Musicology Meets Samantha

Home , Samantha Fox

Musicology Meets Samantha Fox: Exploring an Everyday Aesthetics of Popular Music Author(s): Adrian Renzo Source: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music , December 2018, Vol. 49, No. 2 (December 2018), pp. 333-350 Published by: Croatian Musicological Society Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26844650

REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26844650?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

Croatian Musicological Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music

Adrian Renzo Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies Building Y3A, Room 155 Macquarie University, Musicology Meets MELBOURNE NSW 2109, Australia Samantha Fox: Exploring E-mail: adrian.renzo@mq. an Everyday Aesthetics of edu.au UDC: 78.01:78.067 Popular Music Original Scholarly Paper Izvorni znanstveni rad Received: January 24, 2018 Primljeno: 24. siječnja 2018. Accepted: September 15, 2018 Prihvaćeno: 15. rujna 2018.

Abstract – Résumé Musicological research on popular music has received criticism for not adequately capturing how ‘everyday Introduction listeners’ approach music. This article responds to such critiques by analysing the music tastes of One of the criticisms sometimes levelled against an ‘everyday listener’, de-identified here as ‘HP’. As an ‘every- the scholarly study of popular music is that the result- day listener’, HP diverges from ing studies do not reflect how ‘everyday listeners’ established approaches in 1 musicology: he listens primarily actually listen to music. Musicologists describe mu- to music which has not been sic using jargon that is opaque to scholars from other legitimated by the Anglo-Ameri- can rock press or the academy disciplines, not to mention the millions of listeners (for example, his music collecti- who may have propelled a song into the Top 40.2 on privileges Samantha Fox over the Beatles); he is drawn to More problematically, musicological analysis may ephemeral ‘moments’ rather than inadvertently ‘canonise by complexity’: songs are engaging with each track holisti- cally; and he openly ridicules legitimated and given a sheen of ‘importance’ simply some of his favourite songs by being subjected to scholarly analysis.3 In other rather than treating them as ‘quality’ music. The article argues disciplines such as sociology and media studies, re- that this kind of perspective is important for the study of popular 1 music. HP’s careful attention to Chris KENNETT, Is Anybody Listening?, in: Allan F. specific musical details – details Moore (ed.), Analyzing Popular Music, Cambridge: Cambridge that he himself hears as fleeting, University Press, 2003, 204; Susan McCLARY and Robert WALS- banal, or smutty – demonstrates ER, Start Making Sense! Musicology Wrestles with Rock, in: Si- that it is possible to engage with mon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (eds.), On Record: Rock, Pop and popular music without neces- the Written Word, London: Routledge, 276-79. sarily canonising it. 2 Keywords: popular music S. McCLARY and R. WALSER, Start Making Sense!, 279. • musicology • sociology • 3 C. KENNETT, review of Allan F. Moore’s Sgt Pepper’s Lone- aesthetics • listening • ly Hearts Club Band, Popular Music, 19(2) (2000), 264. canon

333

This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms A. Renzo: Musicology Meets Samantha IRASM 49 (2018) 2: 333-349 Fox: Exploring an Everyday Aesthetics of Popular Music searchers have faced a parallel problem: by focusing on the responses of listeners (rather than recordings), the specifically musical pleasures of popular music have sometimes been overlooked. This article argues that we can learn much about popular music by paying closer attention to the listening practices and interpretations of ‘everyday listeners’, without necessarily abandoning a focus on the sounds themselves, and without necessarily ‘classicizing’ or ‘intellectualizing’ the music.4 As a preliminary step in this direction, the article analyses the listening practices and aesthetics of one such listener (de-identified here as ‘HP’), highlighting the differences between the participant’s responses to popular music and the kinds of analysis that have prolif- erated in popular music studies. The key findings of the research are as follows. First, the very distinction between ‘musicologists’ and ‘other’ listeners is problematic – the interview data demonstrates that HP is at least as attentive a listener as many scholars of popular music. HP’s heavy investment in music chal- lenges the idea that ‘everyday listening’ (that is, listening during everyday activi- ties such as cooking or a train journey or skateboard riding) is necessarily distracted. HP’s listening approach clearly indicates a deliberate and intense immer- sion in music which belies certain scholarly accounts of everyday listening as ‘distracted’.5 Third, the study of popular music does not necessarily need to focus on large-scale form or structure. In fact, ignoring such structure may be a useful starting point for an analysis, and may more closely reflect the ‘everyday’ listening approach. Finally, even though listeners may ridicule the producers of music they like, this does not necessarily result in a detached, ‘ironic’ form of listening.6 As this is a preliminary study, I have deliberately emphasised ways in which the respondent’s perspective differs from the findings of existing scholarship in popular music studies. However, existing scholarly frameworks (such as Richard Peterson’s production of culture approach and Bourdieu’s notion of distinction) are clearly still relevant to HP’s case, so the final section of the article addresses some examples of how existing theoretical positions in popular music studies and related fields can shed light on HP’s ‘everyday aesthetics.’

4 Robert FINK, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice, Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 2005, 30. 5 C. KENNETT, Is Anybody Listening?, 204. 6 Andy BENNETT, Cheesy Listening: Popular Music and Ironic Listening Practices, in: Sarah Baker, Andy Bennett, and Jodie Taylor (eds.), Redefining Mainstream Popular Music, London: Rout- ledge, 2013, 207.

