Development Drowned and Reborn is a "Blues geography" of New Orleans, one that compels readers to return to the history of the Black freedom struggle there to reckon with its unfinished business. Reading contemporary policies of abandonment against the grain, Clyde Woods explores how Hurricane Katrina brought long-standing structures of domination into view. In so doing, Woods delineates the roots of neoliberalism in the region and a history of resistance. Written in dialogue with social movements, this book offers tools for comprehending the racist dynamics of U.S. culture and economy. Following his landmark study, Development Arrested, Woods turns to organic intellectuals, Blues musicians, and poor and working people to instruct readers in this future-oriented history of struggle. Through this unique optic, Woods delineates a history, methodology, and epistemology to grasp alternative visions of development. Woods contributes to debates about the history and geography of neoliberalism. The book suggests that the prevailing focus on neoliberalism at national and global scales has led to a neglect of the regional scale. Specifically, it observes that theories of neoliberalism have tended to overlook New Orleans as an epicenter where racial, class, gender, and regional hierarchies have persisted for centuries. Through this Blues geography, Woods excavates the struggle for a new society.

Smith examines the different ways in which gay men use pop music, both as producers and consumers, and how, in turn, pop uses gay men. He asks what role culture plays in shaping identity and why pop continues to thrill gay men. These 40 essays and interviews look at how performers, from The Kinks' Ray Davies to Gene's Martin Rossiter, have used pop as a platform to explore and articulate, conform to or contest notions of sexuality and gender. A defence of cultural differences and an attack on cultural elitism, Seduced and Abandoned is as passionate and provocative as pop itself.

Black celebrities in America have always walked a precarious line between their perceived status as spokespersons for their race and their own individual success -and between being "not black enough" for the black community or "too black" to appeal to a broader audience. Few know this tightrope walk better than Kanye West, who transformed hip-hop, pop and gospel music, redefined fashion, married the world's biggest reality TV star and ran for president, all while becoming one of only a handful of black billionaires worldwide. Despite these accomplishments, his polarizing behavior, controversial alliances and bouts with mental illness have made him a caricature in the media and a disappointment among much of his fanbase. This book examines West's story and what it reveals about black celebrity and identity and the American dream.

Through a transnational, comparative and multi-level approach to the relationship between youth, migration, and music, the aesthetic intersections between the local and the global, and between agency and identity, are presented through case studies in this book. Transglobal Sounds contemplates migrant youth and the impact of music in diaspora settings and on the lives of individuals and collectives, engaging with broader questions of how new modes of identification are born out of the social, cultural, historical and political interfaces between youth, migration and music. Thus, through acts of mobility and environments lived in and in-between, this volume seeks to articulate between musical transnationalism and sense of place in exploring the complex relationship between music and young migrants and migrant descendant's everyday lives.

Breaking is the first and most widely practiced hip-hop dance in the world today, with an estimated one million participants taking part in this dynamic, multifaceted artform. Yet, despite its global reach and over 40 years of existence, historical treatments of the dance have largely neglected the African Americans who founded it. Dancer and scholar Serouj "Midus" Aprahamian offers, for the first time, a detailed look into the African American beginnings of breaking in the Bronx, New York, during the 1970s. Given the pivotal impact the dance had on hip-hop's formation, this book also challenges numerous myths and misconceptions that have permeated studies of hip-hop culture's emergence. Aprahamian draws on untapped archival material, primary interviews, and detailed descriptions of early breaking to bring this buried history to life, with a particular focus on the early aesthetic development of the dance, the institutional settings in which hip-hop was conceived, and the movement's impact on sociocultural conditions in New York throughout the 1970s. By featuring the overlooked first-hand accounts of over 50 founding b-boys and b-girls, this book also shows how indebted breaking is to African American culture and interrogates the disturbing factors behind its historical erasure.

In this ethnography of Navajo (Dine) popular music culture, Kristina M. Jacobsen examines questions of Indigenous identity and performance by focusing on the surprising and vibrant Navajo country music scene. Through multiple first-person accounts, Jacobsen illuminates country music's connections to the Indigenous politics of language and belonging, examining through the lens of music both the politics of difference and many internal distinctions Dine make among themselves and their fellow Navajo citizens. As the second largest tribe in the United States, the Navajo have often been portrayed as a singular and monolithic entity. Using her experience as a singer, lap steel player, and Navajo language learner, Jacobsen challenges this notion, showing the ways Navajos distinguish themselves from one another through musical taste, linguistic abilities, geographic location, physical appearance, degree of Navajo or Indian blood, and class affiliations. By linking cultural anthropology to ethnomusicology, linguistic anthropology, and critical Indigenous studies, Jacobsen shows how Navajo poetics and politics offer important insights into the politics of Indigeneity in Native North America, highlighting the complex ways that identities are negotiated in multiple, often contradictory, spheres.

A blend of This Is Spinal Tap and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the cult classic confessions of a debauched rock 'n' roller and his adventures in excess on the '80s hair-metal nostalgia tour through Middle America--available again, and now revised and updated.

Once upon a time at the start of the new century, the unheard-of Unband got a chance to drink, fight, and play loud music with '80s metal bands like Dio and Def Leppard. To the mix they brought illegal pyrotechnics, a giant red inflatable hand with movable digits, a roadie dubiously named Safety Bear, a high tolerance for liver damage, and an infectious love of rock & roll and everything it represents.

Unband bassist Michael Ruffino takes us on an epic joyride across a surrealistic American landscape where we meet mute Christian groupies, crack-smoking Girl Scouts, beer-drinking chimps, and thousands of head-bangers who cannot accept that hair metal is dead. Here, too, are uncensored portraits of Ronnie James Dio, Anthrax, Sebastian Bach, Lemmy of Motorhead, and others.

Adios, Motherfucker is gonzo rock storytelling at its finest--excessive, incendiary, intelligent, hilarious, and utterly original.

Essays that overthrow stereotypes and demonstrate the genre's power and mystique. Contributions by Georgia Christgau, Alexander S. Dent, Leigh H. Edwards, Caroline Gnagy, Kate Heidemann, Nadine Hubbs, Jocelyn Neal, Ase Ottosson, Travis Stimeling, Matthew D. Sutton, and Chris Wilson Country music boasts a long tradition of rich, contradictory gender dynamics, creating a world where Kitty Wells could play the demure housewife and the honky-tonk angel simultaneously, Dolly Parton could move from traditionalist ""girl singer"" to outspoken trans rights advocate, and current radio playlists can alternate between the reckless masculinity of bro-country and the adolescent girlishness of Taylor Swift. In this follow-up volume to A Boy Named Sue, some of the leading authors in the field of country music studies reexamine the place of gender in country music, considering the ways country artists and listeners have negotiated gender and sexuality through their music and how gender has shaped the way that music is made and heard. In addition to shedding new light on such legends as Wells, Parton, Loretta Lynn, and Charley Pride, it traces more recent shifts in gender politics through the performances of such contemporary luminaries as Swift, Gretchen Wilson, and Blake Shelton. The book also explores the intersections of gender, race, class, and nationality in a host of less expected contexts, including the prisons of WWII-era Texas, where the members of the Goree All-Girl String Band became the unlikeliest of radio stars; the studios and offices of Plantation Records, where Jeannie C. Riley and Linda Martell challenged the social hierarchies of a changing South in the 1960s; and the burgeoning cities of present-day Brazil, where ""college country"" has become one way of negotiating masculinity in an age of economic and social instability.