2019 album Happiness Begins , they’ve more than made a comeback. Now, they are returning for their first single of 2021 (discounting Nick Jonas’ solo effort). The summer-ready jam “Leave Before You Love Me” is a groove-driven collaboration with producer Marshmello, dropped just ahead of their performance at the Billboard Music Awards.
After weeks of teasing, BTS ‘ new single “Butter” is finally here. Complete with a captivating hook, grand chorus, and shimmering chords, it’s sure to be their next hit. It’s also their second-ever fully English language song, which follows the massive success of their first English track “Dynamite,” so this one is sure to be equally successful.
With “Our Song,” Anne-Marie announces her upcoming album Therapy as a follow up to her 2018 breakout Speak Your Mind , which was the UK's biggest-selling debut release of that year. The fluttering duet details the difficulty of being constantly reminded of a past relationship, a vulnerability that Anne-Marie shares elsewhere on her upcoming album. “My lyrics are my open diary to you all and writing this album has helped me focus and understand my feelings,” she said about the LP.
The last we heard from Oneohtrix Point Never, he was collaborating with The Weekend and dropping the album Magic Oneohtrix Point Never . Now, the musician has tapped Rosalía to add her vocals on his LP’s album closer “Nothing’s Special.” The reimagined track adds much dimension to the song. Rosalía’s moving vocals melt over drawn-out synths, evoking a certain melancholy as she sings of losing a friend.
With her recent singles, Rebecca Black has been leaning into hyperpop territory. But her latest track “Worth It For The Feeling” offers a more sultry R&B tune. The song moves Black one step closer to her impeding album, which she said is going to be a reintroduction of her artistry. "This year has really been a reintroduction of not only where I'm at in my music but really everything surrounding that to create a full picture,” Black said. “It's so fun for me to play sexy in a more unconventional and unusual way – and I want to keep challenging myself to disrupt the idea that people might have of the direction I am going in next."
With her first single of 2021, Banoffee melts heartbreak into a moody electropop tune. “Tapioca Cheeks” features skittering beats and Banoffee’s metallic-tinged vocals about a complicated relationship. “It's about the fears that come with diving in with someone,” Banoffee said of the track. “How love can be awful as well as wonderful at the same time, because it’s just so damn scary. 'Tapioca Cheeks' is a dedication to someone, for them to feel loved and held even when they feel completely incapable or unlovable."
Some of the artists mentioned here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Discuss: Was 1971 the most important year in pop music and politics? - The Globe and Mail
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George Harrison and Ravi Shankar are featured in 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything, premiering on Apple TV+ on May 21, 2021.
Okay boomers, here's a question to keep you occupied for hours and hours: What was the most important year in the history of pop music?
1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything (AppleTV+) is a cornucopia of information, footage, music and digressions. It offers an education to people of all ages and generations and, in truth, that "okay boomers" reference isn't fair; none of those lazily made labels – "Gen Z," "Gen X" – are fair. They're ridiculously American-centric.
There's nothing lazy about the series, and its full title should be noted. Based on the book 1971 – Never a Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year , by David Hepworth – the series pivots on the assertion that pop music changed from a genre about teenage heartbreak and unrequited love to a political force. Not that the creation of this force was planned or that it ever became streamlined, but it seeped into the broader culture in a way that was unique.
The first voice we hear is that of Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, who is reminiscing about Neil Young writing the song Ohio after the Kent State shootings in 1970. That's as good a hook as any to begin with. Pop music began to be about what was happening on the streets and in politics. Also, in that first episode, there's a hint of the later assertion that 1971 was crucial in the advancement of pop music as art – David Bowie is heard saying, "We were creating the 21st century in 1971."
There is a great deal of coverage, with never-before-seen footage, of the end of the Beatles and the beginning of John Lennon's solo career. Plenty of attention is given to George Harrison's all-star concert for Bangladesh (the segment features a very young Geraldo Rivera reporting for local TV news in New York City), and what looms over it all is the war in Vietnam. There's a fascinating tale about anti-war activists breaking into an FBI office on the night Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden. And an unmissable clip of the Ray Conniff Singers performing for Richard Nixon at the White House, with the performance interrupted by one of the singers, Canadian Carole Feraci, unfurling a banner and saying, "Mr. President, stop the bombing of human beings, animals and vegetation."
