Chapter 24- 26:
Root music- A 1990s, an umbrella term for a variety of American folk, blues, and country
styles.
The Ghost Dance religious movement emerged in 1889 under the leadership of Wovoka, a Paiute
shaman who taught that the dance would revive Indians who had died in battle and restore the
dwindling buffalo herds, thus allowing the religion’s followers to repulse the whites who had
been systematically exterminating the buffalo as a tactic in the Plain Indian Wars.
The peyote religion, later named the Native American Church, is based on a northern Mexican
religious practice dating back to pre-Columbrian times.
The most visible aspect of pantribalism today is the intertribal powwow, a major expression of
Indian cultural identity.
- War Dance song- Traditional
- Date: recorded August 1975
- Performers: Adam Pratt, leader; twelve other singers
- Genre: Southern Plains powwow song
- Meter: duple
- Form: a series of aa’bc pushes
Honor Beats- In powwow music, a series of emphatic drumbeats separated by weaker beats,
showing respect for the dancers or memorializing a person mentioned in the song.
“Soy de San Luis” was a written by Santiago Jimenez, part of a multigenerational family of
norteno musicians.
“Soy de San Luic”
- Songwriter: Santiago Jimenez
- Date: 1990
- Instrumentation: vocals, accordion, bajo sexto, electric bass, drums
- Genre: conjunto
- Meter: duple
- Form: strophic
Cajun music- Music of Cajuns, emphasizing dance rhythms and often using button accordion,
fiddle, guitar, triangle, and spoons,
“Ful il sa”- Queen Ida
- Songwriter: Al Rapone
- Date: 1990
- Performers: Queen Ida and the Bon Temps Zydeco Band; instrumentation: vocals,
accordion, electric guitar, electric bass, drums. Frottoir.
- Genre: zydeco
- Meter: duple
- Form: combination of binary dance tune and verse-and-chorus song.
- For "Wai okeaniani" (LG 24.4), Ledward Kaapana, one of the great slack-key masters to
emerge in the 1980s, uses "taro patch," in which the open strings form a G major chord
(actually an F-sharp major chord in the performance heard here, since the entire
instrument is tuned a half-step flat).
"Wai okeaniani" - LEDWARD KAAPANA
- SONGWRITER: traditional
- DATE: 1992
- PERFORMER: Ledward Kaapana
- GENRE: slack key guitar
- METER: duple
- FORM: strophic
Among the cultural practices retained by Yiddish-speaking American Jews was a type of
secular music developed in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires and in Romania and
associated particularly with wedding celebrations.
- Klezmer is a living repertory of traditional Jewish songs and dances, such as freekehs and
Zhuks, to which new pieces are continually added ("klezmer" also refers to the
performance styles associated with that reper-tory).
Chapter 25:
Breathing new life into the record industry in the early 1980s was a new for-mat: the compact
disc (CD). Record companies promised music lovers that the new digital format offered longer
playing times than LPs (true), greater audio fidelity (debatable), and virtual indestructibility (too
good to be true).
In addition to the CD, the most significant new medium to emerge from the 1980s was the music
video, a miniature movie that presents a popular song in an audiovisual format. The idea goes
back to the 1940s and the short-lived phenomenon of "soundies," three-minute musical films
designed to be played on a coin-operated jukebox containing a small projector; the soundies,
some of which featured such big-name performers as Cab Calloway and Louis Jordan, usually
consisted of performers lip-synching to their records before the camera in an imitation of live
nerformance. often with dancers.
- But popular music in the 1980s encompassed more than the coolly ironic New Wave
bands and dance-oriented musicians featured on MTV; also part of the mainstream (or at
least perceived to be so) was heavy metal, which preserved rock's anarchic energy.
Meanwhile, on the fringes of the pop scene were a variety of bands that also kept alive
rock's anti-authoritarian flame, playing a variety of genres such as hardcore punk and
others loosely collected under the general terms "college rock," "indie rock," and-the
name that eventually stuck-alternative rock.
Heavy metal, perceived by its fans as the "true" mainstream of rock, is rooted in the aggressive
styles of such late 1960s-early 1970s rock bands as Iron Butterfly and Steppenwolf (whose 1968
song "Born to Be Wild" contains the phrase "heavy metal thunder," possibly the origin of the
name). Heavy metal is characterized by extremely loud volume levels, a thundering beat, and
long, virtuosic guitar solos that show the influence of guitar heroes like Jimi Hendrix and Carlos
Santana.