334

Musical and Socio-Cultural Complexity

The mere act of describing musical phenomena can have the intended or unintended effect of ascribing complexity to the music. For Kennett, some studies of popular music tend to ‘canonise by complexity.’7 Writing about Moore’s (2007) study of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Kennett states that »it is almost as if the mere fact that…voice-leading patterns, cognitive conclusions, etc., can be arrived at, becomes strong circumstantial evidence of the meisterwerk status of the text being studied.«8 Where vernacular descriptions of music prioritise a song’s simplicity (songs might be described as ‘catchy’ or as ‘earworms’9) academic responses tend to use ‘complexity’ as a legitimating mechanism. The academy arguably encourages research that teases out the unintentional or hidden or less- than-obvious complexity of a musical recording.10 Consequently, even ‘lowbrow’, ‘simple’ music is made to sound more complex. For example, Timothy Warner’s analysis of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ hinges on the claim that it is ‘a finely produced and musically sophisticated product’ and demonstrates this with detailed tables illustrating the complexity of the song structure.11 As Ian Maxwell points out, popular music scholars work under an ‘institutional drive to find something significant’ in popular culture.12 Some scholarship attempts to move beyond this tendency by avoiding canonical genres.13 Ultimately, however, a published analysis needs to draw attention to something for which we can make an academic case that the material was worth drawing attention to in the first place. Therefore, complexity – if not of the sounds themselves then of the song’s social context – still emerges as an implicit theme. Of course, not all scholarly analysis is underpinned by the search for musical complexity. In sociology and in media studies, scholars have often explored the meanings of apparently ‘simple’ music by focusing instead on audiences. For example, Melanie Lowe’s research on Britney Spears’s listeners responds to the

7 Chris KENNETT, review of Allan F. Moore’s Sgt Pepper, 264. 8 Ibid. 9 Kelly JAKUBOWSKI, Lauren STEWART, Sebastian FINKEL, and Daniel MÜLLENSIEFEN, Dissecting an Earworm: Melodic Features and Song Popularity Predict Involuntary Musical Imagery, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 11(2), (2017), 122-35. 10 Cf. David HESMONDHALGH, The Cultural Industries, London: Sage, 43. 11 Timothy WARNER, Pop Music – Technology and Creativity: Trevor Horn and the Digital Revolution, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003, 79. 12 Ian MAXWELL, The Curse of Fandom: Insiders, Outsiders and Ethnography, in: David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus (eds.), Popular Music Studies, London: Arnold, 2002, 113. 13 Ralf von APPEN, André DOEHRING, Dietrich HELMS, and Allan F. MOORE, Introduction, in: Ralf von Appen, André Doehring, Dietrich Helms, and Allan F. Moore (eds.), Song Interpretation in 21st-Century Music, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015, 2.

335

This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms A. Renzo: Musicology Meets Samantha IRASM 49 (2018) 2: 333-349 Fox: Exploring an Everyday Aesthetics of Popular Music parental concern: ‘is Britney Spears a bad influence on pre-teen girls?’14 After spending time with a group of pre-teen and early teenage girls, she concludes that the girls are far more discerning than critics in the popular press would have us believe. Rather than passively internalising Spears’s version of femininity, the girls develop a more complex set of engagements with the star’s persona and with her music. Some of them go so far as to label Spears a ‘slore’ (an elision of the words ‘slut’ and ‘whore’).15 While Lowe does pay attention to the music, her main interest lies in constructions of gender. Music just happens to be the focus of these girls’ fandom. Lowe’s focus in the article could just as well have been a film star, or it could just as well have been another pop singer rather than Spears. We might summarise this approach as: the music is bad but it allows the girls to do something good. In this case, it allows fans to negotiate different versions of femininity. Dafna Lemish takes a similar approach with a group of Israeli gay men and their relationship with the Eurovision Song Contest.16 Several of her respondents declare that Eurovision songs are ‘inferior’ to other types of music, but they point to the pleasures of engaging with Eurovision, as part of a ritual.

For gay men… [Eurovision] goes well beyond the music – lyrics, rhythms, melody, and all. It is the performer, the act of performance itself, and the stage (both literally and metaphorically) that constitute the site of identity construction. The nature of music is negligible at best and distasted [sic] at worst.17

Like Lowe’s article, Lemish’s study implies that the music’s quality is beside the point – the important thing is that it allows gay men to affirm their identity.18 So far, I have briefly reviewed musicologists’ tendency to search for complexity in popular music (where complexity is treated as inherently good). I have also briefly discussed some alternatives to that approach in popular music studies (namely, the sociological tendency to discuss audience member’s identities rather than the music). After discussing the research method, this paper will explore my participant’s very different approach to his favourite popular music. In particular, I will draw attention to the ways in which he enjoys music which is either deliberately or inadvertently simplistic, and the ways in which this music affords pleasure that is not necessarily an affirmation of an identity or a marker of distinction.

14 Melanie LOWE, ‘Tween’ Scene: Resistance within the Mainstream, in: Andy Bennett and Rich- ard A. Peterson (eds.), Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004, 80-95. 15 M. LOWE, ‘Tween’ Scene, 85. 16 Dafna LEMISH, ‘My Kind of Campfire’: The Eurovision Song Contest and Israeli Gay Men, Popular Communication, 2(1) (2004), 41-63. 17 D. LEMISH, ‘My Kind of Campfire’, 60. 18 A similar case could be made for Bourdieu’s notion of ‘distinction’, in which music is of scholarly interest primarily because it allows high-status audiences to distinguish themselves from consumers of ‘lowbrow’ culture.

