ABSTRACT
The song remains the most basic unit of modern pop music. Shaped into being by historical forces—cultural, aesthetic, and technical—the song provides both performer and audience with a world marked off by a short, discrete, and temporally demarcated experience. The word “track” eventually came into ubiquitous use as a metonym for “song” in the 1950s, when recording engineers spoke of multi-track recording. Later, in the early 1980s, the rise of the 12” remix single wrested the lexicon of “track” from its technical origins into the world of DJs and eventually into rave culture as both a comment on the inadequacy of “song” and a critique of it. But long before then, the song and the track had undergone transformations. Pop music has been a powerful vehicle, reflecting and in turn shaping our expectations of gender and sexuality. Pop songs are not always about the past, about history, or steeped in retromania.
