English Rock and Pop Performances

Abstract

This book addresses the phenomenon of non-American rock and pop singers emulating an Americanized singing style for performance purposes. By taking a novel approach to this pop cultural trend and drawing attention to the audience, British and American students’ perceptions of English rock and pop performances were elicited. Interviews guided by various music clips were conducted and analyzed through a detailed qualitative content analysis. The interviewees' responses provide important insights into social meanings attached to Americanized voices and local British accents in the respective genres and show how British and American attitudes toward these performance accents differ. These perceptions and attitudes are illustrated by developing associative fields which offer a fresh view on the notion of indexicalities. An engaging folk linguistic investigation of a relatable everyday pop culture phenomenon, this book makes complex sociolinguistic phenomena easily approachable and qualitative research accessible. It is suitable for intermediate students onward and inspires further research projects in the field of language performances.

An Example of Linguistic Stylization in Spanish Musical Genres: Flamenco and Latin Music in Rosalía’s Discography

“…These registers are in the public mind and represent styles of music or cultural and social styles (Agha 2003). However, while it is true that the indexicality of linguistic phenomena in musical genres is evident, music styles change over time and regenerate; this was found by Trudgill (1980Trudgill ( , 1983 in early studies and is also being observed by researchers in British pop and rock today (Jansen 2022).…”

“…Rosalía is a bilingual speaker of Catalan and S speaks Spanish, she uses phonetic phenomena specific to the Spanish o ern peninsular and, in addition, linguistic characteristics from Catalan ish such as the palatalization of /-l/ at the end of a word, the voicing of word, which is pronounced as [-t] (verdad "true" as [beɾˈð̞ a t]) or the so some speakers, who pronounce this sound as [z], e.g., in los amigos "f os] (Garachana 2018;Villena-Ponsoda 2022;Poch Oliver 2019;Rius-Esc royo 2004, 2021, 1995García Mouton 2007;Vila-Pujol 2007) a] or abanico ("fan") [ava"niko]. 11 We have also noticed examples of articulatory reinforcement of the group [st] with an affricate pronunciation [hts], which is increasingly frequent, especially in western Andalusia (Ruch and Peters 2016;Ruch 2008;Vida Castro 2015, 2022Moya Corral 2007). In studies of traditional flamenco and flamenco fusion this variant also appears in younger generations, and Rosalía continues this trend in her songs.…”