Of Producing Popular Music
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Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 6-26-2019 1:00 PM The Elements of Production: Myth, Gender, and the "Fundamental Task" of Producing Popular Music Lydia Wilton The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Coates, Norma. The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Popular Music and Culture A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Master of Music © Lydia Wilton 2019 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Musicology Commons Recommended Citation Wilton, Lydia, "The Elements of Production: Myth, Gender, and the "Fundamental Task" of Producing Popular Music" (2019). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 6350. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/6350 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract Using Antoine Hennion’s “anti-musicology”, this research project proposes a methodology for studying music production that empowers production choices as the primary analytical tool. It employs this methodology to analyze Kesha’s Rainbow, Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer, and St. Vincent’s Masseduction according to four, encompassing groups of production elements: musical elements, lyrical elements, personal elements, and narrative elements. All three albums were critical and commercial successes, and analyzing their respective choices offers valuable insight into the practice of successful producers that could not necessarily be captured by methodologies traditionally used for studying production, such as the interview. Further, as self-productions by female producers, these records confront and disrupt gendered perceptions of the production role that have mythologized and mischaracterized it in discourse. By unpacking the work of three radical producers, this thesis advocates for, and seeks to contribute to, reforming production discourse. Summary for Lay Audience This project argues for reforming the study of music production by focusing on the choices made by producers. It uses Antoine Hennion’s “anti-musicology” methodology to accordingly analyze Kesha’s Rainbow, Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer, and St. Vincent’s Masseduction as production case studies. All three albums were critical and commercial successes, and uncovering the production choices behind those successes offers greater insight than traditional interviews necessarily could. This project further seeks to redefine how production is thought of and studied by focusing on the work of three female artist- producers, when the production role has historically been characterized as male. .Keywords Music production, production myth, production elements, anti-musicology, Hennion, Kesha, Janelle Monáe, St. Vincent. i Acknowledgments Many thanks to my supervisor, Dr. Norma Coates, for investing her time and invaluable experience. I am grateful for Dr. Jay Hodgson’s insight and support as my second reader. Hannah Buckley, Emmett Robinson Smith, and Matthew Lipson are the best cohort that a scholar could ask for. Thank you Sam, Zeljko , and recently Will, for your dear and dedicated friendship. Emilia, you inspired this research. Henry, I want to be you when I grow up. Thank you to my family, who take my calls even at musician hours. Finally, Francis Mahady, I will send you a copy. ii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................. ii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................. iii List of Appendices ............................................................................................................. v Chapter 1 ........................................................................................................................... 1 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Methodology ........................................................................................................... 5 1.2 Literature Review .................................................................................................... 9 Chapter 2 ........................................................................................................................ 14 2 Kesha's Rainbow .......................................................................................................... 14 2.1 Creative Context ................................................................................................... 15 2.2 Narrative Elements ................................................................................................ 19 2.3 Musical Elements .................................................................................................. 22 2.4 Lyrical Elements ................................................................................................... 28 2.5 Personal Elements ................................................................................................. 32 Chapter 3 ........................................................................................................................ 36 3 Janelle Monae's Dirty Computer .................................................................................. 36 3.1 Creative Context ................................................................................................... 36 3.2 Narrative Elements ................................................................................................ 39 3.3 Musical Elements .................................................................................................. 45 3.4 Lyrical Elements ................................................................................................... 52 3.5 Personal Elements ................................................................................................. 57 Chapter 4 ........................................................................................................................ 60 4 St. Vincent's Masseduction .......................................................................................... 60 iii 4.1 Creative Context ................................................................................................... 61 4.2 Narrative Elements ................................................................................................ 65 4.3 Musical Elements .................................................................................................. 70 4.4 Lyrical Elements ................................................................................................... 79 4.5 Personal Elements ................................................................................................. 82 Chapter 5 ......................................................................................................................... 85 Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 90 Appendices ....................................................................................................................... 95 Curriculum Vitae ............................................................................................................ 98 iv List of Appendices Appendix A: Visual Lyrical Analysis of “Django Jane” ........................................................ 95 v 1 Chapter 1 1 Introduction “The art of record production is to realise a vision expressed by an artist’s articulation in a form that results from the producer’s perception.” – Mike Howlett, “The Record Producer as Nexus” Studying production is a fraught balancing act. Production historically confounds comprehensive definition, leading to discursive inconsistencies in not just “emerging” production studies, but the broader fields of popular culture, popular music, and musicology.1 As Russ Hepworth-Sawyer and Jay Hodgson write in Perspectives on Music Production, “both tacit and explicit definitions of ‘music production’ offered in recent research often bear a tautological resonance: record production is everything done to produce a recording of music”.2 While a well-intentioned effort to maintain a necessarily “broad” view of the production process, a definition of production worth universal utility must engage with the “numerous component procedures” encompassed within the production process, “each of which, while holistically realized, nonetheless requires its own specialized expertise(s).”3 Hepworth-Sawyer and Hodgson argue that an understanding as generalized as the above, while not necessarily inaccurate, “simply doesn’t withstand sustained analytic scrutiny”.4 At the other end of the analytical spectrum is an equally misleading tradition of sonic abstraction, a fixation akin to what Robin James calls, “but what about the music?” criticism.5 Attempting to scale back definitions of production for analytic purposes historically result in academics attempting to hold recordings separate from the socio- political contexts of their making, divorcing