Popular Music Songwriting as Cultural, Creative, and Economic Practice

Yearbook ‘Lied und Populäre Kultur / Song and Popular Culture’ of the Centre for Popular Culture and Music, Vol. 69 (2024), ed. by Michael Ahlers, Jan-Peter Herbst, and Knut Holtsträter.

This yearbook aims to shed light on the historical development and the current state of popular music songwriting in all its aspects. Possible topics and approaches include (but are not limited to):

• Concepts of the relationship between mainstream and marginalized music cultures in the 21st century;
• Influences of standardization, platformisation, and propertisation on songwriting processes or products;
• Singer-songwriters and the folk narrative (contemporary and historical practices);
• Songwriter/composer/producer: terminology and understanding of their roles;
• Literacy and orality in songwriting;
• Historical and current songwriting centres and collaborations (e.g., Music Hall, Tin Pan Alley, Brill Building, Motown, Nashville’s Music Row, London’s Denmark Street, PWL, Stock/Aitken/Waterman, Xenomania, Cheiron Studios, Prescription Songs);
• Business of songwriting and publishing;
• Songwriting as profession and labour;
• Teaching songwriting in and outside music pedagogy;
• Legal and ethical issues of songwriting;
• Contemporary songwriting practices, techniques, or arrangements (e.g., Svengali collaboration between pop artists and backroom songwriters, songwriting camps);
• Production as a part of songwriting, songwriting as a part of production;
• Genre-specifics in songwriting;
• Instruments and tools of songwriting
• Creativity myths and (self-)exploitation of artists;
• Computer-assisted songwriting and artificial intelligence.

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Bad Religion: Punk Politics, Philosophy, and Pedagogy

Call for Chapters

Editors:

• Ellen Bernhard, Assistant Professor of Digital Communication, Georgian Court University, US
• Paul Fields, Senior Lecturer in Music, Buckinghamshire New University, UK

Contact: [email protected]

Deadline for Submissions: 31 July 2023

With over 40 years of experience, 17 studio albums, and an extensive (and continuing) touring schedule, Bad Religion’s impact on music and culture is one worth investigating. The purpose of this edited volume will be to explore the impact of Bad Religion as a steadfast entity in a music genre notorious for its ephemeral tendencies. Because of this, we are interested in pursuing multidisciplinary perspectives on the subject of Bad Religion, seeking academic contributions that will examine different elements of the band’s decades-long tenure in order to demonstrate how Bad Religion’s role in punk rock’s history remains relevant today.

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Unheard Melodies: Towards A Global Musicology of boys love Media

What implications does the study of music, broadly defined, have for boys love media in Asia and beyond? The potential for comprehensive engagement appears vast in theory, but practical exploration remains somewhat limited. This prospective collection of essays aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice by delving into an otherwise relatively unexplored terrain. By examining the intricate dynamics between music and boys love media, encompassing visual, textual, audiovisual elements, and more, our mission is to shed light on the profound influence music exerts on narrative, aesthetics, and emotional expressions. While the amalgamation of music and popular media in the Asian context offers fertile ground for scholarly inquiry, the specific realm of boys love media remains noticeably absent from existing musicological scholarship. Through thoughtful research and an interdisciplinary approach, we warmly invite scholars, researchers, and experts to contribute studies that unravel the intricate connections between music and boys love media. Expanding on themes such as the narrative functions of music, portrayals of musical performances, the symbolic and metaphorical dimensions of music, and the affective and expressive currents in auditory, sonic, and queer contexts, this collection aspires to establish a robust foundation for exploring musicology within the diverse manifestations of boys love media across the expansive Asian landscape and beyond.

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This is Me: Interrogating the Female Pop Star Documentary

From Lady Gaga’s Five Foot Two (2017) to BlackPink’s Light Up the Sky (2020), Billie Eilish’s The World’s A Little Blurry (2021), Love, Lizzo (2022) and many more, documentaries on female pop stars have been released with increased frequency in the past decade. Many of the world’s most famous female artists both in (and beyond) the pop genre have allowed fragments of their onstage and offstage lives to be filmed and released for public consumption as part of the bolstering of their brand.

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K-pop and the West: Media, Fandom, and Transnational Politics

The Asia Research Institute, University at Buffalo (UB), the State University of New York October 27-28, 2023

The University at Buffalo’s Asia Research Institute will host its second annual Korean studies symposium, “K-pop and the West: Media, Fandom, and Transnational Politics,” on October 27- 28, 2023. The symposium aims at creating an opportunity to think about research, pedagogy, and methodologies in our critical study of K-pop in the West. There has been some debate about whether K-pop’s popularity in the U.S. market represents its status as a mainstream—as compared to an ethnic—pop genre. Some would argue that the current success of K-pop be viewed as a collective achievement of K-pop fans. In this view, American fans have, in particular, “fought against” the U.S. media industry’s commercial devaluation of K-pop and their racially discriminatory practices that adversely affect K-pop artists.

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International Conference on Media Industries

16-19 April 2024
Hosted by the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London

Paper, panel, and roundtable proposals are now invited for the 2024 ‘Media Industries’ conference (‘MI2024’).

After the success in 2018 of the inaugural conference ‘Media Industries: Current Debates and Future Directions’, unfortunately the planned 2020 conference had to be cancelled due to Covid lockdowns. We are therefore very pleased to announce the conference will return next year.

A key aim of MI2024 is to maintain an open intellectual agenda and provide a meeting ground for all forms of media industries research.

To this end, the conference invites proposals for papers, panels, and roundtables presenting research from across the full breadth of the media industries.

To energize interdisciplinary discussions, we welcome proposals presenting research from all intellectual and methodological traditions in media industries scholarship.

Additionally, to recognize the full scope and diversity of media industries, proposals may address industries in contemporary or historical contexts, and at global, transnational, national, or sub-national levels of analysis.

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