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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Contemporary popular music > Easy listening, MOR
This book looks at the role of popular music in constructing the myth of the First World War. Since the late 1950s over 1,500 popular songs from more than forty countries have been recorded that draw inspiration from the War. National Myth and the First World War in Modern Popular Music takes an inter-disciplinary approach that locates popular music within the framework of 'memory studies' and analyses how songwriters are influenced by their country's 'national myths'. How does popular music help form memory and remembrance of such an event? Why do some songwriters stick rigidly to culturally dominant forms of memory whereas others seek an oppositional or transnational perspective? The huge range of musical examples include the great chansonniers Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens; folk maestros including Al Stewart and Eric Bogle; the socially aware rock of The Kinks and Pink Floyd; metal legends Iron Maiden and Bolt Thrower and female iconoclasts Diamanda Galas and PJ Harvey.
The Moog synthesizer "bent the course of music forever" Rolling Stone declared. Bob Moog, the man who did that bending, was a lovable geek with Einstein hair and pocket protectors. He walked into history in 1964 when his homemade contraption unexpectedly became a sensation--suddenly everyone wanted a Moog. The Beatles, The Doors, The Byrds, and Stevie Wonder discovered his synthesizer, and it came to be featured in seminal film scores including Apocalypse Now and A Clockwork Orange. The Moog's game-changing sounds saturated 60's counterculture and burst into the disco party in the 70's to set off the electronic dance music movement. Bob had singlehandedly founded the synth industry and become a star in the process. But he was also going broke. Imitators copied his technology, the musicians' union accused him of replacing live players, and Japanese competitors started overtaking his work. He struggled to hang on to his inventions, his business, and his very name. Bob's story upends our notions of success and wealth, showing that the two don't always go together. In Switched On, author Albert Glinsky draws on exclusive access to Bob Moog's personal archives and his probing interviews with Bob's family and a multitude of associates, for this first complete biography of the man and his work. Switched On takes the reader on a roller coaster ride at turns triumphant, heart-breaking, and frequently laugh out loud absurd--a nuanced trip through the public and private worlds of this legendary inventor who altered the course of music.
A new biography of one of the key composers of 20th-century American popular song and jazz,Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm and Race illuminates Blake's little-known impact on over 100 years of American culture. A gifted musician, Blake rose from performing in dance halls and bordellos of his native Baltimore to the heights of Broadway. In 1921, together with performer and lyricist Noble Sissle, Blake created Shuffle Along which became a sleeper smash on Broadway eventually becoming one of the top ten musical shows of the 1920s. Despite many obstacles Shuffle Along integrated Broadway and the road and introduced such stars as Josephine Baker, Lottie Gee, Florence Mills, and Fredi Washington. It also proved that black shows were viable on Broadway and subsequent productions gave a voice to great songwriters, performers, and spoke to a previously disenfranchised black audience. As successful as Shuffle Along was, racism and bad luck hampered Blake's career. Remarkably, the third act of Blake's life found him heraldedin his 90s at major jazz festivals, in Broadway shows, and on television and recordings. Tracing not only Blake's extraordinary life and accomplishments, Broadway and popular music authorities Richard Carlin and Ken Bloom examine the professional and societal barriers confronted by black artists from the turn of the century through the 1980s. Drawing from a wealth of personal archives and interviews with Blake, his friends, and other scholars,Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm and Race offers an incisive portrait of the man and the musical world he inhabited.
The Sound State of Uzbekistan: Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov Era is a pioneering study of the intersection between popular music and state politics in Central Asia. Based on 20 months of fieldwork and archival research in Tashkent, this book explores a remarkable era in Uzbekistan's politics (2001-2016), when the Uzbek government promoted a rather unlikely candidate to the prominent position of state sound: estrada, a genre of popular music and a musical relic of socialism. The political importance it attached to estrada was matched by the establishment of an elaborate bureaucratic apparatus for state oversight. The Sound State of Uzbekistan shows the continuing legacy of Soviet concepts to frame the nexus between music, artists and the state, and explains the extraordinary potency ascribed to estrada. At the same time, it challenges classical readings of transition and also questions common binary models for researching culture in totalitarian or authoritarian states. Proposing to approach lives in music under authoritarianism as a form of normality instead, the author promotes a post-Cold War paradigm in music studies.
