Adding to recent work that explores the aesthetic and social dimensions of newly composed campaign music and its cultural currency, this essay turns a critical lens toward preexisting music and its impact on campaign discourses dur- ing Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential primary campaign. But in a corporatized electoral landscape where the fields of politics and popular culture are inextricably intertwined, and every aspect of the candi- date’s public and private life is subjected to intense scrutiny enabled by the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies, nontraditional texts (such as music) play an increasingly significant role in candidate identity formation. Based on the concepts of groove and flow established earlier, this four-chapter discussion explores Wonder’s particular version of the “robustly collective” grooves that are essential to funk, demonstrating vital musical processes and accounting for some of the unusual power and life of this music.įrom the earliest elections with popular participation to the present day, American presi- dential candidates have harnessed music’s connotative potential and affective properties in a variety of campaign contexts. Each song is analyzed separately but in a similar fashion, allowing for depth of analysis without sacrificing detail. I then analyze “Superstition,” “Higher Ground,” and “You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” focusing on the interactions of rhythm and meter. Chapter 3 outlines the primary musical characteristics of funk and how Wonder’s style grew out the specific approach to funk developed by the house band and producers at Motown Records. Chapters 3 through 6 constitute a single, in-depth discussion of Wonder’s distinctive brand of clavinet-based funk music, divided into four parts. Chapter 2 is an analysis of “Golden Lady” that demonstrates groove and flow operating in areas other than rhythm and meter, in scales beyond the merely local, and in a compound, multi-dimensional manner. It also demonstrates for the first time how Wonder uses repetition of musical elements to create a sense of flow-simultaneously on several different structural levels and in many different ways-and then manipulates that flow throughout the course of the song. Chapter 1 is a general analysis of “Living for the City” that is primarily concerned with form-the shape of the song over time-and the way in which that form interacts with the text and generates meaning(s). I begin by introducing the primarily African-American musical paradox of collective individuality and the musical concepts of groove and flow that are central to soul and funk. The essays focus on two interwoven aspects of soul and funk music, as they are employed by Wonder: the use of repeated musical figures, particularly grooves, to generate a sense of forward motion, or flow and the use of flow in a variety of ways and on many levels to give songs both shape and life. This dissertation is a collection of analytical essays on songs made by Stevie Wonder between 19. Drawing upon the tradition of the history and phenomenology of recorded sound, this thesis therefore aims to contribute to media ecological understandings of how human agency, industry structures, and technological affordances worked together to redefine the structures and the relationships with which they were associated. Moreover, by employing media ecology and practice theory as a framework, the thesis argues that these albums exemplify a cleavage of the recorded musical text from live performance, akin to that of the written text from oral-styled manuscripts to closed literary works. Addressing this blind spot, the thesis seeks to illuminate this time period and its place as a significant bridge to the digital era that followed. These albums deserve attention particularly because, as this thesis argues, existing research on the cultural significance of popular music has focused largely on the periods before or after the 1970s and research on music-making technologies has focused largely on white artists or groups from the late 1960s. This thesis explores changes that occurred in popular music during the 1960s and early 1970s through case studies involving three significant albums released in 19: Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, and Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |