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Books > Music > Contemporary popular music > Rock & pop > General
Popular music is a growing presence in education, formal and otherwise, from primary school to postgraduate study. Programmes, courses and modules in popular music studies, popular music performance, songwriting and areas of music technology are becoming commonplace across higher education. Additionally, specialist pop/rock/jazz graded exam syllabi, such as RockSchool and Trinity Rock and Pop, have emerged in recent years, meaning that it is now possible for school leavers in some countries to meet university entry requirements having studied only popular music. In the context of teacher education, classroom teachers and music-specialists alike are becoming increasingly empowered to introduce popular music into their classrooms. At present, research in Popular Music Education lies at the fringes of the fields of music education, ethnomusicology, community music, cultural studies and popular music studies. The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Music Education is the first book-length publication that brings together a diverse range of scholarship in this emerging field. Perspectives include the historical, sociological, pedagogical, musicological, axiological, reflexive, critical, philosophical and ideological.
Experimentation in Improvised Jazz: Chasing Ideas challenges the notion that in the twenty-first century, jazz can be restrained by a singular, static definition. The worldwide trend for jazz to be marginalized by the mainstream music industry, as well as conservatoriums and schools of music, runs the risk of stifling the innovative and challenging aspects of its creativity. The authors argue that to remain relevant, jazz needs to be dynamic, proactively experimental, and consciously facilitate new ideas to be made accessible to an audience broader than the innovators themselves. Experimentation in Improvised Jazz explores key elements of experimental jazz music in order to discern ways in which the genre is developing. The book begins with an overview of where, when and how new ideas in free and improvised jazz have been created and added to the canon, developing the genre beyond its initial roots. It moves on to consider how and why musicians create free and improvised jazz; the decisions they make while playing. What are they responding to? What are they depending on? What are they thinking? The authors analyse and synthesise the creation of free jazz by correlating the latest research to the reflections provided by some of the world's greatest jazz innovators for this project. Finally, the book examines how we respond to free and improvised jazz: artistically, critically and personally. Free jazz is, the book argues, an environment that develops through experimentation with new ideas.
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.
The outdoor music festival market has developed and commercialised significantly since the mid-1990s, and is now a mainstream part of the British summertime leisure experience. The overall number of outdoor music festivals staged in the UK doubled between 2005 and 2011 to reach a peak of over 500 events. UK Music (2016) estimates that the sector attracts over 3.7 million attendances each year, and that music tourism as a whole sustains nearly 40,000 full-time jobs. Music Festivals in the UK is the first extended investigation into this commercialised rock and pop festival sector, and examines events of all sizes: from mega-events such as Glastonbury Festival, V Festival and the Reading and Leeds Festivals to 'boutique' events with maximum attendances as small as 250. In the past, research into festivals has typically focused either on their carnivalesque heritage or on developing managerial tools for the field of Events Management. Anderton moves beyond such perspectives to propose new ways of understanding and theorising the cultural, social and geographic importance of outdoor music festivals. He argues that changes in the sector since the mid-1990s, such as professionalisation, corporatisation, mediatisation, regulatory control, and sponsorship/branding, should not necessarily be regarded as a process of transgressive 'alternative culture' being co-opted by commercial concerns; instead, such changes represent a reconfiguration of the sector in line with changes in society, and a broadening of the forms and meanings that may be associated with outdoor music events.
The spread of UK music festivals has exploded since 2000. In this major contribution to cultural studies, the lid is lifted on the contemporary festival scene. Gone are the days of a handful of formulaic, large events dominating the market place. Across the country, hundreds of 'boutique' gatherings have popped up, drawing hundreds of thousands of festival-goers into the fields. Why has this happened? What has led to this change? In her richly detailed study, industry insider Dr Roxy Robinson uncovers the dynamics that have led to the formation and evolution of the modern festival scene. Tracing the history of the culture as far back as the fifties, this book examines the tensions between authenticity and commerce as festivals grew into a widespread, professionalized industry. Setting the scene as a fragmented, yet highly competitive market, Music Festivals and the Politics of Participation examines the emergence of key trends with a focus on surrealist production and popular theatricality. For the first time, the transatlantic relationship between British promoters and the social experiment-come-festival Burning Man is documented, uncovering its role in promoting a politics of participation that has dramatically altered the festival experience. Taking an in-depth approach to examining key events, including the fastest growing independent music festival in recent years (Hampshire's BoomTown Fair) the UK market is shown to have produced a scene that champions co-production and the democratization of festival space. This is a vital text for anyone interested in British culture.
Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Groove examines the entwinement of material music objects, technology and memory in relation to a range of independent record labels, including Sarah Records, Ghost Box and Finders Keepers. Moving from Edison's phonograph to digital music files, from record collections to online archives, Roy argues that materiality plays a crucial role in constructing and understanding the territory of recorded sound. How do musical objects 'write' cultural narratives? How can we unearth and reactivate past histories by looking at yesterday's media formats? What is the nature, and fate, of the physical archive in an increasingly dematerialized world? In what ways do physical and digital musical objects coexist and intersect? With its innovative theoretical approach, the book explores the implications of materialization in the fashioning of a musical world and its cultural transmission. A substantial contribution to the field of music and material culture studies, Media, Materiality and Memory also provides a nuanced and timely reflection on nostalgia and forgetting in the digital age.
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
Singing the Body Electric explores the relationship between the human voice and technology, offering startling insights into the ways in which technological mediation affects our understanding of the voice, and more generally, the human body. From the phonautograph to magnetic tape and now to digital sampling, Miriama Young visits particular musical and literary works that define a century-and-a-half of recorded sound. She discusses the way in which the human voice is captured, transformed or synthesised through technology. This includes the sampled voice, the mechanical voice, the technologically modified voice, the pliable voice of the digital era, and the phenomenon by which humans mimic the sounding traits of the machine. The book draws from key electro-vocal works spanning a range of genres - from Luciano Berio's Thema: Omaggio a Joyce to Radiohead, from Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room, to Bjoerk, and from Pierre Henry's Variations on a Door and a Sigh to Christian Marclay's Maria Callas. In essence, this book transcends time and musical style to reflect on the way in which the machine transforms our experience of the voice. The chapters are interpolated by conversations with five composers who work creatively with the voice and technology: Trevor Wishart, Katharine Norman, Paul Lansky, Eduardo Miranda and Bora Yoon. This book is an interdisciplinary enterprise that combines music aesthetics and musical analysis with literature and philosophy.
Broadside ballads-folio-sized publications containing verse, a tune indication, and woodcut imagery-related cautionary tales, current events, and simplified myth and history to a wide range of social classes across seventeenth century England. Ballads straddled, and destabilized, the categories of public and private performance spaces, the material and the ephemeral, music and text, and oral and written traditions. Sung by balladmongers in the streets and referenced in theatrical works, they were also pasted to the walls of local taverns and domestic spaces. They titillated and entertained, but also educated audiences on morality and gender hierarchies. Although contemporaneous writers published volumes on the early modern controversy over women and the English witch craze, broadside ballads were perhaps more instrumental in disseminating information about dangerous women and their acoustic qualities. Recent scholarship has explored the representations of witchcraft and malfeasance in English street literature; until now, however, the role of music and embodied performance in communicating female transgression has yet to be investigated. Sarah Williams carefully considers the broadside ballad as a dynamic performative work situated in a unique cultural context. Employing techniques drawn from musical analysis, gender studies, performance studies, and the histories of print and theater, she contends that broadside ballads and their music made connections between various degrees of female crime, the supernatural, and cautionary tales for and about women.
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.
The music industry often paints a glamorous picture of its stars' lives and achievements, but what is life really like behind the gloss? How does it feel to have a No.1 record, or to live on the road for over 300 days a year? And what happens after the hits stop? The answers to these and many other questions are contained within the pages of this book, as twenty-six major American hitmakers of the Fifties and Sixties reveal their own fascinating stories. Includes previously unpublished interviews with Gary 'US' Bonds, Pat Boone, Freddy Cannon, Crickets Jerry Allison, Sonny Curtis and Joe B. Mauldin, Bo Diddley, Dion, Fats Domino, Duane Eddy, Frankie Ford, Charlie Gracie, Brian Hyland, Marv Johnson, Ben E. King, Brenda Lee, Little Eva, Chris Montez, Johnny Moore (Drifters), Gene Pitney, Johnny Preston, Tommy Roe, Del Shannon, Edwin Starr, Johnny Tillotson and Bobby Vee. Over 150 illustrations including previously unpublished recent portraits as well as vintage ads, record sleeves, label shots, sheet music covers, etc.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Policy is the first thorough analysis of how policy frames the behavior of audiences, industries, and governments in the production and consumption of popular music. Covering a range of industrial and national contexts, this collection assesses how music policy has become an important arm of government, and a contentious arena of global debate across areas of cultural trade, intellectual property, and mediacultural content. It brings together a diverse range of researchers to reveal how histories of music policy development continue to inform contemporary policy and industry practice. The Handbook maps individual nation case studies with detailed assessment of music industry sectors. Drawing on international experts, the volume offers insight into global debates about popular music within broader social, economic, and geopolitical contexts.