It's an eye-opening, mind-bending journey for anyone of any age to digest. But discuss it among yourselves. Me, my memories of 1971 involve footage of riots, bombings, internment without trial and a rage in the air in Ireland that my young mind didn't fully understand. This series doesn't go there enough, but watching it was diverting and instructive, as it provided a context that was once elusive.
K-Pop Probably Won't Get Its Own Grammy Category | Billboard
(L-R) Jungkook, V, Suga, Jin, RM, Jimin and J-Hope of music group BTS attend the 62nd Annual GRAMMY Awards at Staples Center on Jan. 26, 2020 in Los Angeles.
With BTS' first Grammy nomination this past year, many fans of the group (and of K-pop in general) wonder whether a separate K-pop category in the Grammy Awards is plausible.
The Grammys add categories from time to time. In fact, on April 30, the Recording Academy announced that it will add two new categories for the 64th annual Grammy Awards: best global music performance and best música urbana album. This will bring the number of Grammy categories to 86.
"The way I see it, modern K-pop really started in the '90s," says Bill Freimuth, chief awards officer at the Recording Academy. "They took what was popular during that era [such as R&B and bubblegum pop] and made it their own."
This past year, the Academy received just 14 K-pop submissions, which constituted less than 1.5% of the submissions in the pop field.
"What we've heard from the community is that they consider what they are creating to be pop music," says Freimuth. "Some argue that it's pop music from Korea."
Korean music is vast and diverse, and there doesn't seem to be a noticeable factor in these K-pop songs that truly defines Korean music. For example, although "Dynamite" is by a K-pop boy band, it is completely sung in English. This likely played a big part in making the song a hit in America. In addition, the song features pop attributes, which justifies it being slotted in the pop field.
"The general process [of adding a category] is quite formal," says Freimuth. Every year, by a deadline of March 1, the Academy receives proposals from the music community. Those proposals -- which often include adding a category, rewording/defining a current category and changing current awards processes -- are presented to the awards and nominations committee. If the "A&N" committee passes a proposal, it is presented to the board of trustees, which will discuss and ratify the proposed change or not.
As a general rule, the Academy looks to see a potential field of 100 submissions for a proposal to have a strong chance of being added. This past year's 14 K-pop submissions fell far short of that mark.
Billboard Music Awards 2021: Best Performances, Speeches
The Billboard Music Awards don't tell us anything we don't already know. The awards simply reiterate the records that have occurred on the charts over the previous year, in trophy form. That does make the show a Who's Who of pop music, though, featuring some of the bigger performances on the awards-show circuit. Last night's show — one of the most post-COVID awards shows so far, with a near-full (masked, largely outdoor) audience and in-person appearances — was no different, featuring more of the musicians we've already heard for the past year, from the Weeknd to BTS to DJ Khaled ( whose monthlong Khaled Khaled rollout has felt like a year ). But as fated as the BBMAs can feel, last night's show also offered a few surprises, from a stunning performance by Icon Award winner Pink; to moving speeches by Trae tha Truth and Pop Smoke's mother, Audrey Jackson; to the Weeknd's sheer presence; to a whimper of an ending by the Jonas Brothers. Here, the highs, lows, and whoas of the 2021 Billboard Music Awards.
Did anyone else think those dancers were supposed to be oranges? It would've been fitting for Doja Cat and SZA's delectable performance of "Kiss Me More," a song that grows on you with each listen. Doja continues to deliver on the awards-show-performance circuit, with production and choreography in peak form, while SZA made viewers forget all about her preshow nerves. (Seriously, it's great to see her back on awards-show stages. Now, here's hoping she releases another album we can award!)
Twenty One Pilots' performance couldn't rise to become a moment no matter how much Tyler Joseph screamed and jumped around on dragon setpieces.
Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Alicia Keys's debut, Songs in A Minor , seemed like a stretch … until Ms. Keys pulled a video-tribute message from Michelle Obama herself and performed a stunning four-song medley , with all the big notes and piano tricks we've come to expect. If her two-year tenure hosting the Grammys didn't already convince you, this woman can own an awards-show stage.
LOW: Where is country?
Watching Gabby Barrett's emotional acceptance of Top Country Female Artist and Top Country Song was sweet — so why didn't she get a performance? As awards shows struggle to deal with the fallout of Morgan Wallen's racial-slur video , the BBMAs decided it would give Wallen the awards he earned (after Dangerous spent a wild ten weeks at No. 1, mostly after said video) but wouldn't televise any of his awards or let him perform. And, apparently, the BBMAs wouldn't book any other country artists, like Barrett, to perform instead, even if country continues to have staying power on the charts.
