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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Contemporary popular music > Rock & pop
No band has ever been able to demonstrate the enduring power of rock and roll quite like the Rolling Stones, who continue to enthrall, provoke, and invigorate their legions of fans more than fifty years since they began. In Counting Down the Rolling Stones: Their 100 Finest Songs, rock writer Jim Beviglia dares to rank the band's finest 100 songs in descending order. Beviglia provides an insightful explanation about why each song deserves its place. Looking at the story behind the song and supplying a fresh take on the musical and lyrical content, he illuminates these unforgettable songs for new and diehard fans alike. Taken together, the individual entries in Counting Down the Rolling Stones tell a fascinating story of the unique personalities and incredible talents that made the Stones a band for the ages. Counting Down the Rolling Stones is the perfect playlist builder, whether it is for the longtime fan or the newbie just getting acquainted with the work of Mick, Keith, and the boys.
Popular music is a cultural form much rooted in space and place. This book interprets the meaning of music from a spatial perspective and, in doing so it furthers our understanding of broader social relations and trends, including identity, attachment to place, cultural economies, social activism and politics. The book's editors have brought together a team of scholars to discuss the latest innovative thinking on music and its geographies, illustrated with a fascinating range of case studies from the USA, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia and Great Britain.
Puerto Rico is often depicted as a "racial democracy" in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing Reggaeton, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaeton musicians critique racial democracy's privileging of whiteness and concealment of racism by expressing identities that center blackness and African diasporic belonging. Stars such as Tego Calderon criticize the Puerto Rican mainstream's tendency to praise black culture but neglecting and marginalizing the island's black population, while Ivy Queen, the genre's most visible woman, disrupts the associations between whiteness and respectability that support official discourses of racial democracy. From censorship campaigns on the island that sought to devalue reggaeton, to its subsequent mass marketing to U.S. Latino listeners, Rivera-Rideau traces reggaeton's origins and its transformation from the music of San Juan's slums into a global pop phenomenon. Reggaeton, she demonstrates, provides a language to speak about the black presence in Puerto Rico and a way to build links between the island and the African diaspora.
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.
Since her late-1990s debut as a member of the R&B trio Destiny's Child, Beyonce Knowles has garnered both praise and criticism. While some consider her an icon of female empowerment, others see her as detrimental to feminism and representing a negative image of women of color. Her music has a decidedly pop aesthetic, yet her power-house vocals and lyrics focused on issues like feminine independence, healthy sexuality and post partum depression give her songs dimension and substance beyond typical pop fare. This collection of new essays presents a detailed study of the music and persona of Beyonce-arguably the world's biggest pop star. Topics include: the body politics of respectability; feminism, empowerment and gender in Beyonce's lyrics; black female pleasure; and the changing face of celebrity motherhood.
Embracing your Christian identity does not make you "soft." Embracing your Black identity does not make you less Christian. Throughout American history, Black people were not given the freedom to acknowledge their suffering. A. D. Thomason believes that the Holy Spirit brings freedom and liberation as we're able to name our pain, recognize its roots in history and society, and seek healing. While many saw a confident, six-foot-five Black man, A. D. "Lumkile" Thomason lived most of his life in fear and anguish, deeply wounded by encounters with violence, abandonment, and family tragedy. Hiding behind a tough exterior, Adam earned his "Black card" but felt joyless inside. Even traveling around the globe to play professional basketball could not resolve his despair. But in the art of Jay-Z, A. D. discovered stirring honesty that gave voice to his own expressions of longing. And in the gospel of Jesus, he experienced the healing and salvation that had long evaded him. Now through what he calls "kingdom therapy," he's figuring out how to redefine the Jay-Z and Jesus that make up his blackness. A. D. uses his artistry as a poet and storyteller to share how he confessed his internalized pain and embraced the liberating joy of Christ. He writes for millennials, emerging adults, and anyone else who's ready to acknowledge the reality of racial trauma and our need to confront it. A. D.'s powerful story gives you permission to be Black, to be Christian, and to be the person God has made you to be.
Drawing on interviews with stars and musicians, producers and photographers, stylists, writers and celebrity fans, this book chronicles the glam era from its origins in 1970, through its 1972/73 heyday to its mid-seventies collapse and the death of Marc Bolan in September 1977. Fully illustrated throughout, the book includes a wealth of visual material, be it band shots, record sleeves and pin-up posters, or the era's best clobber, magazines and assorted memorabilia.
