Quote recognition Flashcards
“Best known is the rule that the chorus consists of thirty-two bars and the range is limited to one octave and one note.”
“The schematic buildup dictates the way in which [the audience] must listen while, at the same time, it makes any effort in listening unnecessary. Popular music is ‘pre-digested’ in a way strongly resembling the fad of ‘digests’ of printed material.”
“By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself.”
Adorno’s critique of pop music. He rejected the commodification of music and was critical of popular music, believing it to be inferior to classical music due to its standardization, making active listening unnecessary, and pseudo-individualization, meaning that it didn’t truly vary from a formula. He accused pop music of creating apathy in listeners.
“We were sick, alright. Crazy. These sociologists were out there in force in those mid-forties, speculating about the dynamics of mass hysteria, blathering on about how his yearning vulnerability appealed to our mother instincts. What yo-yo’s. Whatever he stirred beneath our budding breasts, it wasn’t motherly.”
Frank Sinatra’s Bobby-Soxers, which were the first instance of the mass-hysteria now associated with fandom.
“Classic blues is called ‘classic’ because it was the music that seemed to contain all the diverse and conflicting elements of Black music, plus the smoother, emotional appeal of the performance. It was the first black music that appeared in a formal context of entertainment, though it still contained the harsh, uncompromising reality of the earlier blues forms.”
The emergence of classic blues from black women who took employment in vaudeville theatres and developed the notion of the professional black female entertainer.
“The lyrics of classic blues become concerned with situations and ideas that are recognizable as having issued from one area of a much larger human concern.”
Classic blues became particularly popular because it had a theatricality to it and a relatability that appealed to both white and black people. The lyrics were often about universal problems, like heartbreak and marital problems, but as a result there was a loss of the specific resonances that blues had for black communities.
“I loved playing jazz with a big band. Loved singing the blues. But I really wanted to be an entertainer- that’s me- on my own. I wanted to play for the people, for millions, not just a few hep cats.”
This was Louis Jordan, a jump blues singer. This makes reference to the commercial quality to his music, which was different from most earlier R&B (formerly race) music.
“The distinctions that I hear writers make between blues and rhythm and blues I regard as artificial. Most of the people that we hear playing the blues came from the same area, even though they may be living in other areas. […] I personally think that it’s all rhythm and blues because it’s blues and it has rhythm”
B.B. King on the R&B category.
“I remember that Dinah Washington was considered R&B or ‘race’. But Dinah sang anything that anybody else sang. She just sang it in her own way. She was doing all of the popular tunes of the late forties and early fifties. So were Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, and Louis Armstrong - these were top black recording artists. […] But they were classed differently.”
B.B. King on the R&B category.
“A couple of times during early morning sessions, with sunshine streaming through the windows, I remember protesting it was the wrong tie of time to capture a blue mood. ‘Ruth, just sing like you’ve got tears in your eyes.’ Herb would direct me. Another time it would be ‘Give me that million-dollar squeal.’ There were occasions when my throat felt sore, or what I used to call ‘rusty’. ‘I like your sound when it’s like that,’ Herb would enthuse. ‘It has an earthy quality, a sexiness.’ ‘Down boy’ I’d kid him”
Ruth Brown talking about how she was treated by Atlantic records, and how she was forced to sing when she wasn’t feeling up to it.
“Throughout my biggest hit-making period I was forced to stand by as white singers like Georgia Gibb and Patti Page duplicated my records note for note and were able to plug them on top television shows like the Ed Sullivan Show, to which I had no access. Chuck Willis wrote “Oh, What a Dream” especially for me, and it was my favourite song, but it was Patti Page, with an identical arrangement, who got to sing it on national television.”
Ruth Brown talking about how she was treated by the general music industry. Her songs were copied and sung by white artists on major platforms that she couldn’t access because she was black, and they got all the credit for her song. This reflects how black artists had trouble crossing over to pop charts because they were mostly compiled from white-owned radio station playlists.
“The problem on Atlantic’s side was they couldn’t figure out what to do with me. ‘Too darn versatile,’ I heard Herb [her producer] mutter more than once. The problem I posed, in turn, was my resistance to singing anything but my first, ballads.”
Ruth Brown was heavily controlled by Atlantic records and did not have a lot of artistic freedom.
“Atlantic let me record anything I wanted to. They never said, ‘No, do our songs, not yours.’ They trusted me and left me alone.
Ray Charles was essentially given full freedom and trust, as opposed to an artist like Ruth Brown who was heavily restricted.
“Music ‘leer-ics’ are touching new lows and if the fast-buck songsmiths and music makers are incapable of social responsibility and self-restraint then regulation – policing, if you will - have to come from more responsible sources. […] Our teenagers are already setting something of a record in delinquency without this raw musical idiom to smell up the environment still more.’’
Criticism from Variety about R&B and the threat it posed to popular music.
“There is no denying that rock n’ roll evokes a physical response from even its most reluctant listeners, for that giant pulse matches the rhythmic operations of the human body, and the performers are all too willing to specify it. […] Psychologists feel that rock n’ roll’s deepest appeal is to the teeners’ need to belong; the results bear passing resemblance to Hitler mass meetings.”
This was the moral panic surrounding rock n’ roll and its potential to supposedly corrupt young people.
“Until recently, histories of popular music describing this period tended to trace an arc of declining quality as authentic, virile rock n’ roll was supplanted by mass-produced schlock.”
refers to the notion that after the decline of rock music, many saw music as having declined in quality, becoming more mass-produced. “The day the music died”
“A song could be written in the morning, recorded in the afternoon, and released a few days late on one of the many small labels that operated out of the Brill”
Quote from Carole King - refers to the industrial-like operations of the Brill building in the girl groups era in the 1960s.
“We each had a little cubby hole with just enough room for a piano, a bench, and maybe a chair for the lyricist.”
Quote from Carole King - refers to the industrial-like operations of the Brill building in the girl groups era in the 1960s.
“Wears no makeup”; “little sex in that clear flow of sound”; “a mother’s voice”
Refers to the depiction of Joan Baez in the media. There was a lot of focus paid to her appearance versus her music.
“Chains of pandiatonic clusters”; “so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat - submediant key-siwtches, so natural is the Aeolian cadence…”
This is a positive critique of the Beatles that utilized classical and technical musicological terms, which lended legitimacy to rock music and to being a critic of rock music.