Questions about why Jon Bon Jovi, of all people, gave her the Icon Award aside, Pink once again proved why she deserves all the Icon Awards at all the awards shows. She gave us the acrobatics; she gave us the emotional ballads; she gave us an appearance by her equally iconic daughter, Willow ; she gave us the TikTok dance; and she gave us a rocking medley of the old hits to end it all? Icon behavior.
WHOA: Billboard selling NFTs to honor Trae's Change Maker Award.
Sure, it's also a change, but for the better ?
Drake told the BBMAs audience that he's "really bad at taking compliments" and "self-conscious about my music" as he accepted the night's most massive award, Artist of the Decade. Sure. But at least Drake didn't have to fully take the spotlight during his acceptance — thanks to the real star of the night, his absolutely adorable son, Adonis .
The Weeknd was the man of the three-plus hours at the BBMAs, taking home ten awards after a dominant year thanks to After Hours and "Blinding Lights." And on top of it all, he delivered yet another of his signature stylish performances, singing "Save Your Tears" between cars in a Los Angeles parking lot ( in a black suit, no less ). The whole night served as a reminder that, even if other awards shows didn't recognize him , the numbers don't lie .
Grammy official explains why a K-pop category is unlikely to happen anytime soon
The Recording Academy, which presents the annual Grammy Awards, occasionally adds new categories to the awards ceremony. The most recent additions are Best Global Music Performance and Best Música Urbana Album, which were announced on April 30 and will be introduced next year during the 64th Grammy Awards.
But according to Bill Freimuth, the chief awards officer at the Recording Academy, a K-pop-only category seems unlikely to happen in the near future. Speaking to Billboard , the Grammy official said that both he and the "community" find it hard to define Korean music enough from ordinary pop music to justify its own category.
"The way I see it, modern K-pop really started in the '90s. They took what was popular during that era [such as R&B and bubblegum pop] and made it their own," he said. "What we've heard from the community is that they consider what they are creating to be pop music."
In addition, Freimuth also points out that the process for adding a new category is "quite formal", requiring detailed proposals and several rounds of approval and ratification by different committees and boards.
As Billboard also noted, potential categories require around 100 potential submissions for a "strong chance" of consideration. However, The Recording Academy only received 14 K-pop submissions last year, which is well below the expected mark.
But despite the unlikelihood of a K-pop category, Freimuth said that the Academy would "love to see more". He added: "We appreciate that the Grammys are so important to them."
Last November, BTS became the first-ever K-pop act to receive a Grammy nomination . The boyband's hit 2020 single 'Dynamite' was up for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance at the recent 63rd Grammy Awards , but ultimately lost out to Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande 's 'Rain On Me' collab.
Why Tacky 2000s Pop Is Cool Now - The Atlantic
There's a paradox to this trend. The sizable audiences that pour in for each movie, podcast, and think piece about the horrors of the 2000s clearly also enjoy the trip down memory lane—a trip defined by images and songs that are now said to be the products of exploitation. Emerging tentatively from a pandemic and an apocalyptic political period, American culture seems hungry for a return to boom-time frivolity, but without the toxic social environment that underlaid it. There's reason to be both wary and giddy about such a desire. If we're in for a roaring 2020s, might the decade revive the garish fun of the 2000s but be a little smarter about it?
Not everyone in the Y2K wave is straining for subversiveness, though. With lyrics about sexting on early-model iPhones, That Kid's music mostly just aims for a blend of nostalgia and hedonism. His cover of Soulja Boy's "Kiss Me Thru the Phone" does swap the original song's pronouns—"baby girl" becomes "baby boy"—and I asked whether he, a Black gay man, sought to undermine the straightness of 2000s pop. He said that wasn't his intention. Sometimes, "something will remind me [that] my very existence is political to some people," he said. "I'm like, Oh, okay . I forget about it."
10 Most Iconic Pop Music Videos From The 2010s | TheThings
There are a plethora of reasons why the 2010s were an iconic year for pop culture. Not only did we witness the rise of hip-hop's popularity as a genre, but we also saw many adult contemporary acts rising to the moon during this impeccable decade. We saw Ed Sheeran , Bruno Mars, Shawn Mendes, Selena Gomez , Christina Perry, and more rise to stardom.
