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The popularity of the motion picture soundtrack O Brother, Where Art Thou? brought an extraordinary amount of attention to bluegrass, but it also drew its share of criticism from some aficionados who felt the album's inclusion of more modern tracks misrepresented the genre. This soundtrack, these purists argued, wasn't bluegrass, but “roots music,” a new and, indeed, more overarching category concocted by journalists and marketers. Why is it that popular music genres like these and others are so passionately contested? And how is it that these genres emerge, coalesce, change, and die out? This book provides new understanding as to why we debate music categories, and why those terms are unstable and always shifting. To tackle the full complexity of genres in popular music, the author embarks on a wide-ranging collection of case studies. Here he examines not only the different reactions to O Brother, but also the impact of rock and roll's explosion in the 1950s and 1960s on country music and jazz, and how the jazz and indie music scenes in Chicago have intermingled to expand the borders of their respective genres. Throughout, the author finds that genres are an integral part of musical culture—fundamental both to musical practice and experience, and to the social organization of musical life.

This book explores the performances of Miles Davis’s “Lost” Quintet, 1968-1970, to illuminate the unfolding of Davis’s musical thinking during a period of personal transition. A careful listening reveals music that privileged an uneasy dynamic tension between, on one hand, sonic and structural openness, surprise, and experimentation and, on the other hand, the rhythmic groove. Viewing Davis’s band in this manner allows new webs of musical interconnection to emerge—not only continuity with Davis’s subsequent funk inflected bands—but also a musical world pioneered most significantly by Ornette Coleman. Davis’s musical peers come to include highly exploratory bands including Circle (co-founded by two members of the “Lost” Quintet) and the Revolutionary Ensemble. This book provides a consideration of the aesthetics and performance practices of all three bands and others in which Circle saxophonist Anthony Braxton played, in search of points of musical resonance. This work concludes by acknowledging a profound distance that lay between Miles Davis and these peers within the musical economy. Elements include access to financial resources, recording contracts, bookings, and the ability to reach an interested public. This work in its fullness thus encompasses yet moves beyond musical aesthetics to explore a fascinating period of discovery and new possibilities emerging within American musical history.

France has long been credited with welcoming African Americans and their music: into its venues, into its compositions, into its writing. Yet the reception of jazz is much more complicated than that narrative suggests, embedded in ongoing debates about race, nation and culture. Paris Blues provides an alternative history, one that looks beyond a few familiar personalities and well-rehearsed stories. It does not dismiss these images, from Josephine Baker in her banana skirt to Django Reinhardt in his caravan. But it asks how they came to be so iconic, and what they hide as well as what they preserve. Its five chapters move broadly chronologically, beginning with two forgotten traditions of the 1920s and ‘30s, revues nègres (black musical theatre) and white show bands; continuing through Josephine Baker’s shows and films of the 30s; and concluding with studies of jazz’s fortunes during the occupation and post-war years. Despite extending as far as 1960, the book’s focus is early jazz and swing: its last chapter considers the revival – reinvention – of these musics alongside modern jazz, and its historiographical consequences. Familiar figures feature prominently, but in unfamiliar contexts: Josephine Baker singing Offenbach; Django Reinhardt in occupied Paris; Sidney Bechet swinging through the fifties. In sum, Paris Blues presents a challenging new account of the African-American presence – one that celebrates achievement but does not shirk to point out the complex interplay of race, writing and power in the construction of history.

From the early days of radio through the rise of television after World War II to the present, music has been used more and more often to sell goods and establish brand identities. And since at least the 1920s, songs originally written for commercials have become popular songs, and songs written for a popular audience have become irrevocably associated with specific brands and products. Today, musicians move flexibly between the music and advertising worlds, while the line between commercial messages and popular music has become increasingly blurred. This book is the story of this infectious part of our musical culture. It tracks the use of music in American advertising for nearly a century, from variety shows such as The Clicquot Club Eskimos to the rise of the jingle, the postwar rise in consumerism and the more complete fusion of popular music and consumption in the 1980s and after. The author contends that today there is no longer a meaningful distinction to be made between music in advertising and advertising music. To make his case, he draws on rare archival materials, the extensive trade press, and hours of interviews with musicians ranging from Barry Manilow to unknown but unforgettable jingle singers.

Hip-hop has come a long way from its origins in the Bronx in the 1970s, when rapping and DJing were just part of a lively, decidedly local scene that also venerated b-boying and graffiti. Now hip-hop is a global phenomenon and, in the United States, a massively successful corporate enterprise predominantly controlled and consumed by whites while the most prominent performers are black. How does this shift in racial dynamics affect our understanding of contemporary hip-hop, especially when the music perpetuates stereotypes of black men? Do black listeners interpret hip-hop differently from white fans? These questions have dogged hip-hop for decades, but unlike most pundits, this book finds answers by interviewing everyday people. Instead of turning to performers or media critics, it focuses on the music's fans—young men, both black and white—and the resulting account avoids romanticism, offering an unbiased examination of how hip-hop works in people's daily lives.

American popular music history takes a new shape when the force behind the hits – radio airplay – claims center stage. The 1950s Top 40 hits approach structured rival formats, too, by the 1970s: rhythm & blues, country, adult contemporary, and rock. This resulted in multiple mainstreams, overlapping centers that explain why pop multiplicity, not rock monoculture, won out by the 1990s. An introduction explores how formats, which pragmatically unite sets of listeners with sets of sounds, are different than genres, which turn on musical ideals. Five case studies then examine particular formats through artists, record labels, and radio stations. The Isley Brothers illustrate how, from early soul to hip-hop, R&B and Top 40 created corporate, mediated rituals of black expression. Dolly Parton’s leap from country to adult contemporary success illustrates Nashville centrism filtering the modern for white southerners. A&M Records’ unlikely hitmakers (Herb Alpert, Carpenters, Peter Frampton, the Police, Amy Grant), demonstrate the calculated diversity, but also precarity, of adult-oriented middle of the road. Elton John’s thirty-year run of Top 40 success reveals a format of outsiders opting in where rockers opted out, coded gay identity, and a British Invasion becoming globalization. Hard rock Cleveland station WMMS, “the Buzzard,” thundered blue-collar rock ideals of cross-class masculinity, tested by the arrival of the yuppie. A final chapter, on formats in the 2000s, notes Latin programming and a surprise: technological upheaval brought Top 40 back to its most potent position in years.