Producing Pop provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes analysis of one of the world's major entertainment industries. Focusing on the contribution of recording industry personnel, it challenges the simplistic assumption that pop music is merely determined by corporate financial interests, and argues against writers who portray the music business as a cultural assembly line.
Based on the critically acclaimed podcast that has broken down hundreds of Top 40 songs, Switched On Pop dives in into eighteen hit songs drawn from pop of the last twenty years--ranging from Britney to Beyoncé, Kelly Clarkson to Kendrick Lamar--uncovering the musical explanations for why and how certain tracks climb to the top of the charts. In the process, authors Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan reveal the timeless techniques that animate music across time and space.
Thirty years after The Beatles split up, the music of Lennon, McCartney, Harrrison and Starkey lives on. What exactly were the magical ingredients of those legendary songs? Why are they still so influential for today's bands? This ground-breaking book sets out to explore The Beatles' songwriting techniques in a clear and readable style. It is aimed not only at musicians but anyone who has ever enjoyed the work of one of the most productive and successful songwriting parterships of the 20th Century. Author Dominic Pedler explores the chord sequences, melodies, harmonies, rhythms and structures of The Beatles' self-penned songs, while challenging readers to enhance their appreciation of the lyrics themselves with reference to the musical context. Throughout the book the printed music and lyrics of The Beatles' songs appear alongside the text, illustrating the author's explanations. The Songwriting Secrets Of The Beatles is an essential addition to Beatles literature - a new and perceptive analysis of both the music and the lyrics written and performed by what Paul McCartney still calls 'a really good, tight little band'.
Pop City examines the use of Korean television dramas and K-pop music to promote urban and rural places in South Korea. Building on the phenomenon of Korean pop culture, Youjeong Oh argues that pop culture–featured place selling mediates two separate domains: political decentralization and the globalization of Korean popular culture. By analyzing the process of culture-featured place marketing, Pop City shows that urban spaces are produced and sold just like TV dramas and pop idols by promoting spectacular images rather than substantial physical and cultural qualities. Oh demonstrates how the speculative, image-based, and consumer-exploitive nature of popular culture shapes the commodification of urban space and ultimately argues that pop culture–mediated place promotion entails the domination of urban space by capital in more sophisticated and fetishized ways.
Pop Music Production delves into academic depths around the culture, the business, the songwriting, and most importantly, the pop music production process. Phil Harding balances autobiographical discussion of events and relationships with academic analysis to offer poignant points on the value of pure popular music, particularly in relation to BoyBands and how creative pop production and songwriting teams function. Included here are practical resources, such as recording studio equipment lists, producer business deal examples and a 12-step mixing technique, where Harding expands upon previously released material to explain how ‘Stay Another Day’ by East 17 changed his approach to mixing forever. However, it is important to note that Harding almost downplays his involvement in his career. At no point is he center stage; he humbly discusses his position within the greater scheme of events. Pop Music Production offers cutting-edge analysis of a genre rarely afforded academic attention. This book is aimed at lecturers and students in the subject fields of Music Production, Audio Engineering, Music Technology, Popular Songwriting Studies and Popular Music Culture. It is suitable for all levels of study from FE students through to PhD researchers. Pop Music Production is also designed as a follow-up to Harding’s first book PWL from the Factory Floor (2010, Cherry Red Books), a memoir of his time working with 1980s pop production and songwriting powerhouse, Stock Aitken Waterman, at PWL Studios.
The playback of recordings is the primary means of experiencing music in contemporary society, and in recent years 'classical' musicologists and popular music theorists have begun to examine the ways in which the production of recordings affects not just the sound of the final product but also musical aesthetics more generally. Record production can, indeed, be treated as part of the creative process of composition. At the same time, training in the use of these forms of technology has moved from an apprentice-based system into university education. Musical education and music research are thus intersecting to produce a new academic field: the history and analysis of the production of recorded music. This book is designed as a general introductory reader, a text book for undergraduate degree courses studying the creative processes involved in the production of recorded music. The aim is to introduce students to the variety of approaches and methodologies that are currently being employed by scholars in this field. The book is divided into three sections covering historical approaches, theoretical approaches and case studies and practice. There are also three interludes of commentary on the academic contributions from leading record producers and other industry professionals. This collection gives students and scholars a broad overview of the way in which academics from the analytical and practice-based areas of the university system can be brought together with industry professionals to explore the ways in which this new academic field should progress.
Music Production Cultures draws on interviews with international educators, surveys completed by students of music production from around the globe, doctoral research findings and contextualised career experiences from the author as a celebrated music producer to explore how effective learning environments can be created for popular music production in higher education. Acknowledging the musical, technological and social diversity in global popular music production practice, this book highlights the integral elements that educators and their institutions must consider in order to provide high-quality and relevant education for the students of today and into the future. Offering concepts, approaches and practices to be integrated into diverse music production pedagogical frameworks in higher education, this book considers the pedagogical approaches and goals that bridge music production education to the industry, using examples and insights from international educators throughout as well as lesson plan examples for instructors. Music Production Cultures develops a foundation of practice to inform teachers designing equitable, diverse and inclusive pedagogies that are dependent on the musical, cultural and social influences of their students. This is an invaluable resource for educators and researchers in the area of audio education looking to develop their pedagogical strategies.
From body art to baseball cards, comics to cathedrals, pie charts to power ballads . . . students need help navigating today’s media-rich world. And educators need help teaching today’s new media literacy. To be literate now means being able to read, write, listen, speak, view, and represent across all media—including both print and nonprint texts, such as film, TV, podcasts, websites, visual art, fashion, architecture, landscape, and music. This book offers secondary teachers in all content areas a flexible, interdisciplinary approach to integrate these literacies into their curriculum. Students form cooperative learning groups to evaluate media texts from various perspectives (artist, producer, sociologist, sound mixer, economist, poet, set designer, and more) and show their thinking using unique graphic organizers aligned to the Common Core State Standards
A philosophical exploration of pop music that reveals a rich, self-reflexive art form with unsuspected depths. In the first major philosophical treatise on the subject, Agnès Gayraud explores all the paradoxes of pop—its inauthentic authenticity, its mass production of emotion and personal resonance, its repetitive novelty, its precision engineering of seduction—and calls for pop (in its broadest sense, encompassing all genres of popular recorded music) to be recognized as a modern, technologically mediated art form to rank alongside cinema and photography. In a thoroughgoing engagement with Adorno's fierce critique of "standardized light popular music," Dialectic of Pop tracks the transformations of the pop form and its audience over the course of the twentieth century, from Hillbilly to Beyoncé, from Lead Belly to Drake. Inseparable from the materiality of its technical media, indifferent and intractable to the perspectives of high culture, pop subverts notions of authenticity and inauthenticity, original and copy, aura and commodity, medium and message. Gayraud demonstrates that, far from being the artless and trivial mass-produced pabulum denigrated by Adorno, pop is a rich, self-reflexive artform that recognises its own contradictions, incorporates its own productive negativity, and often flourishes by thinking "against itself." Dialectic of Pop sings the praises of pop as a constitutively impure form resulting from the encounter between industrial production and the human predilection for song, and diagnoses the prospects for twenty-first century pop as it continues to adapt to ever-changing technological mediations.
This title was first published in 2003.This highly original and accessible book draws on the author’s personal experience as a musician, producer and teacher of popular music to discuss the ways in which audio technology and musical creativity in pop music are inextricably bound together. This relationship, the book argues, is exemplified by the work of Trevor Horn, who is widely acknowledged as the most important, innovative and successful British pop record producer of the early 1980s. In the first part of the book, Timothy Warner presents a definition of pop as distinct from rock music, and goes on to consider the ways technological developments, such as the transition from analogue to digital, transform working practices and, as a result, impact on the creative process of producing pop.
