Our cultural darlings make music; we make them mythic. Every musical genre begets a community of listeners, performers, and critics, and quite often those categories are blurred. From the principled punk refusal of celebrity to hip-hop's celebration of its power, the music world is self-obsessed.

Stars Don't Stand Still in the Sky assembles scholars, music writers, industry workers, and musicians, who offer a range of opinions and experience of the nature of fame. The collection focuses on commerce, the crowd, performance and image, history and memory, and romance. Contributors discuss black women icons, love-songs, the legacy of the blues, the image of the tortured rock star, MTV, the politics of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the joy of line-dancing, and more.

The contributors are James Bernard, Anthony DeCurtis, Katherine Dieckmann, Chuck Eddy, Paul Gilroy, Daniel Glass, Lawrence Grossberg, Jessica Hagedorn, Kathleen Hanna, James Hannaham, Dave Hickey, Jon Langford, Greil Marcus, Angela McRobbie, Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky), Barbara O'Dair, Ann Powers, Toshi Reagon, Simon Reynolds, Robert Santelli, Jon Savage, Danyel Smith, Arlene Stein, Deena Weinstein, and Ellen Willis.

Africa In Stereo examines the role that African American music has played in the pan-Africanist imagination since the end of the nineteenth century. Throughout, Jaji marshals a wide array of critical, archival, literary, visual, and sonic sources to craft an argument centered on the stereophonic echoes between three sites on the African continent emblematic of pan-Africanism (Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa) and black musical cultures in the US (as well as few other places on the diasporic landscape). Rather than take a purely musical tack that traces the influence of African American music on musical repertoires from Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa, Africa In Stereo beautifully shows how a US black popular musical genres inspired a host of writers and filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembene, John Akomfrah, Sol Plaatje, Leopold Senghor, K. Anyidoho, Charlotte Maxeke, Ken Bugul, as well as the glossy visual languages found in the early magazines Bingo (Senegal) and Zonk! (South Africa).

If Benny Goodman was the "King of Swing," then Fletcher Henderson was the power behind the throne. Now Jeffrey Magee offers a fascinating account of Henderson's musical career, throwing new light on the emergence of modern jazz and the world that created it.
Drawing on an unprecedented combination of sources, including sound recordings and hundreds of scores that have been available only since Goodman's death, Magee illuminates Henderson's musical output, from his early work as a New York bandleader, to his pivotal role in building the Kingdom of Swing. He shows how Henderson, standing at the forefront of the New York jazz scene during the 1920s and '30s, assembled the era's best musicians, simultaneously preserving jazz's distinctiveness and performing popular dance music that reached a wide audience. Magee reveals how, in Henderson's largely segregated musical world, black and white musicians worked together to establish jazz, how Henderson's style rose out of collaborations with many key players, how these players deftly combined improvised and written music, and how their work negotiated artistic and commercial impulses.
Whether placing Henderson's life in the context of the Harlem Renaissance or describing how the savvy use of network radio made the Henderson-Goodman style a national standard, Jeffrey Magee brings to life a monumental musician who helped to shape an era.
"An invaluable survey of Henderson's life and music."
--Don Heckman, Los Angeles Times
"Magee has written an important book, illuminating an era too often reduced to its most familiar names. Goodman might have been the King of Swing, but Henderson here emerges as that kingdom's chief architect."
--Boston Globe
"Excellent.... Jazz fans have waited 30 years for a trained musicologist...to evaluate Henderson's strengths and weaknesses and attempt to place him in the history of American music."
--Will Friedwald, New York Sun