The Singer-Songwriter in Europe is the first book to explore and compare the multifaceted discourses and practices of this figure within and across linguistic spaces in Europe and in dialogue with spaces beyond continental borders. The concept of the singer-songwriter is significant and much-debated for a variety of reasons. Many such musicians possess large and zealous followings, their output often esteemed politically and usually held up as the nearest popular music gets to high art, such facets often yielding sizeable economic benefits. Yet this figure, per se, has been the object of scant critical discussion, with individual practitioners celebrated for their isolated achievements instead. In response to this lack of critical knowledge, this volume identifies and interrogates the musical, linguistic, social and ideological elements that configure the singer-songwriter and its various equivalents in Europe, such as the French auteur-compositeur-interprete and the Italian cantautore, since the late 1940s. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of this figure in the post-war period, how and why its contours have changed over time and space subsequently, cross-cultural influences, and the transformative agency of this figure as regards party and identity politics in lyrics and music, often by means of individual case studies. The book's polycentric approach endeavours to redress the hitherto Anglophone bias in scholarship on the singer-songwriter in the English-speaking world, drawing on the knowledge of scholars from across Europe and from a variety of academic disciplines, including modern language studies, musicology, sociology, literary studies and history.
There is a growing awareness around the world of the pressing need to archive the material remnants of popular music so as to safeguard the national and local histories of this cultural form. Current research suggests that in the past 20 or so years there has been an expansion of DIY heritage practice, with the founding of numerous DIY popular music institutions, archives and museums around the world. This edited collection seeks to explore the role of DIY or Pro-Am (Professional-Amateur) practitioners of popular music archiving and preservation. It looks critically at ideas around "DIY preservationism," "self-authorised" and "unauthorised" heritage practice and the "DIY institution," while also unpacking the potentialities of bottom-up, community-based interventions into the archiving and preservation of popular music's material history. With an international scope and an interdisciplinary approach, this is an important reference for scholars of popular music, heritage studies and cultural studies.
When he emerged from the nightclubs of Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan was often identified as a "protest" singer. As early as 1962, however, Dylan was already protesting the label: "I don't write no protest songs," he told his audience on the night he debuted "Blowin' in the Wind." "Protest" music is largely perceived as an unsubtle art form, a topical brand of songwriting that preaches to the converted. But popular music of all types has long given listeners food for thought. Fifty years before Vietnam, before the United States entered World War I, some of the most popular sheet music in the country featured anti-war tunes. The labor movement of the early decades of the century was fueled by its communal "songbook." The Civil Rights movement was soundtracked not just by the gorgeous melodies of "Strange Fruit" and "A Change Is Gonna Come," but hundreds of other gospel-tinged ballads and blues. In Which Side Are You On, author James Sullivan delivers a lively anecdotal history of the progressive movements that have shaped the growth of the United States, and the songs that have accompanied and defined them. Covering one hundred years of social conflict and progress across the twentieth century and into the early years of the twenty-first, this book reveals how protest songs have given voice to the needs and challenges of a nation and asked its citizens to take a stand - asking the question "Which side are you on?"
In this book, native popular musicologists focus on their own popular music cultures from Germany, Austria and Switzerland for the first time: from subcultural to mainstream phenomena; from the 1950s to contemporary acts. Starting with an introduction and two chapters on the histories of German popular music and its study, the volume then concentrates on focused, detailed and yet concise close readings from different perspectives (including particular historical East and West German perspectives), mostly focusing on the music and its protagonists. Moreover, these analyses deal with very original specific genres such as Schlager and Krautrock as well as transcultural genres such as Punk or Hip Hop. There are additional chapters on characteristically German developments within music media, journalism and the music industry. The book will contribute to a better understanding of German, Austrian and Swiss popular music, and will interconnect international and especially Anglo-American studies with German approaches. The book, as a consequence, will show close connections between global and local popular music cultures and diverse traditions of study.
Living in the Merry Ghetto reframes how people use music to build resistance. Author Trever Hagen addresses the social context of illegal music-making in Czechoslovakia during state socialism. He tells the story of a group of rock'n'roll musicians who went underground after 1968, building a parallel world from where they could flourish: the Merry Ghetto. The book examines the case of the Czech Underground and the politics of their music and their way of life, paying close attention to the development of the ensemble The Plastic People of the Universe. Taking in multiple political transitions from the 1940s-2000s, the story focuses on non-official cultural practices such as listening to foreign radio broadcasts, seeking out copied cassette tapes, listening to banned LPs, growing long hair, attending clandestine concerts, smuggling albums via diplomats, recording in home-studios and being thrown in prison for any of these activities. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with Undergrounders, archival research and participant observation, Hagen shows how these practices shaped consciousness, informed bodies and promoted collective action, all of which contributed to an Underground identity.