336

Method

The data in this paper draws on extended semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, and dancing sessions with one respondent, de-identified as ‘HP’ for the purposes of this article. The decision to focus on one person in this article is deliberate. As Sara Cohen notes, music is not only a matter of collective identity; it is ‘also interpreted in idiosyncratic ways by individual listeners.’19 Some of those individuals develop a detailed, if not explicitly articulated, aesthetics of music. They are drawn not only to particular aspects of music, but also to particular ways of listening to that music. My aim is to document the ‘alternative’ aesthetics of the participant, whose preferences diverge from widely established norms of musical value. I am not aiming to ensure that the data ‘represents’ any particular group. My central question is: how does the participant’s aesthetic system differ from the models that are already established in musicology and media studies? In addition to interviews and informal conversations, the research includes dancing sessions, in which the participant connects his smartphone to a hi-fi system and selects songs for himself and for the researcher to dance to. The dancing component is important here because it gives us an insight into embodied responses to music. As Chris Kennett points out, much musicological work is obviously the result of careful, sedentary listening.20 Other ways of engaging with music include singing, lip-synching, and dancing. By inviting these kinds of responses, I aim to build on work by Middleton and Buckland, who highlight the ‘embodied knowledge’ involved in listening.21 I invited HP to participate in this project for several reasons. First, he has accumulated a significant number of CDs (in the thousands rather than hundreds) and vinyl records over the past 30 years. Second, his music collection deviates from conventional lists of ‘Best Albums’ or ‘Best Songs’ available in the popular press.22 He has bought as many singles as he has albums. Many of the songs that he enjoys are performed by artists (almost invariably female) with limited career longevity, and they are often ridiculed in the rock press: his collection features very little material by the Beatles, no material by Bob Dylan, and much material

19 Sara COHEN, Sounding Out the City: Music and the Sensuous Production of Place, Transac- tions of the Institute of British Geographers, 20(4) (1995), 445. 20 C. KENNETT, Is Anybody Listening?, 204. 21 Richard MIDDLETON, Popular Music Analysis and Musicology: Bridging the Gap, Popular Music, 12(2) (1993), 177-90; Fiona BUCKLAND, Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. 22 Carys Wyn JONES, The Rock Canon: Canonical Values in the Reception of Rock Albums, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008; Ralf von APPEN and André DOEHRING, Nevermind the Beatles, Here’s Exile 61 and Nico: ‘The Top 100 Records of All Time’ – A Canon of Pop and Rock Albums from a Sociological and an Aesthetic Perspective, Popular Music, 25(1) (2006), 21-39.

337

This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms A. Renzo: Musicology Meets Samantha IRASM 49 (2018) 2: 333-349 Fox: Exploring an Everyday Aesthetics of Popular Music by Dannii Minogue, Vitamin C, Gina G., and Holly Valance. (When discussing this, he proudly adds: ‘And not just Vitamin C: the B-sides of Vitamin C!’) Third, HP is not a professional musician or academic. While his collection may be hetero- genous, it is not marked by the kind of extreme inclusivity that we often see in the collections of people who are paid to critique or analyse music. Unlike an academic or music journalist, HP has never purchased a record because he needs it for teaching or research.23 Fourth, since HP does not write professionally about music and does not have formal musical training in the Western classical tradition, his perception is not skewed towards musical features such as chord sequences or melodic contours. I do not wish to imply that HP’s auditory perspective is ‘pure’ while that of trained professional musicians and analysts is ‘tainted’. However, people bring a range of ‘modes of listening’24 to music, and a training in a particular method of analysing music inevitably shapes what, exactly, we listen for.25 Speaking and dancing with HP is one way to approach the question of how non- musicologists listen, and what exactly they listen for in their favourite music. HP’s approach is also of musicological interest because – like any musicological analysis – it is based on intensive, repeated listening. In this respect, it belies the assumption sometimes made by music scholars that ‘everyday listening’ is necessarily distracted. Kennett, for example, has criticised Philip Tagg’s approach to music analysis on the grounds that Tagg has obviously listened to the music much more carefully than most other listeners.26 When Tagg analyses AB- BA’s ‘Fernando’, for instance, his analysis is obviously based on careful, repeated listening, most likely through a pair of dedicated headphones. Kennett continues:

If we alter the listening, transplanting the experience to a supermarket, where the soundsystem volume is just high enough to hear that a pop song is being played (although it is difficult to be sure of which song, because of the ambient noise of squeaky trolleys, crying children and overheard conversation), the range of meanings afforded by the recording of ‘Fernando’ will be of little relevance to us; nor will it make much conscious difference whether the song being broadcast is ‘Fernando’ or ‘Waterloo’, since we will probably be concentrating upon locating the olive oil rather than the epistemology of the barely audible Abba [sic] track at the time.27

23 Roy SHUKER, Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures: Record Collecting as a Social Practice, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010, 48. 24 Ola STOCKFELT, Adequate Modes of Listening, in: David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian, and Lawrence Siegel (eds.), Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997, 142. 25 Richard MIDDLETON, Studying Popular Music, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1990, 105. 26 C. KENNETT, Is Anybody Listening?, 203-4. 27 Ibid., 204.

338

For Kennett, Tagg’s approach is fundamentally flawed because the way that he listens to ‘Fernando’ is simply too dissimilar to the way that the average, ‘everyday’ listener encounters the same song. As Tagg himself admits, there is ample evidence that much music is consumed in a more ‘distracted’ way: as a soundtrack to a train journey, as the background to a film scene, or as part of a gaming experience.28 HP’s way of engaging with his favourite music is interesting here precisely because it represents an example of an ‘everyday’ listener paying close attention to music. As we shall see in the following sections, HP may wear a pair of headphones while skateboarding, while shopping, or while catching public transport, but none of these things necessarily means that he is limited to a ‘distracted’ type of listening. While the above reasons are important, the overriding reason I approached HP was because he seems to value aspects of music which are often overlooked in musicology and media studies. He does not necessarily value music for its complexity, or for its ability to express his own or anyone else’s emotions and aspirations.29 Nor does he value the music according to conventional aesthetic criteria, such as vocal acrobatics or subtle inflections in the drumming, or for the ways in which the music combines existing genres.30 There are indications that he values music as ‘aestheticised trash’, but without the ironic detachment documented by Bennett.31 In the next section, I want to draw attention to three aspects of HP’s aesthetic approach which diverge from the usual (implicit) appraisals in the academy: moments, stupidity, and smut.