The role of motion pictures in the popularity of rock music became increasingly significant in the latter twentieth century. Rock music and its interaction with film is the subject of this significant book that re-examines and extends Serge Denisoff's pioneering observations of this relationship. Prior to Saturday Night Fever rock music had a limited role in the motion picture business. That movie's success, and the success of its soundtrack, began to change the silver screen. In 1983, with Flashdance, the situation drastically evolved and by 1984, ten soundtracks, many in the pop/rock genre, were certified platinum. Choosing which rock scores to discuss in this book was a challenging task. The authors made selections from seminal films such as The Graduate, Easy Rider, American Graffiti, Saturday Night Fever, Help!, and Dirty Dancing. However, many productions of the period are significant not because of their success, but because of their box office and record store failures. Risky Business chronicles the interaction of two major mediums of mass culture in the latter twentieth century. This book is essential for those interested in communications, popular culture, and social change.
The New York Dolls played an integral role in laying the
foundations of punk rock. By taking the flamboyant sass of Jagger
and Richards to outrageous extremes and combining it with
down-and-dirty rock 'n' roll, the Dolls -- fronted by icons David
Johansen and Sylvan Sylvain -- brought the punk scene to a fever
pitch and inspired both fans and musicians like the Sex Pistols and
Marilyn Manson. From their origins in the street gangs of New
York's outer boroughs, through their recent rebirth and the
untimely death of bassist Arthur Kane, "Trash! offers a
comprehensive look at these gender-bending scenesters.
Afro-Colombian Hip-Hop: Globalization, Transcultural Music, and Ethnic Identities, by Christopher Dennis, explores the impact that globalization and the transnational spread of U.S. popular culture-specifically hip-hop and rap-are having on the social identities of younger generations of black Colombians. Along with addressing why and how hip-hop has migrated so effectively to Colombia's black communities, Dennis introduces readers to some of the country's most renowned Afro-Colombian hip-hop artists, their musical innovations, and production and distribution practices. Above all, Dennis demonstrates how, through a mode of transculturation, today's young artists are transforming U.S. hip-hop into a more autonomous art form used for articulating oppositional social and political critiques, reworking ethnic identities, and actively contributing to the reimagining of the Colombian nation. Afro-Colombian Hip-Hop uncovers ways in which young Afro-Colombian performers are attempting to use hip-hop and digital media to bring the perspectives, histories, and expressive forms of their marginalized communities into national and international public consciousness.
So this is permanence, edited by Jon Savage with a foreword by Deborah Curtis, presents the intensely personal writings of one of the most enigmatic and influential songwriters and performers of the late twentieth century, Joy Division's Ian Curtis. The songs of Joy Division, infused with the energy of punk but steeped in a resigned longing, were born of Manchester in the late seventies - a once flourishing industrial city in decline. They were the songs too of Ian Curtis's inner tragedies, as he battled depression, epilepsy and debilitating stage fright. Ian Curtis committed suicide in 1980, on the eve of the band's first American tour. Interspersed with the lyrics are previously unpublished facsimile pages of Ian's notebooks, which throw his highly emotive lyrics into fascinating relief and cast light on the creative process of this singularly poetic songwriter.
Despite the musical and social roles they play in many parts of the world, wind bands have not attracted much interest from sociologists. The Sociology of Wind Bands seeks to fill this gap in research by providing a sociological account of this musical universe as it stands now. Based on a qualitative and quantitative survey conducted in northeastern France, the authors present a vivid description of the orchestras, the backgrounds and practices of their musicians, and the repertoires they play. Their multi-level analysis, ranging from the cultural field to the wind music subfield and to everyday life relationships within bands and local communities, sheds new light on the social organisation, meanings and functions of a type of music that is all too often taken for granted. Yet they go further than merely portraying a musical genre. As wind music is routinely neglected and socially defined in terms of its poor musical quality or even bad taste, the book addresses the thorny issue of the effects of cultural hierarchy and domination. It proposes an imaginative and balanced framework which, beyond the specific case of wind music, is an innovative contribution to the sociology of lowbrow culture.
This book considers the history of Do It Yourself art, music and publishing, demonstrating how DIY strategies have transitioned from being marginal, to emergent, to embedded. Through secondary research, observation and 30 original interviews, each chapter analyses one of 15 creative cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dusseldorf, New York, London, Manchester, Cologne, Washington DC, Detroit, Berlin, Glasgow, Olympia (Washington), Portland (Oregon), Moscow and Istanbul) and assesses the contemporary situation in each in the post-subcultural era of digital and internet technologies. The book challenges existing subcultural histories by examining less well-known scenes as well as exploring DIY "best practices" to trace a template of best approaches for sustainable, independent, locally owned creative enterprises.
