Table of Contents

Preface

1 Introduction
Prelude
I. Codes and competences
II. Who is the author?
III. Musicology and popular music
IV. Postlude

2 Family values in music? Billie Holiday's and Bing Crosby's
"I'll Be Seeing You"
I. A tale of two (or three) recordings
II. Critical discourse
III. Biographical discourse
IV. Style and history
V. Performance, effect, and affect

3 When you're lookin' at Hank (you're looking at country)
I. Lyrics, metanarratives, and the great authenticity debate
II. Sound, performance, gender, and the hanky-tonk
III. "A feeling called the blues"
IV. The emergence of "country-western"

4 James Brown's "Superbad" and the double-voiced utterance
I. The discursive space of black music
II. Signifyin(g)-words and performance
III. Musical signifyin(g)

5 Writing, music, dancing, and architecture in Elvis Costello's
"Pills and Soap"
I. The "popular aesthetic"
II. Style and aesthetics
III. Interpretation and (post)modern pop
IV. A question of influence

6 Afterword: the citizens of Simpleton

Appendix
A. Reading the spectrum photos
B. Registral terminology

Notes
Bibliography
Select discography
Index

About the Author

David Brackett is Assistant Professor of Music at SUNY, Binghamton.

Reviews

"With this book, David Brackett takes his place among the handful of musicologists who are leading the development of a critical musicology for popular music. In clear prose, through a thoughtful, engaging authorial voice, Brackett offers six essays that are unified by his desire to create and refine ways of talking about how popular music works. . . . [Brackett's book] is not only much more illuminating and theoretically sophisticated than nearly all of its predecessors, but also more so than most of what has appeared subsequently."--Robert Walser, "Notes"