The Beatles. The Beach Boys. Blur, Bowie, Kylie Minogue, Kate Bush and Coldplay. EMI was one of the big four record companies, with some of the biggest names in the history of recorded music on its roster. Dominating the music industry for over 100 years, by 2010 EMI Group had reported massive pre-tax losses. The group was divided up and sold in 2011. How could one of the greatest recording companies of the 20th century have ended like this? With interviews from insiders and music industry experts, Eamonn Forde pieces together the tragic end to a financial juggernaut and a cultural institution in forensic detail. The Final Days of EMI: Selling the Pig is the story of the British recording industry, laid bare in all its hubris and glory.
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.
A towering figure in American culture and a global twentieth-century icon, Bob Dylan has been at the centre of American life for over forty years. The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan brings fresh insights into the imposing range of Dylan's creative output. The first Part approaches Dylan's output thematically, tracing the evolution of Dylan's writing and his engagement with American popular music, religion, politics, fame, and his work as a songwriter and performer. Essays in Part II analyse his landmark albums to examine the consummate artistry of Dylan's most accomplished studio releases. As a writer Dylan has courageously chronicled and interpreted many of the cultural upheavals in America since World War II. This book will be invaluable both as a guide for students of Dylan and twentieth-century culture, and for his fans, providing a set of new perspectives on a much-loved writer and composer.
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.
This book argues for the importance of popular music in negotiations of national identity, and Germanness in particular. By discussing diverse musical genres and commercially and critically successful songs at the heights of their cultural relevance throughout seventy years of post-war German history, Soundtracking Germany describes how popular music can function as a language for "writing" national narratives. Running chronologically, all chapters historically contextualize and critically discuss the cultural relevance of the respective genre before moving into a close reading of one particularly relevant and appellative case study that reveals specific interrelations between popular music and constructions of Germanness. Close readings of these sonic national narratives in different moments of national transformations reveal changes in the narrative rhetoric as this book explores how Germanness is performatively constructed, challenged, and reaffirmed throughout the course of seventy years.
A story of becoming an artist, by the godmother of rock'n'roll: the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids Patti Smith 'A poet of distinction' New York Times 'Glorious' NPR 'Rare and ferocious' Salon 'Shockingly beautiful' New York Magazine Everything contained in this little book is true, and written just like it was. The writing of it drew me from my strange torpor and I hope that in some measure it will fill the reader with a vague and curious joy... In this small, luminous memoir, the National Book Award-winner Patti Smith revisits the most sacred experiences of her early years, with truths so vivid they border on the surreal. The author entwines her childhood self - and its 'clear, unspeakable joy' - with memories both real and envisioned from her twenties on New York's MacDougal Street, the street of cafes. Woolgathering was completed in Michigan, on Patti Smith's 45th birthday and originally published in a slim volume from Raymond Foye's Hanuman Books. Twenty years later, Bloomsbury is proud to present it in a much augmented edition, featuring writing that was omitted from the book's first printing, along with new photographs and illustrations.
The long overdue autobiography from guitar great and former member of Genesis, Steve Hackett. As with his music, Steve has written a highly detailed, entertaining and embracing tome that charts his life in full, but with a firm emphasis on his years with Genesis that saw the band's meteoric rise to become one of the most successful British bands of all time. Steve talks candidly about his early life, his time with Genesis, and in particular his personal relationships with the other four band members, with great insight into the daily goings on of this major rock band. Naturally A Genesis In My Bed also regales stories of Steve's career since leaving Genesis and the many different journeys that it has taken him on. With his flair for the creative, and a great deal of levity, A Genesis In My Bed is a riveting read. Indispensable for Genesis fans but also essential for general music lovers and avid readers of autobiographies full of heartfelt and emotive tales.