Punk rock has long been equated with the ever-shifting concepts of dissent, disruption, and counter-cultural activities. As a result, since its 1970s and 1980s incarnations, when bands in Britain-from The Clash and Sex Pistols to Angelic Upstarts, U.K. Subs, and Crass-offered alternative political convictions and subversive lifestyle choices, the media has often deemed punk a threat. Bands like Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Bad Religion, and Millions of Dead Cops followed suit in America, pushing similar boundaries as the music mutated into a harsher "hardcore" style that branched deep into suburban enclaves. Those antagonisms and ideals were, in turn, translated by another wave of bands-from Fugazi to Anti-Flag-whose commitment to community building was as pronounced as their taut, explosive tunes. In The Politics of Punk, David Ensminger probes the conscience of punk by going beyond the lyrics and slogans of the pithy culture war. He paints a broad, nuanced, and well-documented picture of the ongoing activism and outreach inherent in punk. Creating a people's history of punk's social, cultural, aesthetic, and political features, the book features original interviews with members of Dead Kennedys, Dead Boys, MDC, Channel 3, Snap-Her, Scream, Minutemen, TSOL, the Avengers, Blowdryers, and many more. Ensminger highlights punk money's influence on philanthropy and community involvement and paints a contextualized picture of how punk critiqued dominant culture by channeling support and media coverage for a wide array of humanitarian programs for gays and lesbians, the homeless, the disabled, environmental and health research, and other causes.
The Ultimate Easy Piano Songlist is a bumper collection of over 40 of the best-selling songs from the 50s to the present day, all specially arranged for easy piano. The collection includes hits such as 7 Years by Lukas Graham, and Let It Go from Disney's Frozen, alongside classics such as Nat King Cole's Let There Be Love to Space Oddity by the late, great David Bowie.
This book is a comprehensive guide to a career in the music industry. Offering advice as to how to get into the business, it explains the main features of a wide range of jobs, such as management, production, promotion and merchandise through to the working lives of recording artists and session musicians.
This book defines the key ideas, scholarly debates, and research activities that have contributed to the formation of the international and interdisciplinary field of Metal Studies. Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines including popular music, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and ethics, this volume offers new and innovative research on metal musicology, global/local scenes studies, fandom, gender and metal identity, metal media, and commerce. Offering a wide-ranging focus on bands, scenes, periods, and sounds, contributors explore topics such as the riff-based song writing of classic heavy metal bands and their modern equivalents, and the musical-aesthetics of Grindcore, Doom metal, Death metal, and Progressive metal. They interrogate production technologies, sound engineering, album artwork and band promotion, logos and merchandising, t-shirt and jewellery design, and fan communities that define the global metal music economy and subcultural scene. The volume explores how the new academic discipline of metal studies was formed, also looking forward to the future of metal music and its relationship to metal scholarship and fandom. With an international range of contributors, this volume will appeal to scholars of popular music, cultural studies, and sociology, as well as those interested in metal communities around the world.
This book bridges a gap in existing scholarship by foregrounding the contribution of women to the nineteenth-century Lied. Building on the pioneering work of scholars in recent years, it consolidates recent research on women's achievements in the genre, and develops an alternative narrative of the Lied that embraces an understanding of the contributions of women, and of the contexts of their engagement with German song and related genres. Lieder composers including Fanny Hensel, Clara Schumann, Pauline Viardot-Garcia and Josephine Lang are considered with a stimulating variety of analytical approaches. In addition to the focus on composers associated with history and theory of the Lied, the various chapters explore the cultural and sociological background to the Lied's musical environment, as well as engaging with gender studies and discussing performance and pedagogical contexts. The range of subject matter reflects the interdisciplinary nature of current research in the field, and the energy it generates among scholars and performers. Women and the Nineteenth-Century Lied aims to widen readers' perception of the genre and help promote awareness of women's contribution to nineteenth-century musical life through critical appraisal of the cultural context of the Lied, encouraging acquaintance with the voices of women composers, and the variety of their contributions to the repertoire.