Some Features of HP’s Aesthetic System

One of the most striking things about HP’s aesthetic system is his interest in ‘Moments’ rather than full songs. (Hereafter, I signal HP’s specific use of the term by capitalising the first letter of the word.) At one point in an interview, I deliberately adopted the language of a Rolling Stone end-of-the-decade feature and asked

28 Michael BULL, No Dead Air! The iPod and the Culture of Mobile Listening, Leisure Studies, 24(4) (2005), 343-55; Karen COLLINS, Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design, Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008; Anahid KASSABIAN, Popular, in: Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss (eds.), Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, 113-23; Marta García Quiñones, Anahid Kassabian, and Elena Boschi (eds.), Ubiquitous Musics: The Everyday Sounds That We Don’t Always Notice, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. 29 Cf. Carys Wyn JONES, The Rock Canon; Deena WEINSTEIN, Art Versus Commerce: Decon- structing a (Useful) Romantic Illusion, in: Karen Kelly and Evelyn McDonnell (eds.), Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth, London: Routledge, 1999. 30 Cf. Allan F. MOORE, The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 30; Motti REGEV, Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013, 76-78. 31 A. BENNETT, Cheesy Listening, 207.

339

This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms A. Renzo: Musicology Meets Samantha IRASM 49 (2018) 2: 333-349 Fox: Exploring an Everyday Aesthetics of Popular Music what he might include in a list of his ‘Top 10 Songs of All Time’. He corrected me: ‘they wouldn’t be songs, they’d be Moments’. He sometimes plays songs on repeat, not to hear the entire song, but to hear the Moment. Moments may last a split second, and occasionally they may consist of a looped groove, but they are usually very short (that is, less than three seconds). HP’s enjoyment of the music is a striking demonstration of Levinson’s point, that »musical enjoyment is had only in the successive parts of a piece of music, and not in the whole as such.«32 The following is a brief selection of Moments which HP selected during a listening session: 1. Linda Scott, ‘I’ve Told Every Little Star’ (1961). High-pitched strings at 1:54. 2. Samantha Fox, ‘Touch Me’ (1986). Vocal phrase (‘aaah touch me!’) at 0:02. 3. Samantha Fox, ‘Touch Me’ (1986). Vocal phrase (‘touch me now!’) at 1:07- 1:08. Here, we can already detect some deviation from the norms of musicological analysis. A focus on Moments is different to a focus on groove, meter, repetition or genre mutation, although it may be related to several of these aspects of popular music.33 In most cases, HP is not listening to the Moment for the way in which it can suspend his sense of time.34 More often, the Moment is so brief that it is difficult to dance to. HP often enacts an embodied response to the moment: he lip-syncs to it, complete with an appropriate facial expression. He imitates Samantha Fox’s pseudo-sexual moaning (‘aaah touch me!’); he makes a nervous, fidgety gesture as he sings along with the high-pitched strings in the Scott record (craning his head forward slightly, in a motion that says ‘I am trying very hard to reach that note’). In other words, a focus on isolated Moments cannot be explained with reference to intra-textual repetition (it often happens only once during a song), nor does it form part of a more expansive unfolding of a song (as might be argued, for example, for the climax of massed brass and strings that accompanies the final section of The Righteous Brothers’ ‘Unchained Melody’). Such an interest in ‘Moments’ is significant because it strains against a tendency in musicology to analyse full tracks.

32 Jerrold LEVINSON, Music in the Moment, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, 14. 33 Cf. Anne DANIELSEN, Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, 2006; Mark BUTLER, Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006; Richard MIDDLETON, ‘Play It Again Sam’: Some Notes on the Productivity of Repetition in Popular Music, Popular Music, 3 (1983), 235-70; Luis-Manuel GARCIA, On and On: Repetition as Process and Pleasure in Electronic Dance Music, Music Theory Online, 11(4) (2005), online at http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/ mto.05.11.4/mto.05.11.4.garcia.html (accessed 13 January 2018); Jason TOYNBEE, Making Popular Mu- sic: Musicians: Creativity and Institutions, London: Arnold, 2000. 34 Simon FRITH, The Best Disco Record: Sharon Red: ‘Never Give You Up,’ in: Alan McKee (ed.), Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007, 198.

