What is happening to pop music and pop culture? Synthesizers, samplers and MDI systems have allowed anyone with basic computing skills to make music. Exchange is now automatic and weightless with the result that the High Street record store is dying. "MySpace," "Twitter" and "You Tube" are now more important publicity venues for new bands than the concert tour routine. Unauthorized consumption in the form of illegal downloading has created a financial crisis in the industry. The old postwar industrial planning model of pop, which centralized control in the hands of major record corporations, and divided the market into neat segments, is dissolving in front of our eyes.

This book offers readers a comprehensive guide to understanding pop music today. It provides a clear survey of the field and a description of core concepts. The main theoretical approaches to the analysis of pop are described and critically assessed. The book includes a major investigation of the revolutionary changes in the production, exchange and consumption of pop music that are currently underway. "Pop Music, Pop Culture" is an accomplished, magnetically interesting guide to understanding pop music today.

'A definitive tome for both Who fans and newcomers alike' ***** Q Magazine Pete Townshend was once asked how he prepared himself for The Who' s violent live performances. His answer? ' Pretend you' re in a war.' For a band as prone to furious infighting as it was notorious for acts of ' auto-destructive art' this could have served as a motto. Between 1964 and 1969 The Who released some of the most dramatic and confrontational music of the decade, including ' I Can' t Explain' , ' My Generation' and ' I Can See For Miles' . This was a body of work driven by bitter rivalry, black humour and dark childhood secrets, but it also held up a mirror to a society in transition. Now, acclaimed rock biographer Mark Blake goes in search of its inspiration to present a unique perspective on both The Who and the sixties. From their breakthrough as Mod figureheads to the rise and fall of psychedelia, he reveals how The Who, in their explorations of sex, drugs, spirituality and class, refracted the growing turbulence of the time. He also lays bare the colourful but crucial role played by their managers, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp. And - in the uneasy alliance between art-school experimentation and working-class ambition - he locates the motor of the Swinging Sixties. As the decade closed, with The Who performing Tommy in front of 500,000 people at the Woodstock Festival, the ' rock opera' was born. In retrospect, it was the crowning achievement of a band who had already embraced pop art and the concept album; who had pioneered the power chord and the guitar smash; and who had embodied - more so than any of their peers - the guiding spirit of the age: war.

After a string of commercial disappointments, in 1986 Australian rock band The Church were simultaneously dropped by Warner Brothers in the US and EMI in Australasia. The future looked bleak. Seemingly from nowhere, their next record, Starfish, became an unlikely global hit. Its alluring and pensive lead single, 'Under the Milky Way', stood in stark contrast to the synth pop and hair metal dominating the 1980s. A high watermark of intelligent rock, Starfish musically anticipated alternative revolutions to come. Yet in making Starfish, The Church struggled with their internal contradictions. Seeking both commercial and artistic success, they were seduced by fame and drugs but cynical towards the music industry. Domiciled in Australia but with a European literary worldview, they relocated to Los Angeles to record under strained circumstances in the heart of the West Coast hit machine. This book traces the story of Starfish, its background, composition, production and reception. To the task, Gibson brings an unusual perspective as both a musician and a geographer. Drawing upon four decades of media coverage as well as fresh interviews between the author and band members, this book delves into the mysteries of this mercurial classic, tracing both its slippery cultural geography and its sumptuous songcraft. Situating Starfish in time and space, Gibson transports the reader to a key album and moment in popular music history when the structure and politics of the record industry was set to forever change.

This book may be used by students in Level 1A or the Complete Level 1 of Alfred's Basic Piano Library or in the first or second book of any method. Titles: The Christmas Song * Frosty the Snowman * Happy Holiday * (There's No Place Like) Home for the Holidays * I'll Be Home for Christmas * Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! * Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer * We Need a Little Christmas.

