Contemporary popular music provides the soundtrack for a host of recent novels, but little critical attention has been paid to the intersection of these important art forms. "Write in Tune" addresses this gap by offering the first full-length study of the relationship between recent music and fiction. With essays from an array of international scholars, the collection focuses on how writers weave rock, punk, and jazz into their narratives, both to develop characters and themes and to investigate various fan and celebrity cultures surrounding contemporary music. "Write in Tune" covers major writers from America and England, including Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and Jim Crace. But it also explores how popular music culture is reflected in postcolonial, Latino, and Australian fiction. Ultimately, the book brings critical awareness to the power of music in shaping contemporary culture, and offers new perspectives on central issues of gender, race, and national identity.

This new study of British popular music shows how it engages with class in mythical ways that allow audiences to perform class-based identities. Case studies on folk rock, punk and indie rock show how this performance works and explore the implications for listeners and audiences.

The International Who's Who in Popular Music 2016 gives biographical information and contact details for some of the most talented and influential artists and individuals from the world of popular music. Now in its eighteenth edition, there are over 7,000 biographies charting the careers and achievements of artists in pop, rock, folk, jazz, dance, world, country music and much more. Key Features: - each entry includes full biographical information: principal career details, recordings and compositions, honours and contact information where available - each entrant is given the opportunity to update his or her information - spans the full range of the popular music industry, from rock to jazz and dance to country - provides information on established names as well as up-and-coming artists - a directory section provides details of music festivals, awards, organizations within the industry, and digital music sources - for ease of reference, the book includes an index of music group members. In one accessible volume this title offers users a vast collection of information on the most famous and influential people in the popular music industry.

I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.--John Lydon
Punk has been romanticized and embalmed in various media. It has been portrayed as an English class revolt and a reckless diversion that became a marketing dream. But there is no disputing its starting point. Every story of punk starts with its idols, the Sex Pistols, and its sneering hero was Johnny Rotten.
In Rotten, Lydon looks back at himself, the Sex Pistols, and the no future disaffection of the time. Much more than just a music book, Rotten is an oral history of punk: angry, witty, honest, poignant, and crackling with energy.

Pop stars have provided audiences with performative moments that have become ingrained in popular consciousness. They are a lens through which deeper understandings about race, gender, politics, history and the artistic process can be understood. When combined with the most affective of mediums - cinema, the combination can be both thrilling and alarming. From the relatively early days of cinema, figures from the world of popular music have made forays into acting and contributed cameo appearances. From Little Richard and Kylie Minogue to Nick Cave and Tom Waits, Pop Stars On Film: Popular Culture in a Global Market offers a collection of essays on some of the most influential international performances from a diverse range of cultural icons. The book considers industry shifts, access and diversity, but also the notion of cultural appropriation, audience appeal, marketing and demographics. Perhaps most importantly, the publication will look at what happens when cultures collide and coalesce.

Grunge, also known as the 'Seattle Sound', emerged from the Pacific north-west in the early part of the 1980s. With the unexpected success of Nirvana's single 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' in 1991, grunge became a household word overnight and launched an American music movement on a par with punk and hip-hop. In Everybody Loves Our Town , Mark Yarm draws from exclusive interviews to tell the whole story: the founding of originators like Soundgarden and the Melvins, the early successes of the Sub Pop record label, the rise of powerhouses Nirvana and Pearl Jam, the media hype, the suicide of Kurt Cobain, and finally, the genre's mid-to-late-nineties decline.

In Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space James Gordon Williams reframes the nature and purpose of jazz improvisation to illuminate the cultural work being done by five creative musicians between 2005 and 2019. The political thought of five African American improvisers-trumpeters Terence Blanchard and Ambrose Akinmusire, drummers Billy Higgins and Terri Lyne Carrington, and pianist Andrew Hill-is documented through insightful, multilayered case studies that make explicit how these musicians articulate their positionality in broader society. Informed by Black feminist thought, these case studies unite around the theory of Black musical space that comes from the lived experiences of African Americans as they improvise through daily life. The central argument builds upon the idea of space-making and the geographic imagination in Black Geographies theory. Williams considers how these musicians interface with contemporary social movements like Black Lives Matter, build alternative institutional models that challenge gender imbalance in improvisation culture, and practice improvisation as joyful affirmation of Black value and mobility. Both Terence Blanchard and Ambrose Akinmusire innovate musical strategies to address systemic violence. Billy Higgins's performance is discussed through the framework of breath to understand his politics of inclusive space. Terri Lyne Carrington confronts patriarchy in jazz culture through her Social Science music project. The work of Andrew Hill is examined through the context of his street theory, revealing his political stance on performance and pedagogy. All readers will be elevated by this innovative and timely book that speaks to issues that continue to shape the lives of African Americans today.

A revised and updated version of the artist's collected lyrics An American original, Patti Smith is a multi-disciplined artist and performer. Her work is rooted in poetry, which infused her 1975 landmark album, Horses. A declaration of existence, Horses was described as 'three chords merged with the power of the word'; it was graced with the now iconic portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe, the subject of her award-winning memoir Just Kids. Initially published in 1998, Patti Smith's Complete Lyrics was a testimony to her uncompromising poetic power. Now, on the fortieth anniversary of the release of Smith's groundbreaking album, Collected Lyrics has been revised and expanded with more than thirty-five additional songs, including her first, 'Work Song', written for Janis Joplin in 1970, and her most current, 'Writer's Song', to be recorded in 2015. The collection is liberally illustrated with original manuscripts of lyrics from Smith's extensive archive. Patti Smith's work continues to retain its relevance, whether controversial, political, romantic or spiritual. Collected Lyrics offers forty-five years of song, an enduring commemoration of Smith's unique contribution to the canon of rock and roll.

Wolfgang Flur was a member of Kraftwerk from 1973 to 1987, contributing to albums such as Autobahn (1974), Radioaktivitat (1975), Trans-Europa Express (1977), Die Mensch-Maschine (1978), Computerwelt (1981) and Electric Cafe (1986). He continues to record music with his solo album Eloquence being released in 2015.

Early hip hop film musicals have either been expunged from cinema history or excoriated in brief passages by critics and other writers. "Hip Hop on Film" reclaims and reexamines productions such as "Breakin'" (1984), " Beat Street" (1984), and "Krush Groove" (1985) in order to illuminate Hollywood's fascinating efforts to incorporate this nascent urban culture into conventional narrative forms. Such films presented musical conventions against the backdrop of graffiti-splattered trains and abandoned tenements in urban communities of color, setting the stage for radical social and political transformations. Hip hop musicals are also part of the broader history of teen cinema, and films such as Charlie Ahearn's "Wild Style" (1983) are here examined alongside other contemporary youth-oriented productions. As suburban teen films banished parents and children to the margins of narrative action, hip hop musicals, by contrast, presented inclusive and unconventional filial groupings that included all members of the neighborhood. These alternative social configurations directly referenced specific urban social problems, which affected the stability of inner city families following diminished governmental assistance in communities of color during the 1980s.

Breakdancing, a central element of hip hop musicals, is also reconsidered. It gained widespread acclaim at the same time that these films entered the theaters, but the nation's newly discovered dance form was embattled--caught between a multitude of institutional entities such as the ballet academy, advertising culture, and dance publications that vied to control its meaning, particularly in relation to delineations of gender. As street-trained breakers were enticed to join the world of professional ballet, this newly forged relationship was recast by dance promoters as a way to invigorate and "remasculinize" European dance, while young women simultaneously critiqued conventional masculinities through an appropriation of breakdance. These multiple and volatile histories influenced the first wave of hip hop films, and even structured the sleeper hit "Flashdance" (1983). This forgotten, ignored, and maligned cinema is not only an important aspect of hip hop history, but is also central to the histories of teen film, the postclassical musical, and even institutional dance. Kimberley Monteyne places these films within the wider context of their cultural antecedents and reconsiders the genre's influence.

'I'm going to camp out on the land ... try and get my soul free'. So sang Joni Mitchell in 1970 on 'Woodstock'. But Woodstock is only the tip of the iceberg. Popular music festivals are one of the strikingly successful and enduring features of seasonal popular cultural consumption for young people and older generations of enthusiasts. From pop and rock to folk, jazz and techno, under stars and canvas, dancing in the streets and in the mud, the pleasures and politics of the carnival since the 1950s are discussed in this innovative and richly-illustrated collection. The Pop Festival brings scholarship in cultural studies, media studies, musicology, sociology, and history together in one volume to explore the music festival as a key event in the cultural landscape - and one of major interest to young people as festival-goers themselves and as students.

'...probably the best book written about grunge' Paul Brannigan, Classic Rock 'Mudhoney are the jewel of Seattle.' Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth If rock fans associate Seattle primarily with Nirvana and Pearl Jam, time has shown that the city's most influential grunge band may well have been Mudhoney. They're still going strong and this is their story. Formed in early 1988 Mudhoney originally comprised Mark Arm, Matt Lukin, Dan Peters and Steve Turner and their debut single, 'Touch Me I'm Sick', was the catalytic force behind Nirvana and Pearl Jam who took grunge global. Mudhoney's would have been another story of half-forgotten pioneers paving the way for others who grabbed the prize... except they not only survived all the classic rock band excesses, but they also kept on producing great music. Bolstered by new member Guy Maddison, they celebrated their quarter-century with a superb 2013 album, Vanishing Point, and showed no signs of slowing down with the release of Digital Garbage in 2018 and Morning In America in 2019. Updated with a new chapter drawing on fresh interviews with the group, this book tells an unconventional tale of rock heroism about a band that missed out on superstardom but kept control of the music and triumphantly outlived their more famous disciples.

The Show That Never Ends is the behind-the-scenes story of the extraordinary rise and fall of progressive ("prog") rock, epitomised by such classic, chart-topping bands as Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull and Emerson Lake & Palmer, and their successors Rush, Styx and Asia. With inside access to all the key figures, The Washington Post national reporter David Weigel tells the story with the gusto and insight Prog Rock's fans (and its haters) will relish. Along the way, he explains exactly what was "progressive" about Prog Rock, how it arose from psychedelia and heavy metal, why it dominated the pop charts but then became so despised that it was satirised in This Is Spinal Tap and what fuels its resurgent popularity today.

The International Who's Who in Popular Music 2015 gives biographical information and contact details for some of the most talented and influential artists and individuals from the world of popular music. Now in its seventeenth edition, there are over 7,000 biographies charting the careers and achievements of artists in pop, rock, folk, jazz, dance, world, country music and much more. Key Features: - each entry includes full biographical information: principal career details, recordings and compositions, honours and contact information where available - each entrant is given the opportunity to update his or her information - spans the full range of the popular music industry, from rock to jazz and dance to country - provides information on established names as well as up-and-coming artists - a directory section provides details of music festivals, awards, organizations within the industry, and digital music sources - for ease of reference, the book includes an index of music group members. In one accessible volume this title offers users a vast collection of information on the most famous and influential people in the popular music industry.

Greil Marcus once said to an interviewer, "There is an infinite amount of meaning about anything, and I free associate." For more than four decades, Marcus has explored the connections among figures, sounds, and events in culture, relating unrelated points of departure, mapping alternate histories and surprising correspondences. He is a unique and influential voice in American letters.Marcus was born in 1945 in San Francisco. In 1968 he published his first piece, a review of "Magic Bus: The Who on Tour," in "Rolling Stone," where he became the magazine's first records editor. Renowned for his ongoing "Real Life Top Ten" column, Marcus has been a writer for a number of magazines and websites, and is the author and editor of over fifteen books. His critique is egalitarian: no figure, object, or event is too high, low, celebrated, or obscure for an inquiry into the ways in which our lives can open outward, often unexpectedly."In Conversations with Greil Marcus," Marcus discuses in lively, wide-ranging interviews his books and columns as well as his critical methodology and broad approach to his material, signaled by a generosity of spirit leavened with aggressive critical standards.

In this first English-language history of the origins and impact of the Japanese pop music industry, Hiromu Nagahara connects the rise of mass entertainment, epitomized by ryukoka ("popular songs"), with Japan's transformation into a middle-class society in the years after World War II. With the arrival of major international recording companies like Columbia and Victor in the 1920s, Japan's pop music scene soon grew into a full-fledged culture industry that reached out to an avid consumer base through radio, cinema, and other media. The stream of songs that poured forth over the next four decades represented something new in the nation's cultural landscape. Emerging during some of the most volatile decades in Japan's history, popular songs struck a deep chord in Japanese society, gaining a devoted following but also galvanizing a vociferous band of opponents. A range of critics-intellectuals, journalists, government officials, self-appointed arbiters of taste-engaged in contentious debates on the merits of pop music. Many regarded it as a scandal, evidence of an increasingly debased and Americanized culture. For others, popular songs represented liberation from the oppressive political climate of the war years. Tokyo Boogie-Woogie is a tale of competing cultural dynamics coming to a head just as Japan's traditionally hierarchical society was shifting toward middle-class democracy. The pop soundscape of these years became the audible symbol of changing times.

In popular music, live performance is one of the most important points of contact between artist and audience. However, this crucial part of the creation and reception of popular music has not received the attention it deserves. "Rock Music in Performance" aims to fill this gap. Focussing on one type of popular music - rock - it will trace the evolution of rock performance styles from the late 1960s to the present, and discuss the paradoxical nature of performance in popular music.

Popular music has become not only one of the most lucrative spheres of human activity, but also one of the most influential on the identities of individuals and communities. Popular music matters, and it matters to many people, people we can only partially understand if we do not understand their music. In the light of this phenomenon the academic study of popular music has become universally established as an active discipline at university level and this timely series brings together the fruits of recent teaching and research in this field. It makes overt recognition of the fact that the study of popular music is necessarily inter-disciplinary and addresses issues as diverse as: the popular music industry and its institutions; aspects of the history of genres; issues in the theories and methodologies of study and practice; questions of the ontologies and hermeneutics of particular musics; the varying influence of different waves of technological development; the ways markets and audiences are constructed, reproduced and reached; and aspects of the repertory without which there would be no popular music to study. The eight volumes in this series span the range of the world's popular music genres from rap, hip hop, soul and jazz, to roots, electronica, dance and club music. Each volume editor has contributed an introductory essay which constitutes a broad overview of the specific group of genres, and made a selection of the most important and influential published articles, papers and other relevant material. Taken together, these volumes offer an invaluable resource for the study of popular music today in all its forms.

This book identifies and examines three years of Beyonce's career as a pop mega star using critical race, feminist, and performance studies methodologies. This book explores how the careful choreography of Beyonce's image, voice, and public persona, coupled with her intelligent use of audio and visual mediums, makes her one of the most influential entertainers of the 21st century. Keleta-Mae proposes that 2013 to 2016 was a pivotal period in Beyonce's career and looks at three artistic projects that she created during that time: her self-titled debut visual album Beyonce, her video and live performance of 'Formation', and her second visual album Lemonade. By examining the progression of Beyonce's career during this period, and the impact it had politically, culturally, and socially, the author demonstrates how Beyonce brought 21st Century feminism into the mainstream through layered explorations of female blackness. Ideal for scholars and students of performance in the social and political spheres, and of course fans of Beyonce herself, this book examines the mega superstar's transition into a creator of art that engages with Black culture and Black life with increased thoughtfulness.

Shimmering in maximal minimalism, joyful bleakness, and bodiless intimacy, Laurie Anderson's Big Science diagnosed crises of meaning, scale, and identity in 1982. Decades later, the strange questions it poses loom even larger: How do we remain human when our identities are digitally distributed? Does technology bring us closer together or further apart? Can we experience the stillness of "now" when time is always moving? How does our experience become memory? Laurie Anderson pioneered new techniques and aesthetics in performance art, becoming its first and most enduring superstar. In this book, author S. Alexander Reed dives into the wonderfully strange making and meanings of this singular album and of its creator's long artistic career. Packed with scrupulous new research, reception history, careful description, and dizzying creativity, this book is an interdisciplinary love letter to a record whose sounds, politics, and expressions of gendered identity grow more relevant each day.