340

A second important feature of HP’s aesthetic system is stupidity. The vast majority of songs which HP plays repeatedly are what he calls ‘stupid’. In part, HP uses a strategy that Simon Frith identifies in an article on so-called ‘bad’ music. Frith notes that ‘bad’ music is often positioned as ridiculous: music »made by singers who can’t sing, players who can’t play, producers who can’t produce.«35 When we spoke about a hypothetical list of ‘Top 10 Songs of All Time’, HP reported that only one of them involves ‘any kind of respect for the songwriter’ (followed by laughter). He considers most of his favourite music to be stupid. In our conversations, he has played me several examples. One such example is ‘Say Goodbye’, performed by Australian soap-star- turned-pop-singer Melissa Tkautz. The song appears on the B-side of the single ‘Read My Lips’ (released under the name ‘Melissa’ in 1991). If we were to inter- pret ‘Say Goodbye’ less than charitably, we might draw attention to its maudlin, sentimental lyrics (‘you keep your broken promises / I’ll keep my distance’). We could also identify several pitch issues in the melody: there are numerous times where Tkautz’s voice audibly deviates from the ‘correct’ pitch. There are also moments when Tkautz’s voice sounds strained because it pushes at the upper limit of her vocal range. Such straining is sometimes a way of performing ‘sincer- ity’, as in the climaxes of songs such as Bon Jovi’s ‘Livin’ On A Prayer’.36 In contrast, Tkautz’s straining sounds far less intentional and therefore arguably comes across as a failed attempt at earnestness. Furthermore, her voice is placed over a relatively cheap-sounding instrumental backing, where the synthesizers often function as simple replacements for an absent string section. I draw attention to these elements in ‘Say Goodbye’ not to advance the view that it is objectively a ‘bad’ recording, but to emphasize that HP takes deliberate pleasure from what he believes is ‘naïve or foolish music.’37 This pleasure extends to the visuals associated with the music. For example, HP shows me a clip of Vio- la Wills singing ‘Gonna Get Along Without You Now’ (taken from the Dutch television program Top Pop). He identifies and laughs at several segments where there is a »gap between what performers/producers think they are doing and what they actually achieve.«38 (It is clear from his moves and gestures that HP has watched the video many times: he can mimic the singer’s moves right down to the grin on her face.) First, there is ‘the spin’. For the opening of the song, Wills dances alone, microphone in hand, with her feet semi-obscured by the dry ice fog that swirls around the stage. At 0:13, Wills spins 180 degrees, at a relaxed pace, and

35 S. FRITH, What is Bad Music?, in: Chris Washburne and Maiken Derno (eds.), Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, London: Routledge, 2004, 18. 36 R. WALSER, Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993, 123. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid.

341

This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms A. Renzo: Musicology Meets Samantha IRASM 49 (2018) 2: 333-349 Fox: Exploring an Everyday Aesthetics of Popular Music faces the front of the stage again just in time to mouth the first line of the song: ‘ah-ha / mm-hmm’. Second, HP repeatedly points to the amateurishness of the editing. He notes that, despite the singer’s near-constant grin, she often seems unsure of which camera to address. He speculates on the conversation that might have occurred at a mixing desk somewhere off-screen, in which two cameramen deliberately change camera angles spontaneously, so as to disarm Wills. Then he performs another impersonation of Wills on stage. Affecting a surprised look, he exclaims: ‘Oops! Where’s my camera?’ While in some ways this resembles the ironic detachment of listeners identified by Bennett, I would argue that HP’s extreme investment in this music (it takes a long time to perfect his impersonations of the artists concerned) means that his engagement with this music cannot simply be equated to the ‘irony’ that Bennett talks about. The ‘ironic’ approach, after all, implies that there is a real type of music behind all this frippery, the kind of music that a listener genuinely and unreservedly enjoys. What makes HP’s aesthetic system interesting is the very fact that he gives the lie to distinctions between the really enjoyable music and the frippery: the music he is most passionate about happens to be the very material which he ridicules. The third (and perhaps most salient) aspect of HP’s aesthetic system is smut. In many cases, smut constitutes one of the primary ways that HP attributes musical value to a song. It is often more important than whether a song is well-produced, whether the vocal performances are in key, or whether the featured samples work well together. I have identified three types of musical smut in his listening practices. First and most obvious are songs with straightforwardly explicit subject matter. HP introduced me to the Peaches song ‘Shake Yer Dix’ (Fatherfucker, 2003) as follows: »This is pure [smut]…. The only reason I love this song is because I know the only reason this bitch wrote this song was to be rude.« He dances and sings along with the song – always note-perfect, with every inflection faithfully reproduced – until we reach the section at 1:35, where we both burst into laughter: »are the motherfuckers ready for the fatherfuckers / are the fatherfuckers ready for the motherfuckers«. Even though HP enjoys the overall smuttiness of the song, the Moments that he is especially drawn to are still those ad-libbed, ‘throwaway’ lines in the background. The call-and-response sections in the later choruses are good examples of this. In the first chorus of the song (0:09-0:18), Peaches sings the line ‘shake yer dix, shake yer dix’ in every second bar, and remains silent in the alternate bars. However, at 2:14-2:24, Peaches adds repetitions of the title to those formerly ‘silent’ bars. In these new vocal phrases, she speaks the title rather than singing it. The spoken sections have a conspiratorial tone for several reasons. Rather than the multi-tracked unison sung parts of the chorus, the spoken phrases consist of just one rendition of the line, recorded close to the microphone. The performer’s sly emphasis on the word ‘dix’ (‘shake yer diiix, shake yer diiix’) adds

