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Post by ben on Mar 9, 2011 12:56:24 GMT -5
Hello fellow music boffs  I'm currently planning a coursework essay for an English Literature module I'm doing on Postwar Literatures of Waste and we have a blank canvas in terms of subject and primary texts. I'm thinking about looking at Idlewild's debut album, 'Hope is Important', however I've never written any critical work about music before. I have two questions, any help from anyone more used to writing about music would be very much appreciated! 1. Is there an assumption among popular music criticism that only 'seminal' bands such as The Smiths or The Sex Pistols or The Beatles are worthy of critical writing? Is it weird/unusual writing about a little-known Scottish punk revival band (which they were during the period of this album), and, more importantly, will there be any published criticism out there that I can engage with? 2. Does anyone know of any good journal articles / books / sources of information that deal with british/scottish punk music, or 90s revivals of this genre? Thank you! |
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Post by Owen from Final Fantasy on Mar 26, 2011 9:04:21 GMT -5
When I was in school, the only pop music that was accepted as being worthy of any academic attention was The Beatles and Frank Zappa.
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Post by Jo on Mar 26, 2011 10:21:19 GMT -5
This sounds familiar!
I'm in my second year at University now, and I have to start planning my options for next year. One of them is a compulsory dissertation and I had no idea what to do (made even more of a problem by everybody else's clear ideas and direction!). I'd been kinda thinking for a while that I'd like to do something on song lyrics, but I wasn't really sure if the lyrics and music I was interested in and wanted to talk about would be deemed 'academic' enough. So I had a chat with a couple of tutors and it certainly seems that not much has changed - I kept getting pointed towards Zappa and Bob Dylan.
I think I've nearly sorted it out now though. I wanted to do it on more contemporary musicians, and I remembered seeing in an interview with you Owen that you'd said Lewis's role was kind of a twist on the typical 'baby' of popular music, and I thought that that reversal of perspective was interesting. After explaining the story of Lewis and Spectrum to a particularly helpful tutor, he recommended a couple of obscureish plays and texts in which the creator/creation relationship is changed somehow. And so (essay nearly over, I promise (maybe I could just submit this)) nooowwww, I've managed to get a working title that's something along the lines of 'An investigation of the relationship between an author and his creation across a range of media.' or something. ha.
Anybody got any ideas?
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Post by Jo on Mar 26, 2011 10:37:59 GMT -5
Is it weird/unusual writing about a little-known Scottish punk revival band (which they were during the period of this album) I'm sure you can talk about anything as long as you explore it in enough depth, and use all the right jargon! |
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Post by yesanastasia on Apr 8, 2011 20:35:50 GMT -5
This assignment may have come and gone by now, but I thought I'd add my two cents, for what it's worth.
Yes, particularly in proper "music" faculties (and honestly, a lot of them are loathe to allow even the Beatles). However, other fields such as cultural studies, media studies, English, sociology etc. have opened up a lot in the past few decades, and are much more receptive to other approaches to pop music studies. There are also some more progressive music scholars, as well as ethnomusicologists, but on the whole, music faculties are pretty conservative (at least in my experience). Simon Frith has done a lot to demystify the study of actual popular music, and has, in some ways, inspired a new approach to popular music studies.
As to whether you'll be able to find specific criticism, it's definitely possible, but you're more likely to have luck with journal articles than any other sources. If your institution has a digital journal search within its catalogue, that would definitely be the spot to check.
Punk is decidedly Not My Genre, but I took a course a few years back. You might try "England's Dreaming" by Jon Savage (mostly about the Sex Pistols, but there's a lot more than just that - quite a bit of historical context), or "Rip It Up and Start Again" by Simon Reynolds (more on post-punk, but could be relevant).
Good luck!
