Search Results (52)

This article examines the use of satire in the song lyrics of two eco-themed pop songs: Talking Heads’s “(Nothing but) Flowers” (1988) and Anohni’s “4 Degrees” (2015). A close listening approach to these songs reveals ironic discrepancies between the experience produced by musical performance and the sentiments expressed in the song lyrics. A rhetorical framework informs how an examination of such discrepancies may enable new perceptions of the environmental theme to come to mind through what Charles A. Knight calls a satiric “frame of mind”. The satire in these songs not only targets attitudes to convey a moral judgment on them but also provokes audiences to undertake the task of self-examination. If successful, satire in popular song lyrics can contribute to the reconfiguration of listeners’ perceptions of the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature. Full article

This study investigates the theological function of the contemporary worship song “The Blessing” by addressing the following guiding research question: in what ways does “The Blessing” function as a form of prophetic declaration and communal prayer in contemporary congregational worship? Drawing on frameworks from Pentecostal theology, lyrical theology, and performative speech-act theory, this study analyzes how the song’s language, structure, and performance embody Spirit-enabled proclamation and intercession. Engaging Rice’s Evagrian–LAPT grammar, Glenn Packiam’s theology of worship as encounter, and Steven Félix-Jäger’s model of New Testament prophecy, the textual analysis focuses on the song’s present-tense verbs of divine action and its lyrical constructions. Scripturally grounded in Numbers 6:24–26, “The Blessing” operates as a sung benediction that invokes God’s blessing, sanctification, divine favor and protection, covenantal presence, and peace. The repetitive use of “Amen” functions as a communal seal of affirmation, turning passive reception into active, prophetic participation when sung. This study contends that the song exemplifies how contemporary congregational song serves as primary theology—Spirit-inspired, embodied, and sounded—where proclamation and prayer are nurtured in lived worship. Ultimately, “The Blessing” functions as a pneumatological and ecclesial act of sung prophecy and intercession—an instance of primary theologizing that nurtures the worshiping community and mediates a Spirit-empowered encounter with divine hope. Full article

With the increasing demands of long-term overseas assignments, workers in isolated environments, such as maritime crews, often experience heightened psychological stress and a lack of accessible emotional support. This study investigates the effectiveness of online song intervention program based on contextual support model in reducing work-related distress and enhancing psychological resilience among the ship crews dispatched for an extensive period for work. Eighteen overseas workers participated in a four-week intervention that included both individual and group sessions, where they engaged with songs to cultivate personal and interpersonal resources. A deductive content analysis following the intervention revealed 3 main categories, 6 generic categories, and 14 subcategories. The three main categories identified were relationships, autonomy, and mood regulation. The relationships category encompassed support systems and bonding, focusing on empathy, consolation, positive perspective, vicarious empowerment, trust, and changes of perspective. Autonomy involved fostering a sense of control and fulfillment through determination, anticipation, motivation, and achievement. Mood regulation was divided into grounding and emotional resolution, which included containment, sedation, externalization, and ventilation. The findings highlight that song lyrics offer valuable insights for developing resources aimed at mood regulation, social support, and self-efficacy, helping to alleviate work-related stress during dispatch periods. Songs also foster a sense of control, competence, and relational connectedness, with mood regulation emerging as a key feature of their emotional impact. These results suggest that incorporating songs with lyrics focused on personal and interpersonal resources could be an effective strategy to support remotely dispatched workers. Furthermore, this approach appears to be a viable and scalable solution for online programs. Full article

This paper explores the harmonious integration of Confucian moral values and officially sanctioned love-themed lyrics in music education across Mainland China. It addresses the main research question: What role do officially approved school songs, which embody themes of love related to three key relationships—(1) family and home, (2) teachers and friends, and (3) the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) and the Chinese nation—play in promoting the virtue of love through singing within Mainland China’s music education? By analyzing two sets of officially approved music textbooks for primary school students, consisting of a total of 24 volumes, this study reveals how love-themed lyrics serve as a medium for propagating political ideology while reinforcing traditional Confucian values among the younger generation. The research illustrates how love, as a fundamental virtue, is expressed and reinforced through these songs, highlighting their significance in fostering emotional and ethical development. The findings underscore the role of music education in cultivating a sense of community and national identity, as well as the interconnectedness of personal and collective values in shaping students’ moral frameworks. Full article