342

This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms A. Renzo: Musicology Meets Samantha IRASM 49 (2018) 2: 333-349 Fox: Exploring an Everyday Aesthetics of Popular Music to the conspiratorial tone. It is this section which HP mimics with the most enthu- siasm, often bursting into laughter as he does so. A second type of smut which HP is drawn to are songs which were not intended to be smutty, but which HP re-appropriates by interpreting key lines as a double entendre. Roy Orbison’s ‘Working For the Man’ serves as an example here. After a series of ‘butch’ grunts which punctuate the introduction to the song, it makes sense for HP to read smut into lines such as: »Oh, don’t relax, I want elbows and backs / I want to see everybody from behind«. Such appropriation does not emerge spontaneously: it is obviously the result of a familiarity with gay culture, and it resonates with (for instance) the Pet Shop Boys’ appropriation and ‘ultra-campifying’ of disco songs such as ‘Go West’, a point to which I shall return.39 The above types of smut, however, are primarily concerned either with lyrics or with an idiosyncratic delivery of lyrics: ‘shake yer diiix’; ‘I want to see everybody from behind’. The most interesting type of smut that HP is drawn to is what I will call musical smut. With this term, I refer to those times that HP makes an association between a film scene or photograph and a programmed drum track. He performs a suggestive dance which either mimics the film scene or serves as a conglomerate of similar dance moves. Mel & Kim’s ‘Showing Out’ serves as a useful example, particularly because the section discussed here has minimal lyrical material. I will focus on the introduction to the Extended Version of the song, but the reader is advised that similar musical devices are used in the introduction to the 7” version of the song. ‘Showing Out’ is a particularly interesting example because it illustrates a case where HP interprets sound (as opposed to lyrics) as ‘smutty’, and performs to it accordingly. The device is found in the introduction to the song (0:00-0:59). This section consists of some short samples of Mel & Kim’s vocals (‘show, show, show- sho- / show, show, show-sho-’) (0:03-0:22), a bass line (0:47-0:59), and some programmed hi-hats playing a pattern indebted to Chicago house music. However, none of those elements figure prominently in HP’s dancing to the song. Instead, he is drawn to the semiquaver drum fills which commence at 0:22 and mark the end of each two-bar phrase. For HP, the semiquaver drum fills call to mind a non-existent scene from the 1996 film Striptease. No scenes in the film feature Demi Moore dancing to ‘Showing Out’, but when he dances to the song he imagines that this is the sort of musical figure that Moore should have danced to in the film. He has a very specific routine. Just as the drum fill typically acts as a kind of punctuation mark in popular music (occurring, for instance, at the end of successive four-bar

39 David M. HALPERIN, How to Be Gay, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012; Corey K. CREEKMUR and Alexander DOTY, Introduction, in: Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (eds.), Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, London: Cassell, 1995, 1-4; Mark BUTLER, Taking it Seriously: Intertextuality and Authenticity in Two Covers by the Pet Shop Boys, Popular Music, 22 (1) (2003), 1-19.

343

This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms A. Renzo: Musicology Meets Samantha IRASM 49 (2018) 2: 333-349 Fox: Exploring an Everyday Aesthetics of Popular Music phrases), HP punctuates his dancing by jogging on the spot in time with the semi- quavers, simultaneously cupping both his nipples in his hands and ‘jiggling’ them. While doing so, his face is contorted in a caricature of porn-influenced ‘come-and- get-it’ desire – all pouting lips, squinting eyes, and head-shaking. What is interesting about this move is that HP interprets the sound itself as ‘smutty’ by mimicking media representations of striptease performances. Little in the song’s lyrics hint at a Striptease-like scenario, but HP makes a plausible, embodied case for hearing ‘Showing Out’ this way. The Moment, in this case, is inextricably connected with the moves that HP performs when he listens to the song. HP is not alone in making this kind of association. The official music video for another of his favourite songs, Ice Cube’s ‘You Can Do It’, exhibits a similar link between rigidly sequenced electronic music and a suggestive dancefloor move. The introduction to the song features several chords which have been stuttered in a way that resembles the skipping of a malfunctioning CD. In the video at 0:18-0:19, this sound is accompanied by images of female dancers twerking on podiums in a nightclub, rapidly shaking their rear ends from side to side or up and down. The association is made again at 0:50 and at 1:51 (with a medium close-up of a woman bending over).40 This association between electronic music and this type of dance move confirms Goodwin’s point that we »have grown used to connecting machines and funkiness.«41 Music scholars have often treated ‘funkiness’ as something driven by deviations from a musical grid, such as the ‘participatory discrepancies’ identified by Keil.42 But as more recent scholarship has pointed out, people are often just as attracted to rigidly quantised music.43 HP’s imagining of Demi Moore performing a specific dance as part of a strip routine on a podium constitutes an embodied construction of the funkiness of Mel & Kim’s ‘Showing Out’, even if much of the music press describes Stock Aitken Waterman productions as desperately non-funky. HP’s focus on Moments means that he is often drawn to the very things that are either ignored by popular music gatekeepers and analysts, or to the things that are seen as evidence of the music’s inferiority. His pleasure in these Moments is analo- gous to the pleasure that other audiences take from live performance: the acciden- tal, the pseudo-improvised, or the plain errors come to the foreground. (It is

40 Cf. Elizabeth PÉREZ, The Ontology of Twerk: From ‘Sexy’ Black Movement Style to Afro- Diasporic Sacred Dance, African and Black Diaspora, 9(1) (2016), 19-20. 41 Andrew GOODWIN, Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Digital Age of Reproduction, in: Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (eds.), On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, London: Rout- ledge, 1990, 263. 42 Charles KEIL, Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music, Cultural Anthropology, 2 (1987), 275-283. 43 Hans ZEINER-HENRIKSEN, Moved by the Groove: Bass Drum Sounds and Body Movements in Electronic Dance Music, in: Anne Danielsen (ed.), Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010, 138.

344

particularly interesting that HP takes this kind of pleasure in music which is typically not amenable to live performance: his favourite sections are very often sequenced.) His focus on ridiculousness also recalls Bennett’s recent exploration of ‘cheesy’ listening practices in popular music. Bennett discusses the ‘Seventies Night’ where people unashamedly revel in the tackiest tunes of that decade, adorning the more flamboyant fashions of the time as an ironic way of laughing at both the music and at themselves.44 While there is a lot of laughter when HP talks about this music, I would suggest that his engagement with music does not demonstrate the same level of ironic detachment as Ang identified in soap opera viewers, or that Bennett identified amongst fans of Tom Jones. The music discussed in this article, after all, is music which HP has on repeat: music which he has memorised right down to minute inflections in synth lines and vocal ad-libs. My key point is that a focus on Moments, stupidity, and smut has not really made its way into musicology, partly because our focus has predominantly been on highlighting instances of intended or unintentional complexity in popular music.45 So far, this article has focused on some ways in which HP’s tastes diverge from the kinds of issues typically addressed in popular music studies. However, inevitably, there are several ways in which his tastes and his commentary on those tastes intersect with existing debates about popular music. In the following section, I aim to tease out some of these existing connections.

What is Familiar about HP’s Aesthetic System?

Thus far I have highlighted ways in which HP’s system of aesthetic apprecia- tion ‘falls through the cracks’ of musicological analysis. The things that draw him to particular songs or to particular Moments are seldom analysed in musicology. However, several ideas from musicology and sociology are still relevant here and can help to shed light on HP’s tastes. First, it is worth noting that some of HP’s favourite Moments are enjoyed because they come from a network of familiar sounds or because they explicitly refer to other sounds. In this respect, then, HP’s tastes could be read as confirma- tion of Lacasse’s work on intertextuality.46 Lacasse is interested in those recordings where songs explicitly or implicitly refer to other songs, whether through the use of sampling, re-recording, or some other means. His analysis stems from the pleasure of tracing a song’s lineage: here is a song based on a direct sample, here

44 A. BENNETT, Cheesy Listening, 207. 45 D. HESMONDHALGH, The Cultural Industries, 43. 46 Serge LACASSE, Intertextuality and Hypertextuality in Recorded Popular Music, in: Michael Talbot (ed.), The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2000, 35-58.

345

This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms A. Renzo: Musicology Meets Samantha IRASM 49 (2018) 2: 333-349 Fox: Exploring an Everyday Aesthetics of Popular Music is an instance of a re-played sample, here is an instance of quasi-quotation, and so on. Similar pleasures have driven other efforts at typology.47 There is evidence of a similar approach in some of HP’s favourite Moments. Particular moments stand out for him because they refer to another moment in the same song, or to a moment in another song. For example, the Linda Scott strings that I discussed earlier (1:54) stand out because they have been added to a chorus that previously lacked them (1:09). Similarly, HP enjoys several parts of ‘Erotica (WØ 12”)’ because he hears them against a backdrop of other versions of Erotica, and other Madonna songs. For instance, an uncredited sample in ‘Justify My Love (The Beast Within Mix)’ (1:55-4:05) has been sped up and turned into a kind of chorus for ‘Erotica’ (beginning at 1:19 and ceasing abruptly at 1:35). In another part of the ‘Erotica’ remix, HP singles out the line »I’d like to put you in a trance«. He states that he likes the way this line has been repositioned in the remix. In the original version of ‘Erotica,’ Madonna sings the word ‘like’ on a down- beat; in the remix she sings the same word on the second beat of the bar. The fact that HP explicitly refers to all the precursors to these Moments demonstrates that he is well aware of the intertextual references. By referring to the precursors, he acknowledges that his pleasure in, say, the ‘Erotica’ chant is not completely arbi- trary: it draws on ‘Justify My Love’. Even the most fleeting Moment has a history, and existing work such as Lacasse’s can help to explain its appeal. HP’s approach to aesthetics also resonates with existing approaches in sociology and media studies. For example, he clearly deploys some of his tastes as markers of distinction. In particular, he sometimes talks about music which he ‘understands’ but other people do not. We might recall Keir Keightly’s point about the ideology that has often been associated with rock music: »[o]ne of the great ironies of [rock music is that] while rock has involved millions of people buying a mass-marketed, standardised commodity…these purchases have produced intense feelings of…uniqueness.«48 Several times during our conversations, HP distinguishes himself as being the ‘only’ person who appreciates a particular artist, song, or Moment. This can be a risky approach, given that we are usually talking about mass-produced pop music. As Keightly would say, how is it possible to assert ‘uniqueness’ in the ability to buy a Kylie Minogue record? Millions of other people, after all, have done the same thing. In such cases, HP refines his argument: the uniqueness is not in

47 Virgil MOOREFIELD, Modes of Appropriation: Covers, Remixes and Mash-ups in Contempo- rary Popular Music, in: Amanda Bayley (ed.), Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 291-306; Christine BOONE, Mashing: Toward a Typol- ogy of Recycled Music, Music Theory Online, 19(3) (2013). 48 Keir KEIGHTLY, Reconsidering Rock, in: Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 109.

346

This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms A. Renzo: Musicology Meets Samantha IRASM 49 (2018) 2: 333-349 Fox: Exploring an Everyday Aesthetics of Popular Music the purchasing of the record, but in having the right approach to the record – he hears it the right way. The following exchange illustrates HP’s effort to distinguish himself from other ‘regular’ consumers of pop music. In this instance, we were talking dispar- agingly about the cynical marketing of music to the gay male community.49

HP: They [white gay males] are not even listening to early Kylie anymore. AR: Kylie? You don’t think the gays are listening to Kylie? [At this point, I am nonplussed. Kylie Minogue would appear to be one of the more reliable gay icons in popular music.] HP: The early stuff? I don’t think they are! I don’t think they are. AR: What if I told you that early Kylie was having a big revival on Oxford Street [one of the centers for gay male culture in Sydney, Australia], and everyone was into it – would you not like it anymore? HP: Well, I wouldn’t go that far. But if they got into it, it would be a revival, whereas I knew about it all along.

