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.

Made in Ireland: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, sociology and musicology of 20th- and 21st-century Irish popular music. The volume consists of essays by leading scholars in the field and covers the major figures, styles and social contexts of popular music in Ireland. Each essay provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance to Irish popular music. The book is organized into three thematic sections: Music Industries and Historiographies, Roots and Routes and Scenes and Networks. The volume also includes a coda by Gerry Smyth, one of the most published authors on Irish popular music.

Made in Ireland: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, sociology and musicology of 20th- and 21st-century Irish popular music. The volume consists of essays by leading scholars in the field and covers the major figures, styles and social contexts of popular music in Ireland. Each essay provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance to Irish popular music. The book is organized into three thematic sections: Music Industries and Historiographies, Roots and Routes and Scenes and Networks. The volume also includes a coda by Gerry Smyth, one of the most published authors on Irish popular music.

'A true testimonial and epic love letter to the soul saving power of rock & roll . . . Read it and be inspired, as I was' Bobby Gillespie 'Lenny Kaye has illuminated ten facets of the jewel called rock and roll from a uniquely personal and knowledgeable perspective. He draws from a lifetime of inspiration and experience. A youth plugging in his first electric guitar, a fan taking the dance floor, a propelling player, a humble guardian of history, and the writer I have always known him to be' Patti Smith Memphis, 1954. New Orleans 1957. Philadelphia 1959. Liverpool, 1962. San Francisco 1967. Detroit 1969. New York, 1975. London 1977. Los Angeles 1984 / Norway 1993. Seattle 1991. Rock and roll was birthed in basements and garages, radio stations and dance halls, in cities where unexpected gatherings of artists and audience changed and charged the way music is heard and celebrated, capturing lightning in a bottle. Musician and writer Lenny Kaye explores ten crossroads of time and place that define rock and roll, its unforgettable flashpoints, characters and visionaries, how each generation came to be, how it was discovered by the world. Whether Elvis Presley's Memphis, the Beatles' Liverpool, Patti Smith's New York or Kurt Cobain's Seattle, LIGHTNING STRIKING reveals the communal energy that creates a scene, a guided tour inside style and performance, to see who's on stage, along with the movers and shakers, the hustlers and hangers-on, and why everybody is listening. Grandly sweeping and minutely detailed, informed by Kaye's acclaimed knowledge and experience as a working musician, LIGHTNING STRIKING is an ear-opening insight into our shared musical and cultural history, a carpet ride of rock and roll's most influential movements and moments.

This volume examines the global influence and impact of DIY cultural practice as this informs the production, performance and consumption of underground music in different parts of the world. The book brings together a series of original studies of DIY musical activities in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Oceania. The chapters combine insights from established academic writers with the work of younger scholars, some of whom are directly engaged in contemporary underground music scenes. The book begins by revisiting and re-evaluating key themes and issues that have been used in studying the cultural meaning of alternative and underground music scenes, notably aspects of space, place and identity and the political economy of DIY cultural practice. The book then explores how the DIY cultural practices that characterize alternative and underground music scenes have been impacted and influenced by technological change, notably the emergence of digital media. Finally, in acknowledging the over 40-year history of DIY cultural practice in punk and post-punk contexts, the book considers how DIY cultures have become embedded in cultural memory and the emotional geographies of place. Through combining high-quality data and fresh conceptual insights in the context of an international body of work spanning the disciplines of popular-music studies, cultural and media studies, and sociology the book offers a series of innovative new directions in the study of DIY cultures and underground/alternative music scenes. This volume will be of particular interest to undergraduate students in the above-mentioned fields of study, as well as an invaluable resource for established academics and researchers working in these and related fields.

Popular Music Pedagogies: A Practical Guide for Music Teachers provides readers with a solid foundation of playing and teaching a variety of instruments and technologies, and then examines how these elements work together in a comprehensive school music program. With individual chapters designed to stand independently, instructors can adapt this guide to a range of learning abilities and teaching situations by combining the pedagogies and methodologies presented. This textbook is an ideal resource for preservice music educators enrolled in popular music education, modern band, or secondary general methods coursework and K-12 music teachers who wish to create or expand popular music programs in their schools. The website includes play-alongs, video demonstrations, printed materials, and links to useful popular music pedagogy resources.

