A singer-songwriter's view of the French record industry: the case of Léo Ferré

Popular Music ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Tinker
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
North American ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
Legal Requirements ◽  
Record Industry ◽  
The Road ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Marked Resistance

Léo Ferré exemplifies what is now widely regarded in France as the golden era of la chanson française during the 1950s and 1960s. This article examines how one singer-songwriter attempted to deal in his own, highly idiosyncratic way with the contraints of working within the record industry, and focuses on the development of his ambivalent relationship with the record label owner and producer, Eddie Barclay. Although sympathetic to Ferré's cause, Barclay also adopted a pragmatic approach, particularly where questions of censorship were concerned, as he attempted to balance commercial necessity, legal requirements as well as the creative demands of the artist. The discussion also explores how Ferré has contributed to contemporary intellectual debates relating to the significance of popular music within a French context. Ferré showed marked resistance to North American influence and middle-of-the-road pop music, particularly la chanson yéyé, but he was by no means not-influenced by the arrival of rock in France.

scholarly journals New Ways of Analysing the History of Varieties of English – An Acoustic Analysis of Early Pop Music Recordings from Ghana

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Outer Circle ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
First Results ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Music Recordings

Focusing on English in Ghana, this paper explores some ways in which early popular music recordings might be used to reconstruct the phonology of colonial and post-colonial Englishes in a situation where other recordings are (mostly) absent. While the history of standard and, to a certain degree, non-standard varieties of “Inner Circle Englishes” (Kachru 1986) has received linguistic attention, diachronic investigations of Outer Circle varieties are still the exception. For the most part, descriptions of the history of post-colonial Englishes are restricted to sociohistorical outlines from a macro-sociolinguistic perspective with little if any reference to the linguistic structure of earlier stages of the varieties. One main reason for this lack of diachronic studies is the limited availability of authentic historical data. In contrast to spoken material, written sources are more readily available, since early travel accounts, diaries or memoirs of missionaries, traders and administrators often contain quotes and at times there are even documents produced by speakers of colonial Englishes themselves (cf. the diary of Antera Duke, a late 18th century Nigerian slave trader; Behrendt et al. 2010). Such material provides insights into the morphology, syntax and the lexicon of earlier stages of varieties of English (cf. Hickey 2010), but it is inadequate for the reconstruction of phonological systems. Obtaining spoken material, which permits phonological investigation, is far more difficult, since there are comparatively few early recordings of Outer Circle Englishes. In such cases, popular music recordings can fill the gap. I will present first results of an acoustic analysis of Ghanaian “Highlife” songs from the 1950s to 1960s. My results show that vowel subsystems in the 1950s and 1960s show a different kind of variation than in present-day Ghanaian English. Particularly the STRUT lexical set is realized as /a, ɔ/ in the Highlife-corpus. Today, it is realized with three different vowels in Ghanaian English, /a, ε, ɔ/ (Huber 2004: 849). A particular emphasis will also be on the way Praat (Boersma and Weenink 2011) can be used to analyze music recordings.

Record Collectors: Hollywood Record Labels in the 1950s and 1960s

2013 ◽  
Vol 148 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-126
Author(s):  
Cory Messenger
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
New Record ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
Record Industry ◽  
Commercial Success ◽  
Recorded Music ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
The 1950S

The affiliation between film and music is the cornerstone of modern entertainment industry synergy. This article examines one of the key chapters in that relationship: the period in the 1950s during which the major studios entered the record business. Ostensibly designed to capitalise on the emerging film soundtrack market, the flurry of mergers, acquisitions and the establishment of new record labels coincided with the rise of rock‘n’ roll and the explosion of the market for recorded popular music. The studios quickly found that in order to keep their record labels afloat, they needed to establish a foothold in popular music. The processes by which they achieved this transformed the marketing of recorded music, sparking a period of unprecedented commercial success for the record industry in the late 1960s. Simultaneously, from these record subsidiaries Hollywood learned how to market cinema to a youth audience, heralding the arrival of ‘New Hollywood’.

