Reconstructs the socio-political history of the heroic in music through case studies spanning the middle ages to the twenty-first century The first part of this volume reconstructs the various musical strategies that composers of medieval chant, Renaissance madrigals, and Baroque operas, cantatas or oratorios employed when referring to heroic ideas exemplifying their personal moral and political values. A second part investigating the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries expands the previous narrow focus on Beethoven's heroic middle period and the cult of the virtuoso. It demonstrates the wide spectrum of heroic positions - national, ethnic, revolutionary, bourgeois and spiritual - that filtered not only into 'classical' large-scale heroic symphonies and virtuoso solo concerts, but also into chamber music and vernacular dance music. The third part documents the forced heroization of music in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes such as Nazi-Germany and the Soviet Union and its consequences for heroic thinking and musical styles in the time thereafter. Final chapters show how recent rock-folk and avant-garde musicians in North America and Europe feature new heroic models such as the everyday hero and the scientific heroine revealing new confidence in the idea of the heroic.

'This book is a must for everyone interested in illuminating the idea of unexplainable genius' - QUESTLOVE Equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century. He wasn't known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at age thirty-two, he had never had a pop hit. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod, revered as one of the most important musical figures of the past hundred years. At the core of this adulation is innovation: as the producer behind some of the most influential rap and R&B acts of his day, Dilla created a new kind of musical time-feel, an accomplishment on a par with the revolutions wrought by Louis Armstrong and James Brown. Dilla and his drum machine reinvented the way musicians play. In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas chronicles the life of James DeWitt Yancey, from his gifted Detroit childhood to his rise as a sought-after hip-hop producer to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death. He follows the people who kept Dilla and his ideas alive. And he rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of Motown soul to funk, techno, and disco. Here, music is a story of what happens when human and machine times are synthesized into something new. This is the story of a complicated man and his machines; his family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators; and his undeniable legacy. Based on nearly two hundred original interviews, and filled with graphics that teach us to feel and "see" the rhythm of Dilla's beats, Dilla Time is a book as defining and unique as J Dilla's music itself. Financial Times Music Book of the Year 2022

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.

n the wake of the wartime experience of sexual slavery for the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War (1930-45), Korean survivors lived under great pressure not to speak about what had happened to them. These sexual slaves were known as "comfort women," and this book brings us into the lives of three of them: Pak Duri, Mun Pilgi, and Bae Chunhui. Over the course of seven years, author Joshua Pilzer worked with these now-elderly women, living alongside of them, smoking with them, eating with them, singing and playing with them, documenting and trying to understand their worlds of song. Hearts of Pine focuses on the selves and social lives that these three women cultivated through song. During four decades of post-war public secrecy about the comfort women system, song served for these women as both a private and a public means of coping with their trauma - each used song in a different way to reckon with their experiences and to forge a new sense of self. In the 1990s a nationalist movement arose in South Korea to seek redress from the Japanese government and to tend to the previously-shunned comfort women survivors in their old age. Suddenly these women, and many others like them, found themselves pulled from the margins of society and thrust into the very center of the public cultural spotlight. Appearing on television and radio as well as at political events and protest rallies, the "comfort women grandmothers" collectively functioned as an emblem of the horrors Japan inflicted on long "enslaved" Korea - a Korea that had now overcome Japanese domination. But while the women were to stand forward as symbols of Korea's triumph over metaphorical enslavement, they were still not enabled to speak of the details of their own actual enslavement, as these horrors remained too disturbing for the public to tolerate - the public did not want to hear about what the comfort women had suffered, only that they had, like Korea herself, survived. Yet in the face of the selective interests and forces of the public cultural imagination, and directly into the media spotlights of South Korean public culture itself, all three of these women continued to use song as a means of expressing publicly that which they were not supposed to talk about. Through the intimate and tenderly crafted portraits of three off-beat old women in a South Korean old age home (who made routine appearances on national television and radio), Hearts of Pine addresses basic questions about the power of music vis-a-vis other forms of social expression, illuminates the history of Korean music in the twentieth century, and tells a new history of the "comfort women" system and postwar South Korean public culture.

Carole King's early compositional work in the 1970s paved the way for many women songwriters of popular music. Among her best-known compositions are You've Got a Friend, Up on the Roof, Will You Love Me Tomorrow? and (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman. This reference encompasses Carole King's musical career from her compositions in the early 1960s through the 1990s, including her recently composed My One True Friend for the film "One True Thing" and Anyone at All for the film "You've Got Mail." A brief biography of Carole King, which includes a critical analysis of her music, precedes an extensive discography of 1,275 recording entries and bibliography sections.