David Jacobs, Alan Freeman, John Peel, Tommy Vance and Roger Scott were in their different ways five of the greatest pioneering British disc jockeys of the last sixty years. All were accomplished media personalities in their own right, and all were passionate and well-informed about the music they presented on radio and sometimes television. Jacobs, a much-respected broadcaster for over sixty years, was the face of 'Juke Box Jury' and the maestro of easy listening and songs from the shows; 'Fluff' Freeman the pop-picker, who introduced the Top 20 rundown, later championing heavy and progressive rock, followed by opera and the classics; Peel revelled in the alternative music scene generally shunned by most daytime presenters; Vance, 'the Music Vendor' the friend and lover of hard rock and New Wave of British Heavy Metal; and Scott an eclectic mix of genres in a career which sadly proved all too short. This book examines the lives and careers of each.

'Don't live life worrying about it, just T. Rex the s*** out of it.' - Sylvain Sylvain The New York Dolls were called many things; glam, proto-punk, hard rock, but are probably best understood as a 'dirty rock & roll' band. Combining an aggressively androgynous style with street smart New York attitude and campy humour, the New York Dolls ushered in the era of CBGBs, heroin chic, loud guitars and referential lyrics which gave rise to Patti Smith, The Ramones, Television and many more. Fans of the band range from Guns N' Roses to Morrissey, who organised the reformation of the band when he curated Meltdown festival in 2004. Sylvain Sylvain was there from the start, and this is his story. Taking in his early life in New York, the rise, fall and rise again of the New York Dolls, and all his misadventures between, There's No Bones in Ice Cream is the true story of one of rock's greatest, told in his own authentic voice. 'In any great band it's often The Quiet One who has the best stories. There's No Bones in Ice Cream would be a superb book even if Sylvain worked in a bank. As it is it's one of the best rock biographies ever. Ten out of ten.' - Classic Rock

This book is about Senegalese Pop star Youssou Ndour, also known as the king of mbalax music. The word mbalax was the name given to a specific drumming beat. Today, it is used to name a musical genre played by Wolof and Serer percussionists to entertain people at almost every family event such as naming and wedding ceremonies, storytelling, dances, and others, generally held by Senegalese women. Almost all social and family events are, or can be, musicalized in Senegal: there is music for every social gathering and mbalax is the music genre that most often accompanies such events. Mbalax music groups mix sabar instruments, which include the cool, lamb, ndend, mben-mben, ndeer, tunune, and tama, also known as "talking drum," with modern elements such as electric and bass guitars, trumpets and keyboards. Ndour has substantially contributed to the popularity of mbalax music throughout the world. The book retraces the artist's early career and life-changing events and encounters, song repertoire themes and hits, conquest of the international scene and years of glory and international recognition, interests in media and television businesses, activism and political engagement of one among the one hundred most influential personalities of the world, according to Time magazine in 2007. The author analyzes Ndour's philosophical stance, religious beliefs, and wisdom through analysis of his rich song repertoire.

An essential part of human expression, humor plays a role in all forms of art, and humorous and comedic aspects have always been part of popular music. For the first time, The Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Humor draws together scholarship exploring how the element of humor interacts with the artistic and social aspects of the musical experience. Discussing humor in popular music across eras from Tin Pan Alley to the present, and examining the role of humor in different musical genres, case studies of artists, and media forms, this volume is a groundbreaking collection that provides a go-to reference for scholars in music, popular culture, and media studies. While most scholars, when considering humor's place in popular music, tend to focus on more "literate" forms, the contributors in this collection seek to fill in the gaps by surveying all kinds of humor, critical theories, and popular musics. Across eight parts, the essays in this collection explore topics both highbrow and low, including: Parody and satire Humor in rock and global music Gender, sexuality, and politics The music mockumentary Novelty songs Humor has long been a fixture of the popular music soundscape, whether on stage, in performance, on record, or on film. The Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Humor covers it all, presenting itself as the most comprehensive treatment of the topic to date.

This volume studies the relationships between government and the popular music industries, comparing three Anglophone nations: Scotland, New Zealand and Australia. At a time when issues of globalization and locality are seldom out of the news, musicians, fans, governments, and industries are forced to reconsider older certainties about popular music activity and their roles in production and consumption circuits. The decline of multinational recording companies, and the accompanying rise of promotion firms such as Live Nation, exemplifies global shifts in infrastructure, profits and power. Popular music provides a focus for many of these topics-and popular music policy a lens through which to view them. The book has four central themes: the (changing) role of states and industries in popular music activity; assessment of the central challenges facing smaller nations competing within larger, global music-media markets; comparative analysis of music policies and debates between nations (and also between organizations and popular music sectors); analysis of where and why the state intervenes in popular music activity; and how (and whether) music fits within the 'turn to culture' in policy-making over the last twenty years. Where appropriate, brief nation-specific case studies are highlighted as a means of illuminating broader global debates.

The first joint biography of one of rock 'n' roll's greatest song writing teams, Hitmakers Inc. explores the private lives and public triumphs of lyricist Doc Pomus and composer Mort Shuman. Between 1958 and 1965, usually working out of Manhattan's famous Brill Building, they wrote some 500 teen anthems and timeless ballads for Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, The Drifters, Bobby Darin, Del Shannon and Andy Williams among others. Polio-stricken ex-blues shouter Pomus always attracted the press coverage, but after the duo split junior partner Shuman proved the more colourful of the two, acting in films, writing musicals, joining the post-Beatles British beat boom and eventually becoming a chart-topping singer-composer in his own right in - of all places - France. The story of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, writing together and individually, reveals a personal dynamic that was both warm and difficult but which at its height produced songs like 'Teenager In Love', 'Save The Last Dance For Me', 'Surrender', 'Little Sister', '(Marie's The Name) His Latest Flame' , 'This Magic Moment' and 'Lonely Avenue'.

Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy examines the capacity of musiciking to cultivate ecological literacy, approaching eco-literate music pedagogy through philosophical and autoethnographical lenses. Building on the principle that music contributes uniquely to human ecological thinking, this volume tracks the course of eco-literate music pedagogy while guiding the discussion forward: What does it mean to embrace the impulse to teach music for ecological literacy? What is it like to theorize eco-literate music pedagogy? What is learned through enacting this pedagogy? How do the impulsion, the theorizing, and the enacting relate to one another? Music education for ecological consciousness is experienced in local places, and this study explores the theory underlying eco-literate music pedagogy in juxtaposition with the author's personal experiences. The work arrives at a new philosophy for music education: a spiritual praxis rooted in soil communities, one informed by ecology's intrinsic value for non-human being and musicking. Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy adds to the emerging body of music education literature considering ecological and environmental issues.

Status Quo were one of the most successful, influential and innovative bands of the 1970s. During the first half of the decade, they wrote, recorded and performed a stream of inventive and highly complex rock compositions, developed 12 bar forms and techniques in new and fascinating ways, and affected important musical and cultural trends. But, despite global success on stage and in the charts, they were maligned by the UK music press, who often referred to them as lamebrained three-chord wonders, and shunned by the superstar Disk Jockeys of the era, who refused to promote their music. As a result, Status Quo remain one of the most misunderstood and underrated bands in the history of popular music. Cope redresses that misconception through a detailed study of the band's music and live performances, related musical and cultural subtopics and interviews with key band members. The band is reinstated as a serious, artistic and creative phenomenon of the 1970s scene and shown to be vital contributors to the evolution of rock.

Bringing together exciting new interdisciplinary work from emerging and established scholars in the UK and beyond, Litpop addresses the question: how has writing past and present been influenced by popular music, and vice versa? Contributions explore how various forms of writing have had a crucial role to play in making popular music what it is, and how popular music informs 'literary' writing in diverse ways. The collection features musicologists, literary critics, experts in cultural studies, and creative writers, organised in three themed sections. 'Making Litpop' explores how hybrids of writing and popular music have been created by musicians and authors. 'Thinking Litpop' considers what critical or intellectual frameworks help us to understand these hybrid cultural forms. Finally, 'Consuming Litpop' examines how writers deal with music's influence, how musicians engage with literary texts, and how audiences of music and writing understand their own role in making 'Litpop' happen. Discussing a range of genres and periods of writing and popular music, this unique collection identifies, theorizes, and problematises connections between different forms of expression, making a vital contribution to popular musicology, and literary and cultural studies.

In 1974 the British progressive rock group Genesis released their double concept album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The story was described by Genesis's then front-man Peter Gabriel as a 'moral fable' about Rael, a half-Puerto-Rican New York City street tough who is engulfed by a solid cloud into a series of strange adventures in a metaphysical realm. The album is a surreal allegory drawing its material from religious, literary and psychological themes. More than thirty years after its release, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway still enthralls listeners, earning the distinction of being Genesis's most consistently selling back-catalogue release. Kevin Holm-Hudson analyses The Lamb within the context of Genesis's recorded output, within the progressive rock genre as a whole, and within the context of social and political changes of the mid 1970s. The Lamb marked a conscious shift in their story setting to America, and for the first time the songs were oriented to the present rather than the past or future. Significantly, while 1974 marked the peak of music industry growth and consolidation through corporate mergers, it was also the year in which America was confronted with its limits: through the first of the OPEC energy crises, the resignation of Richard Nixon, the withdrawal from Vietnam, and the effects of runaway inflation. Genesis's native Britain was also to feel the effects of the energy crisis, intensified by a period of economic slowdown that ultimately led to the rise of Thatcherism. The Lamb is set in New York City during this time of uncertainty. Within a few years the economic constraints would affect the industry as a whole and as a result progressive rock would suffer a precipitous drop in industry support. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway thus makes a particularly rich subject for detailed study, providing compelling intersections between the musical, textual and socioeconomic aspects of an album.