Notice that, when pressed on a particular point, HP refines his argument. I was nonplussed by HP’s claim that the gay male community has abandoned Kylie Minogue. When I put this to him, he specified that he was referring to early Minogue records – that is, the kind of material produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman. In this conversation, we eventually reached a kind of stalemate: it is impossible, after all, to prove that a ‘community’ of people was or was not listening to early Minogue records. (Neither one of us has the resources to complete that kind of quantitative study.) I was still curious to know how HP would react, though, if he were faced with incontrovertible evidence that gay men were listening to some of his favourite music. I therefore resorted to a hypothetical situation: what if it became obvious that HP’s tastes were indeed shared by the very people he was trying to distance himself from? His response now shifted towards a familiar distinction-seeking position: in such a case, other people would be newly discovering Kylie, whereas he would have known about this music all along. HP is effectively saying: not only does he have more knowledge than them; he also has the right kind of knowledge. This form of distinction recalls Sarah Thornton’s argument in her seminal study of club cultures. Like her participants, HP treats Sydney’s gay male community (for the purposes of this discussion) as relatively homogenous: ‘they’ do not appreciate music in the same way he does.50

49 Cf. Toby MANNING, Gay Culture: Who Needs It?, in: Mark Simpson (ed.), Anti-Gay, London: Cassell, 1996, 98-99. 50 Sarah THORNTON, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital, Cambridge: Polity, 1995, 114-15.

347

Conclusion

The aesthetic perspectives of ‘everyday listeners’ can be useful for scholars interested in popular music, for the following reasons. First, as this preliminary study has demonstrated, it is possible to privilege the banal, the stupid, the smutty, and the ephemeral in popular music rather than only seeking the innova- tive, the virtuosic, or the structurally sophisticated. Walter Everett writes: »I am certain the music about which I write will live long regardless of my poor power to add or detract.«51 In contrast, HP’s perspective suggests that the music people play repeatedly – and the music which scholars consequently analyse – need not necessarily ‘live long’. People’s engagement with music may be illuminating even if neither the listener nor the researcher regards the music as aesthetically challenging or worthwhile. Second, the split between a musicological mode of listening and other types of listening needs further interrogation. HP’s intense investment in specific musical details (for example, his recognition of obscure samples in a remix of Madonna’s ‘Erotica’, or his attention to sequenced snare drum hits in Mel and Kim’s ‘Showing Out’) recalls Ruth Herbert’s important point: »directed…and distracted ways of listening do not map neatly onto special (unusual) and ordinary (mundane and habitual) contexts nor relate consistently to general levels of musical engagement.«52 While it is true that audiences may listen to music in a variety of contexts and while undertaking various everyday tasks, this does not necessarily guarantee that those people are listening in a ‘distracted’ way. In fact, such everyday listening may be the very context in which key Moments (to borrow HP’s terms) stand out. Third, this study has illustrated that Moments (rather than entire songs or albums) may be a legitimate focus for further research. Fourth and finally, this article has highlighted that ridiculing music does not necessarily equate with an ironic, detached mode of listening, nor does ridicule imply lack of engagement with the sounds themselves. On the contrary, HP’s careful attention to specific musical details – details that he himself regards as fleeting, stupid, or smutty – demonstrates that it is possible to study popular music without necessarily ‘canonis[ing] by complexity.’53

51 Walter EVERETT, Confessions from Blueberry Hell, or, Pitch Can Be A Sticky Substance, in: Walter Everett (ed.), Expression in Pop-Rock Music: A Collection of Critical and Analytical Essays, New York: Garland, 2000, 336. 52 Ruth HERBERT, Everyday Music Listening: Absorption, Dissociation and Trancing, Farnham: Ash- gate, 2011, 189. 53 C. KENNETT, Is Anybody Listening?, 204.

348

Summary

Susret muzikologije i Samanthe Fox: istraživanje svakodnevne estetike popularne glazbe

Muzikološko istraživanje popularne glazbe doživjelo je kritiku zbog kanoniziranja popularne glazbe i zato što nije odgovarajuće objasnilo kako se ‘svakodnevni slušatelji’ pribli- žavaju glazbi. Ovaj članak odgovara na takve kritike analizirajući estetičke izbore i načine slušanja jednog konkretnog ‘svakodnevnog slušatelja’, deidentificirajući ga ovdje kao ‘HP’. Istraživanje ističe nekoliko modaliteta po kojima se način slušanja HP-a razlikuje od usta- ljenih pristupa u muzikologiji i sociologiji. Prvo, HP ne sluša one vrste glazbe koje su pro- glasili valjanima anglo-američki rock tisak i akademski krugovi (na primjer, njegova glazbe- na zbirka daje prednost Samanthi Fox pred Beatlesima). Drugo, on se koncentrira na vrlo posebne ‘momente’ u svakome zvučnom zapisu, a ne na to da se u svakome zapisu anga- žira holistički. Treće, on očituje dubok angažman u glazbi (na primjer, izvodeći fino nijansi- rane kretnje prema glazbenom videu), dok je istodobno ismijava. U članku se raspravlja o tome da su stajališta ‘svakodnevnog slušatelja’ važna za istraživanje popularne glazbe. Takva stajališta mogu pomoći muzikologiji da izbjegne zam- ke kanoniziranja složenošću: ona ohrabruju istraživače da se pozabave glazbom koju se najšire shvaća kao banalnu ili efemernu, a ne da se samo fokusira na inovativno i struktur- no sofisticirano. Uz to, doživljaj slušateljâ kao što je HP dovodi u pitanje samo razlikovanje između ‘znanstvenog’ i ‘svakodnevnog’ slušanja. I napokon, u članku se naglašava da slušatelji mogu istodobno ismijavati i prigrliti neku glazbu. Takvo ismijavanje ne implicira manjak angažmana u samim zvukovima. Naprotiv, HP-ova brižna pozornost na pojedine glazbene detalje – detalje koje on sam čuje kao prolazne, glupe ili odvratne – pokazuje da je moguće baviti se popularnom glazbom a da ju se nužno ne kanonizira.

349

This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 86.59.13.237 on Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:55:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms