Mashups are a specific type of sample-based music where 'new' songs are created entirely from 'old' recordings. They contain no 'original' material and are the most overt examples of intertextuality in popular music. Vocal and instrumental parts are separated from musical backing through the process of 'unmixing'. Many of these extracts circulate freely (and often anonymously) on the Internet awaiting recombination with other samples. Following a brief history of mashup pioneers and an overview of its key players, I utilise a range of theoretical approaches to raise questions about originality and the role of the author as it pertains to entirely-sampled music. Permeating the essay are considerations of modernism and postmodernism. I suggest that the collaging, self-referential, ahistoric, postmodernistic tendencies of mashup creation are tempered by the outward-looking, inclusive, modernistic tendencies of DJ culture.

Tyler Bickford, Tween Pop: Children’s Music and Public Culture. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. 2020. 240 pp. ISBN 978-1-4780-0819-4 (pbk). $25.95.

This article describes the Children's Music Quotient (CMQ), a method of content analysis that aims to quantify the concept of childness developed by Peter Hollindale in Signs of Childness in Children's Literature and apply it to the study of recordings of music made for children. It outlines the development of the CMQ and demonstrates the kinds of findings it can generate through case studies based on a broad range of children's music recordings. The analysis of attributes within three categories of the recordings (music, lyrics and sonics) is used to support wider arguments about discourses of childhood in specific socio-historical examples. An evaluation of the method highlights its adaptability for the quantitative analysis of other children's media, such as books, films, television shows and computer games

No abstract

No abstract