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Popular music of the 1980s is remembered today as having a "sound" that is somehow unified and generalizable. The '80s sound is tied to the electric piano preset of the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. Not only was this preset (E. PIANO 1) astonishingly prevalent--heard in up to 61% of #1 hits on the pop, country, and R&B Billboard charts in 1986--but the timbre of E. PIANO 1 also encapsulates two crucial aspects of a distinctly '80s sound in microcosm: one, technological associations with digital FM synthesis and the Yamaha DX7 as a groundbreaking '80s synthesizer; and two, cultural positioning in a greater lineage of popular music history. This article analyzes the timbre of E. PIANO 1 by combining ethnographic study of musician language with visual analysis of spectrograms, a novel combination of techniques that links acoustic specificity with social context. The web of connections created by the use and re-use of DX7 presets like E. PIANO 1, among hundreds or maybe thousands of different tracks and across genres, is something that allows modern listeners to abstract a unified notion of the "'80s sound" from a diverse and eclectic repertoire of songs produced in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the contested issue of defining the genre of bluegrass music. Interpreting this debate as a subjective negotiation and renegotiation of a category, it focuses on the discursive and musical means through which ontologies of bluegrass are framed. In doing so, the article adds to a growing body of literature that considers genre in popular music as a flexible construct involving both musical performance and cultural formations. The article begins by exploring the idea of bluegrass as constructed by Bill Monroe and a number of early bluegrass scholars, after which it invokes recent work on human cognition and categorisation to analyse the genre debate among bluegrass enthusiasts. The article ultimately proposes that such discourse, notwithstanding its apparent futility, can be regarded as a vital means for a genre's self-perpetuation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The power ballad has become a mainstay of popular music since the 1970s. This article offers a history of the songs and discusses their place in the larger field of popular music genres. The songs are defined by the use of both a musical formula based on constant escalation and an expressive formula that combines the euphoric uplift created by rousing music with sentimental themes and ploys. Contrary to views that power ballads first appeared in 1980s rock and are primarily rock numbers, the songs emerged in the 1970s pop recordings of Barry Manilow and others, and from early on crossed genre lines, including pop, rock and R&B. These crossings result in an exchange between the fervour of the power ballad and the distinct expressive qualities of the other genres. This article also places the power ballad in the larger history of the ballad. The songs are part of a shift toward more effusive and demonstrative styles of ballads underway since the 1960s. In addition, the emotional excesses of the power ballad fit into a larger change in the expressive tone of works across different popular culture media. With those works, emotions are to be large, ecstatic and immediate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]