Hearing Luxe Pop: Glorification, Glamour, and the Middlebrow in American Popular Music Volume 2 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780520300118)

Hearing Luxe Pop explores a deluxe-production aesthetic that has long thrived in American popular music, in which popular-music idioms are merged with lush string orchestrations and big-band instrumentation. John Howland presents an alternative music history that centers on shifts in timbre and sound through innovative uses of orchestration and arranging, traveling from symphonic jazz to the Great American Songbook, the teenage symphonies of Motown to the "countrypolitan" sound of Nashville, the sunshine pop of the Beach Boys to the blending of soul and funk into 1970s disco, and Jay-Z's hip-hop-orchestra events to indie rock bands performing with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. This book attunes readers to hear the discourses gathered around the music and its associated images as it examines pop's relations to aspirational consumer culture, theatricality, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and glamorous lifestyles.

Author: John Howland
ISBN-10: 0520300114
ISBN-13: 9780520300118
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 06/08/2021
Pages: 394
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.10d