The Word Rhythm Dictionary: A Resource for Writers, Rappers, Poets, and Lyricists is a new kind of dictionary-one that reflects the use of "rhythm rhymes" by rappers, poets, and songwriters of today. This is an eminently practical reference work for all wordsmiths looking to add musicality to their writing. Users of this dictionary can alphabetically look up words in the General Index to find collections of words that have the same rhythm as the original word and are readily useable in ways that are familiar to us in everything from vers libre poetry to the lyrics and music of Bob Dylan and hip hop groups. Professional writers and students have long used traditional rhyming dictionaries for inspiration by perusing lists of rhyming words; they may ask themselves, "I need a word that rhymes with blue," and are led to shoe, flu, or you. These rhyming words evoke through juxtaposition new images, thoughts, and actions that inspire creative directions and pleasing twists as verses and stanzas unfold. For the first time ever, this dictionary now allows writers and poets to ask the same question, but of word rhythm- "I need a word with the same rhythm as butterfly. . . . " Today's lyricists and poets know that there is so much more to the flow of their creations than just matching vowels. The Word Rhythm Dictionary organizes words by additional properties: phonetic similarity (alliteration and literary consonance), the number of syllables in words, and syllable stress patterns. Never has it been easier to locate words that feature similar sounds, matching meters, and rhythmic grooves, from traditional rhymes like "clashing" and "splashing," to near rhymes like "rollover" and "bulldozer," "unrefuted undisputed" to pure metrical matches, like "biology" and "photography." Additional appendixes allow readers to search according to poetic metrical feet and musical rhythm through a visual index of notated rhythms, allowing musicians and lyricists to track down words that match preexisting motives and melodies. This book could become the new fun addiction (or... addiction affliction...constriction conviction...conniption prescription...subscription conscription) for writers, musicians, lyricists, rappers, poets, and wordsmiths alike. Oh, and it's a lot of fun just to browse!

This book explores the two major reasons for hip-hop culture's proliferation throughout the world: 1) the global centrality of African American popular culture and the transnational pop culture industry of record companies and entertainment conglomerates; and 2) "connective marginalities" that are extant social inequalities forming the foundation for an "underground" network of hip-hop communities. Both of these levels of hip-hop's global circulation are based in the youth culture's Africanist aesthetic, which is an extension of previous black artistic expressions such as verbal word play, polyrhythmic dance improvisations, radical juxtapositions of musical structures, and the folkloric trickster figure. Additionally, the text explores computer technology and the internet in this age of information that also serves hip-hop culture's globalization.

From Cliff Richard to The Rolling Stones, and from The Beatles to Plan B, pop music has been inseparable from its cinematic exploitation. This book constitutes the first delivered examination of the place of the pop music film in British cinematic and musical history. It explores the way music and film have exerted a mutual influence at an economic, social and artistic level. From The Tommy Steele Story, a cheap and cheerful 'cash in' on what was considered a passing fad, through Richard Lester's innovative and globally successful Beatles vehicles and on to the Jungian artistic maze of Mick Jagger's Performance, the 1950s and 1960s saw pop acts and directors create an entire life-cycle for a new film genre. Thereafter, its intermittent revivals, be it Slade in Flame or the Spice Girls in Spice World, have kept sound and vision inseparable in the public consciousness, revisiting and reshaping our pop and film heritage.

This volume examines how African indigenous popular music is deployed in democracy, politics and for social crusades by African artists. Exploring the role of indigenous African popular music in environmental health communication and gender empowerment, it subsequently focuses on how the music portrays the African future, its use by African youths, and how it is affected by advanced broadcast technologies and the digital media. Indigenous African popular music has long been under-appreciated in communication scholarship. However, understanding the nature and philosophies of indigenous African popular music reveals an untapped diversity which can only be unraveled by the knowledge of myriad cultural backgrounds from which its genres originate. With a particular focus on scholarship from Nigeria, Zimbabwe and South Africa, this volume explores how, during the colonial period and post-independence dispensation, indigenous African music genres and their artists were mainstreamed in order to tackle emerging issues, to sensitise Africans about the affairs of their respective nations and to warn African leaders who have failed and are failing African citizenry about the plight of the people. At the same time, indigenous African popular music genres have served as a beacon to the teeming African youths to express their dreams, frustrations about their environments and to represent themselves. This volume explores how, through the advent of new media technologies, indigenous African popular musicians have been working relentlessly for indigenous production, becoming champions of good governance, marginalised population, and repositories of indigenous cultural traditions and cosmologies.

Black Sea Sketches is a portrait of some of the diverse musical cultures surrounding the Black Sea and in its hinterlands. Its six separate chapters follow a very broad trajectory from close-ups of traditional music (chapters 1-4) towards wide-angle studies of art music (chapters 5-6), and each of them opens windows to big, border-crossing themes about music and place. A wide variety of repertoires is discussed: ancient layers of polyphonic music, bardic songs, traditional music from the coasts and mountains, the sacred music of Islam and Orthodox Christianity, the art music of Europe and West Asia, and present-day popular music 'scenes'. The usual practice is for each chapter to begin with a Black Sea coastal location before reaching out into the hinterlands. The result is a collection of six relatively discrete essays on different locations and topics, but with underlying thematic continuities, and offering a wide-ranging commentary on cultural difference. Firmly grounded in ethnographic and documentary research, this is an important study for scholars and researchers of Ethnomusicology, as also of Caucasian and Russian/East European Studies.

Having spent his entire career as a professional singer, songwriter, and musician, Thinking About Tomorrow is the amazing tale of rock and roll survivor Keith West. From being inspired by Elvis in the 1950s to pop stardom and working alongside the greats of the music world in the 1960s, Keith was at the eye of the storm alongside peers including The Who, The Beatles, The Kinks, The Small Faces, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and many, many more. With his Tomorrow bandmates - Steve Howe, Junior and Twink - Keith was a pioneer of psychedelic music in the 1960s with songs such as My White Bicycle, and he also achieved international fame alongside Mark Wirtz with the song Excerpt from a Teenage Opera (popularly remembered by millions of music fans as Grocer Jack). Tomorrow evolved from the R&B and mod bands Four + 1 and The In Crowd and, while their recorded output is small, their influence on other artists and the way rock music would develop is widely-regarded as enormous. Steve Howe went on to continue his incredible guitar adventures in Yes and Asia, and Twink would continue to influence the rock world as a member of pioneering bands The Pretty Things, The Pink Fairies, and Hawkwind. Keith would go on to have a long career in the music business, embracing punk in the late 70s and indie music in the 80s and 90s. But this is no straightforward tale of rock and roll hedonism; the book also pulls back the curtain on the mysterious world of the music industry. It reveals how agents, managers, publishers, record companies, songwriters, artists and the media are all locked together in an endless pursuit of the elusive elixir of their professional lives - a hit. Yet, once lightning has struck, the tragic consequences, the tremendous opportunities and the money generated can still create ripples half a century later...

For jazz historians, Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings mark the first revolution in the history of a music riven by upheaval. Yet few traces of this revolution can be found in the historical record of the late 1920s, when the records were made. Even black newspapers covered Armstrong as just one name among many, and descriptions of his playing, while laudatory, bear little resemblance to those of today. For this reason, the perspective of Armstrong's first listeners is usually regarded as inadequate, as if they had missed the true significance of his music. This attitude overlooks the possibility that those early listeners might have heard something valuable on its own terms, something we ourselves have lost. If we could somehow recapture their perspective-without abandoning our own-how might it change our understanding of these seminal recordings? In Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, Harker selects seven exceptional records to study at length: "Cornet Chop Suey," "Big Butter and Egg Man," "Potato Head Blues," "S.O.L. Blues"/"Gully Low Blues," "Savoy Blues," and "West End Blues." The world of vaudeville and show business provide crucial context, revealing how the demands of making a living in a competitive environment could catalyze Armstrong's unique artistic gifts. Technical achievements such as virtuosity, structural coherence, harmonic improvisation, and high-register playing are all shown to have a basis in the workaday requirements of Armstrong's profession. Invoking a breadth of influences ranging from New Orleans clarinet style to Guy Lombardo, and from tap dancing to classical music, this book offers bold insights, fresh anecdotes, and, ultimately, a new interpretation of Louis Armstrong and his most influential body of recordings.

Wisdom and musings on creativity and life from one of the world's most beloved musicians, producers, and mentors, Quincy Jones12 Notes is a self-development guide that will affirm that creativity is a calling that can and should be answered, no matter your age or experience. Drawing from his own life, and those of his many creative collaborators past and present, Quincy Jones presents readers with lessons that are hardworking and accessible, yet speak to the passion of self-expression. He includes sections as deep as how to transform grief into power, and as practical as how to set goals and articulate intentions through daily affirmations. Weaving his story throughout, Jones lets readers in on his own creative process, as well as the importance of letting honesty, hard work, and good relationships drive your career.

Almost 20 years ago Michael Brocken created from his doctoral research, what became both a seminal and contested volume concerning the social mores surrounding the British Folk Revival up to that point in time: The British Folk Revival 1944-2002. In this long-overdue second edition he revisits not only his own research, but also that of others from the 1990s and early 21st century. He then considers how a discourse of folkloric authenticity emerged in the closing years of the 19th century and how a worrying nationalistic immanence came to surround folk music and dance during the inter-war years. Brocken also proposes that the media: records, radio and TV in post-WWII folk revivalism can offer us important insights into how self-directed learning of the folk guitar emerged. Brocken moves on to consider the business structures of the contemporary folk scene and how relationships are formed between contemporary folk business and the digital and social media spheres. In his penultimate chapter he discusses the masculinisation of folk traditions and asks important questions about how our folk traditions are carried and are authorised. In the final chapter he also considers the rise of an exciting new folk live music built environment.

The BBC's Jazz Book of the Year for 2008. Few jazz musicians have had the lasting influence or attracted as much scholarly study as John Coltrane. Yet, despite dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and his own recorded legacy, the "facts" about Coltrane's life and work have never been definitely established. Well-known Coltrane biographer and jazz educator Lewis Porter has assembled an international team of scholars to write The John Coltrane Reference, an indispensable guide to the life and music of John Coltrane. The John Coltrane Reference features a a day-by-day chronology, which extends from 1926-1967, detailing Coltrane's early years and every live performance given by Coltrane as either a sideman or leader, and a discography offering full session information from the first year of recordings, 1946, to the last, 1967. The appendices list every film and television appearance, as well as every recorded interview. Richly illustrated with over 250 album covers and photos from the collection of Yasuhiro Fujioka, The John Coltrane Reference will find a place in every major library supporting a jazz studies program, as well as John Coltrane enthusiasts.

Independent rock, known as "indie rock" (rock independent of the major label corporations), is music dedicated to the art of rock: it's adventurous, eclectic, defiant, inventive, and restlessly creative. For over 40 years, indie bands have prided themselves on the back-breaking efforts of self-promotion, self-produced albums, homemade album cover art, and even, for the stalwart artist, self-run record labels. Encyclopedia of Indie Rock chronicles the history and development indie rock, providing students, scholars, and music fans with an extensive overview of the musical and cultural phenomenon. Inside this engaging volume readers will find over 150 entries on the singers and songwriters, producers, labels, and icons who have shaped the genre from the humble beginnings of lo-fi homemade records in the 1960s through the history of seasoned veterans who mastered the fine art of staying afloat despite every obstacle that the cutthroat industry threw at them. Among the featured: BLArcade BLFire BLBlack Flag BLDIY (Do It Yourself) BLgrunge BLJesus and Mary Chain BLlo-fi BLMelvins BLPavement BLPerforming Songwriter BLThe Ramones Righteous Babe Records BLriot grrl BLThe Smiths BLSonic Youth BLSST Records BLSub-Pop Records BLSXSW BLWomen in Indie Rock BLFrank Zappa volume also includes a timeline; a resource guide, which includes recommended books and articles, Web sites, and festivals; and indices in both the front and back of the book to make navigation very user-friendly. Necessary and entertaining reading for any indie rock fan who has ever adorned their locker, backpack, or car with a band's logo, Smith captures the history and evolution of the movement in this thorough, illuminatingencyclopedia.

Kate Bush is widely respected as one of the most unique solo female performers to have ever emerged in the field of popular music. She has achieved that rare combination of great commercial success and critical acclaim, with "Hounds of Love" considered widely to be her masterpiece. The album regularly features in 'best album' lists, and in the 2004 Observer poll was the highest placed work by a solo female artist. The album allows the author, Ron Moy, the critical opportunity to explore a wide range of issues relating to technology, production, authorship, grain of the voice, iconography, critical and commercial impact, collaboration, gender, sexuality, narrative, and social and cultural context.

Now in paperback, the New York Times bestseller by one of rock's most provocative figuresScar Tissue is Anthony Kiedis's searingly honest memoir of a life spent in the fast lane. In 1983, four self-described "knuckleheads" burst out of the mosh-pitted mosaic of the neo-punk rock scene in L.A. with their own unique brand of cosmic hardcore mayhem funk. Over twenty years later, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, against all odds, have become one of the most successful bands in the world. Though the band has gone through many incarnations, Anthony Kiedis, the group's lyricist and dynamic lead singer, has been there for the whole roller-coaster ride. Whether he's recollecting the influence of the beautiful, strong women who have been his muses, or retracing a journey that has included appearances as diverse as a performance before half a million people at Woodstock or an audience of one at the humble compound of the exiled Dalai Lama, Kiedis shares a compelling story about the price of success and excess. Scar Tissue is a story of dedication and debauchery, of intrigue and integrity, of recklessness and redemption--a story that could only have come out of the world of rock.

The first comprehensive reference work on popular music of the world Contributors are the world's leading popular music scholars Includes extensive bibliographies, discographies, sheet music listings and filmographies This second volume consists of some 460 entries by 130 contributors from around the world. Entries range between 250 and 5000 words, and are arranged in four parts: Part I: Performers and Performing; Part II: Musical Production and Transmission; Part III: Musical Instruments; Part IV: Musical Forms and Practice. Entries include musical examples, bibliographies, discographies and filmographies. An extensive index is also provided. Contents: Preface Part I: Performers and Performing Groups Individuals Performance Techniques Part II: Musical Production and Transmission Personnel Processes: Interpretative/Technological Technologies Part III: Musical Instruments Found Instruments Guitars Keyboard Instruments Mechanical Instruments Percussion Instruments Stringed Instruments Voice Wind Instruments Part IV: Musical Form and Practice Form Harmony Melody Rhythm The Piece Timbre Words, Images and Movement Index

Tempo: A Scarecrow Press Music Series of Rock, Pop, and Culture offers titles that explore rock and popular music through the lens of social and cultural history, revealing the dynamic relationship between musicians, music, and their milieu. Like other major art forms, rock and pop music comment on their cultural, political, and even economic situation, reflecting the technological advances, psychological concerns, religious feelings, and artistic trends of their times. Whether you are a professional musician or regular listener, diehard fan or music student, titles in the Tempo series are the ideal introduction to major pop and rock artists and the music they produced and their cultural and musical impact on society. With each year, new books appear on Bob Dylan, attesting to his continuing importance as a major figure in American music and culture. Bob Dylan: American Troubadour is the first book on Dylan to look at his entire career, from his first album to his most recent, Tempest, released 50 years later in 2012.In a brief compass, Brown provides insightful critical commentary on Dylan's entire corpus, placing full scope of Dylan's career in the context of its times in order to assess the relationship of Dylan's music to contemporary American culture. Each chapter addresses a particular phase of Dylan's career, taking its cue from events in Dylan's life and from the collective experiences that shaped the times. As the artist who famously proclaimed the times, they are a-changin', Dylan was never static as an artist, his music altering as the times changed. In Bob Dylan: American Troubadour, Donald Brown follows the shifting versions of Dylan, from his songs of conscientious social involvement to more personal exploratory songs; from his influential rock albums of the mid-'60s to his adaptations of Country music; from his three very different tours in the 1970s to his born again period as a proselytizer for Christ, to his frustrations as a recording and performing artist in the 1980s; from his retrospective importance in the Nineties to the refreshingly vital albums he has been producing in the 21st century.Bob Dylan: American Troubadour will engage not only Dylan fans and students of his work but those interested American popular music, history, and culture. Anyone who has been touched, challenged or surprised by a Dylan song, who would like to know more about this long and fascinating career, who wants to discover Dylan within his context will find in Bob Dylan: American Troubadour a concise and informed critical overview of Dylan's music and his place in the American musical landscape.