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Post by deerful on Apr 15, 2011 19:01:18 GMT -5
Hello! I've been lurking for a bit, and couldn't quite leave this thread alone without posting, even though in forum terms it's probably ancient. I'm in my second year at University now, and I have to start planning my options for next year. One of them is a compulsory dissertation and I had no idea what to do (made even more of a problem by everybody else's clear ideas and direction!). I'd been kinda thinking for a while that I'd like to do something on song lyrics, but I wasn't really sure if the lyrics and music I was interested in and wanted to talk about would be deemed 'academic' enough. So I had a chat with a couple of tutors and it certainly seems that not much has changed - I kept getting pointed towards Zappa and Bob Dylan. I think I've nearly sorted it out now though. I wanted to do it on more contemporary musicians, and I remembered seeing in an interview with you Owen that you'd said Lewis's role was kind of a twist on the typical 'baby' of popular music, and I thought that that reversal of perspective was interesting. After explaining the story of Lewis and Spectrum to a particularly helpful tutor, he recommended a couple of obscureish plays and texts in which the creator/creation relationship is changed somehow. And so (essay nearly over, I promise (maybe I could just submit this)) nooowwww, I've managed to get a working title that's something along the lines of 'An investigation of the relationship between an author and his creation across a range of media.' or something. ha. Anybody got any ideas? I'm a music student at Cambridge (which has probably the most conservative music department in the UK), and (assuming I do well enough in my exams) have a Masters place at one of the University of London colleges to study popular musicology which I'm hoping I'll eventually get a PhD in, so I'm entrenched in both ends of the spectrum (ahaha spectrum) right now. I Am Serious about Music Which Is Not 'Serious'. Proper academia on popular music is in my opinion quite lacking *generally* at the moment, partly because it's quite easy to ignore any kind of detailed analysis when you aren't working from a score. I've written my dissertation this year on the performance personae of a semi-famous '90s Britpop musician, and the main difficulty has been concrete analysis without having a concrete text to analyse from, if that makes sense. Philip Auslander has written some interesting stuff on studying music academically as performance, rather than as score, and so has Nicholas Cook (who IMHO is probably the most hard-line, serious musicologist working in pop at the moment - his stuff is quite dense but it's really interesting). I would also suggest specifically that you dig out Matthew Bannister's article 'Adorno is a Punk Rocker'. It's basically a reconsideration of a theory which Adorno applied to classical music (which brings up a whole pile of other issues because he despised pop, but anyway) - which looks partly at the 'removal of the author' from his own work. Bannister talks about it in relation to the Velvet Underground, but it did occur to me that in a way that's what's enacted in Heartland, though in a very different, less formalistic and more literal way. I'm not sure if I should be proud or ashamed that Heartland was the first thing I thought of when I read it  The other (perhaps useful to both you and Ben) thing I was told by my supervisor is that if you're writing on a musician who's considered 'marginal' you should justify why you're doing so, and how the stuff you've come up with could be enlightening if applied to a broader range of musicians. ANYWAY. I will go back to lurking and *maybe actually post on something directly Owen-related* at some point. Sorry for the uberlong post, and if I'm the lamest person who's ever posted here, I apologise D: (edit) I've just realised I've said virtually nothing helpful to Ben - I'm curious as to how much engagement with the music, rather than solely the lyrics, you'd be expected to do. I know of one person who analysed an album for a piece of English coursework, and I think she focused only on lyrics. |
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Post by Jo on Apr 16, 2011 6:39:39 GMT -5
I'm sorry for hijacking your thread Ben, genuinely. Hopefully as we're looking at similar topics anything that gets posted here might be of use to both of us!
to Justmade: Thanks a heap! I'll definitely be tracking those articles down over the summer in preparation for next year. Let me know how you get on with your dissertation, it sounds fascinating! Where are you thinking of going in London? I'm at Goldsmiths UoL at the moment, I'd certainly recommend it here!
Philip Auslander and Nicholas Cook sound worth the investigation. So far I've been pointed towards Luigi Pirandello's play 'Six Characters In Search Of An Author' and Paul Auster's 'The New York Trilogy' because of their examinations of the author/creation relationship.
Ideally I'd love to focus just on music. I'm in love with Joanna Newsom's lyrics as well, it just seems that I have to tie it all back to literature. I suppose that's to be expected and I shouldn't complain, it's just gonna be tough to not get carried away!
Also, I think you make a good point about justifying focusing on a comparatively marginal artist. No offence Owen. I can see how that'd be important, and such a justification would certainly strengthen my marker's opinion on the Zappa and Zimmerman validity of anything I actually end up writing!
Owen, any chance of an interview when you're in London next month? haaa
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Alyssa!
Go Away
I'm out on the street with an open case and a mandolin and with every coin I am born again
Posts: 437
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Post by Alyssa! on Apr 17, 2011 3:39:25 GMT -5
Do you have a copy of the score / a comfort with reading it? When I wrote a 22-pager for my English class on Heartland, the score helped me sort through some detail out of what was essentially a lyrical essay: anything from, instrumentation patterns, tempos, chord structures and patterns, melodies, sequences, to notes themselves. Maybe it's best not to get bogged down in theory, but it can be vaguely helpful. For example, did you know that in Psycho, that *stab* chord is always spelled the same way, which is identical to Wagner's spelling of it as one of the "character chords" in Tristan and Isolde. From that you get an allusion and cool cross-relations and stuff.
I started a piece a l'il bit ago that breaks down the structure of The Suburbs into smaller 2-4 song chunks, gives it an Act I and an Act II, and examines the pacing between songs. From there you can make the case that The Suburbs is a kind of understated modern rock opera and examine the way it approaches mythological storytelling. I just like playing around....which is not helpful! Sorry!
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Post by Jo on Apr 18, 2011 4:57:59 GMT -5
That sounds fascinating, but I'm limited only to 10,000 words, and I think that focusing on the score in such a way might be deemed too far away from linguistic analysis as far as the marker is concerned. I'm not sure, maybe I could tie it in somewhere, somehow! Also, I'm an English student, so that might all bit a bit over my head! |
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