Los Angeles was also an important center for hardcore punk. Like their forebears the Ramones
and the Sex Pistols, hardcore punk bands played songs that were short, fast, and loud, with lead
singers shouting angry, anarchistic, nihilist lyrics. Unlike the 1970s punk bands, however, they
were more inclined to indulge in instrumental solos-always within very short song formats-
featuring me coes arumming and exploration of guitar effects sun as este distortion.
Local music scenes throughout the United States gave rise to an assortment of bands whose
music lay somewhere between MTV-style mainstream accessibility and the confrontational
stance of hardcore punk and heavy metal.
Perhaps the most important musical innovation of the late twentieth century, hip-hop, also
emerged from a local music scene: in this case, black and Latino neighborhoods of New York
City.
o scratching: manually moving a record back and forth under the playback stylus to
produce percussive rhythmic effects
o looping or cutting: alternating between two copies of the same record to repeat one
section of a song over and over
o beatmatching: adjusting the speed of one turntable so that the record played on it matches
exactly the tempo of a record on the other turntable, allowing dancers to continue
uninterruptedly from song to song and allowing the DJ to move seamlessly back and
forth between songs
o beat juggling: combining the preceding techniques to create new music from snippets of
prerecorded music
A key element was the use of looping to extend through repetition a favorite part of a song,
usually an instrumental passage or break, into an occasion for ecstatic dancing. The dancers, b-
boys and b-girls, developed a vocabulary of gymnastic moves that came to be called b-boying or
breaking by its practitioners and, by the general public, break dancing.
- As turntablism grew more complex, this role was often handed over to an MG, who, as
the name indicates, acted as a master of ceremonies. In short time the MC's patter
developed into rap, the vocal component of hip-hop music and, along with DJing, b-
boying, and graffiti, one of the four pillars of hip-hop culture.
Rap draws on African American traditions of rhythmically intoned speech, including the oratory
of black Pentecostal preachers; toasting, the telling of humorous, often boastful stories; and the
dozens, or dirty dozens, a game of exchanging humorous insults, a source as well of the
innumerable jokes beginning "Yo momma..." Rap also benefited from early explorations into
poetry recitations with jazz accompaniment dating back to the Beats and continued in the 1970s
by the Last Poets and by Gil Scott-Heron, both of whom stressed social commentary reflecting
the black nationalist movement of the 1960s.
The MC's rapping went hand in hand with the DJ's ability to extract, alter, and extend
instrumental breaks from records in short, to spontaneously create a rhythmic instrumental
accompaniment, or beat, for the MC.
- That balance changed in 1979 with the release of "Rapper's Delight," the first commercially
successful hip-hop record. "Rapper's Delight" was the result of efforts by Sylvia Robinson, a
producer, singer, and guitarist who in the 1950s had scored an R&B hit, "Love Is Strange," as
half of the duo Mickey and Sylvia.
- Because live interaction with dancers, a significant part of the DI's craft, had no place in
recorded hip-hop, the Dj came to be seen as merely providing a backdrop for the rapping
Likewise, as MCing came to be less about acting as master of ceremonies than about crafting rap
performances, attention increasingly turned to the work of rappers, as MCs were now more likely
to be called.
As early as 1982 rap had produced its first hit single with social commentary: "The Message"
(LG 25.1), credited to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, who performed it in concert even
though only one of the furious Five, Melle Mel, appears on the record.
Duke Bootee also created the instrumental track with a synthesizer and a drum machine, a device
that imitates percussive sounds and sound effects, such as the shattering glass that introduces the
rapping in "The Message."
Public Enemy explored the use of samplers-digital devices that manipulate recorded sounds in
synthesizer-like ways-to create rhythmic loops of prerecorded sound, replicating a DI's beat
juggling to build up dense beats for the politically charged rapping of leader Chuck D. At the
same time, the eclectic tastes of DJ Afrika Bambaataa, who combined Afrofuturist imagery with
European and Japanese electronic dance music, inspired other rap artists to extend the range of
musical influences in hip-hop.
"The Message" -GRANDMASTER FLASH
AND THE FURIOUS FIVE
SONGWRITERS: Sylvia Robinson, Ed Fletcher,
and Melvin Glover
DATE: 1982
PERFORMERS: Duke Bootee (Ed Fletcher) and
Melle Mel (Melvin Glover)
GENRE: rap
METER: duple
FORM: verse and chorus, with vamps and
interlude
As graphic as "The Message" and even angrier, the new genre, dubbed gangsta rap, earned
greater notoriety with Straight Outta Compton, a 1989 album by N.W.A. (Niggaz with Attitude).
A member of N.W.A. who signed onto Death Row as a solo artist was Dr. Dre, an innovative Dj,
producer, and rapper. Dre's 1993 album The Chronic expands the musical range of hip-hop beats
by exploring more-relaxed tempos and greater textural variety, a style called G-funk.
