Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T03:18:50.448Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Counting down to number one: the evolution of the meaning of popular music charts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Ernest A. Hakanen
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Every weekday evening on Columbia Broadcasting's (CBS) Late Show, host David Letterman delivers his tongue-in-cheek top ten lists. The lists have become one of the most recognisable symbols of American popular culture. Part of the humour lies in the pithy ranked statements about current events. However, much of the fun resides in Letterman's mockery of our obsession with rankings – rankings of everything from automobiles to college football teams to human attractiveness. The humour is sustained from night to night, week to week, year to year because of our uneasiness with rankings as a very powerful and enduring value-organising tool.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , January 1998 , pp. 95 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Althusser, L. 1977. For Marx (London)Google Scholar
Attali, J. 1989. Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis)Google Scholar
Baudrillard, J. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St Louis)Google Scholar
Baudrillard, J. 1983a. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (New York)Google Scholar
Baudrillard, J. 1983b. Simulations (New York)Google Scholar
Best, S. and Kellner, D. 1991. Postinodern Theory (London)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, V. W. 1985. ‘Women in popular music: a quantitative analysis of feminine images over time’, Sex Roles, 13 (9/10), pp. 499–506CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eco, U. 1976. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ennis, P.H. 1994. The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music (Hanover, NH)Google Scholar
Foucault, M. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York)Google Scholar
Foucault, M. 1982. ‘The subject and power’, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermaneutics, (eds) Dreyfus, H.L. and Rabinow, P. (Chicago)Google Scholar
Gergen, K. 1991. The Saturated Self (New York)Google Scholar
Gottdiener, M. 1995. Postinodern Semiotics: Material Culture and the Forms of Postmodern Life (Oxford)Google Scholar
Goody, J. 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind (New York)Google Scholar
Grossberg, E. 1992. We Got to Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservativism and Postmodern Culture (London)Google Scholar
Hakanen, E.A. 1995. ‘Emotional use of music by African American adolescents’, Howard Journal of Communication, 5(3), pp. 214–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hacking, I. 1981. ‘How should we do the history of statistics?’, Ideology and Consciousness, 8, pp.15–16Google Scholar
Hacking, I. 1982. ‘Biopower and the avalanche of printed numbers’, Humanities in Society, 5 (3, 4), pp. 279–95Google Scholar
Hawkes, T. 1977. Structuralism and Semiotics (Los Angeles)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hesbacher, P., Clasby, N., Clasby, H.G. and Berger, D.C. 1977. ‘Solo female vocalists: Some Shifts in Stature and Alterations in Song’, Popular Music and Society, 5(1), pp. 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jameson, F. 1972. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, NJ)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McLuhan, M. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York)Google Scholar
Phillips, D. D. and Schattmann, T. 1990. ‘Strip mining for gold and platinum: record sales and chart performance pre- and post-MTV’, Popular Music and Society, 14 (1), pp. 85–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poster, M. 1990. The Mode of Information (Chicago)Google Scholar
Postman, N. 1992. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York)Google Scholar
Riesman, D. 1961. The Lonely Crowd (New Haven)Google Scholar
Sanjek, D. 1991. American Popular Music Business in the 20th Century (New York)Google Scholar
Sarup, M. 1993. An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Post-Modernism (Athens)Google Scholar
Schlattmann, T. 1991. ‘From disco divas to the material girls: who's ruling the charts?’, Popular Music and Society, 15 (4), pp. 1–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wagner, R. 1995. ‘If you have the advertisement you don't need the product’, in Rhetorics of Self-Making, (ed.) Battaglia, D., pp. 59–76Google Scholar
Wells, A. 1986. ‘Women in popular music: changing fortunes from 1955 to 1984’, Popular Music and Society, 10(4), pp. 73–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wells, A. 1991. ‘Women on the pop charts: a comparison of Britain and the United States, 1960–88’, Popular Music and Society, 15(1), pp. 25–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar