Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgement
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Popular music analysis: ten apothegms and four instances
- 3 From lyric to anti-lyric: analyzing the words in pop song
- 4 The sound is ‘out there’: score, sound design and exoticism in The X-Files
- 5 Feel the beat come down: house music as rhetoric
- 6 The determining role of performance in the articulation of meaning: the case of ‘Try a Little Tenderness’
- 7 Marxist music analysis without Adorno: popular music and urban geography
- 8 Jethro Tull and the case for modernism in mass culture
- 9 Pangs of history in late 1970s new-wave rock
- 10 Is anybody listening?
- 11 Talk and text: popular music and ethnomusicology
- Bibliography
- Discography
- Film/Videography
- Index
5 - Feel the beat come down: house music as rhetoric
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgement
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Popular music analysis: ten apothegms and four instances
- 3 From lyric to anti-lyric: analyzing the words in pop song
- 4 The sound is ‘out there’: score, sound design and exoticism in The X-Files
- 5 Feel the beat come down: house music as rhetoric
- 6 The determining role of performance in the articulation of meaning: the case of ‘Try a Little Tenderness’
- 7 Marxist music analysis without Adorno: popular music and urban geography
- 8 Jethro Tull and the case for modernism in mass culture
- 9 Pangs of history in late 1970s new-wave rock
- 10 Is anybody listening?
- 11 Talk and text: popular music and ethnomusicology
- Bibliography
- Discography
- Film/Videography
- Index
Summary
It's 4 a.m. and you're speeding. On the crowded dance space, jagged flashes of strobe lighting fuse with the booming sound of the sub-bass to create a kaleidoscope of sensations. The sonic roar is driven by the fast pace of the 125 bpm beat, transporting you to a destination far removed from the grim realities of everyday life. Blood pressure rises as the temperature in the room intensifies and the beat takes control; all inhibitions are abandoned for euphoria. Lost in the music, you are aware of your feelings for all sharing the dancefloor as the serotonin in your body creates waves of depthless bliss. Suddenly the break section is upon us and the regular beat becomes layered with the amorous moans of a female vocalist lifting our emotions to a higher plateau. Next the rhythm and bass drop out leaving the voice on its own, raw, exposed, orgasmic. Flanged into the mix, pleasurable groans fill the air as the strobes dissipate into a flood of purple haze. You want to swoon, fall, float, as suspense in waiting for the return of the beat becomes an excruciating eternity. Caught in time, the crowd appears in a trance swaying with arms raised in response to the ecstatic moans of the female vocalist. Starting up again, then, slowly, the beat begins to pound through: the throb of the kick drum punctuated with stabs of metal-edged brass sounds on the off-beats. No longer are you listening, but feeling the overpowering beat as everyone starts jacking to the energy with a fluency that locks into the beat.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Analyzing Popular Music , pp. 80 - 102Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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