Musical Nuances and the Aesthetic Experience of Popular Music Hooks: Theoretical Considerations and Analytical Approaches

This article discusses the concept of musical nuances from a process-oriented perspective, with a particular emphasis on the aesthetic experience of hooks in Western popular music. First, the text elaborates on the particularities of nuances from the perspective of cognitive psychology. Second, it highlights their importance for musical interpretation, characterization, memorization, and valuation. Third, it critically reflects on analytical approaches to rhythmic and melodic nuances and gets into alternative methods to analyze such microscopic subtleties in the context of musical hooks. Fourth, analytical examples examine nuance-related intricacies in song phrases as processes regarding the aesthetic experience of increasing and decreasing intensity, tension, and motion. Finally, the findings and theoretical considerations are discussed in the broader context of mainstream popular music analysis.

Kuuk, Skrap, and the Resistance Vernacular

How are gendered identities enabled, contested, and performed through Nordic popular music? Building on relevant approaches in popular music analysis, this article offers an investigation into the function/s of language and musical style in enabling and engendering agency and subjectivity via two case studies in Norwegian popular music. Gender and language are crucial factors in this. In a global context of popular music, bands and artists who choose to sing in their local language may be seen to take up marginal positions compared to artists who choose to sing in English, as the choice of language would naturally limit their audience. I argue that this overlooks the efficacy of using one’s local language to express points of view that are relevant on a local level; what is more, it overlooks the possibility of subverting globalized trends and using these to one’s own ends. In this article, I offer close readings of Norwegian-language albums by two all-female groups: the hip-hop duo Kuuk (Live fra Blitz) and the electronica duo Skrap (Atlantis). Applying Russell A. Potter’s (1995) concept of the ‘resistance vernacular’ as it has been expanded and operationalized by Tony Mitchell (2004), I contend that the bands’ use of their local language opens their music to a broader set of possibilities when it comes to subverting gender and genre norms at the same time as it enhances the music’s political potential. Working in discernible genres enables both bands to create music that expresses a feminist stance; in the case of Kuuk, deconstructing and subverting expectations of gendered behaviour through parodying hip-hop misogyny, and in the case of Skrap, drawing on strategic naïvety to steer clear of gender stereotypes.

Popular music analysis too often neglects the analysis of popular music

For more than two decades, a trend in popular music scholarship has been the publication every few years of an edited collection of analytical essays (e.g., Covach and Boone 1997; Moore 2003; Everett 2008). These multi-author volumes sometimes have a specific analytical concern, such as intertextuality (Burns and Lacasse 2018), but more typically they simply bring together a variety of essays written by a variety of authors using a variety of methods to analyse music from a variety of styles. Strategically, the editors of these volumes will pitch this lack of any strong unifying theme as an advantage, asserting that the broad range of approaches gives the reader a sense for the diversity of current perspectives (as in, for example, the preface to Spicer and Covach 2010 or the introduction to von Appen et al. 2015). To be fair, the exclusive focus on analysis, particularly close readings of the ‘text’ itself, makes the chapters of these collections hold together more than, say, the articles in any regular issue of Popular Music. However, with typically only a dozen or so contributions in each volume, these multi-author works often seem like scattershot glimpses into the vast universe of possible analytical approaches and musical styles.

Strategies for Settler Decolonization: Decolonial Pedagogies in a Popular Music Analysis Course

Canadian institutions of higher education are grappling with decolonization, particularly with how to move beyond decolonial and settler colonial theory and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action to practical and specific strategies for meaningful change in the classroom. To that end, this paper offers a case study of a settler instructor’s process of decolonization in a popular music analysis course and describes a variety of methods for decolonizing course design and classroom activities. A discussion of how to apply and adapt the author’s methods for different courses, programs, and local contexts leads to critical reflection on the impact of these changes on student learning and their efficacy in terms of decolonization itself.