Augmenting the author’s prior research on lyrical code-switching, as presented in Picone, “Artistic Codemixing”, published in 2002, various conceptual frameworks are made explicit, namely the enlistment of multimodal and intertextual approaches for their methodological usefulness in analyzing and interpreting message-making that incorporates lyrical code-switching as one of its components. Conceived as a bipolarity, the rooted (or local) and the transcendent (or global), each having advantages in the negotiation of identity, is also applied to the analysis. New departures include the introduction of the notion of “curated lyrical code-switching” for the purpose of analyzing songs in which multiple performers are assigned lyrics in different languages, as a function of their respective proficiencies, as curated by the person or persons having authorial agency and taking stock of the social semiotics relevant to the anticipated audience. Moving beyond the negotiation of the identity of the code-switching composer or performer, in another new departure, attention is paid to the musical identity of the listener. As a reflection of the breadth of lyrical code-switching, a rich assortment of examples draws from the musical art of Beyoncé, Jon Batiste, Stromae, Shakira, BTS, NewJeans, Indigenous songsmiths, Cajun songsmiths, Latin Pop and Hip-Hop artists, songs composed for international sports events, and other sources. Full article

In 1978, the American hard rock band Blue Öyster Cult released the song “Godzilla” as the first single from the fifth studio album Spectres. Despite not registering on popular charts, it would eventually evolve into an iconic song of its era. “Godzilla” continues to receive airplay on classic rock stations, and it remains a staple of the band’s touring performances. In 2019, a cover of the song, more than forty years after its release, made its film debut in Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Though the song is primarily a tribute to the Japanese monster from which it gets its name, “Godzilla” also reflects the nuclear fear and paranoia of the 1970s Cold War era. “Godzilla’s” cultural impact, the song’s lyrics, the Cold War context in which it was written, and its connection to the kaiju films featuring the famous monster are examined. While this is the most popular and well-known song dedicated to Godzilla, it is not the only one. Other compositions have, but they have failed to achieve the iconic status that Blue Öyster Cult’s version has attained. This song has evolved into an unofficial anthem for the great monster. Full article

This paper assesses the relationship between the so-called “curses” on the Woman in Gen 3:16 in terms of themes (garden, tree, creation, marriage, procreation, and so on) and concludes that the late poetic text of the Song aims at a deliberate corrective to the negative view of gender relations in Genesis. The use of mashal, “to rule over” in Gen 3 is reassessed from the perspective of its use of the native genre designation of mashal in Wisdom Literature. There, it refers to similarities between two compared items. The direct reversal of God’s speech to the humans in Gen 3, where the woman will be ruled over by her man but still desire him, appears in the Song in the speeches of the Beloved: there she states categorically that the man is her beloved and belongs to her, while she belongs to him. The tactic of defamiliarization (a Russian literary concept) is used to juxtapose radically different views and destabilizes the notion of only one meaning for the words under consideration. In effect, reading two opposing themes together forges a new, more inclusive understanding of both. This paper concludes with a dramatic new rendering of the Song, “The Song I Sing Complete” with speech and motifs reassigned to the woman’s voice, foregrounding her remarks within the genre of love poetry, drawing on tropes found in lyrical poetry and the myth of Israel’s neighbors in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Full article

Multilingual and multicultural worship can take on many models and expressions. Initially, Chinese immigration to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s led to an increased population of churches. Many Chinese church services were conducted in Cantonese, catering to the needs of first-generation immigrants, mainly from Hong Kong. Yet, the children of these older generations grew up with a bicultural hybridized identity expressed first in small English-speaking youth groups that led to English-speaking worship services within Chinese churches. Contributing to the field of worship studies through music repertoire studies over four weeks in June and July 2017 at Birmingham Chinese Evangelical Church, we raised the following questions: (1) what do the chosen worship songs represent with regards to the liturgical theology and cultural expressions of this community and (2) how is self-perception and perception of the divine expressed in the lyrical themes of these songs? Our study revealed that singing English songs from the West dominated the corporate liturgical identity of these services. Yet, through a British-born Chinese evangelical cultural reading, some lyrical themes were particularly resonant within Chinese culture, such as honor, shame, reverence, and bowing. Full article

