American Popular Culture Commons^™

Bass And Drum Grooves In R&B: Analysis And Composition, Hugh Taylor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The term “R&B” has existed within the musical lexicon for nearly eighty years. It was first introduced in 1949 to replace the label “race music,” and was a combination of blues, jazz, gospel, and rock. Since then, the genre has transitioned from swing-based, live instrumentation toward straight-eighth backbeats and electronically produced sounds. Despite these shifts, contemporary R&B continues to borrow from its ancestral roots while maintaining a modern aesthetic. A primary feature that has persisted through this landscape is the “groove,” specifically defined here as the rhythmic layer created by the drums and bass. In R&B, the bass provides both …

Music As Memory And Narrative In American Graffiti And Dazed And Confused, Jacob Tone

CAFE Symposium 2026

This poster explores how George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) and Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993) utilize popular music as a narrative tool to define the evolution of American youth culture. By examining the shift from the unified, diegetic radio culture of 1962 to the fragmented, ironic rock pastiche of 1976, the research highlights how Lucas creates a "communal identity" rooted in sincerity while Linklater captures the "disillusionment" of a generation adrift. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that these soundtracks are not mere background elements but serve as vital cultural archives that mediate between history and cinematic memory, shaping the way …

Murder On Music Row: A Narrative Analysis Of Mass-Mediated Country Music And Independent Texas Red Dirt Music, Jennifer A. Worley

Communication Theses

This project employs Roland Barthes' narrative codes as a framework for textual analysis to examine the underlying structures and meanings within song lyrics from two contrasting traditions of country music: mass-mediated Nashville country and Texas Red Dirt. With a sample spanning a five-year period, the study explores how narrative forms reflect broader socio-cultural dynamics and economic forces. Drawing upon the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, particularly the works of Theodor Adorno and Karl Marx, the project concentrates on the commodification of cultural products and implications for authenticity and truth in cultural expression. Through a comparative analysis, the research reveals …

Record Scratch: The Podcast, Kate Widmer

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

“Record Scratch: The Podcast” is an attempt to gather some of the history of Missoula’s alternative music scene from the 1990s until now, to contribute to documentation of Montana’s art scenes as well as to summarize and finalize my two and a half years of doing music reporting in Missoula. For the podcast, I interviewed four people who are active in Missoula’s music scene. Our discussions range from their youth through to the present day, giving several perspectives on Missoula’s changing music culture, as well as what it means to be a punk in Montana. My guiding reason for this …

Pop Culture And Politics: Engaging Students In American Government Through Art, Music, And Film, Laura Merrifield Wilson

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Strategically and thoughtfully employing popular culture in teaching political science can enable students to better understand, analyze, and relate to the material. In a discipline that can be viewed by students as too boring, too distant, and too polarizing, the use of relevant music, TV/film clips, toys, memes, and other popular culture artifacts can engage otherwise unengaged students in a meaningful way. This paper argues that using popular culture in teaching political science can demonstrate relevance, serve as a generational translator, expose the bias of experience, and enable an expression of self. In demonstrating relevance, popular culture makes material fresh …

Constraining The (Im)Possible: Improvisation And Violence In Rafi Zabor’S The Bear Comes Home, Hannah Ianniello

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This paper will explore the role of jazz improvisation in the characterization of the protagonist in Rafi Zabor’s 1998 jazz novel, The Bear Comes Home. I suggest that Zabor represents the process of improvisation to not only enhance the enigma of The Bear’s ability as a jazz musician, but also to enhance his capacity towards violence.

Through the exploration of the actual process of improvisation in the research of Paul Berliner, Ingrid Monson and Alyn Shipton, Improvisation in a real jazz context is collaborative and exploratory. However, Zabor, like many other authors (such as Michael Ondaatje, James Baldwin and …

Lady Gaga Meets Ritzer: Using Music To Teach Sociological Theory, Kenneth Culton, José A. Muñoz

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This paper presents methods for instructors to deal with student anxiety over theory courses. The method is an interactive class exercise that provides instructors with direction as to using popular music. The paper accomplishes this through the use of several cases for including music in order to spark discussion and suggestions for helping students to interpret the theory presented. Additionally, suggestions for incorporating writing assignments with the exercise are provided here. A table linking music to a theorist is also provided.

Book Review: Something In The Water: A History Of Music In Macon, Georgia, 1823-1980, Timothy Cole Hale

Georgia Library Quarterly

No abstract provided.

El Nacimiento Del Rock En Español: ¿Cómo Fue Que Este Género De Música Latina Tuvo Éxito?, Alejandro V. Martinez

World Languages and Cultures

This paper titled El nacimiento del rock en español: ¿Cómo fue que este género de música latina tuvo éxito? will cover information regarding the Spanish rock movement. This essay compares what is written in this paper to that of prior scholars to show that although they do bring valid points, there is a lot more than many of us realize. There are various articles and reports written about the movement, but many do not explain the creation of the movement, let alone its survival in the music industry as a new genre that some had never heard of or had …

Rafael Cortijo’S Space Music: Sounds Of Caribbean Blackness, Marissel Hernandez-Romero

Third Stone

Black Puerto Rican musician Rafael Cortijo (1928-1982) is a key feature in Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and Latin American music. He is one of the few musicians celebrated internationally for his skills as a percussionist, orchestra leader, and composer. Despite this, his music is often described as as ‘noise’, or at least that was my memory growing up in a predominantly white community in Puerto Rico. This article proposes and theorizes the existence of a Hispanic Caribbean Space Music emerging at the same time of the Afrofuturist movement and to which Rafael Cortijo makes a great contribution. By doing this, I …

Song Analysis - Final Project For The American Musical Experience, Agustina Checa

Open Educational Resources

Assignment designed as a final project for the undergraduate course MSH245: The American Musical Experience at Lehman College. This course surveys different musical expressions that emerged in the United States as well as the historical, social and technological contexts framing their popularization.This assignment asks students to analyze a song of their choosing performed by an American artist and to follow specific requirements in their study of this piece which include: historical and social contextualization, analysis of style, influences and lyrics, as well as the elaboration of a "listening guide" to fully appreciate the composition. Students are given the …

Intro To Jazz, Jon De Lucia

Open Educational Resources

OER Based Syllabus for MUS 145 Intro to Jazz course at City College. Covers the history and development of jazz along with basic music fundamental vocabulary.

Noise Over Signal: Phonography Culture As Participatory, Patrick Williams, Jason Luther

Librarian Publications

While participatory culture has been of special interest to scholars for nearly three decades, much of the focus has centered on digitally networked contexts. The digital age has indeed transformed our approaches to listening to music and how we operate as fans of music; these approaches can weave together the new and the old, and are enacted among a variety of spaces, objects, and relationships. We explore how the re-emergence of one such object in the digital age — the LP — has produced social arrangements that perhaps excavate older listening practices but do so in ways that have been …

In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American girls and women used the parlor piano to reshape their lives between 1880 and 1920, the years when the instrument reached the height of its commercial and cultural popularity. Newspapers, memoirs, biographies, women’s magazines, personal papers, and trade publications show that female pianists engaged in public-facing piano play and work in pursuit of artistic expression, economic gain, self-actualization, social mobility, and social change. These motivations drove many to use their piano skills to play beyond the parlor, by studying in conservatory, working as classical and popular music performers and composers, founding and teaching at schools, working as department store …

The Musical World Of Joseph Rumshinsky’S Mamele, D. A. Geller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The Musical World of Joseph Rumshinsky’s Mamele” consists of a set of three cases studies that demonstrate the enormous need and potential for further Yiddish theater music scholarship. There exists little Yiddish theater scholarship that addresses music in any meaningful way: scholars like David Lifson, Nahma Sandrow, and Joel Berkowitz tend to view Yiddish theater’s rich musical traditions as a footnote in the larger history of Yiddish theater’s dramatic development. Yet Yiddish theater music developed independently from Yiddish drama, and therefore needs to be studied from a primarily musical perspective. I connect scholarship across the fields of Jewish studies …

Resonant Texts: The Politics Of Nineteenth-Century African American Music And Print Culture, Paul Fess

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Resonant Texts: the Politics of Nineteenth-Century African American Music and Print Culture, investigates musical sound as a discursive tool African American writers and activists deployed to contest enslavement before the Civil War and claim citizenship after Emancipation. Traditionally, scholars have debated the degree to which nineteenth-century African American music constituted evidence of black culture and marked a persistent African orality that still abides within African American textual production. While these trends inform this project, my inquiry focuses on the ways that writers placed elements of musical sound—such as rhythm, melody, choral singing, and harmony—at the center of their …

Movements, Music, And Meaning: A Comparative Analysis Of Cultural Narratives In Vietnam Era And Post-9/11 Anti-War Music, Jonathan Nathaniel Redman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the presence of widely circulating cultural narratives in the lyrics of approximately eighty anti-war songs from the Vietnam and post-9/11 eras. Unlike prior movements and music research, this thesis privileges culture over movements and views movements as cultural antennae both picking up on trends and cultural narratives, and broadcasting their own altered cultural meanings back into the “cultural airways.” It sees music as a cultural medium which acquires cultural meanings from its surroundings, alters those meanings, synthesizes new ones, and perpetuates old ones. Drawing on comparative and narrative analysis approaches informed by grounded theory techniques, this thesis …

Who Can Afford To Improvise? James Baldwin And Black Music, The Lyric And The Listeners [Table Of Contents], Ed Pavlic

Literature

More than a quarter-century after his death, James Baldwin remains an unparalleled figure in American literature and African American cultural politics. In Who Can Afford to Improvise? Ed Pavlić offers an unconventional, lyrical, and accessible meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music, from gospel and blues to jazz and R&B. Based on unprecedented access to private correspondence, unpublished manuscripts and attuned to a musically inclined poet’s skill in close listening, Who Can Afford to Improvise? frames a new narrative of James Baldwin’s work and life.

The route …

Living In A Gangsta’S Paradise: Dr. C. Delores Tucker’S Crusade Against Gansta Rap Music In The 1990s, Jordan A. Conway

Theses and Dissertations

This project examines Dr. C. DeLores Tucker’s efforts to abolish the production and distribution of gangsta rap to the American youth. Though her efforts were courageous and daring, they were not sufficient. The thesis will trace Tucker’s crusade beginning in 1992 through the end of the 1990s. It brings together several themes in post-World War II American history, such as the issues of race, gender, popular culture, economics, and the role of government. The first chapter thematically explores Tucker’s crusade, detailing her methodology and highlighting pivotal events throughout the movement. The second chapter discusses how opposition from rap artists, and …

Rave Reviews The History Of Akron's Tuesday Musical, Thomas Bacher, Cynthia Harrison, Sharon Cebula

University of Akron Press Publications

The Tuesday Musical Club was founded in 1887 by thirteen young Akron women who had an overwhelming desire to share their love of music. With further support of Gertrude Penfield Seiberling, the wife of industrialist Frank Seiberling, the organization grew like many other musical organizations across the country. Unlike similar clubs, the Akron-based entity continued to expand and is one of a very few that have survived. Among the artists who have appeared as a part of the rich history of Akron's Tuesday Musical Organization are Vladimir Horowitz, Artur Rubinstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Yascha Heifetz, Glenn Gould, Van Cliburn, Isaac Stern, …

Unlocking The Paradox Of Christian Metal Music, Eric S. Strother

Theses and Dissertations--Music

In 1984, Stryper released its first album The Yellow and Black Attack and introduced audiences to a different kind of heavy metal. Instead of lyrics about sex, alcohol, and Satan, Stryper sang about Jesus, salvation, and God. While there were a number of fans ready for this change more were not. Members of the Church as well as members of the metal subculture were in agreement that Christianity and heavy metal were incompatible. Despite these objections, however, more bands emerged, and Christian metal became a significant genre within the Christian music industry. These bands presented Christian-oriented lyrics within the full …

Whitaker, Francis J., 1916-1994 (Mss 406), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans of selected items (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Collection 406. Correspondence, research notes and manuscript articles of Francis J. “Thomas” Whitaker, a Benedictine monk who lived and worked at St. Maur’s Priory, formerly the South Union Shaker Village in Logan County, Kentucky, from 1954-1988. He amassed a large collection of photocopied research material on the South Union community as well as other Shaker villages and museums in the United States. Also includes his research on various Catholic topics.

When Predator Becomes Prey: The Gendered Jargon Of Popular Culture, Melissa R. Ames

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century the vernacular of popular culture has been bombarded by sexualized terminology. Although these terms are often formed with humorous intent, their staying power and use as cultural descriptive categories is both intriguing and disturbing. Also troubling is the fact that the majority of these new terms, such as puma (a thirty-something female “dating” a younger male), cougar (a forty-plus female “dating” a younger male), and MILF (“mother I’d like to fuck”), are restricted to the female gender alone. This article analyzes the etymology of these terms, their use in popular culture (ranging …

Stoner, Joel, B. 1950 (Fa 492), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 492. Interviews, transcriptions, photographs, and miscellaneous data collected by Joel Stoner pertaining to the Bowling Green, Kentucky music scene in the 1970s.

Jienan Yuan (Chien Yuan) Interview, Lauren Smith

Asian American Art Oral History Project

2009 interview with record producer and composer Chien Yuan by Lauren Smith

Cooper, Laura (Fa 314), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid and full-text scan of paper (Click on “Additional Files” below) for Folklife Archives Project 314. Paper: "Cowboys and Songs" written by Laura Cooper for a Western Kentucky University folk studies class.

Mtv: Sounds Of A Generation, Amanda Evens

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

Ridington, Amber Flower, B. 1969 (Fa 200), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 200. Transcriptions and cassette tapes (14) of interviews that Amber Ridington, Western Kentucky University student, had with Joe Marshall, Bowling Green, Kentucky, and other individuals who were knowledgeable about the operations of the Quonset, 1946-1959, a music and recreational venue in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Summer 1993, 90.9 Wmpg Fm

WMPG Program Guides

WMPG program guide for Summer 1993.

Spring 1993, 90.9 Wmpg Fm

WMPG Program Guides

WMPG Program Guide, Spring 1993.