Indonesia is celebrated for its courtly arts, its beautiful beaches, its tourist attractions, and its artisan marketplace. Yet long overdue is a look at Indonesian Islam as the source of and inspiration for the arts throughout the history if its people, and in the dynamic popular performances of today. From the rhythmic grooves of dang dut, the archipelago's tenacious pop music, to the oft-quoted image of the wayang shadow puppet-theater, Divine Inspirations: Music and Islam in Indonesia investigates the expression of the Muslim religion through a diversity of art forms in this region. And from Quranic recitation by teenaged girls and women in Jakarta to the provincial patronage of Sufi arts and Muslim ritual as regional performance, this volume further addresses the ways in which Islam-inspired performance has been co-opted and appropriated for the expression of national culture. Eleven ethnographic case studies by an international roster of specialists in Indonesian expressive culture and performing arts are complimented by an introduction by co-editors David Harnish and Anne Rasmussen, and an epilogue by senior scholar Judith Becker. The collection explores the region's various micro-cultures of music, dance, religious ritual, government patronage, social censorship, tourism, development, and gender roles and relations. This pastiche speaks on personal, political, global, and local levels to the most important question of identity and ideology in Indonesia today: Islam. Divine Inspirations will engage readers interested in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Islam, world religions, global discourse, and music, arts and ritual.

This collection of original essays is in tribute to the work of Derek Scott on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. As one of the leading lights in Critical Musicology, Scott has helped shape the epistemological direction for music research since the late 1980s. There is no doubt that the path taken by the critical musicologist has been a tricky one, leading to new conceptions, interactions, and heated debates during the past two decades. Changes in musicology during the closing decades of the twentieth century prompted the establishment of new sets of theoretical methods that probed at the social and cultural relevance of music, as much as its self-referentiality. All the scholars contributing to this book have played a role in the general paradigmatic shift that ensued in the wake of Kerman's call for change in the 1980s. Setting out to address a range of approaches to theorizing music and promulgating modes of analysis across a wide range of repertories, the essays in this collection can be read as a coming of age of critical musicology through its active dialogue with other disciplines such as sociology, feminism, ethnomusicology, history, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, aesthetics, media studies, film music studies, and gender studies. The volume provides music researchers and graduate students with an up-to-date authoritative reference to all matters dealing with the state of critical musicology today.

Jimi Hendrix has been for sure a unique guitarist and a master of rock music, who, with his early death, aged 27, entered the Rock'n'roll Hall of Fame with all the glory it takes. The never-heard-before result of his continuous improvement was contained in just three albums "Are You Experienced?", "Axis: Bold as Love" and "Electric Ladyland". A deep focus on the three most important years of Hendrix's career, closely followed by Assante, skilled author and real expert on rock music. Unedited photos, quotes, legendary interviews and deep research to outline the iconic figure of this rock legend.

How has Hanguk (South Korean) hip hop developed over the last two decades as a musical, cultural, and artistic entity? How is hip hop understood within historical, sociocultural, and economic matrices of Korean society? How is hip hop represented in Korean media and popular culture? This book utilizes ethnographic methods, including fieldwork research and life timeline interviews with fifty-three influential hip hop artists, in order to answer these questions. It explores the nuanced meaning of hip hop in South Korea, outlining the local, global, and (trans)national flows of musical and cultural exchanges. Throughout the chapters, Korean hip hop is examined through the notion of buran-personal and societal anxiety or uncertainty-and how it manifests in the dimensions of space and place, economy, cultural production, and gender. Ultimately, buran serves as a metaphoric state for Hanguk hip hop in that it continuously evolves within the conditions of Korean society.

Bob Dylan: All the Songs focuses on Dylan's creative process and his organic, unencumbered style of recording. It is the only book to tell the stories, many unfamiliar even to his most fervent fans, behind the more than 500 songs he has released over the span of his career. Organized chronologically by album, and updated to include all of his most recent work including the 2020 release of his 39th album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, Margotin and Guesdon detail the origins of his melodies and lyrics, his process in the recording studio, the instruments he used, and the contribution of a myriad of musicians and producers to his canon.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'As the Brits say: I'm gobsmacked. I devoured this book... one of the most potent examples of living the dream' DEBBIE HARRY 'A great drummer who has written a great book' BILL MURRAY 'A revealing inside account of the highs and lows of a band who looked and sounded like nobody else' OLIVIA LAING, Guardian Chris Frantz's memoir tells the story of his life with Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club and his life-long love affair with Tina Weymouth. He remembers the early performances at CBGB alongside the Ramones, Patti Smith, Television and Blondie and recording the game changing albums, Talking Heads '77, More Songs About Buildings And Food, Fear Of Music, and Remain In Light. During a break from Talking Heads, Chris and Tina formed Tom Tom Club; in the process creating a hybrid of funk, disco, pop and electro that would have a huge impact on the club scene around the world. Warm and candid, funny and heartfelt, Remain in Love charts the rise of a band that began as a dream and culminated with their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and reveals the once-in-a-lifetime love story and creative partnership between Chris and Tina, one of the greatest rhythm sections of all time.