The title seeks to show how people are embedded culturally, socially and linguistically in a certain peripheral geographical location, yet are also able to roam widely in their use and takeup of a variety of linguistic and cultural resources. Drawing on data examples obtained from ethnographic fieldwork trips in Mongolia, a country located geographically, politically and economically on the Asian periphery, this book presents an example of how peripheral contexts should be seen as crucial sites for understanding the current sociolinguistics of globalization. Dovchin brings together several themes of wide contemporary interest, including sociolinguistic diversity in the context of popular culture and media in a globalized world (with a particular focus on popular music), and transnational flows of linguistic and cultural resources, to argue that the role of English and other languages in the local language practices of young musicians in Mongolia should be understood as "linguascapes." This notion of linguascapes adds new levels of analysis to common approaches to sociolinguistics of globalization, offering researchers new complex perspectives of linguistic diversity in the increasingly globalized world.
George Cory and Douglass Cross wrote just one song that was successful. They were unknown before they wrote it, and unknown after it became a hit. Until now. Their lives were a tangle: They eked out a meager living, in San Francisco and Brooklyn, for fifteen years before Tony Bennett serendipitously came across "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," the song that had languished for almost a decade. Bennett's recording revived his career, and made the songwriters enormously rich. But wealth didn't beget happiness. Cory and Cross broke up, Cross drank himself to death and Cory, widely believed to be a suicide, died from drinking as well. There's a statue in front of an iconic hotel in San Francisco that honors the song. It's Tony Bennett's statue. Cory and Cross don't even have a street sign.
This book offers an in-depth study of the globalization of contemporary South Korean idol pop music, or K-Pop, visiting K-Pop and its multiple intersections with political, economic, and cultural formations and transformations. It provides detailed insights into the transformative process in and around the field of Korean pop music since the 1990s, which paved the way for the recent international rise of K-Pop and the Korean Wave. Fuhr examines the conditions and effects of transnational flows, asymmetrical power relations, and the role of the imaginary "other" in K-Pop production and consumption, relating them to the specific aesthetic dimensions and material conditions of K-Pop stars, songs, and videos. Further, the book reveals how K-Pop is deployed for strategies of national identity construction in connection with Korean cultural politics, with transnational music production circuits, and with the transnational mobility of immigrant pop idols. The volume argues that K-Pop is a highly productive cultural arena in which South Korea's globalizing and nationalizing forces and imaginations coincide, intermingle, and counteract with each other and in which the tension between both of these poles is played out musically, visually, and discursively. This book examines a vibrant example of contemporary popular music from the non-Anglophone world and provides deeper insight into the structure of popular music and the dynamics of cultural globalization through a combined set of ethnographic, musicological, and cultural analysis. Widening the regional scope of Western-dominated popular music studies and enhancing new areas of ethnomusicology, anthropology, and cultural studies, this book will also be of interest to those studying East Asian popular culture, music globalization, and popular music.
Popular Music Theory and Analysis: A Research and Information Guide uncovers the wealth of scholarly works dealing with the theory and analysis of popular music. This annotated bibliography is an exhaustive catalog of music-theoretical and musicological works that is searchable by subject, genre, and song title. It will support emerging scholarship and inquiry for future research on popular music.
How is cultural activity shaped by the places where it unfolds? One answer has been found in the 'scenes perspective', a development within popular music studies that explains change and transformation within musical practices in terms of the social and institutional histories of scenes. Scene Thinking: Cultural Studies from the Scenes Perspective takes up this framework - and the mode of analysis that goes with it - as an important contribution to cultural analysis and social research more generally. In a series of focused case studies - ranging across practices like drag kinging, Bangladeshi underground music, urban arts interventions and sites like single performance venues, urban neighbourhoods in various states of gentrification, and virtual networks of game consoles in countless living rooms - the authors demonstrate how 'scene thinking' can enrich cultural studies inquiry. As a humanistic, empirically oriented alternative to network-based social ontologies, thinking in terms of scenes sensitizes researchers to complex, fluid processes that are nonetheless anchored and made meaningful at the level of lived experience. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.
Since launching his career at the Village Voice in the early 1980s Greg Tate has been one of the premiere critical voices on contemporary Black music, art, literature, film, and politics. Flyboy 2 provides a panoramic view of the past thirty years of Tate's influential work. Whether interviewing Miles Davis or Ice Cube, reviewing an Azealia Banks mixtape or Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, discussing visual artist Kara Walker or writer Clarence Major, or analyzing the ties between Afro-futurism, Black feminism, and social movements, Tate's resounding critical insights illustrate how race, gender, and class become manifest in American popular culture. Above all, Tate demonstrates through his signature mix of vernacular poetics and cultural theory and criticism why visionary Black artists, intellectuals, aesthetics, philosophies, and politics matter to twenty-first-century America.
How does the sacred/secular opposition explain itself in the context of musical production? This volume traces this binary as it frames Western Classical music and Indian Classical music in the 18th and 19th centuries, laying the ground for a contemporary exploration of what is ostensibly sacred music in South Asia. Offering a potent critique of musicological knowledge-making, Virinder S. Kalra explores examples of South Asian musics in various domains and traverses a new cartography of music in which the sacred and the secular overlap. Drawing on examples which include Qawaali, Kirtan and popular devotional genres, Sacred and Secular Musics offers new empirical material, as well as new insights into conceptualising religion and music, and the ways in which music performs sacredness and secularity across the contested India-Pakistan border in the region of Punjab. Through its deconstruction of the sacred/secular opposition, Sacred and Secular Musics explores the relationship of religion and music to wider questions of religion and politics. Its postcolonial approach brings Asia into the Western sacred/secular opposition, and provides a set of analytical tools - a language and range of theories - to allow further exploration of non-western religious music.
The Singer-Songwriter in Europe is the first book to explore and compare the multifaceted discourses and practices of this figure within and across linguistic spaces in Europe and in dialogue with spaces beyond continental borders. The concept of the singer-songwriter is significant and much-debated for a variety of reasons. Many such musicians possess large and zealous followings, their output often esteemed politically and usually held up as the nearest popular music gets to high art, such facets often yielding sizeable economic benefits. Yet this figure, per se, has been the object of scant critical discussion, with individual practitioners celebrated for their isolated achievements instead. In response to this lack of critical knowledge, this volume identifies and interrogates the musical, linguistic, social and ideological elements that configure the singer-songwriter and its various equivalents in Europe, such as the French auteur-compositeur-interprete and the Italian cantautore, since the late 1940s. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of this figure in the post-war period, how and why its contours have changed over time and space subsequently, cross-cultural influences, and the transformative agency of this figure as regards party and identity politics in lyrics and music, often by means of individual case studies. The book's polycentric approach endeavours to redress the hitherto Anglophone bias in scholarship on the singer-songwriter in the English-speaking world, drawing on the knowledge of scholars from across Europe and from a variety of academic disciplines, including modern language studies, musicology, sociology, literary studies and history.
'I will always believe in the strength we have as women.' As the queen of pop music since the glory days of Destiny's Child to her incredible solo career, Beyonce is one of the most inspiring and powerful women in music. The Little Book of Queen Bey is a collection of the most iconic quotes from a woman who needs no introduction. When it comes to self-love, empowerment and sisterhood, Beyonce has more wisdom than anybody. From how to be an independent woman to positive affirmations that will give you hope, The Little Book of Queen Bey is the perfect gift for fans of the goddess of pop. Prepare to be inspired.
At fifteen, Sanford Brunson Campbell (1884-1952) became enchanted with the new sounds of ragtime and ran away from his rural Kansas home, hopping a train to Sedalia, Missouri, determined to take piano lessons from a black musician he had never met. Scott Joplin nicknamed his white protege ""The Ragtime Kid."" A composer and entertainer at the dawn of the ragtime era, ""Brun"" was a prime mover in the ragtime revival of the 1940s and helped establish Joplin's prominence as an American virtuoso. Campbell's own legacy was tarnished by his inability to tell a straight story and he was often dismissed as a liar and a clown. Based on his memoirs, musical compositions and correspondence with music industry notables, this first comprehensive biography of Campbell reveals an engaging storyteller and a devotee wholly dedicated to a musical genre that had been given up as dead. His firsthand account of life as an itinerant pianist in the Midwest provides a unique picture of life a century ago.
This book provides a manuscript-megaphone for a variety of perspectives on popular music education, including those we do not usually hear from, but who are doing far and away the coolest, most relevant and most interesting things. It includes rants, manifestos, and pieces that are pithy and punchy and poignant, which have resulted in a wide tonal variety among chapters, from more traditionally scholarly pieces replete with citations and references, through descriptions of practice, to straight-up polemics. It is more about beliefs, experiences and motivation, about frustrations, aspirations and celebrations. The chapters are intended to whet appetites, prime pumps, open eyes, and keep cogs turning. This book is organized into four parts: Beyond the Classroom, Identity and Purpose, Higher Education and Politics and Ideology. This book is intended for academics of all ages and stages, but the writing is often deliberately non-academic in tone. The book will appeal to those working in popular music studies, communication studies, education research, and should be of interest to those involved in policy decisions at national and regional levels. It is also directly relevant to researchers looking music industry and music ecosystems nationally, regionally and internationally, as education and popular music industry, DIY and community sectors continue to enmesh in complex and evolving ways.