In this major biography, the late Timothy White explores both the career and the troubled personal journey of the legendary singer-songwriter. Rich with insights from Paul McCartney, Carly Simon, Sting, Danny 'Kootch' Kortchmar, the entire Taylor family and many other key figures around James Taylor and his music. Dispelling myth and rumour, Long Ago and Far Away examines the roots of Taylor's mental anguish and his recurring battles with heroin and alcohol. This is an epic family history, an exploration of the real stories behind Fire and Rain and the rest of the songs, as well as a frank account of Taylor's days on the Apple record label, the financial disaster of his Greatest Hits album deal and the deaths and divorces that have haunted his life. This edition has been updated by his friend and former Rolling Stone comrade Mitch Glazer and includes an epilogue about the memorial concerts for Timothy that James Taylor helped organise. The book includes many rare photos and an extensive discography and bibliography.

Why is gender inseparable from pop songs? What can gender representations in musical performances mean? Why are there strong links between gender, sexuality and popular music? The sound of the voice, the mix, the arrangement, the lyrics and images, all link our impressions of gender to music. Numerous scholars writing about gender in popular music to date are concerned with the music industry's impact on fans, and how tastes and preferences become associated with gender. This is the first collection of its kind to develop and present new theories and methods in the analysis of popular music and gender. The contributors are drawn from a range of disciplines including musicology, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, philosophy, and media studies, providing new reference points for studies in this interdisciplinary field. Stan Hawkins's introduction sets out to situate a variety of debates that prompts ways of thinking and working, where the focus falls primarily on gender roles. Amongst the innovative approaches taken up in this collection are: queer performativity, gender theory, gay and lesbian agency, the female pop celebrity, masculinities, transculturalism, queering, transgenderism and androgyny. This Research Companion is required reading for scholars and teachers of popular music, whatever their disciplinary background.

Music is an accumulation of mediators: instruments, languages, sheets, performers, scenes, media and so on. There is no musical object 'in itself'; music must always be made again. In this innovative book, Hennion turns the elusiveness of music into a resource for a pragmatic analysis: by which collective process do we make music appear among us? Rather than offering a sociology of music, The Passion for Music listens to the lesson provided by the case of music - this art of infinite mediations. Learning from music allows us to transform the paradigm to be offered by sociology, by confronting it (from Durkheim and Weber to Bourdieu) with a different way of considering objects. For this task, Hennion draws on aesthetics (Adorno) and art history (Haskell, Baxandall), as well as science and technology studies and popular music studies (Latour, Frith, DeNora). As part of that project, The Passion for Music presents a wide-ranging series of case studies, restoring attention to the rich and varied intermediaries through which music is brought to life: from the debate around the reinterpretation of baroque music, to the classroom, the rock scene, the classical music concert, Bach's 'social career' in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the practices of music 'amateurs' today. This is the first English translation of one of the most important works of French scholarship on music and society.

The untimely deaths of Amy Winehouse (2011) and Whitney Houston (2012), and the 'resurrection' of Tupac Shakur for a performance at the Coachella music festival in April 2012, have focused the media spotlight on the relationship between popular music, fame and death. If the phrase 'sex, drugs and rock'n'roll' ever qualified a lifestyle, it has left many casualties in its wake, and with the ranks of dead musicians growing over time, so the types of death involved and the reactions to them have diversified. Conversely, as many artists who fronted the rock'n'roll revolution of the 1950s and 1960s continue to age, the idea of dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse (which gave rise, for instance, to the myth of the '27 Club') no longer carries the same resonance that it once might have done. This edited collection explores the reception of dead rock stars, 'rock' being taken in the widest sense as the artists discussed belong to the genres of rock'n'roll (Elvis Presley), disco (Donna Summer), pop and pop-rock (Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse), punk and post-punk (GG Allin, Ian Curtis), rap (Tupac Shakur), folk (the Dutchman Andre Hazes) and 'world' music (Fela Kuti). When music artists die, their fellow musicians, producers, fans and the media react differently, and this book brings together their intertwining modalities of reception. The commercial impact of death on record sales, copyrights, and print media is considered, and the different justifications by living artists for being involved with the dead, through covers, sampling and tributes. The cultural representation of dead singers is investigated through obituaries, biographies and biopics, observing that posthumous fame provides coping mechanisms for fans, and consumers of popular culture more generally, to deal with the knowledge of their own mortality. Examining the contrasting ways in which male and female dead singers are portrayed in the media, the book

