Overview

Winner, ASA (American Society for Aesthetics) 2023 Outstanding Monograph Prize For Theodore Gracyk meaning in popular music depends as much on the context of reception and performer’s intentions as on established musical and semantic practices. Songs are structures that serve as the scaffolding for meaning production, influenced by the performance decisions of the performer and their intentions. Arguing against prevailing theories of meaning that ignore the power of the performance, Gracyk champions the contextual relevance of the performer as well as novel messaging through creative repurposing of recordings. Extending the philosophical insight that meaning is a function of use, Gracyk explains how both the performance persona and the personal life of a song’s performer can contribute to (or undercut) ethical and political aspects of a performance or recording. Using Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain”, Pink Floyd, the emergence of the musical genre of post-punk and the practice of “cover” versions, Gracyk explores the multiple, sometimes contradictory, notions of authenticity applied to popular music and the conditions for meaningful communication. He places popular music within larger cultural contexts and examines how assigning a performance or recording to one music genre rather than another has implications for what it communicates. Informed by a mix of philosophy of art and philosophy of language, Gracyk's entertaining study of popular music constructs a theoretical basis for a philosophy of meaning for songs.

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9781350249097

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Reviews

This book and its theories will be a starting point for all future scholarship on popular music songs. Gracyk's philosophical and critical acumen are on display in every chapter. Reading this book, one not only gets a theory of how popular songs communicate, but also a theory of musical covers versus remakes, an account of collective creation with a solution to the Pink Floyd problem, and an analysis of post-punk and why it matters. --Tobyn DeMarco, Professor of Philosophy, Bergen Community College, USA

Author Information

Theodore Gracyk is Professor of Philosophy at Minnesota State University Moorhead, USA. He is the co-editor of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

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