In Pop Masculinities, author Kai Arne Hansen investigates the performance and policing of masculinity in pop music as a starting point for grasping the broad complexity of gender and its politics in the early twenty-first century. Drawing together perspectives from critical musicology, gender studies, and adjacent scholarly fields, the book presents extended case studies of five well-known artists: Zayn, Lil Nas X, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, and Take That. By directing particular attention to the ambiguities and contradictions that arise from these artists' representations of masculinity, Hansen argues that pop performances tend to operate in ways that simultaneously reinforce and challenge gender norms and social inequalities. Providing a rich exploration of these murky waters, Hansen merges the interpretation of recorded song and music video with discourse analysis and media ethnography in order to engage with the full range of pop artists' public identities as they emerge at the intersections between processes of performance, promotion, and reception. In so doing, he advances our understanding of the aesthetic and discursive underpinnings of gender politics in twenty-first century pop culture and encourages readers to contemplate the sociopolitical implications of their own musical engagements as audiences, critics, musicians, and scholars.

Do You Believe in the Power of Rock & Roll? is a history of alternative rock from John Robb, with the music still ringing in his ears. This collection follows John's journey from the late 1970s, when he was first caught up in punk's high-octane thrill, to the present day, via the early days of the rave scene, the birth of electronic and techno, and myriad bands that spun off on their own idiosyncratic paths. John was the first person to write about Nirvana, he coined the term Britpop, and he documented the Stone Roses' rise out of Manchester before anyone else was interested. He was at every pivotal gig, and has interviewed every key player in the business, including Jordan, the queen of punk, founding father of new American rock Steve Albini, goth-rock guitarist Daniel Ash, infamous Oasis co-founder Noel Gallagher, and music greats like Lemmy and Poly Styrene. Few others have witnessed first-hand so many important moments of the last forty years of rock history. Here, they come together to form the essential history of a personal quest to document the ever-changing soundtrack of the modern world.

The International Who's Who in Popular Music 2014 gives biographical information and contact details for some of the most talented and influential artists and individuals from the world of popular music. Now in its sixteenth edition, there are over 7,000 biographies charting the careers and achievements of artists in pop, rock, folk, jazz, dance, world, country music and much more. Key Features: each entry includes full biographical information: principal career details, recordings and compositions, honours and contact information where available each entrant is given the opportunity to update his or her information spans the full range of the popular music industry, from rock to jazz and dance to country provides information on established names as well as up-and-coming artists a directory section provides details of music festivals, awards, organizations within the industry, and digital music sources for ease of reference, the book includes an index of music group members. In one accessible volume this title offers users a vast collection of information on the most famous and influential people in the popular music industry.

In the mid 1920s, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote a song called "Ol' Man River" that combined the seriousness of a Negro spiritual with the crowd-pleasing power of a Broadway anthem. Inspired, according to Kern, by the voice of the African American singer Paul Robeson, "Ol' Man River" went on to great success in the Broadway musical Show Boat and became a signature song for Robeson, who turned the tune towards his own goals as an activist. But the story of "Ol' Man River" goes deeper than the curiosity of a song recorded by so many in so many different ways. For at the heart of Oscar Hammerstein's lyric is a clear-eyed vision of the black experience in American history. Anyone-black or white-who thought they should sing "Ol' Man River" has had to deal with the charged racial content of the song. Who Should Sing "Ol' Man River"? traces this aspect of "Ol' Man River's" course through American history, an at-times high-stakes journey where the African American struggle for dignity and equality came down to the lyrics of a popular song. However beyond Robeson and Show Boat, "Ol' Man River" also had a long and rich life in the world of popular music. An astonishing variety of singers and musicians from across the musical spectrum-from pop to jazz, opera to doo wop, rhythm and blues to gospel to reggae-all chose to perform or record it. Who Should Sing "Ol' Man River"?: The Lives of an American Song traces out the performance history of this remarkable song by listening closely to over two hundred recorded and filmed versions dating from the song's debut in 1927 to the present. Many famous pop singers made "Ol' Man River" a signature song; among them Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland: white performers who took up a lyric told from the black perspective. Important jazz artists such as Bix Biederbecke, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Count Basie, and Keith Jarrett all played it. Opera singers-black and white, male and female-took it up as well. And a slew of surprising names from the first decades of rock and roll also recorded this inescapable tune, among them Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, the Temptations, Cher, and Rod Stewart.