blissblogger
Well-known member
there's an academic called Jason Toynbee who wrote an interesting book with a boring title "Making Popular Music Musicians, Creativity and Institutions " a few years ago --he's not quite a musicologist a la Susan McLary but the approach goes against the consumer-makes-meaning angle of cultural studies in so far as he's looking at the producers of music, what their mindset is, the field of possibilities and limits within which they operate. And--relevant to this discussion--there are some amazingly meticulous and detailed breakdowns on what's going on in some drum'n'bass tracks -- i think one of the case studies is Shimon 'the predator' or maybe it's a randall & Andy C track, 'cool down' -- but anyway very very fastidious and closely observed descriptions of the timbral qualities of beats, the multiple basslines, the way the breaks are organised and intermesh, the changes within the tracks, the synth-refrains coming in, and how all of it creates a certain mood.
the thing about the McLary et al approach i always feel is that they're looking to prove infallible effects that originate in certain chord changes and note patterns and the macro-structure of a musical piece, tension climax etc, but just going by some of the examples they give, it's totally possible for a listener to miss all this emotional language and be completely bypassed by it. One example is a Whitesnake song that she analyses as a journey into an abyss of dread-of-the-female. Having seen the video dozens of times on MTV i can vouch that none of this ever occurred to me. It could be that the other cultural signifiers--the cheesy video with the model girlfriend of David Coverdale writhing around with the singer in a car, the timbre of his cod-blues-sub-Plant voice and all its associations, the production quality of the guitars (lite-metal), completely over-rode for me all the effects they were analysing in terms of the chord changes supposedly taking the listener into a kind of musical equivalent of the vagina dentata. There's a similar analysis of a Madonna song which left me equally feeling "nah, didn't affect me like that".
the thing about the McLary et al approach i always feel is that they're looking to prove infallible effects that originate in certain chord changes and note patterns and the macro-structure of a musical piece, tension climax etc, but just going by some of the examples they give, it's totally possible for a listener to miss all this emotional language and be completely bypassed by it. One example is a Whitesnake song that she analyses as a journey into an abyss of dread-of-the-female. Having seen the video dozens of times on MTV i can vouch that none of this ever occurred to me. It could be that the other cultural signifiers--the cheesy video with the model girlfriend of David Coverdale writhing around with the singer in a car, the timbre of his cod-blues-sub-Plant voice and all its associations, the production quality of the guitars (lite-metal), completely over-rode for me all the effects they were analysing in terms of the chord changes supposedly taking the listener into a kind of musical equivalent of the vagina dentata. There's a similar analysis of a Madonna song which left me equally feeling "nah, didn't affect me like that".