A capacious and stimulating tour de force of the mainstream music industry that reveals the cultural import of even the most deliberately banal performers and songs. Weisbard finds depths in our culture s shallows as he investigates and articulates the cultural construction of such phenomena as Dolly Parton, Elton John, the Isley Brothers, A&M Records, and the rise of radio populism. He further sheds new light on the upheavals in the music industry over the last fifteen years and the implications of them for the audiences the industry has shaped. Each chapter brings us to see afresh precisely that music and those musicians that have become the most familiar and overexposed, by delving into the minutiae of how pop stars and their music were made and framed for repeated consumption in the era dominated by radio."

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.

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.

Music's role in animating democracy--whether through protests and demonstrations, as a vehicle for political identity, or as a means of overcoming social divides--is well understood. Yet musicians have also been drawn to the potential of embodying democracy itself through musical processes and relationships. In this book, author Robert Adlington uses modern democratic theory to explore what he terms the 'musical modelling of democracy' as manifested in modern and experimental music of the global North. Throughout the book, Adlington demonstrates how composers and musicians have taken strikingly different approaches to this kind of musical modelling. For some, democratic principles inform the textural relationships inscribed into musical scores, as in the case of Elliott Carter's 'polyvocal' compositions. Pioneers of musical indeterminacy sought to democratise the relationship between composer and performers by leaving open key decisions about the realisation of a work. Musicians have involved audiences in active participation to liberate them from the passivity of spectatorship. Free improvisation groups have experimented with new kinds of egalitarian relationships between performers to reject old hierarchies. In examining these different approaches, Adlington illuminates the achievements and ambiguities of musical models of democracy. As a result, this book not only offers an important new perspective on modern musicians' engagement with a central political idea of the past century, but it also encourages a deeper and more critical engagement with the idea of democracy within present-day musical life.

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.

For a century and more, the idea of democracy has fuelled musicians’ imaginations. Seeking to go beyond music’s proven capacity to contribute to specific political causes, musicians have explored how aspects of their practice embody democratic principles. This may involve adopting particular approaches to compositional material, performance practice, relationships to audiences, or modes of dissemination and distribution. Finding Democracy in Music is the first study to offer a wide-ranging investigation of ways in which democracy may thus be found in music. A guiding theme of the volume is that this takes place in a plurality of ways, depending upon the perspective taken to music’s manifold relationships, and the idea of democracy being entertained. Contributing authors explore various genres including orchestral composition, jazz, the post-war avant-garde, online performance, and contemporary popular music, as well as employing a wide array of theoretical, archival, and ethnographic methodologies. Particular attention is given to the contested nature of democracy as a category, and the gaps that frequently arise between utopian aspiration and reality. In so doing, the volume interrogates a key way in which music helps to articulate and shape our social lives and our politics.