Description
Book SynopsisHearing Luxe Pop explores a deluxe-production aesthetic thathas long thrived in American popular music, in which popular-music idioms are merged with lush string orchestrations and big-band instrumentation. John Howland presents an alternative music history that centers on shifts in timbre and sound through innovative uses of orchestration and arranging, traveling from symphonic jazz to the Great American Songbook, the teenage symphonies of Motown to the countrypolitan sound of Nashville, the sunshine pop of the Beach Boys to the blending of soul and funk into 1970s disco, and Jay-Z's hip-hop-orchestra events to indie rock bands performing with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. This book attunes readers to hear the discourses gathered around the music and its associated images as it examines pop's relations to aspirational consumer culture, theatricality, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and glamorous lifestyles.
Trade Review"Love this book for its championing of style, its critical edge, its humorous voice, its generosity, extravagance, and immersiveness." * Twentieth-Century Music *
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Hearing Luxe Pop [is] underpinned by relevant notated examples and rich descriptions of the music, situated within discourses around sophistication, cosmopolitanism and glamourous lifestyles, which together make this book a dearly needed contribution to the field of popular music studies." * Swedish Journal of Music Research *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: From Paul Whiteman, to Barry White, Man
1 • Hearing Luxe Pop: Jay-Z, Isaac Hayes, and the Six Degrees of Symphonic Soul
2 • The (Symphonic) Jazz Age, Musical Vaudeville, and "Glorified" Entertainments
3 • Jazz with Strings: Between Jazz and the Great American Songbook
4 • Defining Populuxe: Capitol Records and the Swinging Early Hi-Fi Era
5 • Phil Spector, Early 1960s "Teenage Symphonies," and the Fabulous Lower Middlebrow
6 • Mining AM (White) Gold: The 1960s MOR-Pop Foundations of 1970s Soft Rock
7 • Isaac Hayes and Hot Buttered (Orchestral) Soul, from Psychedelic to Progressive
8 • From Sophistisoul to Disco: Barry White and the Fall of Luxe Pop
Afterword
Notes
Index
