Pop Music

Inquirer critic Dan DeLuca writes about pop music and culture at .

There are still a few open-air concerts on the pop music schedule - Florence & the Machine plays the Susquehanna Bank Center on Tuesday, and Philadelphia electronic jam band the Disco Biscuits will brave the chill to stage their City Bisco festival, featuring Diplo and RJD2, on Oct. 5-6. But for the most part, when the leaves on the trees are falling to the sound of the breezes that blow - to evoke Van Morrison, who'll release Born to Sing: No...

WONDER WHERE the old-fashioned heart and humor at the core of Paul McCartney's music came from? Answers can clearly be found in his recent foray album into jazz-tinged American pop standards, "Kisses on the Bottom," featuring ditties like "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive. " This is music McCartney was spoon-fed as a Liverpool lad, "especially at New Year's Eve parties at Uncle Joe or Aunt Jan's where they'd roll the carpet back, get the piano out and sing all these songs," he recalled.

With all of the hype and promotion by City Hall, the Budweiser Made in America two-day festival that climaxed in rain and music Sunday night on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway had a lot to live up to. The Jay-Z-driven mega-event, attracting the likes of Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, and closing act Pearl Jam - combined with a Bruce Springsteen concert in South Philadelphia - turned the city for one weekend into the live-entertainment capital of America....

MUSIC Doobie or not Doobie It only seems like Chicago and the Doobie Brothers were responsible for about two-thirds of all of the hits of the 1970s, which makes Saturday's double-bill a must for fans of the pop music of that decade. While both bands continue to be road warriors, this year's tour is a special one for the Doobies, whose breakthrough (second) album, "Toulouse Street" (which included "Listen To the Music," "Rockin' Down the Highway" and "Jesus Is Just Alright")

According to a new study from researchers at the Spanish National Research Council, the familiar complaint that contemporary popular music has grown loud, predictable, and simpler than ever may be exactly right. While one must be skeptical of quantitative music studies, the analysis may have a point, even if the portrait it paints is incomplete. The study's analysts ran 464,411 recordings in all popular-music genres from the period of 1955 to 2010 (called the "Million Song Dataset")

'Honestly, even if you love a band, how many records by the same band do you want to hear?" asks Kip Berman. An existential question coming from someone contemplating making a third album. Berman's band, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, have made two excellent records of bright and buzzy indie-pop, overtly indebted to the '80s bands on small labels such as Creation, Sarah, and Postcard. Songs like "Heart in Your Heartbreak" and "Teenager in Love" are succinct and immediate gems, unabashedly melodic but noisy with brash guitars.