Unfortunately, that decade is long gone, leaving us nothing but good nostalgia to reminisce. To sum it up, here are the top ten most iconic pop music videos from the decade, from Iggy Azalea's "Fancy" to The Weeknd's "I Can't Feel My Face."
Not only did Iggy Azalea and Charlie XCX make their breakthrough with "Fancy," but they also paid homage to one of the most iconic coming-of-age comedies of all time, Clueless , on its accompanying music video. The then-rising rap star plays her inner Cher while the singer takes on Tai's character.
No one could escape "Despacito" by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee from 2017 onwards. The reggaeton pop was so iconic that it's become the most viewed music video of all time, having amassed a total of 7 billion views per March 2021.
Plus, the success of "Despacito" helped popularize Spanish-speaking songs to the mainstream market once again and promote tourist interest in Puerto Rico, the singer's hometown where the "Despacito" music video takes place.
We all know "Gangnam Style" helped the rise of the Korean Wave in the early 2010s, but it's also a criticism to the higher and upper-class people of the Gangnam District of Seoul. Everything about "Gangnam Style" played an important role in introducing South Korean music to the mainstream: its horse dance, lyrics, and everything.
Moving to a slower and more ballad-oriented trajectory, there's Adele with "Hello" from her best-selling 25 album. Shot in a black-and-white lens, the "Hello" music video gives a chilling nostalgia about a woman calling her younger self after a nasty breakup with her loved one. Accomplishment-wise, the music video has become one of the most viewed YouTube videos of all time with almost 2.8 billion views. Its album, 25 , has emerged to be one of the best-selling albums of all time.
You may remember Gotye from "Somebody That I Used to Know" back in 2011. Sure, it may be his only top-ten hit to this day as his international success didn't last very long. However, the Grammy-winning song was extremely successful for the Belgian-Australian singer that he was inducted into the Australian Hall of Fame later.
Taylor Swift proved that she's a versatile artist when she made her total transformation from a country queen to a pop sensation in 1989 . "Blank Space," one of its leading singles, takes New York's Oheka Castle as its background and makes satire out of her girl next door image. Per May 2021, the music video has amassed 2.7 billion views on YouTube.
Quincy Jones Is Backing a New NFT Marketplace Designed for Music Fans - Rolling Stone
NFTs could reshape the fan experience — that is, if NFT marketplaces were user-friendly and the digital collectibles were actually affordable. Industry insiders tell Rolling Stone that a new marketplace called OneOf has been designed specifically for musicians and music lovers, and that it will announce its plans on Tuesday to better serve fans looking for cheaper NFT options, including children and teenagers.
Quincy Jones , Whitney Houston, Doja Cat, John Legend, TLC, Charlie Puth, Jacob Collier, G-Eazy, Alesso, and other stars have already prepared collections that are expected to drop in tandem with OneOf’s launch sometime in June, according to early press materials reviewed by Rolling Stone . Jones is also a partner and an owner in the company. Adam Fell, Quincy Jones Productions’ president, co-founded OneOf with digital media executive Joshua James and tech entrepreneur Lin Dai, who will also serve as its CEO. The company, which has been in the works for about two years, recently raised $63 million from a seed round; tech investors include 88rising co-founder Jason Ma and Bill Tai, one of the earliest investors in Zoom. (Tai was also an early investor in Dapper Labs, which created CryptoKitties.)
NFTs are also, for the most part, pretty expensive. For months now, early adopters have made headlines with sales that soar up into the millions — and there are rarely any NFTs that have catered to budget shoppers looking for $10 or $25 options (mainly due to Ethereum’s minting costs, which can run creators as much as $150 per NFT; the NFTs then have to be priced above that cost, in order to turn a profit).
OneOf will not run on the Ethereum blockchain, so its team says the platform will require zero minting costs, which they believe is an “industry-first commitment.” Instead, OneOf will run on the Tezos network. “[The Dapper Labs team] came to the conclusion that Ethereum was just not able to scale and support NFTs,” says Dai. “Dapper was processing so many transactions that they actually slowed down Ethereum to a crawl. [Ethereum] couldn’t process transactions fast enough. But also, because they were processing so many transactions, the cost skyrocketed. So, they spent the next two and a half years building their own blockchain.”
OneOf will still offer one-of-one tokens, but it also has a diamond tier, which holds one-of-five to one-of-twenty tokens; a platinum tier, which holds one-of-one-hundred to one-of-one-thousand tokens; and a gold tier, which holds one-of-ten-thousand to one-of-one-hundred-thousand tokens. The latter is, of course, the lowest-priced tier.
