Popular music

Female pop stars have been a force to reckon with within the modern music industry and have dominated music charts around the globe. Each female pop star creates her own unique sounds, lyrics and catchy music to entice a fan base to follow them. However, are female pop stars really that different? Jennifer Lena argues in "Chapter 2: Three Musics, Four Genres: Rap, Bluegrass and Bebop Jazz" that "music histories are full of hints that there is a pattern to the evolution of communities of sound"…

one of the only common ties in society is the use of music. Even the most secluded locations still have their own form of music which in a way makes music a universal language. Over the course of history countless technological advances have impacted music differently. With the invention of the computer the way we create music has been rewritten. The use of the computer to create music has changed our culture at its foundation with advancing music exponentially, but also causing some negative…

With the release of his third album “To Pimp a Butterfly,” many critics believe that Kendrick Lamar has raised the bar for popular music artist including other pop artists such as Kanye West and Taylor Swift (Miers). Specifically, “Alright” is a powerful song (practice) made into a popular hit (product) by hip-hop and R&B radio stations (media) for all people, especially the African American community (audience). The song and live performance highlights the struggle of being a black male in a…

the shriek of a dying cow. I whimpered as these terrible sounds emitted out of my violin, and threw my violin down in defeat. I slowly tilted my head towards the clock, a terrifying reminder that my addition was only 10 min away. I gathered up my music, and ambled away from the empty practice room to where my judge would listen to my audition. A tearful boy my age brushed past me. He exited the room I was heading for, room 218. It sent a shiver down my spine thinking it was an omen for things…

Lizzo has become very popular in the last year with lyrics like “I don’t need a crown to know that I’m a queen”. She can be described as a breath of fresh air in hip-hop culture with her body-positive message. One of her songs from Coconut Oil, “Good As Hell”, was in the soundtrack for the movie, Barbershop: The Next Cut. Lizzo is very different from other hip-hop artists for a number of reasons; she is based out of Minneapolis and the other being that she is a classically trained flutist. In…

Milton Babbitt has been both a controversial composer, as well as author. In his article, “Who Cares if You Listen?”, Babbitt is quite harsh on his thoughts of contemporary music and performance as a whole. Babbitt discusses why contemporary composers, who produce “serious” and “advanced” pieces, should stop allowing their music to become accessible to the public. Instead, Babbitt calls for a restriction on their compositions and performances. He believes that the general public is uninterested…

make them distinctive in global cinematic domains. Through the simulations of Britishness, The ceremony thus becomes a global audio-visual commodities (Tzanelli, 2013: 59). The performance heavily emphasizes on the nationally iconic personality from popular culture such as Mr Bean and James Bond and successfully achieved a blending of the seriousness and entertainment. In the next section ‘Happy and Glorious’, Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh enter the stadium, the royal navy…

First, it contributes to a greater sense of realism in the viewer. Sound originating from a source within the world of the scene does not indicate does as certainly as music from a non-diegetic source. Secondly, it can indicate information to the viewer. As the source of the music comes from within the universe of the characters, the music’s presence can be related to things within that universe, very relevantly to the characters themselves. In the same way that knowledge of someone’s musical…

Our unit of work focuses on the relationship between popular culture and the Australian society after WWII on the year 10 level for both the humanities and music leaning areas. This topic is part of the AUSVels year 10 history/ geography curriculum and aligned with the 2016 Victorian music curriculum. The main inquiry questions for this unit is: “How has global pop-culture (music, film and T.V.) influenced Australian Identity and society in a post WW2 environment?”. The three key terms for…

Popular Culture Postmodernism possess both a positive attraction and a usefulness to the analyst of popular culture as it offers a wider and more dynamic understanding of contemporary representation. It has entered into a more diverse number of vocabularies and has spread outwards from the realms of art history into political theory and on to the pages of youth culture magazines, record sleeves and fashion spreads. In the book “Postmodernism and Popular Culture” by Angela McRobbie, she talks…