This book is the first to explore style and spectacle in glam popular music performance from the 1970s to the present day, and from an international perspective. Focus is given to a number of representative artists, bands, and movements, as well as national, regional, and cultural contexts from around the globe. Approaching glam music performance and style broadly, and using the glam/glitter rock genre of the early 1970s as a foundation for case studies and comparisons, the volume engages with subjects that help in defining the glam phenomenon in its many manifestations and contexts. Glam rock, in its original, term-defining inception, had its birth in the UK in 1970/71, and featured at its forefront acts such as David Bowie, T. Rex, Slade, and Roxy Music. Termed "glitter rock" in the US, stateside artists included Alice Cooper, Suzi Quatro, The New York Dolls, and Kiss. In a global context, glam is represented in many other cultures, where the influences of early glam rock can be seen clearly. In this book, glam exists at the intersections of glam rock and other styles (e.g., punk, metal, disco, goth). Its performers are characterized by their flamboyant and theatrical appearance (clothes, costumes, makeup, hairstyles), they often challenge gender stereotypes and sexuality (androgyny), and they create spectacle in popular music performance, fandom, and fashion. The essays in this collection comprise theoretically-informed contributions that address the diversity of the world's popular music via artists, bands, and movements, with special attention given to the ways glam has been influential not only as a music genre, but also in fashion, design, and other visual culture.
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.
This interdisciplinary volume explores the girl's voice and the construction of girlhood in contemporary popular music, visiting girls as musicians, activists, and performers through topics that range from female vocal development during adolescence to girls' online media culture. While girls' voices are more prominent than ever in popular music culture, the specific sonic character of the young female voice is routinely denied authority. Decades old cliches of girls as frivolous, silly, and deserving of contempt prevail in mainstream popular image and sound. Nevertheless, girls find ways to raise their voices and make themselves heard. This volume explores the contemporary girl's voice to illuminate the way ideals of girlhood are historically specific, and the way adults frame and construct girlhood to both valorize and vilify girls and women. Interrogating popular music, childhood, and gender, it analyzes the history of the all-girl band from the Runaways to the present; the changing anatomy of a girl's voice throughout adolescence; girl's participatory culture via youtube and rock camps, and representations of the girl's voice in other media like audiobooks, film, and television. Essays consider girl performers like Jackie Evancho and Lorde, and all-girl bands like Sleater Kinney, The Slits and Warpaint, as well as performative 'girlishness' in the voices of female vocalists like Joni Mitchell, Beyonce, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Kathleen Hanna, and Rebecca Black. Participating in girl studies within and beyond the field of music, this book unites scholarly perspectives from disciplines such as musicology, ethnomusicology, comparative literature, women's and gender studies, media studies, and education to investigate the importance of girls' voices in popular music, and to help unravel the complexities bound up in music and girlhood in the contemporary contexts of North America and the United Kingdom.
This book examines do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches to the collection, preservation, and display of popular music heritage being undertaken by volunteers in community archives, museums and halls of fame globally. DIY institutions of popular music heritage are much more than 'unofficial' versions of 'official' institutions; rather, they invoke a complex network of affect and sociality, and are sites where interested people - often enthusiasts - are able to assemble around shared goals related to the preservation of and ownership over the material histories of popular music culture. Drawing on interviews and observations with founders, volunteers and heritage workers in 23 DIY institutions in Australasia, Europe and North America, the book highlights the potentialities of bottom-up, community-based interventions into the archiving and preservation of popular music's material history. It reveals the kinds of collections being housed in these archives, how they are managed and maintained, and explores their relationship to mainstream heritage institutions. The study also considers the cultural labor of volunteers in the DIY institution, arguing that while these are places concerned with heritage management and the preservation of artefacts, they are also extensions of musical communities in the present in which activities around popular music preservation have personal, cultural, community and heritage benefits. By looking at volunteers' everyday interventions in the archiving and curating of popular music's material past, the book highlights how DIY institutions build upon national heritage strategies at the community level and have the capacity to contribute to the democratization of popular music heritage. This book will have a broad appeal to a range of scholars in the fields of popular music studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, archive studies and archival science, museum studies, critical heritage studies, cultural studies, cultural sociology and media studies.
This book explores the trend of retro and nostalgia within contemporary popular music culture. Using empirical evidence obtained from a case study of fans' engagement with older music, the book argues that retro culture is the result of an inseparable mix of cultural and technological changes, namely, the rise of a new generation and cultural mood along with the encouragement of new technologies. Retro culture has become a hot topic in recent years but this is the first time the subject has been explored from an academic perspective and from the fans' perspective. As such, this book promises to provide concrete answers about why retro culture dominates in contemporary society. For the first time ever, this book provides an empirically grounded theory of popular music, retro culture and its intergenerational audience in the twenty-first century. It will appeal to advanced students of popular music studies, cultural studies, media studies, sociology and music. |
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