This article explores the ethics of “speaking” the artistic languages or idioms of diverse cultures in the earliest Christian communities. This article presents a key New Testament text, the Song of Zechariah (the Benedictus in Luke 1:68–79), as a poetic text meant for communal performance and examines that cultural phenomenon through the lens of “musical caring” to examine the meaning such a poetic phenomenon has for modern Christian life and worship. First, I will briefly summarize the evidence for the Song of Zechariah as a lyrical poem containing the artistic “multilingualism” of both Hebrew and Greek poetic idioms. Then, I will assess such an artistic communal expression in its first-century context with Myrick’s concept of musical caring, broadened to allow for uncertainty of the Song of Zechariah’s first-century performance methods. Finally, I will consider the twenty-first-century implications or lessons from such care and inclusivity in the first century. Full article

This study explored the effectiveness of a virtual music therapy program, based on positive psychotherapy principles, in college students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Twenty-four undergraduate students with partial PTSD were initially assigned to either an experimental group or a control group, with 11 participants in each group by the study’s end. The experimental group underwent 15 video sessions of the therapy program, completing one session per weekday over 3 weeks. The program involved worksheets targeting goals aligned with positive psychology, such as positive affect, life meaning, personal strengths, gratitude, hope, and happiness. The activities included writing music autobiographies, creating and analyzing song lyrics, and exploring various music pieces. The effectiveness of the intervention was measured using the 21-item Depression Anxiety Stress Scale and the Korean Version of Positive Psychological Capital (K-PPC) before, immediately after, and 3 weeks post-program. The experimental group showed significant improvements in stress (F = 5.759, p < 0.05), anxiety (F = 4.790, p < 0.01), depression (F = 5.740, p < 0.01), self-efficacy (F = 3.723, p < 0.05), resilience (F = 4.739, p < 0.05), and the K-PPC total score (F = 3.740, p < 0.05) compared with the control group. These improvements were maintained at the 3-week follow-up. The findings suggest that positive psychology-based virtual music therapy can significantly enhance the mental health of highly stressed college students, especially during challenging times such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Full article

In this study, we present a novel approach for music emotion recognition that utilizes a stacked ensemble of models integrating audio and lyric features within a structured song framework. Our methodology employs a sequence of six specialized base models, each designed to capture critical features from distinct song segments: verse1, chorus, and verse2. These models are integrated into a meta-learner, resulting in superior predictive performance, achieving an accuracy of 96.25%. A basic stacked ensemble model was also used in this study to independently run the audio and lyric features for each song segment. The six-input stacked ensemble model surpasses the capabilities of models analyzing song parts in isolation. The pronounced enhancement underscores the importance of a bimodal approach in capturing the full spectrum of musical emotions. Furthermore, our research not only opens new avenues for studying musical emotions but also provides a foundational framework for future investigations into the complex emotional aspects of music. Full article

For over a century, Hong Kong Christians have sung Chinese hymns in an “out-of-tone” manner. Lyrics in traditional hymnals were translated or written to be sung in Mandarin, the national language, but most locals speak Cantonese, another Sinitic and tonal language. Singing goes “out-of-tone” when Mandarin hymns are sung in Cantonese, which often causes meaning distortions. Why did Hong Kong Christians accept this practice? How did they move from singing “out-of-tone” to creating contextualized Cantonese contemporary worship songs? What does this process reveal about the evolution of Chinese Christianity? From a Hong Kong-centered perspective, this article reconstructs the city’s hymnological development. I consider the creation of national Mandarin hymnals during Republican China as producing a nationalistic Mainland-centric and Mandarin-centric Chinese Christianity. Being on the periphery, Hong Kong Christians did not have the resources to develop their own hymns and thus continued to worship “out-of-tone”. With the decline of the old Chinese Christian center of Shanghai, the growth of Cantonese culture and Hongkonger identity, and the influence of Western pop and Christian music, local Christians began to create Cantonese contemporary worship songs. This hymnological contextualization reflects and contributes to not only the decolonization but, more importantly, the decentralization of Chinese Christianity. Full article