Boom's Blues stands as both a remarkable biography of J. Frank G.Boom (1920-1953) and a recovery of his incredible contribution to blues scholarship originally titled The Blues: Satirical Songs of the North American Negro. Wim Verbei tells how and when the Netherlands was introduced to African American blues music and describes the equally dramatic and peculiar friendship that existed between Boom and jazz critic and musicologist Will Gilbert, who worked for the Kultuurkamer during World War II and had been charged with the task of formulating the Nazi's Jazzverbod, the decree prohibiting the public performance of jazz. Boom's Blues ends with the annotated and complete text of Boom's The Blues, providing the international world at last with an English version of the first book-length study of the blues. At the end of the 1960s, a series of thirteen blues paperbacks edited by Paul Oliver for the London publisher November Books began appearing. One manuscript landed on his desk that had been written in 1943 by a then twenty-three-year-old Amsterdammer Frank (Frans) Boom. Its publication, to which Oliver gave thetitle Laughing to Keep from Crying, was announced on the back jacket of the last three Blues Paperbacks in 1971 and 1972. Yet it never was published and the manuscript once more disappeared. In October 1996, Dutch blues expert and publicist Verbei went in search of the presumably lost manuscript and the story behindits author. It only took him a couple of months to track down the manuscript, but it took another ten years to glean the full story behind the extraordinary Frans Boom, who passed away in 1953 in Indonesia.

- A comprehensive guide to musicals that are based on musicians' existing back catalogues - how they work, why they work and why they are so successful. - Written for musical theatre students at all levels - primarily on the 150 BA degrees across the UK and North America. - The first book to address this relatively new genre of musical theatre, doing so with in-depth and wide ranging analysis.

This text explores the possibility of drawing upon a punk ethos to inspire and invigorate sociology. It uses punk to think creatively about what sociology is and how it might be conducted and aims to fire the sociological imaginations of sociologists at any stage of their careers, from new students to established professors.

"Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Philip Larkin" argues that a true understanding of Philip Larkin as man and poet lies beyond his enduring public appeal and the variety of criticism that has recently been applied to his work. Richard Palmer suggests that the ostensible simplicity of Larkin's writing, which continues to attract so many readers to him, is deceptive, masking as it does one of the richest and most resonant of oeuvres in twentieth-century poetry. Penetrating the many masks of Larkin, the book sheds new and considerable light on the hitherto largely ignored spiritual significance of his work. Based upon close and scrupulous reading of the poems themselves, it draws upon insights gained from the history of art and the study of religion and myth as much as literary criticism and personal biography.It also brings long-overdue attention to what is seen to be perhaps the chief love, and operative aesthetic force, of Larkin's life: jazz. "Such Deliberate Disguises" is thus a major contribution, not just to Larkin studies, but to the wider cultural history of our times.

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From youth violence, to the impact of high stakes educational testing, to editorial hand wringing over the moral failures of hip-hop culture, young people of color are often portrayed as gang affiliated, "troubled," and ultimately, dangerous. The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back examines how youth activism has emerged to address the persistent inequalities that affect urban youth of color. Andreana Clay provides a detailed account of the strategies that youth activists use to frame their social justice agendas and organize in their local communities.

Based on two years of fieldwork with youth affiliated with two non-profit organizations in Oakland, California, The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back shows how youth integrate the history of social movement activism of the 1960s, popular culture strategies like hip-hop and spoken word, as well as their experiences in the contemporary urban landscape, to mobilize their peers. Ultimately, Clay's comparison of the two youth organizations and their participants expands our understandings of youth culture, social movements, popular culture, and race and ethnic relations.