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Books > Music > Contemporary popular music
This book is a lively, comprehensive and timely reader on the music
video, capitalising on cross-disciplinary research expertise, which
represents a substantial academic engagement with the music video,
a mediated form and practice that still remains relatively
under-explored in a 21st century context. The music video has
remained suspended between two distinct poles. On the one hand, the
music video as the visual sheen of late capitalism, at the
intersection of celebrity studies and postmodernism. On the other
hand, the music video as art, looking to a prehistory of
avant-garde film-making while perpetually pushing forward the
digital frontier with a taste for anarchy, controversy, and the
integration of special effects into a form designed to be
disseminated across digital platforms. In this way, the music video
virally re-engenders debates about high art and low culture. This
collection presents a comprehensive account of the music video from
a contemporary 21st century perspective. This entails revisiting
key moments in the canonical history of the music video, exploring
its articulations of sexuality and gender, examining its
functioning as a form of artistic expression between music, film
and video art, and following the music video's dissemination into
the digital domain, considering how digital media and social media
have come to re-invent the forms and functions of the music video,
well beyond the limits of "music television".
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.
More than thirty years after The Beatles split up, the music of
Lennon, McCartney and Harrison lives on. What exactly were the
magical ingredients of those legendary songs? why are they still so
influential for today's bands? This groundbreaking book sets out to
exlore The Beatles' songwriting techniques in a clear and readable
style. It is aimed not only at musicians but anyone who has ever
enjoyed the work of one of the most productive and successful
songwriting partnerships of the 20th century. Author Dominic Pedler
explains the chord sequences, melodies and harmonies that made up
The Beatles' self penned songs and how they uncannily complemented
the lyrical themes. He also assesses the contributions that rhythm,
form and arrangement made to the Beatles unique sound. Throughout
the book the printed music of the Beatles' songs appears alongside
the text, illustrating the authors explanations. The Songwriting
Secrets of The Beatles is an essential addition to Beatles
literature - a new and perceptive analysis of the music itself
itself as performed by what Paul McCartney still calls 'a really
good, tight little band'.
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.
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