Popular music scholars, along with Carole King fans, will appreciate this detailed source of available research materials on Carole King. The discography is divided into three sections: a performance discography, a miscellaneous discography, and a composition discography. Separate bibliographies cover writings, such as reviews, that focus on King's recordings, a general bibliography, and a brief bibliography of electronic resources. A filmography and videography are also included.

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.

Hip-hop as survivor testimony? Rhymes as critical text? Drawing on her own experiences as a lifelong hip-hop head and philosophy professor, Lissa Skitolsky reveals the existential power of hip-hop to affect our sensibility and understanding of race and anti-black racism. Hip-Hop as Philosophical Text and Testimony: Can I Get a Witness? examines how the exclusion of hip-hop from academic discourse around knowledge, racism, white supremacy, genocide, white nationalism, and trauma reflects the very neoliberal sensibility that hip-hop exposes and opposes. At this critical moment in history, in the midst of a long overdue global reckoning with systemic anti-black racism, Skitolsky shows how it is more important than ever for white people to realize that our failure to see this system-and take hip-hop seriously-has been essential to its reproduction. In this book, she illustrates the unique power of underground hip-hop to interrupt our neoliberal and post-racial sensibility of current events.

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.

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.

From Biggie to Pac, Lil' Kim to Lauryn Hill, Hip-Hop Legends Alphabet features an A-Z of the OG MCs, DJs, and lyrical masterminds behind the freshest flows and dopest beats in music history. Written and illustrated to introduce hip-hop greats to a new generation of fans.

(Book). Far from being "the quiet one," George Harrison was a writer and arranger of terrific power and beauty, and his guitar playing was fundamental to the Beatles' sound and success. Now fully revised and expanded, this new edition of While My Guitar Gently Weeps: The Music of George Harrison is the most comprehensive evaluation of George Harrison's musical career ever published. Treating each of Harrison's songs with unprecedented analysis, author Simon Leng reveals Harrison's eclectic approach from teenage Nashville twang through Indian raga, psychedelia, gospel, soul, and pure pop and thoroughly defines Harrison's role in the Beatles. First-hand accounts of the Concert for Bangladesh and the making of All Things Must Pass take the reader deep into the most fertile and controversial periods of Harrison's long solo career that culminated with Brainwashed . Enhanced with insights from key figures who worked closely with Harrison throughout his extraordinary career, While My Guitar Gently Weeps is a remarkably stirring study and portrait of a great artist whose musical and spiritual quest changed the lives of millions of people around the world while redefining popular music and rock 'n' roll.

To mark the first issue of this exciting new journal, Liverpool University Press are publishing a commemorative paperback edition of The Journal of Beatles Studies which will be available alongside the Open Access Journal edition. The Journal of Beatles Studies is the first journal to establish The Beatles as an object of academic research, and will publish original, rigorously researched essays, notes, as well as book and media reviews. The journal aims are; to provide a voice to new and emerging research locating the Beatles in new contexts, groups and communities from within and beyond academic institutions; to inaugurate, innovate, interrogate and challenge narrative, cultural historical and musicological tropes about the Beatles as both subject and object of study; to publish original and critical research from Beatles scholars around the globe and across disciplines. The Journal of Beatles Studies establishes a scholarly focal point for critique, dialogue and exchange on the nature, scope and value of The Beatles as an object of academic enquiry and seeks to examine and assess the continued economic value and cultural values generated by and around The Beatles, for policy makers, creative industries and consumers. The journal also seeks to approach The Beatles as a prism for accessing insight into wider historical, social and cultural issues.