The complex notion of "rasa," as understood by Javanese musicians, refers to a combination of various qualities, including: taste, feeling, affect, mood, sense, inner meaning, a faculty of knowing intuitively, and deep understanding. This leaves us with a number of questions: how is rasa expressed musically? Who or what has rasa, and what sorts of musical, psychological, perceptual, and sociological distinctions enter into this determination? How is the vocabulary of rasa structured, and what does this tell us about traditional Javanese music and aesthetics?
In this first book on the subject, Rasa provides an entry into Javanese music as it is conceived by the people who know the tradition best: the musicians themselves. In one of the most thorough explorations of local aesthetics to date, author Marc Benamou argues that musical meaning is above all connotative - hence, not only learned, but learnable. Following several years performing and researching Javanese music in the regional and national cultural center of Solo, Indonesia, Benamou untangles the many meanings of rasa as an aesthetic criterion in Javanese music, particularly in court and court-derived gamelan traditions. While acknowledging that certain universal psychological tendencies may inspire parallel interpretations of musical meaning, Rasa demonstrates just how culturally specific such accrued, shared meanings can be.

'I was spotty, wore an anorak, had biro-engraved flared blue jeans with "purple" and "Sabbath" written on the thighs, and rode an ear-splittingly uncool moped. Oh yes, and I wanted to be a drummer...' Bruce Dickinson - Iron Maiden's legendary front man - is one of the world's most iconic singers and songwriters. But there are many strings to Bruce's bow, of which larger-than-life lead vocalist is just one. He is also an airline captain, aviation entrepreneur, motivational speaker, beer brewer, novelist, radio presenter, film scriptwriter and an international fencer: truly one of the most unique and interesting men in the world. In What Does this Button Do? Bruce contemplates the rollercoaster of life. He recounts - in his uniquely anarchic voice - the explosive exploits of his eccentric British childhood, the meteoric rise of Maiden, summoning the powers of darkness, the philosophy of fencing, brutishly beautiful Boeings and firmly dismissing cancer like an uninvited guest. Bold, honest, intelligent and funny, this long-awaited memoir captures the life, heart and mind of a true rock icon, and is guaranteed to inspire curious souls and hard-core fans alike.

Fusing blues, jazz and psychedelia with an outrageous personal style and image, Hendrix is still revered as the most important instrumentalist in the history of rock. He died aged 27 from drugs and alcohol. Capturing the essence of Hendrix's intense, apocalyptic and ultimately tragic life, the author covers Hendrix's boyhood in Seattle, his years in the US Air Force, his reputation as the best sideman around, his manic trip to London and superstardom, the songs, the concerts, the flaming guitars, the drugs, the booze, the women and most important, the incomparable legacy he left behind.

In her long career, Canadian songstress Joni Mitchell has been hailed as everything from 1960s folk icon to 20th century cultural figure, artistic iconoclast to musical heroine, extreme romantic confessor to outspoken commentator and lyrical painter. While some criticised what they viewed as her seeming dismissal of commercial considerations, she simply viewed her trajectory as that of any artist serious about the integrity of their work. But whatever musical position she took, she was always one step ahead of the game, making eclectic and innovative music Albums like The Ladies Of The Canyon, Blue , Hejira and Mingus helped define each era of the 1970s, as she moved from exquisitely pitched singer songwriter material towards jazz. Her past influence was obvious in the 1980s when hoards of assuming successors (some highly respectable) gathered her exotic breadcrumbs with a view to distilling their illusive compounds, while Joni simultaneously forged ahead. This book revisits her studio albums in detail from 1968's Song to a Seagull to 2007's Shine, providing anecdote and insight into the recording sessions, an in depth analysis along with a complimentary level of lyrical and instrumental examination.