“That is where we think we have something that’s really compelling for artists,” says Fell. “Because we have the ability to not charge the artists minting or gas fees, the artists can sell NFTs at any price. It doesn’t matter if the artist sells one NFT for a million dollars or a million NFTs for a dollar — and the latter is oftentimes much better for some artists, especially artists that are just starting.”
OneOf also believes its relationship with Tezos will win over skeptical celebrities with its more environmentally friendly functionality. “One or two years ago, we ran a calculation and saw that Ethereum’s power consumption was going to be astronomical,” says Dai, who adds that it takes currently two days’ worth of a U.S. household’s power to mint a single NFT . He says he would rather “empower artists in fans in a responsible way.”
How exactly is Tezos different? Dai lays it out pretty simply: “Bitcoin is generation-one blockchain technology,” he says, explaining that its developers were focused intensely on preventing attacks and keeping malicious sources from modifying records. “The proposed idea was to get super technical, specific computers that run on specialized chips that calculate mathematical problems impossible to calculate by regular computers. It’s so hard that it costs a lot. Generation two is basically Ethereum. Ethereum is more programmable, but that makes it a little more prone to attack.” He says that the generation-two idea was also based on computational mathematics, but developers lowered the threshold so that graphics processing units (GPUs) could solve the problems. “It’s more efficient, but now you have thousands or millions of computers or graphic cards trying to mine Ethereum. It still requires computational power as a barrier to verifying transactions,” Dai says.
The third-generation theory has been around for six to eight years. “Pretty much all new blockchains are built on this third group of ideas,” Dai says. “It’s called ‘proof of stake.’ Ethereum and Bitcoin run on ‘proof of work,’ meaning that computers have to work very hard to maintain the network. But computers don’t have to work very hard: The verifiers can stake assets — their blockchain tokens — for the privilege of verifying a transaction. They’re putting up collateral. So, if you misbehave, your collateral gets taken by the network. The bigger the network gets, the more collateral you have to put up, and the more impossible it is to attack. That’s far more efficient. The actual recording and verifying of the transaction takes very little computational power; it’s the mathematical problem that Ethereum and Bitcoin force you to solve before you are allowed to verify a transaction that’s unnecessary. Even Ethereum agreed that ‘proof of stake’ is the future, and they’ve been working on evolving.”
K-pop's rise over consistent struggles in Western pop culture | Talon Marks
K-POP Music Town holds all goods and albums of K-Pop’s biggest stars on the stage. Although many groups constantly hit success, it seems like these idols don’t receive proper treatment in the media. Photo credit: Keanu Ruffo
Keanu Ruffo: K-Pop is filled with bright lights, vibrant colors, and crazy concepts of styles. The fans and culture of K-Pop is a constant source of strength for the artists and groups.
Western pop culture were quick to say that they(K-Pop artists) don’t fit the mold of a traditional western pop act, attacking their notions of what can fly, and what can be popular.
It has especially influenced American music culture by becoming one of the most popular foreign genres of pop music in the United States with new introductions of groups like BTS gaining fans by the day.
The growth of K-Pop popularity in the United States is commonly known as the “Hallyu wave,” which translates to the Korean wave.
With Korean pop’s presence, emphasis on performance and a larger appeal to more demographics have been introduced.
K-Pop has made an especially noticeable impact for americans the last three years when BTS, referred to as Bangtan Boys in English, started making headlines and catching attention from billions of people around the world with their choreography, appearance, and music styles.
Eric Weisbard '88 Tracks American Music Evolution Through Writing | Princeton Alumni Weekly
The book: Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music (Duke University Press) by Eric Weisbard '88 compiles and critiques prominent American music writing on the most popular music through the decades. From William Billings' 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded Weisbard connects memoirs, biographies, and song compilations to blues novels, magazine essays, and academic studies. This book was rooted in Weisbard's desire to produce a comprehensive analysis of the development of American music through its writing. Through his research, Weisbard comes to realize the significance of fundamental questions asked decades ago and the unchanging relevance of song and music. Songbooks serves as a guide for anyone interested in understanding how we have digested and interpreted the most influential pieces of American music throughout history.
