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In recent years, Björk has defied pop music criticism's persistent myth of male genius by asserting her authorship as a singer, songwriter, composer, and producer. She expressed these concerns during a 2015 Pitchfork interview with Jessica Hopper by reflecting on the press's minimization of her production work throughout her career and her desire to reclaim her creative authority as a model for younger female-identified artists. During this portion of the conversation, she mused, "I've sometimes thought about releasing a map of all my albums and just making it clear who did what." Her impulse to challenge masculinist creation myths through documentation became the catalyst for Björk: Sonic Symbolism, a 2022 podcast miniseries sponsored by Mailchimp in which she discussed her albums' creative processes with friends Oddny' Eir and A' smundur Jo'nson in a series of interviews. The title, which Björk defines as "a visual shortcut to describe sound," provides the podcast's framework for her articulation of authorial control, which she examines through album art that illustrates each cover's mood and character; poetic synopses of each album's unique audiovisual language; and references to her various studio, video, and stage collaborators. By using close listening to examine Björk's conversations with Eir and Jo'nson and the episodes' illustrative song segments, this article posits that Björk's engagement with podcasting as an audio storytelling medium allows her to foreground her distinct speaking and singing voice as both a feminist intervention upon the recording industry and as a sonic metaphor for authorial control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses textual and discourse analysis to examine the interpersonal dynamic between Rob and Cherise in High Fidelity (Hulu 2020), two Black female characters at the center of a gender- and race-flipped TV remake of Nick Hornby's (1995) novel and Stephen Frears's (2000) film. It centers Cherise in the frame by examining how she opposes her secondary status as a supporting character with her undervalued critical and creative acumen, traits she shares with her white male literary and cinematic counterparts but activates differently as a Black woman. It situates Cherise and actress Da'Vine Joy Randolph's interpretation of the source material through the practice of cover singing. Though covers are often dismissed as unoriginal, reinterpretation is particularly useful for Black female performers who transform other peoples' songs as a tactic against artistic marginalization, one that allows them to critique institutional racism and sexism. This acuity implicates the media industries' limited imagination for Black female characters and the performers who bring them to life. Thus, Cherise and Randolph reveal the work ahead to bring Black female characters into focus by embellishing the margins of a story and challenging an adaptation process that was not designed to center them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harold and Maude (1971) DVD distributed by the Criterion Collection, 2012 Appropriate for a film that takes on loss as one of its main themes, death shapes the Criterion Collection [...]

RuPaul's Drag Race (Logo TV, 2009-present) tethers drag culture to pop stardom by structuring challenges around host RuPaul's recording career and eliminations around lip sync contests that promote guest judges' music. By its fourth season, it began substantially rewarding contestants for using pop music to showcase their own branding and musical skills. By analyzing the program and its surrounding industry discourse, this article identifies a Season 4 infomercial challenge promoting RuPaul's catalogue as a turning point in the program's relationship to pop music due to its winner's ascent as a recording artist. As a result, many white and light-skinned cast members were far better able to mount their own recording careers after appearing on the program than their counterparts of color. Thus, this article argues that Drag Race uses the recording industry as a site for contestants' professionalization that reinforces pop music's and reality programming's entrenched neoliberalism and post-racial politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that music is a meaningful resource within feminist and queer communities that supplements traditional modes of activist work and political commentary. To do so, it analyzes guest-curated playlists for feminist- and queer-oriented multimedia sites Bitch Media and Homoground by offering thick description of a representative playlist from each site's archive in order to interpret their political motives. Such mixing practices represent playlists' civic engagement in two ways. First, they demonstrate fan identification through producers' efforts to assemble feminist critiques from music by recording artists who represent various eras and genres and identify as female, queer, and/or people of color. Second, it indicates digital media's potential for community-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the music performances and booking practices in the television program "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon." The author evaluates the labor relations between musicians, bandleaders, and booking agents and describes how the television program broke emerging recording artists. Also explores is the show's musical identity.

This essay considers music’s interpretive functions in Varda’s 2008 documentary Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse. The film’s score references the director’s collaborative history with other composers throughout her career. In particular, the author is interested in what Varda’s musical collaborations can tell us about her creative process and her own sense of authorship. The author also claims that Les Glaneurs’ musical selections allow the filmmaker to aurally signify her reflections about the state of contemporary French citizenship. Thus, this essay considers how Les Glaneurs uses French popular music to reflect on the cultural and political significance of economically marginalized French citizens who steal out of economic necessity. The author will attend to the formal construction of the film’s heterogeneous score and discuss the musical contributions from three of Varda’s frequent collaborators, along with Varda’s participation. In doing so, the author argues that Les Glaneurs’ score gives us a fuller understanding of the director’s use of the term ‘gleaning’ in relation to her work as a filmmaker. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]