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The medium and materials of popular music: ‘Hound Dog’, turntablism and muzak as situated musical practices1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2007

CHARLES FAIRCHILD
CHARLES FAIRCHILD
Affiliation:
Art Music Unit, Seymour Centre, 4th Floor, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, AustraliaE-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Popular music studies has rarely exhibited the kinds of disciplinary coherence found in closely related disciplines mostly due to the field’s adoption and adaptation of methodological and theoretical innovations from a variety of disciplines, notably sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, media studies and musicology. However, many commentators continue to seek disciplinary coherence without making any critical aesthetic distinctions between the medium and materials of popular music. Distinctions and interrelationships between the literal or material aspects of popular music and the social or cultural processes of making meaning from popular music are central to the definition of a particular but not exclusive field of analysis. Through such distinctions, the very category ‘popular music’ can be understood as a more flexible and supple distinction based on an understanding of methods of construction, production and mediation in specific relation to the technical, contextual and sociological aspects of music. I use different performances of ‘Hound Dog’, the practices of ‘turntablism’, and the exigencies of Muzak as examples for analysis offering ways in which the aesthetic, material and contextual aspects of popular music can be understood in order to incorporate the actual sound of music into the analysis of its social, cultural and musical construction.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 99 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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Footnotes

1

This article grew out of an inter-faculty colloquium at the University of Sydney in 2005 called ‘Renegotiating Musicology’. I offer my thanks to colloquium participants for their comments and suggestions.

References

1 This article grew out of an inter-faculty colloquium at the University of Sydney in 2005 called ‘Renegotiating Musicology’. I offer my thanks to colloquium participants for their comments and suggestions.