The author: A longtime music critic, Eric Weisbard '88 has spent years studying and writing about music, leading him to found the Pop Conference, hosted annually by the Museum of Pop Culture. In his current position, as an associate professor of American studies at the University of Alabama, Weisbard teaches the history, criticism, and literature of American pop music. In 2014, Weisbard published Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstream of American Music for which he received the Woody Guthrie Award. He was also the co-editor of the Spin Alternative Record Guide and has written for the Village Voice.
Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music aims to capture all of that sequence and more. It's a critical guide to the authors, artists, and topics accruing a catalog as far back as William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer . The range of books makes an argument for intellectual history, comparable to pop's implications for music history. You'll find a blues novel by Gayl Jones and folk ballad mysteries by Sharyn McCrumb, memoirs by groupie Pamela Des Barres and industry figures Carrie Jacobs-Bond and Clive Davis, Top 40 charts books by Joel Whitburn and ragtime-era clippings collated by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, glossy prose by Gilbert Seldes and Tom Wolfe. The provisional status of popular music authors, due to identity, funding, or creative obsession, shaped their output. Enduring stuff came from outsiders: women and/ or writers of color, authors displaced by sexuality or partial education, deviants from orthodoxy. Efforts to fix music's meaning by discipline or genre have often meant less than a glimpse useful enough to pass around the way djs would a breakbeat, comparable to the verse a songwriter distills from experience to suggest a world.
I define popular music primarily around songs, America as both place and influence, literature as something that captivates as much as it informs. My entries are short: suggestive rather than definitive. And they proceed in the order of publication date for the book that launched the career or discourse, putting foundational texts near others in a period and letting them all quest forward. In popular music, new forms required new interpretations: think Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize and the Is-he-literature? debate. Music writing's preemptive verbiage line-cut more traditional scholarship. Since the 1990s, academics have created a more formal literature: studies that extended other studies, shared keywords, university press book series. That's here, too. But professionalizing should not mean dismissing earlier writing. Hybridity and patched-together methods are not a weakness of popular music literature—they're its essence. Rereading expansively can be as revisionist as wholly new exploration.
Books on music have come in a few dominant forms: collections of songs that showed a subject existed; critical, autobiographical, and fictional salvos attuned to the timbres of pop culture; genre and disciplinary codifications meant to set boundaries; and cultural studies revisionism challenging such norms. To taxonomize:
Collected works made a case even as they made a sale, arguments about value and immensity. Slave Songs of the United States credited Black musical originality. Morrison Foster's 160-song collection sanctified his younger brother Stephen. John Lomax's Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads alchemized "Home on the Range" into a Library of Congress folk division. Whitburn's chart tallies valued commercial multiplicity.
Academic disciplines separated popular music, too, but by methods of analysis. The contributors to H. Wiley Hitchcock's New Grove Dictionary of American Music revamped musicology. Lawrence Levine brought folk laughter into American cultural history and archive digging into popular music writing. Bruno Nettl tracked the upstart field of ethnomusicology, raising comparative questions. Howard Becker and Richard Peterson fostered a sociology of culture, stressing institutions.
With Reagan and Thatcher in power and populist tastes no longer assumed progressive, cultural studies arrived, under Stuart Hall's leadership. Dissecting assumptions rather than, as earlier, deepening them, the approach was brought into rock criticism by Simon Frith, folklore by Robert Cantwell, jazz academia by Robert O'Meally's Columbia cohort, musicology by Susan McClary, ethnomusicology by Steven Feld, the African diaspora by Paul Gilroy, hip-hop by Tricia Rose, metal by Robert Walser, minstrelsy by Eric Lott, sound by Jonathan Sterne, Latinx scenes by Frances Aparicio, country by Diane Pecknold, Broadway musicals by Stacy Wolf. Similarly, fiction augmented the funky with the fantastic: the cyberpunk of William Gibson, future/past jumbles by Jennifer Egan. Post-boomer critics dug up once-deplored taste fringes: the poptimism of a Carl Wilson or Ann Powers, Alex Ross rooting classical in the popular sphere.
These tales have the same moral. Professionalism was always in question, same as primitivism. That was American music. That was American music writing. And it's all a very long story. Popular music involves not so much music and lyrics as music and the entire social and cultural field that supports and frames it. Writing that found a new way to chart an aspect of this universe, letting a part illuminate the whole, did most for our understanding. To ramble, haphazardly and gleefully, through books that predate us, is to realize that while such matters as commerce versus creativity, novelty versus classics, Blackness versus "Blackness" constitute core dialectics, popular and music remain the most fundamental intersection. Each word subsumes a panoply of selves and note-taking practices.
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