Full Description
Smooth explores the ways in which music has sought to be easy, approachable, comforting and beguiling in its accessibility. From easy listening and exotica in the 1950s through jazz fusion, new age music, ambient and chill out, K-Pop, AOR and MOR, Japanese city pop and performance of high emotion alongside the warm and mellow bath of adult contemporary, Smooth analyses what easy listening can be across a range of often very poorly-defined genres. Global in scope, Smooth covers the music of the culture industry as aspiring to the universal and timeless, and evaluates how easy (and eased) listening works and how it affects the listener.
Contents
Introduction: Smoothness in Listening
1. Omnipresent Background
2. Function
3. Big Emotion
4. Smooth Jazz
5. Generic Transcendence: Adult Contemporary
6. Soft Power: AOR
7. Identification and the Group: K-Pop
8. Ambience/New age/Chill
9. Nostalgia, Melancholy and Japanese city pop
10. The Songbook: Timeless singers and songs
11. Christmas
Conclusion: All and Nothing
