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The Pump‐Up in Pop Music of the 1970s and 1980s
Author(s) -
RICCI ADAM
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
music analysis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.25
H-Index - 18
eISSN - 1468-2249
pISSN - 0262-5245
DOI - 10.1111/musa.12086
Subject(s) - semitone , tone (literature) , focus (optics) , literature , harmonic , section (typography) , energy (signal processing) , computer science , aesthetics , art , history , linguistics , philosophy , mathematics , acoustics , speech recognition , physics , optics , statistics , operating system
The pump‐up, which transposes an entire section of a pop song up by semitone or whole tone, has been widely castigated as a cheap trick for investing an inferior song with more energy towards its end. And cheap trick it often is, especially when the procedure seems unmotivated by anything within the song itself but is instead imposed from without. Indeed, previous scholars have focused especially on songs that prepare their pump‐ups through various means. This study continues that focus while also providing some useful generalizations from a corpus study of approximately 250 songs. Concentrating on the decades of the 1970s and '80s as critical to the development of the pump‐up, it identifies common harmonic types and their interaction with particular intervals of transposition – including those larger than a whole step – and then examines some more unusual and nuanced examples.