When Freddie Mercury died in 1991, aged just 45, the world was rocked by the vibrant and flamboyant star's tragic secret that he had been battling AIDS. The announcement of his diagnosis reached them less than 24-hours before his death, shocking his millions of fans, and fully opening the eyes of the world to the destructive and fatal disease. In Somebody to Love, biographers Mark Langthorne and Matt Richards skilfully weave Freddie's pursuit of musical greatness with Queen, his upbringing and endless search for love, with the origins and aftermath of a terrible disease that swept across the world in the 1980s. With brand new perspectives from Freddie's closest friends and fellow musicians, this unique and deeply moving tribute casts a very different light on his death. An intimate read, like Freddie and his art, it will stay with you for a long time to come.

Women, Music, Culture: An Introduction, Third Edition is the first undergraduate textbook on the history and contributions of women in a variety of musical genres and professions, ideal for students in Music and Gender Studies courses. A compelling narrative, accompanied by 112 guided listening experiences, brings the world of women in music to life. The author employs a wide array of pedagogical aides, including a running glossary and a comprehensive companion website with links to Spotify playlists and supplementary videos for each chapter. The musical work of women throughout history-including that of composers, performers, conductors, technicians, and music industry personnel-is presented using both art music and popular music examples. New to this edition: An expansion from 57 to 112 listening examples conveniently available on Spotify. Additional focus on intersectionality in art and popular music. A new segment on Music and #MeToo and increased coverage of protest music. Additional coverage of global music. Substantial updates in popular music. Updated companion website materials designed to engage all learners. Visit the author's website at www.womenmusicculture.com

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

Born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, George Michael was raised in a family of Greek Cypriot immigrants in North London, and dreamed of stardom when he was a little boy. At just twelve years old he met Andrew Ridgeley and the two of them went on to achieve stunning success in the early 1980s with Wham!, creating music that remains popular to this day. Yet despite the enormous success of Wham!, George wanted more, and so set about recreating himself as a serious solo artist, reaching heights of even greater success. Ironically, however, even from the early days he was plagued with insecurity about his sexuality, which, combined with the calamity of losing his first lover to AIDS and his mother to cancer, plunged him into a lifelong struggle with drug addiction. He died, at the tragically early age of just fifty-three, on Christmas Day 2016. George Michael's life and career brought him international fame, and his sudden and unexpected death shocked the world. His unrivalled popularity as an artist, however, and the music he made, have turned him into one of the immortal greats of pop music. As Emily Herbert shows in this new biography, his legacy is not just his music, but his many extraordinary, and often anonymous, acts of charity.

In recent years, popular music museums have been established in high profile locations in many of the presumed "musical capitals" of the world, such as Los Angeles, Liverpool, Seattle, Memphis, and Nashville. Most of these are defined by expansive experiential infrastructures centered around spectacular, high-tech displays of varying sizes and types. Through over-the-top acts of display, these museums influence and reflect the values and priorities in the public life of popular music. This book examines the phenomenon of the popular music museum outside the typical and familiar frames of heritage and tourism. Instead, it looks at these institutions as markers of the broader entertainment industry in the era of its rise to global dominance. It highlights the multiple manifestations of power as read across a range of institutions and material forms and discusses how this contributes to shaping the experience of popular culture.