This article explores the way in which love is understood and expressed through the original English lyrics of songs by New Creation Church Singapore (NCC) in comparison to the original songs from Hillsong Church Australia (Hillsong) through the period of 2014–2020. While NCC has a multilingual congregation, reflective of the larger Singaporean society, it composes and releases original contemporary congregational songs (CCS) with English lyrics. English is the primary language in Singapore; however, it is shaped by the languages spoken in homes (e.g., Mandarin, Malay, Tamil). Combined with the theological emphases of NCC, its CCS provide a unique lens into English as a common language of worship. This article demonstrates that while the use of English lyrics is a unifying force for multilingual congregational worship, it is also not benign, but actively shaping Christian confession and associated theology and being shaped by wider multilingual contexts. Full article

The humanistic-geographical associations of popular music foster the potential to articulate the production and reproduction of an activity-centered politicized ontology of space in the everyday social life of any creative communitarian framework where an alternative set of lifestyles, choices, and tastes engage in a constant play. A cursory glimpse at the (counter-)cultural artistic productions of the American 1970s shows that the lyrical construction of real and imaginary geographical locales has remained a distinguishing motif in the song-writing techniques of the celebrated rock poets. In the case of Bruce Springsteen, whether it is the ‘badlands’, constituting the rebellious and notorious young adults, or the ‘promised land’, which is the desired destination of all his characters, his lyrical oeuvre has numerously provided an alternative sense of place. Springsteen’s lyrical and musical characterization of fleeting urban images like alleys, hotels, engines, streets, neon, pavements, locomotives, cars, etc., have not only captured the American cities under the changing regime of capital accumulation but also contributed to the inseparability of everyday social lives and modern urban experiences. Against the backdrop of this argument, this article seeks to explore how the socio-political and cultural aesthetics of Springsteen’s song stories unfurl distinct spatial poetics through their musical language. Also, the article attempts to delineate how Springsteen’s unabashed celebration of the working-class geography of the American 1970s unveils a site of cultural struggle, wherein existing social values are reconstructed amidst imaginary landscapes and discursive strategies of resistance are weaved. Full article

This article focuses on the influence of Western progressive rock music on some innovative members of the Union of Soviet Composers, who were open to new trends and influences. These Soviet composers’ interest in progressive rock was not only intellectual, but also had serious practical implications. During the 1970s, several composers made attempts to create original works following various styles of prog rock. Occasionally, they incorporated elements of prog rock into their otherwise experimental compositions. One can see the influences of prog rock in the works of prominent composers such as A. Pärt, S. Gubaidulina, V. Martynov, V. Silvestrov, V. Artemiev, G. Kancheli, and A. Schnittke. After discussing the development of the prog rock tradition in the USSR and dwelling on the peculiarities of prog rock as a genre, I focus on three works created by Soviet composers under the influence of prog traditions: the 4th Symphony for orchestra and rhythm section by Latvian composer Imants Kalniņš, which follows the traditions of symphonic rock; an avant-garde rock opera titled “Flemish Legend” by Leningrader Romuald Grinblat, written to the lyrics by dissident bard Yulii Kim and heavily influenced by the twelve-tone system; and a suite of art-rock songs titled “On the Wave of My Memory” composed by pop composer David Tukhmanov, based on the poems of poets with a “decadent” reputation in the Soviet ideological context. All of these composers had to create within the Soviet ideological restrictions on modern and rock music, in particular, and all of them had to engage in their own trickster-like antics to produce and perform their works. Although they are little remembered today, these works stand as unexpected and singular achievements of Soviet composers during complex times. Full article