Embodied Expression in Popular Music

Abstract This study of embodiment and meaning in popular music explores a wide-ranging repertoire, offering a performance-based analytical methodology that progresses from basic idiomatic gestures, to gestural combinations and interactions with large-scale design, to broader interpretive strategies that engage with theories of embodiment, the musical topic, and narrative. The book examines artistic practices in popular song that draw from a vast range of stylistic sources, including rock, blues, folk, soul, funk, fusion, and hip hop, as well as European classical and African American gospel musical traditions. Exploring the interrelationships in how we create, hear, and understand music through the body, the study demonstrates how a focus on body-instrument interaction can illuminate musical structures while leveling implied hierarchies of cultural value. Through detailed analysis of artists’ creative strategies in singing and playing their instruments, the book probes how musicians represent subjectivities of gender, race, and social class in shaping songs and whole albums. Tracing connections from foundational musicians including Jimi Hendrix and Aretha Franklin to recent artists, the book clarifies how inferences of musical topic and narrative are part of a larger creative process in strategically positioning musical gestures. This study of popular song explores how the situated and engaged body provides an integral dimension in listening, performing, and creating musical cultures, as it comprises a means by which we understand our own bodies in relation to the world.