Hearing Luxe Pop

Glorification, Glamour, and the Middlebrow in American Popular Music

John Howland author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:30th Jul '21

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Hearing Luxe Pop cover

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.

"Love this book for its championing of style, its critical edge, its humorous voice, its generosity, extravagance, and immersiveness." * Twentieth-Century Music *
"Hearing Luxe Pop [is] underpinned by relevant notated examples and rich descriptions of the music, situated within discourses around sophistication, cosmopolitanism and glamourous lifestyles, which together make this book a dearly needed contribution to the field of popular music studies." * Swedish Journal of Music Research *

ISBN: 9780520300101

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 30mm

Weight: 680g

394 pages