It has taken Liverpool almost half a century to come to terms with the musical, cultural and now economic legacy of the Beatles and popular music. At times the group was negatively associated with sex and drugs images surrounding rock music: deemed unacceptable by the city fathers, and unworthy of their support. Liverpudlian musicians believe that the musical legacy of the Beatles can be a burden, especially when the British music industry continues to brand the latest (white) male group to emerge from Liverpool as 'the next Beatles'. Furthermore, Liverpudlians of perhaps differing ethnicities find images of 'four white boys with guitars and drums' not only problematic in a 'musical roots' sense, but for them culturally devoid of meaning and musically generic. The musical and cultural legacy of the Beatles remains complex. In a post-industrial setting in which both popular and traditional heritage tourism have emerged as providers of regular employment on Merseyside, major players in what might be described as a Beatles music tourism industry have constructed new interpretations of the past and placed these in such an order as to re-confirm, re-create and re-work the city as a symbolic place that both authentically and contextually represents the Beatles.
The double bass - the preferred bass instrument in popular music during the 1960s - was challenged and subsequently superseded by the advent of a new electric bass instrument. From the mid-1960s and throughout the 1970s, a melismatic and inconsistent approach towards the bass role ensued, which contributed to a major change in how the electric bass was used in performance and perceived in the sonic landscape of mainstream popular music. Investigating the performance practice of the new, melodic role of the electric bass as it appeared (and disappeared) in the 1960s and 1970s, the book turns to the number one songs of the American Billboard Hot 100 charts between 1951 and 1982 as a prime source. Through interviews with players from this era, numerous transcriptions - elaborations of twenty bass related features - are presented. These are juxtaposed with a critical study of four key players, who provide the case-studies for examining the performance practice of the melodic electric bass. This highly original book will be of interest not only to bass players, but also to popular musicologists looking for a way to instigate methodological and theoretical discussions on how to develop popular music analysis.
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.
In Negro Soy Yo Marc D. Perry explores Cuba's hip hop movement as a window into the racial complexities of the island's ongoing transition from revolutionary socialism toward free-market capitalism. Centering on the music and lives of black-identified raperos (rappers), Perry examines the ways these young artists craft notions of black Cuban identity and racial citizenship, along with calls for racial justice, at the fraught confluence of growing Afro-Cuban marginalization and long held perceptions of Cuba as a non-racial nation. Situating hip hop within a long history of Cuban racial politics, Perry discusses the artistic and cultural exchanges between raperos and North American rappers and activists, and their relationships with older Afro-Cuban intellectuals and African American political exiles. He also examines critiques of Cuban patriarchy by female raperos, the competing rise of reggaeton, as well as state efforts to incorporate hip hop into its cultural institutions. At this pivotal moment of Cuban-U.S. relations, Perry's analysis illuminates the evolving dynamics of race, agency, and neoliberal transformation amid a Cuba in historic flux.
In Negro Soy Yo Marc D. Perry explores Cuba's hip hop movement as a window into the racial complexities of the island's ongoing transition from revolutionary socialism toward free-market capitalism. Centering on the music and lives of black-identified raperos (rappers), Perry examines the ways these young artists craft notions of black Cuban identity and racial citizenship, along with calls for racial justice, at the fraught confluence of growing Afro-Cuban marginalization and long held perceptions of Cuba as a non-racial nation. Situating hip hop within a long history of Cuban racial politics, Perry discusses the artistic and cultural exchanges between raperos and North American rappers and activists, and their relationships with older Afro-Cuban intellectuals and African American political exiles. He also examines critiques of Cuban patriarchy by female raperos, the competing rise of reggaeton, as well as state efforts to incorporate hip hop into its cultural institutions. At this pivotal moment of Cuban-U.S. relations, Perry's analysis illuminates the evolving dynamics of race, agency, and neoliberal transformation amid a Cuba in historic flux.
Divided into three sections, Linda Phyllis Austern collects eighteen, cross-disciplinary essays written by some of the most important names in the field to look at this stimulating topic. The first section focuses on the cultural and scientific ways in which music and the sense of hearing work directly on the mind and body. Part Two investigates how music works on the socially constructed, representational or sexualized body as a means of healing, beautifying and maintaining a balance between the mental and physical. Finally, the book explores the action of music as it is heard and sensed by wider social units, such as the body politic, mass communication, from print to sound recording, and broadcast technologies.
Here is the story of the boy from Brixton who became one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, returned to prominence in the 21st with music and visions informed by a sense of his own mortality and who through his life and work, changed lives and those of generations to come. David Bowie's music is loved by many and known by all as the soundtrack to the world of changes that was heralded by the creation of Ziggy Stardust. Through the hits and personas that followed, the work in art, drama, film and fashion, Bowie's voice rang clearly across the decades summoning everyone to a party where strangeness would be celebrated and the 'now' would always be new. Yet David Bowie remained forever the outsider, observing, creating, collaborating, inspiring and moving forward. This book follows a life that as much as any other was a personal journey but one in which so many joined and made part of their own. |
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