Thinking About Popular Music

Catalog description

Catchy yet controversial. Fun but hard-hitting. Popular music is not just entertaining: it presents societal issues, raises questions, expresses ideas. This course considers how popular music of the 20th century manifested the hopes, contradictions, ingenuity, and challenges of life in the United States, as seen and heard through the experiences of musicians and audiences. We will address three core questions: (1) How is “talent” and “good” music distinguished? (2) What happens when we treat music as “property,” especially with respect to broader ideas of ownership and credit? (3) When, how, and why is music considered dangerous? We delve into these questions by profiling musicians’ lives, analyzing the musical traits of specific repertoire, investigating changes in how music circulates, and situating popular music in U.S. cultural history. This course is not a chronological survey and does not aim to cover all U.S. popular music (or global popular music). Instead, each core question is addressed through case studies. Over the course of the semester students learn listening and analytic skills, how to engage critically with a range of writings about music, how to develop compelling arguments and articulate them verbally in class discussions and in writing assignments.