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Anatomy of the Hit: Bruno Mars and Cardi B ‘Please Me’
[JB note: This article was originally commissioned by TIDAL, and is part of a series - see links below. Parental advisory: adult themes in the lyrics.] Ariana Grande - 7 rings Mabel - Don't Call Me Up Billie Eilish - Bad Guy Taylor Swift feat. Brendon Urie - ME!...
Eurovision 2019 – live musical analysis
[update - the day after] I correctly predicted the winner (Netherlands), but my second and third place predictions (Sweden and Australia) were a little further down the list: Sweden was 6th, Australia 9th. Not bad. Here's an interactive infographic of the final...
Anatomy of the hit: Ariana Grande’s ‘7 rings’
As a music theory geek, I love to get inside songs and figure out why we like them. There’s something beautiful about the ability of a mainstream hit to bring people together. And when the songwriter and singer is as extraordinary a talent as Ariana Grande, we can be...
Popular Music Education: Foreword
This post is taken from my foreword to The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education: Perspectives and Practices (Bloomsbury, 2019). Editors: Zack Moir, Bryan Powell, Gareth Dylan Smith. Used by permission. Popular Music Education. These three words, even though...
Berklee Indian Ensemble in #360 video
Sometimes music just speaks for itself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?=1&v=gub20d7WI3I Listen with headphones. For best results, use a 360 headset or phone with Google Cardboard (ambisonic mix will change as you turn your head toward band members).
Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice
In October 2018, Berklee announced the launch of a new initiative, led by the remarkable Terri Lyne Carrington. The Institute was founded on a musical question, which is: What would jazz sound like in a culture without patriarchy? This morning I was viewing the video...
Optimal distinctiveness and the songwriting singer #arp
Davey will be discussing songwriter identity in the context of optimal distinctiveness theory, and uses this to frame some popular music within the known teen phenomenon of 'I loved [that band] before they were famous'. He uses the famous example of iMacs that looked...
Microrhythms and Microsounds in African-American Popular Music
I always love to hear Anne speak. Alas, I live-blogged her entire hour-long keynote today, complete with examples, and due to a horrible Wordpress browser fail (including no success with autosave reversions) I lost all the text and examples! So to recreate it from...
Meaning in vocal timbre #arp
The (Dis) Embodied Voice: hearing meaning in vocal timbre Simon Zagorski-Thomas (London College of Music, UWL) Keywords: Vocal timbre, ecological perception, embodied cognition, sonic cartoons ABSTRACT: It can be argued that since the persona of the performer...
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