Settling the Pop Score

Part 1 Settling the pop score...: grounding aesthetic and ideological values; musical codes and compositional design; modelling identity; interpreting ironic intent; further discursions into the pop text; towards a critical musicology of the popular; mobilizing the pop score. Part 2 "I'll never be an angel" - stories of deception in Madonna's music: reading musical codes in Madonna's performance; hearing, seeing, feeling gender; spectatorship and seduction; production and (post)modernist "survival"; final concluding thoughts. Part 3 Anti-rebel, lonesome boy - Morrissey in crisis?: with a thorn in his side; constructs of male identity in Morrissey; characterization and "star" depiction; modelling empathy through vocal "sound"; interpreting ironic markers in pop texts; conclusion. Part 4 Annie Lennox's "Money Can't Buy It" - masquerading identity: opting for gender disguise; questions of musical coding; visualizing sound through videography; being "totally" diva; conclusion. Part 5 "Call it performance, honey" - the Pet Shop Boys: masculinity in the 1980s; being boring and clever - style as rhetoric; banality - political discourses of pleasure and power; "disco-tex and the sexelettes" -satirical musical address; towards a PSB discourse; conclusion. Part 6 Subversive musical pleasures in "The Artist (Again) Known as Prince": 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.