Hearing Luxe Pop Glorification, Glamour, and the Middlebrow in American Popular Music

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