Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate

by Washburne,Christopher J.

• ISBN13: 9780415943659
• ISBN10: 0415943655
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-09-29
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Why are some popular musical forms and performers universally reviled by critics and ignored by scholars-despite enjoying large-scale popularity? How has the notion of what makes "good" or "bad" music changed over the years-and what does this tell us about the writers who have assigned these tags to different musical genres? Many composers that are today part of the classical "canon" were greeted initially by bad reviews. Similarly, jazz, country, and pop musics were all once rejected as "bad" by the academy that now has courses on these and many other types of music. This book addresses why this is so through a series of essays on different musical forms and performers. It looks at alternate ways of judging musical performance beyond the critical/academic nexus, and suggests new paths to follow in understanding what makes some music "popular" even if it is judged to be "bad." For anyone who has ever secretly enjoyed ABBA, Kenny G, or disco,Bad Musicwill be a guilty pleasure!

Table of Contents

Editor's Preface	ix
Introduction	1	(14)
Christopher Washburne
Maiken Derno
What is Bad Music?	15	(24)
Simon Frith
I Value & Identity Politics
White Trash Alchemies of the Abject Sublime: Country as ``Bad'' Music	39	(23)
Aaron A. Fox
Pop Music, Racial Imagination, and the Sounds of Cheese: Notes on Loser's Lounge	62	(21)
Jason Lee Oakes
Bad World Music	83	(21)
Timothy D. Taylor
Theorizing the Musically Abject	104	(19)
Elizabeth Tolbert
II Canonizing the Popular, Discovering the Mundane
Does Kenny G Play Bad Jazz?: A Case Study	123	(25)
Christopher Washburne
The Flight from Banality	148	(25)
James Koehne
The Good, The Bad, and The Folk	173	(17)
Richard Carlin
Film, Music, and the Redemption of the Mundane	190	(22)
Giorgio Biancorosso
A Moment Like This: American Idol and Narratives of Meritocracy	212	(23)
Matthew Wheelock Stahl
III Noise, Malfunction, and Discourses of (In)Authenticity
Extreme Noise Terror: Punk Rock and the Aesthetics of Badness	235	(22)
Angela Rodel
Glitch--The Beauty of Malfunction	257	(18)
Torben Sangild
Glitches, Bugs, and Hisses: The Degeneration of Musical Recordings and the Contemporary Musical Work	275	(19)
Eliot Bates
Rock Critics Need Bad Music	294	(17)
Deena Weinstein
Much Too Loud and Not Loud Enough: Issues Involving the Reception of Staged Rock Musicals	311	(22)
Elizabeth L. Wollman
IV Historical Afterthought
Trivial Music (Trivialmusik): ``Preface'' and ``Trivial Music and Aesthetic Judgment''	333	(30)
Carl Dahlhaus
Uli Sailer
Walter Frisch
Contributors	363	(4)
Index	367