HOME

WORK

THE CASE STUDY

     Scholarly writing about most popular music, and especially Electronic Dance Music, tends to prize musical context (producers, fans, communities, modes of production and consumption) over the musical text itself.  This is partially due to the disciplinary origins of pop music studies (anthropology, sociology, cultural studies), but it also has to do with a lack of tools/methods for describing and interpreting popular music.
     This is where I (hopefully) come in.  I've decided to take one track and do a close reading--the post-modern-friendly version of an analysis.  A close reading combines the notion of 'closeness' (an intense, detailed, often deconstructive examination) with post-modern ideas of 'reading' (a subjective, interpretive act, often seeking/creating meaning).  Years and years of academic debate has made it clear that there is no one perfect way execute a close reading, but why should there be a perfect way?  My approach in this study is to accept the imperfect incompleteness inherent in any kind of reading, and then try to minimize its effect by reading from multiple perspectives.
     If a text (an object that can be 'read') can be viewed from multiple perspectives, then it stands to reason that these different perspectives can often lead to very different and sometimes conflicting meanings for the same text.  This is why I ultimately chose the first track ("Everybody's Soft") from the debut album, "Do You Party?", by The Soft Pink Truth (a.k.a. Drew Daniel a.k.a. one-half of experimental/IDM duo Matmos), for my case study.  From the first moment I heard the track, I perceived several different layers of sonic meaning, and it seemed like the perfect object of study. 
      Admittedly, you might call that 'cheating' or 'stacking the deck'...so what?  Perhaps there are other EDM/IDM tracks out there that are less 'rich' with layers of meaning, and perhaps they are equally valued and valuable to EDM/IDM consumers.  Perhaps those tracks are 'rich' in other ways that I and other scholars have yet to describe.  I have the rest of my life to consider 'other' tracks, but this one happens to be where my head is at right now, and that's all the justification I need.

SOURCES

ONLINE REVIEWS

      Admittedly, "Do You Party?" hasn't had the same media attention as—say—the latest Britney Spears/Eminem/Xtina Aguilera collaboration, but there's still a substantial number of reviews available on the net.  Since I've gone to the trouble of collecting them, you might as well check them out, too.

• Discogs.com
• ForcedExposure
• LAUT.de
• Bleach, Anthony C. PopMatters.com
• Cianciotta, Aurelio. neural.it
• DiBenedetto, Lou. Atrocity Exhibition
• Leone, Dominique. PitchforkMedia.com
• Marchese, Steve. Free Williamsburg
• matthieu. Bokson
• Mishra, Jyoti. Bzangy Groink
• shaviro. The Pinoccio Theory
• Swenson, Kylee. RemixMag.com
• Tomaselli, Peter. Absorb.org
• Various. Amazon.com

SUPERVISOR'S CORNER

     This area is for those super-special, extra-excellent people who, it just so happens, will be assigning a mark to my final paper.  All of the links below are password-protected files (research materials, copyrighted stuff, etc.).  It's just like a secret society...but without the handshake. [NOTE: I've put these offline until I get the password-protection thing worked out on the new U of Chicago server.]

Full Draft (PDF file)

NOTE: This is the most current version of this paper!  Acccept no substitute!  I've removed earlier versions of this paper so that there will be no confusion.

Last updated August 9, 2004 19:18

Working outline (PDF file)

Last updated October 28, 2003 21:25

Figure List (DOC file)

This is the complete set of figures I'm using, including a number of screenshots which will not make it into the final draft.

Last updated December 6, 2003 3:57

Projective Transcription (PDF file)

This is the transcription I did, using Hasty's meter as projection model.

Last updated December 6, 2003 4:01