Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.48 (766 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0415943663 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 390 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-04-01 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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 Music will be a guilty pleasure!. 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
Chris Washburne is an Assistant Professor in the Music Department at Columbia University. He is also a trombonist who has played with major bands led by Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri, and leads his own Latin-jazz group.Maiken Derno holds a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Dept of Comparative Literature at the U of Copenhagen, and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia U from 1997-98. She al
Every now and then a book comes along that is embedded in our collective cultural conscience that we rarely see publicly discussed. Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate is such a volume.–Laura J. Gray, University of Wartloo, Notes, September 2005
"Don't judge this book by its cover" according to TheH. The cover and title would have you believe that this is a fun (or at least entertaining) book on the topic of bad music. It is actually a collection of scholarly essays on what makes bad music bad. The prose is as dense, dry, and impenetrable as the bran muffins sold in hospital cafeterias. My greatest fear is that the contributors to this volume actually thought they were being funny. My second greatest fear. "Most of the essays are drivel" according to A normal musician. This book is a waste of time and money. I wished they'd named it accurately, "Academic blowhards give opinions on obscure stuff". About 10% of this book is actually interesting. If you're an academic into stroking intellectual egos, this is the book for you.