Tag archives: music
“All my love’s in vain”: the language of the blues
The following is an extract from The Blues: A Very Short Introduction by Elijah Wald (OUP 2010) pp.116-9 Even the greatest blues songwriters have seen no harm in reworking each other’s phrases. As with hip-hop sampling, the idea is to create something unique and new by a combination of borrowing, reworking, and adding original touches—with [...]
Music to my ears: 5 composers and how to pronounce them
How many foreign languages can you Handel? Shall we make a Liszt? Ok, ok, we’ll stop before you start Chopin our heads off. All punnery aside, clicking through the pages of a music dictionary like Grove Music Online, one is presented with a wide selection of head-scratching-inducing names. Here are some of our favorites: Camille [...]
Glissandos and glissandon’ts
“GLISSANDO. A term unfortunately used by composers anywhere but in Italy to indicate a rapid glide over the notes of a scale on keyboard instruments and the harp, as well as a slur with no definite intervals on strings and on the trombone. Italians do not use it for the simple reason that it is [...]
From rockabilly to mathcore: exploring the cultural and linguistic blending of popular music genres
The language of music has never been more nimble. With fusion genres like nu metal, trip hop, acid jazz, and synthpop having emerged over the last thirty years or so, it’s no surprise that our music vocabulary has expanded. And since we here at the OxfordWords blog love our portmanteaus, it only seems right to [...]
Ghost like Swayze: a bit of hip-hop slang
As we rolled on, I seen the patrol on creep, so we got ghost. —“Alwayz into Somethin’” , from N.W.A.’s Efil4zaggin (1991) For me, this lyric represents one of the great potentials of hip-hop. An otherwise unremarkable sentiment, when channelled through the mind and mouth of a deft MC, can become something poetic and memorable. [...]
I was Country when Country wasn’t cool
Over a decade ago I experienced something of an epiphany. On a long drive under the endlessly wide skies of the Canadian prairie, I tired of the bland AOR from the FM stations on my hire car’s radio so I flipped over to AM and started listening to the first station I found, which was [...]
Time to get ill: Beastie Boys lyrics in the Oxford English Dictionary
Like many folks of my generation, upon hearing about the death of Adam Yauch, aka MCA, I’ve spent the last few weeks revisiting my Beastie Boys’ albums. At one point during my listen, I began to wonder about their lyrics and what kind of mark they’ve made on the English language. Is it possible that [...]
Take our band names quiz
Would the Beach Boys have sounded the same if they had been called Carl and the Passions? Does On A Friday convey the same passion as Radiohead? Would teenagers have found as much to scream about had The Executive not evolved into Wham? How much do you know about band names? Take our quiz and [...]
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