- The East Coast counterpart to Death Row Records was Big Boy, founded in 1993 by rapper
Puff Daddy (later Diddy). Big Boy's most profitable act was a son of Jamaican immigrants, the
Notorious B.I.G., also known as Biggie Smalls, whose Ready to Die (1995) played the familiar
gangsta tropes, which were by no means confined to West Coast rap. A rivalry between the Fast
and West Coast factions came to a climax when Tupac Shakur was the victim of a drive-by
shooting in
1996.
Hammer and Smith demonstrated that there was cultural space for styles of rap that could have
more mainstream appeal.
- Like rock and country in the 1990s, hip-hop developed a contrarian branch: alternative
hip-hop. The term arose as a way to distinguish artists who did not fit into either the
gangsta or mainstream categories.
All of these characteristics are on display in grunge, the alternative rock that emerged in Seattle
in the late 1980s and found widespread popularity in the early 1990s.
- One descendant of heavy metal is industrial rock, best represented by the "group" Nine
Inch Nails, actually the overdubbed, studio-created music of an individual musician,
Trent Reznor; after creating an album in the studio, Renor would assemble an ad-hoc
band to perform the music live on tours.
- An important new development was rap metal, which combined the assaultive
instrumental textures of heavy metal with rapped vocals.
- Jam bands such as Phish and the Dave Matthews Band continued the legacy of the
1960s-era Grateful Dead by touring incessantly, focusing on live performance more than
recording, and developing instrumental virtuosity in long solos.
Other artists pursued roots rock, which, as the name implies, combined a return to earlier rock
sounds with the roots revival's interest in folk music.
- Around the same time that Trouble Girls appeared, the punk-inspired riot grirl movement
was at its height, with groups like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney proving that women
could rock with all the ferocity of their male counterparts.
Two artists whose careers began in the 1980s, Suzanne Vega and Michelle
XO
Shocked, are representative of the anti-folk movement, a category that embraces singer-
songwriters whose sound is too edgy or punk to be considered part of the folk tradition.
Just as rock spawned alternative rock and folk gave rise to anti-folk, country music encountered
its own oppositional movement in the 1990s: alternative country, or alt.country.
Because of its wide range of stylistic resources, from honky-tonk to bluegrass and rockabilly,
alt.country is also
Americana
known by the label Americana.
Along with singer-songwriters Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams, one of the most influential
alt.country artists is Gillian Welch, who brings an unusual pedigree to country music.
"Orphan Girl" (LG 25.2), the first track on Welch's debut album, exemplifies her characteristic
songwriting, performance, and production style.
SONGWRITER: Gillian Welch
DATE: 1996
PERFORMERS: Gillian Welch, vocal, acoustic guitar; David Rawlings, vocal, electric guitar,
six-string bass, Optigan; T-Bone Burnett,
Optigan
GENRE: alt.country
METER: duple
FORM: verse and chorus
Chapter 26:
In the early years of the decade, the Billboard Hot 100 charts were dominated by pop divas such
as Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and Janet Jackson.
Another aspect of 1990s mainstream pop was the preponderance of boy bands. These male vocal
ensembles sang and usually danced but seldom, despite the label, played their own instrumental
backings.
But the heart of Clear Channel's programming was contemporary hit radio (CHR), an updating of
the Top 40 format that had dominated radio since the 1950s.
Led by the CD, total recorded music revenue in 1999 reached $14.6 billion, its highest peak to
date. A decade later, that figure would be cut in half. and it would continue to spiral downward
in subsequent vears. The seeds of that downfall were planted in the late 1990s in a college dorm
room, a story to be taken up later in this chapter.
Eminem, the first white solo artist to sustain a career in hip-hop. Eminem's first big success,
1999's The Slim Shady LP, introduced his alter ego, Slim Shady, a figure who could verbalize
hostility and aggression too extreme for the unmasked Eminem (who already is the stage persona
of Marshall Mathers).
Hip-hop's second significant Broadway appearance was in Lin-Manuel
-Manuel Miranda
Miranda's musical In the Heights, which depicts a Latino community in New York's Washington
Heights neighborhood (Miranda's birthplace). the show's mixture of hip-hop and Latin dance
styles won it a Tony award for best musical in 2008, the year it opened at the Richard Rodgers
Theatre.
But those achievements pale in comparison to Miranda's 2015 musical Hamilton.
His concept-to portray America's founding fathers as battling rappers, played by a cast of African
American and Latino actors-inverts blackface minstrelsy to draw a parallel between modern-day
MCs and the ambitious young colonial revolutionaries who used words and wits to rise from
obscurity to positions of power.
"My Shot," from Hamilton
DATE: 2015
PERFORMERS: Lin-Manuel Miranda (Alexander Hamilton); Daveed Diggs (Marquis de
Lafayette); Okieriete Onaodowan (Hercules Mulligan); Anthony Ramos (John Laurens); Leslie
Odom Jr.
(Aaron Burr); ten-piece orchestra conducted by Alex Lacamoire
GENRE: musical theater
METER: duple
FORM: compound AABA with coda
A 1976 updating of copyright law addressed the technological changes that had taken place since
1909, extended the length of copyright protection, and codified a doctrine of fair use: the concept
that no formal permission is needed when a work of art or literature is copied or quoted for
purposes of criticism, parody, scholarship, and similar limited uses.
Taking fragments of prerecorded music and assembling them into hip-hop beats falls into a gray
area regarding fair use and plagiarism (the latter involves not crediting a source, while "fair use"
concerns the economic value of intellectual property).
Under the first, the Sonny Bono Act-named after a recently deceased congressman who had been
a folk-rock singing star in the 1960s-anything created after 1923 that was still copyright
protected in 1998 would remain so until at least 2019; that included almost everything by George
Gershwin, Cole Porter, and other long-dead songwriters.
(DMCA), gives copyright holders veto power over all uses of their work, even those that
constitute fair use.
The DCMA was in part a response to new digital technology that in the 1990s was making
electronic media easier to disseminate.
Because searching for MP3s was slow and laborious, Shawn Fanning, an eighteen-year-old
student at Northeastern University in Boston, developed a utility that made it easier for users to
locate MP3s and download them directly from other users' computers-a peer-to-peer (p2p) file-
sharing network.
Napster users did not pay for the music they downloaded, but neither did they receive payment
for allowing others to copy the music they owned.
Though both cases were settled out of court, a successful lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA), the music industry's lobbying organization, shut Napster down
in 2001. But the death of Napster was not the death of p2p networks, and music fans simply
migrated from one relatively short-lived p2p to another.
If one piece of technology were to be singled out as most responsible for the signature sound of
early twenty-first-century popular music, that device would be Auto-Tune. Originally designed
to correct off-key performances, this processor measures the pitch of an audio signal-for
example, a voice singing into a microphone-then, if necessary, shifts the recorded pitch to the
nearest correct pitch in equal temperament.
More common today in mainstream pop is the track-and-hook method, which begins when a
producer, or a team of producers, crafts a track, the instrumental backing that sets the rhythm,
harmony, and general mood for the song-to-be (i.e., what in hip-hop is called a "beat".
Another musician then improvises vocally over the track until a usable melody emerges, one
whose most memorable phrase will function as a hook, the part of the song that gets stuck in the
listener's memory.
Reality TV transformed the behind-the-scenes manufacturing of pop stars into a foreground story
of competition and victory. Though many contest winners soon disappeared from the public eye,
others, such as Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood, parlayed their Idol success into highly
successful careers.
Apple's 2001 launch of iTunes, an application that allows users to download, organize, and listen
to digitally recorded music and video, met consumers' demand for inexpensive, legal access to
the music they wanted to hear.
In contrast, iTunes' practice of unbundling the music-allowing users to pick and choose single
tracks rather than full albums-led to a further decline in overall music sales.
Streaming services deliver music over the Internet in highly compressed audio files that the
receiving device plays immediately rather than saving to a hard drive.
Many streaming services allow listeners to create playlists of favorite music, which implies a
sense of ownership, however attenuated. But most users make little use of that feature, opting
instead to follow curated playlists organized around genres, moods, or activities such as exercise
or studying.
Hand in hand with the growth of online music distribution was the advent of new devices for
listening to that music. Portable listening devices equipped with headphones date back to the
transistor radio in the 1960s, supplemented by cassette players in the 1970s and CD players such
as the Sony Walkman in the 1980s.
The same technology also makes it possible to manipulate the recorded music of other artists.
But remixes can be more than simple reworkings of dance music. The Canadian John Oswald,
who began creating sound collages in the 1970s, alters popular songs to create avant-garde
electronic music that defamilia-rizes the familiar, a process he calls "plunderphonics."
Oswald's aesthetic of creating new music from recognizable sources informs another type of
musical recycling, the mash-up, in which tracks from two or more songs are combined to create a
new song.
Mash-ups became more widely known in 2004, with the rapid proliferation on the Internet of DJ
Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, which combines the vocal tracks from Jay-Z's Black Album
with heavily processed instrumental tracks from the 1968 album officially called The Beatles but
generally known as The White Album.