In this riveting inside account of his life in rock-and-roll band Aerosmith, Joe Perry opens up for the first time to tell the story of his wild, unbridled life as the band's lead guitarist. He delves deep into his volatile, profound, and enduring relationship with singer Steve Tyler, and reveals the real people behind the larger-than-life rock-gods on stage. It's an intimate account of nearly five decades of mega highs and heartbreaking lows. The story of Aerosmith is not your average rock-and-roll tale. It's an epic saga, at once a study in brotherhood and solitude that plays out on the killing fields of rock and roll. With record-making hits and colossal album sales that compete with legends such as U2 and Frank Sinatra, Aerosmith has earned their place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But with a sweeping comeback in the late 80s, one can see there is a bigger story here: to come back that high, you have to have plummeted pretty low. Aerosmith's game with fame is one of success, failure, rebirth, re-destruction, even the post-destructive rebirth, but here they are today, in their 60s and still on top. ROCKS is ultimately a story of endurance, and it starts almost half a century ago with young Perry, the misanthrope whose loving parents practically begged him to assimilate, but who quits school because he doesn't want to cut his hair. He meets Tyler in a restaurant in Boston, sways him from pop music to the darker side, rock-and-roll, and it doesn't take long for the "Toxic Twins" to skyrocket into a world of fame, drugs, and utter excess. Perry takes a personal look into the two stars behind Aerosmith, the people who enabled them, the ones who controlled them, and the ones who changed them.

A monumental oral biography filled with raucous joy, aching loss and terrible poignancy, Elvis & the Memphis Mafia is the first book to capture the King - the man and the phenomenon - in his full complexity. Through revealing interviews with three of Elvis' s closest friends, who were also his protectors and rescuers, Nash achieves the first true mapping of Elvis' s psyche. Billy Smith - Elvis' s first cousin and the person he reputedly loved most after his own mother - Marty Lacker - best man at his wedding and foreman of the ' Memphis Mafia' , the King' s handpicked group of gatekeepers and confidants - and Lamar Fike - the touring crew member who accompanied him into the Army - were with Elvis from his teens to his final days and provide unique access to the greatest of all rock and roll legends. The revelations cut through every aspect of Elvis' s life, from the childhood seeds of his drug dependency, through his fear for his mother' s life and his plan to change his identity, to his bizarre self-mutilation. No one who reads this symphonic blending of three proud, ribald, sad and ultimately wistful voices can fail to be profoundly moved.

Over the past four decades, the spectacular, "globalized" aspects of cultural circulation have received the majority of scholarly - and consumer - attention, particularly in the study of South Asian music. Ethnomusicologists increasingly cast their studies in transnational terms, in part to take account of these emerging, globally mediated forms and their localized counterparts. As a result, a broad range of community-based and other locally-focused performance traditions in the regions of South Asia have remained relatively unexplored. markets have fostered the development of an aesthetic based The authors of Theorizing the Local provide a challenging and compelling counter-perspective to the overwhelming attention paid to the "globalized," arguing for the sustained value of comparative microstudies which are not concerned primarily with the flow of capital and neoliberal politics. What does it mean, they ask, for musical activities to be local in an increasingly interconnected world? What are the motivations for theoretical thought, and how are theoretical formulations instigated by the needs of performers, agents promoting regional identity, efforts to sustain or counter gender conventions, or desires to compete? To what extent can theoretical activity be localized to the very acts of making music, interacting, and composing? intriguing-often music sharing common melodic, harmonic, or Theorizing the Local offers unusual glimpses into rich musical worlds of south and west Asia, worlds which have never before been presented in a single volume. The authors cross the traditional borders of scholarship and region, exploring in unmatched detail a vast array of musical practices and significant ethnographic discoveries extending from Nepal to India, India to Sri Lanka, Pakistan to Iran. Enriched by audio and video tracks on the extensive companion website, Theorizing the Local represents an important and necessary addition to the study of South Asian musical traditions and a broader understanding of 21st century music of the world.

Exhaustively researched and packed with unique insights, this history journeys from the punk scene's roots in the mid-1960s to the arrival of "new wave" in the early 1980s. With a cast that includes Patti Smith, Pere Ubu, Television, Blondie, the Ramones, the MC5, the Stooges, Talking Heads, and the Dead Boys, this account is the definitive story of early American punk rock. Extraordinarily balanced, it tells the story of the music's development largely through the artists' own words, while thoroughly analyzing and evaluating the music in a lucid and cogent manner. First published in 1993, this was the first book to tell the stories of these then-little-known bands; now, this edition has been updated with a new discography, including imports and bootlegs, and an afterword detailing the post-1970s history of these bands. Filled with insights from interviews with artists such as Lou Reed, Debbie Harry, David Byrne, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell, this book has long been considered one of the essential reads on rock rebellion.