Conference Agenda

Yoasobi's "Idol” (2023) has achieved unprecedented success for a Japanese song, reaching #1 on Billboard's Global ex-US chart. The opening theme for the anime Oshi no ko, the song encapsulates the series’ critique of the pop-idol industry by focusing not on its main characters but on Ai, a legendary idol who is murdered in the first episode but remains the characters’ object of obsession. Structured as three verse-chorus cycles presenting, in turn, the viewpoints of fans, Ai’s bandmates, and Ai herself, the song narrates this story by employing multiple genres as topics and exploiting their associations.

This paper illustrates the use of topics as narrative devices in popular music, in this case forming a metacommentary of the entertainment industry. Taking Mirka’s definition of topic as styles taken out of their proper context to use in another and applying Peircean analysis, I demonstrate how the evocation of rap, trap, cantata, idol pop, singer-songwriter, and Eurobeat—each with its own conventions, associations, and well-known songs—produces a multifaceted narrative. I begin with a close analysis of texture (cf. Moore, Lavengood), melody, and harmony to identify the topics, combined with examining wordplay and references to the Oshi no ko franchise and short story “45510” to establish narrative. The conventions of trap—quotations of famous tracks, orchestral hits, booming bass, triplets, shifting rhyme placement, and intonational patterns—signal internal darkness subverted by a kawaii (cute) delivery. Plaintive, leaping melodies with chromatic harmonies on piano recall female singer-songwriters like Yūming and Aiko and their nods to emotional truth. Idol-pop tropes—the half-time pre-chorus with otaku participation, the unprepared upward modulations—evoke the brighter-than-bright J-pop sound and fan culture, while the Eurobeat chorus recalls hit songs and groups of the late 1990s to early 2000s, when Ai’s life is set. The novelty layer (e.g., handclaps, shouts, breaking glass) references events in the series and adds to the narration. This strategic topic-mixing and intertextuality tell a complex story of the imagery and toxicity inherent in the entertainment industry. This case study illustrates how popular music deploys genre-topics as narrative and cultural critique.

Owing to its compelling fusion of heavy metal, spectralism, and sub-bass drones, the music of the guitar duo Sunn O))) (pronounced “sun”) has attracted significant academic attention. Music theorists Jonathan Bernard, Olivia Lucas, and Ciro Scotto analyze the roles of repetition, distortion, feedback, overtones, and the bodily experience of extreme volume at the band’s performances. Religious scholar Owen Coggins interprets the performances as rituals of “trance, spirituality, and mystic experience” (2018, 135). Queer/feminist scholar Aliza Shvarts demonstrates how the band’s music raises questions surrounding gender, heteronormativity, power, and reproductive labor. Two Sunn O))) songs bring many of these issues into focus: “Alice,” an instrumental homage to jazz pianist/harpist Alice Coltrane, and “Kannon 2,” whose lyrics recount a miracle performed by the gender-shifting Buddhist deity Kannon (a.k.a. Guanyin). In both songs, Sunn O))) mobilize expressive strategies to convey stories about these figures. I argue that these songs depict spiritual transformations through musical and lyrical means: Coltrane undergoes a transformation; Kannon undergoes one, then executes one.

Idiosyncratic notes played by Thelonious Monk, a mid-twentieth-century bebop pianist, challenge expectations of harmony and melody that listeners bring to tonal jazz. These notes elicit evocative reactions from listeners, such as “wrong notes,” “melodic glitches,” and “trickster dissonance” (Levine 1995; Feurzeig 2011; Kellman 2022). Scholars have explored such notes through theories of intentionality (they are not mistakes—they have meaning) and embodiment (Feurzeig 2011; Givan 2009), but there is room to consider the notes in an analytical-listening context.

With this in mind, I propose a three-layer model as a listening framework for exploring the deeper implications of these “wrong (but right) notes” in their musical context: layer 1 is what jazz historians refer to as “American Popular Song” (1920s-50s Broadway and Tin Pan Alley lead sheets, more or less) characterized by vocally conceived melodies, tonal harmony with functional chromaticism, symmetrical phrases, and popular song forms; layer 2 is a bebop reinterpretation of American Popular Song, which incorporates virtuosic instrumentally conceived melodies, extravagant chromaticism, substitution and extended tertian chords, stable and unstable harmonies, emphasis on non-harmonic tones, etc.; layer 3 contains Monk’s “wrong notes,” which exceed the usual instrumental idiom of bebop, creating startling textures and effects as harshly dissonant features (major/minor second intervals, multiple-note clusters, unexpected dynamics and articulation, etc.) that are incongruent with the layer 1 and 2 tonal contexts.

This paper analyzes Monk’s performance of “Body and Soul,” showing nested “wrong” but “right” notes—congruences and incongruences—among musical events in the three layers from an analytical-listening perspective.