What did popular song mean to people across the world during the First World War? For the first time, song repertoires and musical industries from countries on both sides in the Great War as well as from neutral countries are analysed in one exciting volume. Experts from around the world, and with very different approaches, bring to life the entertainment of a century ago, to show the role it played in the lives of our ancestors. The reader will meet the penniless lyricist, the theatre chain owner, the cross-dressing singer, fado composer, stage Scotsman or rhyming soldier, whether they come from Serbia, Britain, the USA, Germany, France, Portugal or elsewhere, in this fascinating exploration of showbiz before the generalization of the gramophone. Singing was a vector for patriotic support for the war, and sometimes for anti-war activism, but it was much more than that, and expressed and constructed debates, anxieties, social identities and changes in gender roles. This work, accompanied by many links to online recordings, will allow the reader to glimpse the complex role of popular song in people's lives in a period of total war.

PJ Harvey's performances are premised on the core contention that she is somehow causing 'trouble'. Just how this trouble can be theorised within the context of the music video and what it means for a development of the ways we might conceptualise 'disruption' and think about music video lies at the heart of this book. Abigail Gardner mixes feminist theory and critical models from film and video scholarship as a rich means of interrogating Harvey's work and redefining her disruptive strategies. The book presents a rethinking of the masquerade that allies it to cultural memory, precipitated by Gardner's claim that Harvey's performances are conversations with the past, specifically with visualised memories of archetypes of femininity. Harvey's masquerades emerge from her conversations and renegotiations with both national and transatlantic musical, visual and lyrical heritages. It is the first academic book to present analysis of Harvey's music videos and opens up fresh avenues into exploring what is at stake in the video work of one of Britain's premier singer-songwriters. It extends the discussion on music video to consider how to make sense of the rapidly developing digital environment in which it now sits. The interdisciplinary nature of the book should attract readers from a range of subject areas including popular music studies, cultural studies, media and communication studies, and gender studies.

1979. The dawn of Thatcher' s Britain. It' s a country crippled by strikes, joblessness and economic gloom, divided by race and class - and skanking to a new beat: 2-Tone. The unruly offspring of white boy punk and rude boy ska, the new music' s undeniable leaders were The Specials. Bursting out of Coventry' s concrete jungle, their lyrics spoke of failed marriages, petty violence, crowded dance floors, gangsters and race hate - but with a wit that outshone their angry punk forebears. On stage they were electric, and at the heart of this energy was the vocal chemistry of the ethereal Terry Hall and Jamaican rude boy Neville Staple. In 1961, aged only five, Neville was sent to England to live with his father - a man for whom discipline bordered on child abuse. Growing up black in the Midlands of the Sixties and Seventies wasn' t easy, but then Nev was hardly an angel. His youth was marked by scuffles with skins, compulsive womanising, and a life of crime that led from shoplifting to burglary and eventually borstal and Wormwood Scrubs. But throughout there was music, and now Nev tells how a very bad boy became part of the most important band of the Eighties. He remembers sound system battles; the legendary 2-Tone tour with The Selecter, Madness and Dexy' s - and their clashes with NF thugs. He recalls the band' s increasing tensions and eventual split; his subsequent foray into bubblegum pop with Fun Boy Three; and a new found fame in America, as godfather to bands like Gwen Stefani' s No Doubt. Finally he reflects on The Specials' reunion and how even now, thirty years on, they can' t help tearing themselves apart.Raucous and charming Original Rude Boy is the story of a man who done too much, much too young. Neville Staple was a frontman with The Specials, a member of the hugely successful pop trio Fun Boy Three and now tours the world with own his own ska act The Neville Staple Band. Visit him at: www.nevillestaple.co.uk Tony McMahon is a journalist and TV producer living in south London.

Teaching the Beatles is designed to provide ideas for instructors who teach the music of the Beatles. Experienced contributors describe varied approaches to effectively convey the group's characteristics and lasting importance. Some of these include: treating the Beatles' lyrics as poetry; their influence on the world of art, film, fashion and spirituality; the group's impact on post-war Britain; political aspects of the Fab Four; Lennon and McCartney's songwriting and musical innovations; the band's use of recording technology; business aspects of the Beatles' career; and insights into teaching the Beatles in an online format.