Tag Archives: music history

Gatekeepers, Ballads, and Misplaced Contempt: A White Paper on Starship, We Built This City, and the Cultural Misreading of No Protection

Posted on December 27, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary This white paper addresses two related and persistent anomalies in popular music criticism surrounding Starship and their 1985 album No Protection: Why “We Built This City” is routinely treated as one of the worst songs of the 1980s, … Continue reading →

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White Paper: A Typology of New Wave Bands Based on the Precise Nature of Elements in Their Sound

Posted on December 27, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary New Wave is often described loosely as a post-punk, late-1970s–1980s genre blending pop accessibility with modernist aesthetics. Such descriptions obscure the fact that New Wave is better understood as a family of sound-engineering strategies, not a single musical … Continue reading →

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White Paper: Male vs. Female Lyrics in Toto’s “Georgy Porgy” and Their Relationship to the Nursery Rhyme

Posted on December 19, 2025 by nathanalbright

1. Overview and Research Question Toto’s 1978 song “Georgy Porgy” is built around a striking contrast: Male lead vocal (Steve Lukather): introspective, guilty, lovesick first-person verses. Female vocal (Cheryl Lynn): a looping, almost accusatory nursery-rhyme hook (“Georgy Porgy, pudding and … Continue reading →

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White Paper: Curated Memory vs. Measured Success: What Bread’s Compilations Reveal About Popularity, Taste, and Soft-Rock Canon Formation

Posted on December 14, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Bread’s legacy is unusually shaped by compilation albums rather than by sustained attention to their original studio LPs. By comparing The Best of Bread (1973), a comprehensive view of Bread’s singles output, and later greatest-hits collections, this white … Continue reading →

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White Paper: A Short History of Boy Krazy

Posted on December 12, 2025 by nathanalbright

Boy Krazy (sometimes mis-remembered as “Boy Crazy”) are one of those small but revealing footnotes in pop history: a short-lived New York girl group whose one big hit arrived two years late, whose album was largely built from repurposed Kylie … Continue reading →

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White Paper: The Paradox of Obscurity: Why “Babe, What Would You Say” Became a Forgotten Hit

Posted on December 8, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary “Babe, What Would You Say”—released in late 1972 and rising to major chart success in early 1973—is a classic example of a song whose momentary popularity failed to translate into long-term cultural memory. Despite reaching the Top 3 … Continue reading →

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White Paper: The Neglected Production of Phil Collins

Posted on November 25, 2025 by nathanalbright

Phil Collins is usually remembered as the voice behind “In the Air Tonight,” the drummer-frontman of Genesis, and the pop superstar who dominated 1980s radio. What tends to be forgotten is that he was also a remarkably busy and influential … Continue reading →

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White Paper: Fatalism, Agency, and Relational Identity in CHVRCHES’ “Leave a Trace”

Posted on October 27, 2025 by nathanalbright

Abstract This paper examines the theme of fatalism and the construction of relational identity in CHVRCHES’ 2015 single “Leave a Trace.” Drawing upon the song’s lyrical content, public commentary by lead vocalist Lauren Mayberry, and broader philosophical conceptions of fatalism, … Continue reading →

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White Paper: The Musical Partnership of the Female Singer and Male Producer

Posted on October 27, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Throughout the history of popular music, a remarkably consistent pattern has emerged: the collaboration between a female singer and a male producer or instrumentalist. From The Carpenters to Everything But the Girl, from Frou Frou to Billie Eilish … Continue reading →

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Why Fine Young Cannibals Never Made a Third Studio Album — and What Happened Next (1989–present)

Posted on October 22, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive summary Fine Young Cannibals (FYC) were one of the most successful UK-to-US crossover pop acts of the late 1980s, scoring two U.S. #1 singles and a U.S. #1 album with The Raw & the Cooked (1989). Yet the group … Continue reading →

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