Settling the Pop Score

Stan Hawkins is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is noted for his contribution to the development of popular music studies especially in the UK and Scandinavia, and is the author of analytical articles on the Pet Shop Boys, Prince, Bjork, Annie Lennox, Peter Gabriel, Arrested Development, Kraftwerk, and Madonna. In addition, he is Editor-in-Chief for Popular Musicology Online and the Norwegian chair for the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). As a musician, he has been professionally active as a composer and performer in the fields of contemporary music and jazz.

Contents: General editor's preface; Settling the pop score...: Introduction; Grounding aesthetic and ideological values; Musical codes and compositional design; Identity politics; Modelling identity; Interpreting ironic intent; Further discursions into the pop text; Towards a critical musicology of the popular; Mobilising the pop score; ’I’ll never be an angel’: stories of deception in Madonna’s music: Introduction; Reading musical codes in Madonna’s performance; Hearing, seeing, feeling gender; Spectatorship and seduction; Production and (post)modernist ’Survival’; Final concluding thoughts; Anti-rebel, lonesome boy: Morrissey in crisis?: Introduction; With a thorn in his side; Constructs of male identity in Morrissey; Characterisation and ’star’ depiction; Modelling empathy through vocal ’sound’; Interpreting ironic markers in pop texts; Conclusion; Annie Lennox’s ’Money Can’t Buy It’ - masquerading identity: Introduction; Opting for gender disguise; Questions of musical coding; Visualising sound through videography; Being totally Diva; Conclusion; ’Call it performance, honey’: The Pet Shop Boys: Introduction; Masculinity in the 1980s; Being boring and clever: style as rhetoric; Banality: political discourses of pleasure and power; Musical (dis)pleasures; ’Disco-Tex and the Sexelettes’: satirical musical address; Towards a PSB discourse; Conclusion; Subversive musical pleasures in ’The Artist (Again) Known as Prince’: Introduction; Dialectics of music and imagination; Identity as racial commodity; Stylistic and technical codes in Diamonds and Pearls; Sexing and ’spinning’ gender in musical expression; Carnivalesque musical display: signs of the times?; Conclusion; Bibliography; Discography; Index.