Reading the charts – making sense with the hit parade

Popular Music ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Parker
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Radio Stations ◽  
Record Industry ◽  
The Past ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
History Of ◽  
Top 40

One of the formations which helps to shape the meaning of modern pop music is the charts. In theory, the charts define the most popular of popular musics, the goal, the pinnacle of success. Both professionals and audience dedicate large amounts of time and money to producing and consuming this series of comparative market histories produced at rapid and regular intervals. Technology is bent to the service of the research in order that the figures be produced more quickly and with the appearance of accuracy. But why should we be interested in the Top 40 itself rather than its music? Writers on pop have provided us with some detailed descriptions of the charts (Frith 1978; Harker 1980; Wallis and Malm 1984; Street 1986), but few have noted that this level of consumer obsession with sales figures is almost unique to the record industry. Consumers of other commodities do not usually consult a specialist book or magazine in order to discover the past sales history of their favourite brand, nor do they listen to particular radio stations in order to ascertain the best selling product of the week. Why then should the sales results of EMI, Polygram, WEA and others be of interest to their consumers when the same data about multi-national corporations in other market sectors are primarily of interest to market insiders and analysts? An important caveat needs to be added in that popular music is now not the only type of cultural production that foregrounds sales figures. More recently popular literature (the ‘Bestsellers List’), video and films have all begun to use this format but in none of these cases is the chart as central as it is with pop music.

Japan in Japan: notes on an aspect of the popular music record industry in Japan

Popular Music ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 107-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toru Mitsui
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Record Industry ◽  
Foreign Companies ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Japanese Companies

The record and tape sales figures of the Japanese record industry have exceeded those of the industries of all other capitalist nations, except the USA, since the mid-seventies. In 1980, Japan's share amounted to 13.9 per cent of all sales in the capitalist sphere according to surveys by Billboard. The USA had 35.8 per cent, West Germany 11.6 per cent, the UK 11.6 per cent and France 7.3 per cent (Kawabata 1977, p. 22; 1982, pp. 91, 199). The output of foreign records, recorded and pressed by Japanese companies, to foreign records, pressed by Japanese companies from masters recorded by foreign companies primarily for their own consumers, has been about three to two. A good many of these foreign records are of American and European popular music, and in this field one can perceive a new and interesting tendency to promote and succeed with artists who are or were less successful in their own country. The tendency, whose background I am going to discuss here, started in the mid-seventies; one of the early examples is provided by Kiss, a New York group, which was shrewdly promoted and achieved wide popularity in Japan before succeeding nationwide in America.

The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Japanese Cinema ◽  
Electronic Sound ◽  
Recorded Sound ◽  
Sound Image ◽  
Visual Style ◽  
Sound Technology ◽  
Sound Culture

This collection of essays explores the development of electronic sound recording in Japanese cinema, radio, and popular music to illuminate the interrelationship of aesthetics, technology, and cultural modernity in prewar Japan. Putting the cinema at the center of a ‘culture of the sound image’, it restores complexity to a media transition that is often described simply as slow and reluctant. In that vibrant sound culture, the talkie was introduced on the radio before it could be heard in the cinema, and pop music adaptations substituted for musicals even as cinema musicians and live narrators resisted the introduction of recorded sound. Taken together, the essays show that the development of sound technology shaped the economic structure of the film industry and its labour practices, the intermedial relation between cinema, radio, and popular music, as well as the architecture of cinemas and the visual style of individual Japanese films and filmmakers.

The University Rock Ensemble: Popular music learning and drumming in higher education

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-262
Author(s):  
Haley J. Nutt
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Ensemble Learning ◽  
North American ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Descriptive Study ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Music Learning ◽  
American Higher Education ◽  
The University

This article provides a descriptive study of the FSU Rock Ensemble to demonstrate the value of providing inclusive popular music-based ensemble learning and opportunities in higher education. Beginning with an autoethnographic study of my experiences as a drummer in – and eventually director of – the non-auditioned ensemble, followed by a consideration of the attitudes articulated by several other drummers who recently participated in the ensemble, I analyse how musicians learn a traditionally non-academic music in an academic space. I conclude with a critical assessment of challenges that the group faced, with the hope that such considerations are useful for universities interested in establishing similar ensembles. Overall, the inclusive nature of the Rock Ensemble facilitated interactions that I argue are advantageous within the current climate of North American higher education, allowing students, drummers and non-drummers alike, unprecedented opportunities to perform music they love, forge new relationships and engage with the local community.

scholarly journals Trumpeting through the iron curtain: The breakthrough of jazz in socialist Yugoslavia

Muzikologija ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 53-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Radina Vucetic
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The West ◽  
Voice Of America ◽  
Record Industry ◽  
Socialist Government ◽  
Specific Position ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Hearts And Minds ◽  
The Voice

