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.
Hearing Luxe Pop Glorification, Glamour, and the Middlebrow in American Popular Music
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Publication of this book was supported in part by a grant from the H. Earle Johnson Fund of the Society for American Music.
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Reviews
"Arrangers are the hidden heroes of popular music, and this is their story, told by a pop musicologist as comfortable with orchestral charts as the Billboard charts. John Howland’s deft delineation of the swanky sounds that link symphonic jazz, mood music, easy listening, adult contemporary, baroque pop, soft rock, orchestral soul, and aspirational hip-hop is masterful and full of wit. Mix yourself a dry martini, put on your headphones and your best reading glasses, and enter the lush world of luxe pop!"—Robert Fink, author of Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice"Howland presents an important counternarrative to both rock and jazz scholars whose investment in a kind of stylistic/ideological purity has obscured the continuities between traditions. These throughlines, including this 'damnably American' luxe style, often operate at the margins of emerging canons but at the center of popular experience."—Robynn Stilwell, author of S-Town and the Art of Podcast Music
"A one-of-a-kind guided tour through a kaleidoscopic musical landscape, where pop music—from the Great American Songbook to hip-hop—assumes the high-class sheen of the grand tradition. In this wonderful book, Howland ranges widely across the spectrum of high, middle, and lowbrow musical style and aesthetics, exploring the mysteries and miracles of musical hybridity in the American pop pageant."—Albin Zak, author of I Don’t Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America
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