Rock and Popular Music
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8.3: Nicholas Shea, “The Feel of the Guitar in Popular Music Performance” – shows how fretboard gestures help to demarcate musical form; provides an analytical framework rooted in popular music performance practice rather than “traditional” music theory
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8.5: Eron F.S., “Flat 2 as Hotness in Post-Millennial Pop” – shows how scale degree flat 2 became a marker for hotness/sexiness in contemporary pop music; connects this phenomenon to exoticism and cultural appropriation; suitable for introducing students at all levels to topic theory
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8.1: Noriko Manabe: “Abe Road: Kuwata Keisuke’s Beatles Parody” – illustrates how Kuwata used the subtleties of word sounds to create a parody album critical of the Japanese government
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7.6: Megan Lavengood, “‘Oops!…I Did It Again’: The Complement Chorus in Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, and *NSYNC” – introduces a chorus where two melodic lines introduced earlier in the song are set in counterpoint with one another; suitable for students at all levels learning about pop music form, counterpoint, and melodic construction; introduces hocket
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9.2: Christine Boone, “Algorithmic Remixes” – treats YouTube song remixes as a kind of analysis
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6.4: Alyssa Barna, “The Dance Chorus in Recent Top-40 Music” – describes a new formal module in pop music influenced by EDM production techniques; suitable for students learning about musical form, the impact of timbre/production on musical experience, and embodiment
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5.5: Matthew E. Ferrandino and Brad Osborn, “Seeing Stories, Hearing Stories in Narrative Music Video” – introduces four different kinds of relationships between visual and lyrical content in music videos ranging from “explicit narrative,” in which images and lyrics tell the same story, to “conflicting narrative,” in which the images and lyrics tell contradicting stories; makes connections between visual narrative and musical content, including harmonic progression, music production, and vocal register; ideal for engaging analysis of lyrics, musical content, and images in music video