During the Cold War, jazz became a powerful propaganda weapon in the battle for ?hearts and minds?. As early as the 1950s, the American administration began its Cold War ?jazz campaign?, by broadcasting the popular jazz radio show Music USA over the Voice of America, and by sending its top jazz artists on world tours. In this specific cultural Cold War, Yugoslavia was, as in its overall politics, in a specific position between the East and the West. The postwar period in Yugoslavia, following the establishment of the new (socialist) government, was characterized by strong resistance towards jazz as ?decadent? music, until 1948 when ?no? to Stalin became ?yes? to jazz. From the 1950s, jazz entered Yugoslav institutions and media, and during the following two decades, completely conquered the radio, TV, and record industry, as well as the manifestations such as the Youth Day. On account of the openness of the regime during the 1950s and 1960s, Yugoslavia was frequently visited by the greatest jazz stars, such as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. In the context of the Cold War, the promotion of jazz in Yugoslavia proved to be beneficial for both sides - by exporting jazz, America also exported its freedom, culture and system of values, while Yugoslavia showed the West to what extent its political system was open and liberal, at least concerning this type of music.

scholarly journals “Music for millions”. Janos Marothy and academic research on popular music in socialist Hungary

Muzikologija ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 117-125
Author(s):  
Adam Ignacz
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Archival Data ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Musical Institutions ◽  
The 1950S

In this paper I demonstrate the changes in Janos Marothy?s aesthetic and political attitudes towards popular music. Being an internationally acknowledged Marxist musicologist, Marothy found employment in many important musical institutions, in the framework of which he not only had an overview of the events of Hungarian popular music, but with his presentations and articles, in the 1950s and early 1960s he also exerted a considerable influence on them. Using archival data and media coverage, I examine Marothy?s key texts which demanded a revision in the matter of ?socialist realism? and which announced a growing attention and tolerance towards the musical products of Western ?mass culture?: jazz and pop-rock. His work shows how popular music became a part of academic research in Socialist Hungary.

scholarly journals Starting young: Multimodal gender presentation in children’s pop music

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
School Age ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Mixed Methods Approach ◽  
Music Competition ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Eurovision Song Contest ◽  
Gender Presentation ◽  
Background Context ◽  
Selection Of

A recent quantitative study (Smith, Choueiti, and Pieper 2018) demonstrates the hegemonic discrimination in today’s popular music scene, particularly but not exclusively in gender and race. This paper builds on that study, taking it not only into a multimodal dimension (where musical and visual performances are taken into account), but also extending it to children’s popular music, here defined as popular music performed by children for an audience and market primarily made up of children and their guardians.  The annual Norwegian popular music competition for children aged 8-15 Melodi Grand Prix Junior (MGP Jr) is the children’s equivalent of the adult competition to be Norway’s entry in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). It has been running since 2004, with 10 entries in each final, and those from 2007 onwards are available for public viewing on the national television channel’s website (tv.NRK.no). The resulting 130 songs thus provide a meaningful corpus from which to study current and recent multimodal gendered presentations of child performers.  Preliminary multimodal gender analyses (cf Maxwell and Mittner 2018) show that the performances are based around traditional gender binaries (i.e. boys and girls). While both presented genders sing, except for rare exceptions it is only boys who play instruments. This both complements and contrasts the study of the ESC (Isaksen forthcoming) which also shows a clear dominance of singing, particularly among female and female-presenting artists (including drag queens).  When these results from children’s pop music and from the ESC are set in relation to Smith, Choueiti, and Peiper 2018 in an interdisciplinary mixed methods approach, it is clear to see that the discrimination in the industry not only begins at a young age, it is also presented as normal, indeed attractive, to child viewers. This is borne out by the decreasing uptake of music tuition at Norwegian kulturskoler (the provider of state-sponsored lessons in the arts), particularly among school-age girls (Utdanningsdirektøret 2017).  In this paper I will present multimodal analyses of a selection of songs from MGP Jr in order to provide both examples of and exceptions to the norms shown by the statistics. In addition, an analysis of the (gendered) presentations of standard Norwegian instrument textbooks (cf Blix 2018) provides background context, with an emphasis on the gendered meanings that surround children in their everyday musical lives.  With thanks to Matilda Maxwell (age 11), aspiring instrumentalist, fan of MGP Jr, and research assistant. 

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