There is a growing awareness around the world of the pressing need to archive the material remnants of popular music so as to safeguard the national and local histories of this cultural form. Current research suggests that in the past 20 or so years there has been an expansion of DIY heritage practice, with the founding of numerous DIY popular music institutions, archives and museums around the world. This edited collection seeks to explore the role of DIY or Pro-Am (Professional-Amateur) practitioners of popular music archiving and preservation. It looks critically at ideas around "DIY preservationism," "self-authorised" and "unauthorised" heritage practice and the "DIY institution," while also unpacking the potentialities of bottom-up, community-based interventions into the archiving and preservation of popular music's material history. With an international scope and an interdisciplinary approach, this is an important reference for scholars of popular music, heritage studies and cultural studies.
Using a collection of over one thousand popular songs from the war years, as well as around 150 soldiers' songs, John Mullen provides a fascinating insight into the world of popular entertainment during the First World War. Mullen considers the position of songs of this time within the history of popular music, and the needs, tastes and experiences of working-class audiences who loved this music. To do this, he dispels some of the nostalgic, rose-tinted myths about music hall. At a time when recording companies and record sales were marginal, the book shows the centrality of the live show and of the sale of sheet music to the economy of the entertainment industry. Mullen assesses the popularity and significance of the different genres of musical entertainment which were common in the war years and the previous decades, including music hall, revue, pantomime, musical comedy, blackface minstrelsy, army entertainment and amateur entertainment in prisoner of war camps. He also considers non-commercial songs, such as hymns, folk songs and soldiers' songs and weaves them into a subtle and nuanced approach to the nature of popular song, the ways in which audiences related to the music and the effects of the competing pressures of commerce, propaganda, patriotism, social attitudes and the progress of the war.
Using a collection of over one thousand popular songs from the war years, as well as around 150 soldiers' songs, John Mullen provides a fascinating insight into the world of popular entertainment during the First World War. Mullen considers the position of songs of this time within the history of popular music, and the needs, tastes and experiences of working-class audiences who loved this music. To do this, he dispels some of the nostalgic, rose-tinted myths about music hall. At a time when recording companies and record sales were marginal, the book shows the centrality of the live show and of the sale of sheet music to the economy of the entertainment industry. Mullen assesses the popularity and significance of the different genres of musical entertainment which were common in the war years and the previous decades, including music hall, revue, pantomime, musical comedy, blackface minstrelsy, army entertainment and amateur entertainment in prisoner of war camps. He also considers non-commercial songs, such as hymns, folk songs and soldiers' songs and weaves them into a subtle and nuanced approach to the nature of popular song, the ways in which audiences related to the music and the effects of the competing pressures of commerce, propaganda, patriotism, social attitudes and the progress of the war.
Simon Frith has been one of the most important figures in the emergence and subsequent development of popular music studies. From his earliest academic publication, The Sociology of Rock (1978), through to his recent work on the live music industry in the UK, in his desire to 'take popular music seriously' he has probably been cited more than any other author in the field. Uniquely, he has combined this work with a lengthy career as a music critic for leading publications on both sides of the Atlantic. The contributions to this volume of essays and memoirs seek to honour Frith's achievements, but they are not merely 'about Frith'. Rather, they are important interventions by leading scholars in the field, including Robert Christgau, Antoine Hennion, Peter J. Martin and Philip Tagg. The focus on 'sociology and industry' and 'aesthetics and values' reflect major themes in Frith's own work, which can also be found within popular music studies more generally. As such the volume will become an essential resource for those working in popular music studies, as well as in musicology, sociology and cultural and media studies.
Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens and Leo Ferre are three emblematic figures of post-war French popular music who have been constantly associated with each other by the public and the media. They have been described as the epitome of chanson, and of 'Frenchness'. But there is more to the trio than a musical trinity: this new study examines the factors of cultural and national identity that have held together the myth of the trio since its creation. This book identifies the combination of cultural and historical circumstances from which the works of these three singers emerged. It presents an innovative analysis of the correlation between this iconic trio and the evolution of national myths that nurtured the cultural aspirations of post-war French society. It explores the ways in which Brel, Brassens and Ferre embody the myth of the left-wing intellectual and of the authentic 'Gaul' spirit, and it discusses the ambiguous attitude of post-war French society towards gender relations. The book takes an original look at the trio by demonstrating how it illustrates the popular representation of a key issue of French national identity: the paradoxical aspiration to both revolution and the maintenance of the status quo. |
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