"Ed's photos take us behind the scenes and in the middle of the action. I always felt like I was being transported to the location of the shot, and was experiencing it all first hand. The Stooges Funhouse sessions are my favorite rock photos of all time. I wanted to be those guys. Those images have stayed with me my entire life and continue to inspire me to this day !!!!!" - John Varvatos In May 1970, The Stooges were in the middle of recording their celebrated album, Fun House at Elektra Records Recording Studio in Los Angeles. That same month, they appeared at the Whisky a Go-Go on Sunset Boulevard for two incredible nights. Ed Caraeff, a new rock photographer who had burst onto the scene three years prior with his now-iconic image of Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar onstage at Monterey, happened to be in that crowd, and took a plethora of wonderful pictures. Only a few stills from that phenomenal gig were ever reproduced. Most famously, one was used on the cover of Fun House. The rest were filed away. Until now. Ed Caraeff's coverage of this monumental moment is reprinted here for the first time in book form. He not only captures the energy, madness and raw power of Iggy Pop's performance, but also the preceding minutes before the band stepped onto stage and made history. Along with images and contact sheets, original interviews shed new light on that unforgettable night. Interviewed by pop-culture historian Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, names include Jac Holzman, Head of Elektra Records during the recording of Fun House; Mikael Maglieri, son of Mario Maglieri, owner of the Whisky a Go-Go when The Stooges played in 1970; Danny Fields, a DJ/publicist credited for signing MC5 and The Stooges; and Jeff Gold, music historian and noted Iggy Pop biographer. A tribute to the band that rocked the world, Iggy & The Stooges: One Night at the Whisky, 1970 will revolutionise your view of music.

The complete, definitive and never-before-published catalogue of Hipgnosis, Vinyl * Album * Cover * Art finally does justice to the work of the most important design collective in music history, which, according to Roddy Bogawa, director of the documentary Taken by Storm (2011), 'designed half your record collection'. Founded in 1967 by Storm Thorgerson, Aubrey 'Po' Powell and Peter Christopherson, Hipgnosis gained legendary status in graphic design, transforming the look of album art forever and winning five Grammy nominations for package design. Their revolutionary cover art moved away from the conventional group shots favoured by record companies of the day, resulting in the ground-breaking, often surreal designs which define the albums of many of the biggest names in the history of popular music: 10cc, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Peter Gabriel, The Police, Genesis, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, Robert Plant, Syd Barrett, Throbbing Gristle, T. Rex, Wings, Yes and XTC, to name but a few. Arranged chronologically, Vinyl * Album * Cover * Art features stunning reproductions of every single Hipgnosis cover - 372 in total - coupled with detailed information by Po and Storm Thorgerson on the artworks and the compelling stories behind their creation. Additional contributions by Peter Gabriel, Marcus Bradbury, and Pentagram's Harry Pearce provide engrossing insights into the way these incredible artworks came into being; place the covers in context; and reflect on their enduring impact on album design. A highly accessible stand-alone volume, Vinyl * Album * Cover * Art will also make the perfect pop partner to the groundbreaking Hipgnosis | Portraits (2014) with its rare revelations and behind-the-scenes photography.

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.

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.

"All the photos of David Bowie you could possibly ever need. The most noteworthy collection of David Bowie images ever accumulated. Whether you want to own the book as a collector's item or display it on your coffee table, this definitive work is a tribute fit for an icon." - Interview magazine David Bowie: Icon gathers the greatest photographs of one of the greatest stars in history, into a single, luxurious volume. The result is the most important anthology of David Bowie images that has ever been compiled. With work by many of the most eminent names in photography, this book showcases a stunning portfolio of imagery, featuring the iconic, the awe inspiring, the candid and the surprising. An astonishing 25 photographers from around the world have contributed to this celebration. Their images are accompanied by personal essays and reflections about working with this astonishing artist. From memories of the earliest days at the Arts Lab in Beckenham to what it was like touring the world with Bowie, each contributor shares their experiences of working with - and knowing - this most extraordinary figure. From portraits and album covers, performances and rehearsals, to rarely seen private moments and candid snapshots, this collection is at once powerful, sentimental and inspiring. The thoughts and reminiscences of the photographers, many sharing their memories for the first time, give us an insight into this artist unlike any other. Photography and text by: Fernando Aceves, Brian Aris, Philippe Auliac, Alec Byrne, Kevin Cummins, Chalkie Davies, Justin de Villeneuve, Vernon Dewhurst, Gavin Evans, Gerald Fearnley, Lynn Goldsmith, Greg Gorman, Andrew Kent, Markus Klinko, Geoff MacCormack, Janet Macoska, Terry O'Neill, Denis O'Regan, Norman Parkinson, Mick Rock, John Scarisbrick, Steve Schapiro, Barry Schultz, Masayoshi Sukita and Ray Stevenson. Features an introduction by Bowie's life-long friend, the artist George Underwood. When David Bowie passed away on 10 January 2016, the world lost a musical hero. But his legacy lives on. While his sound and style evolved throughout his career - from Ziggy to the Thin White Duke - two facts never changed: he was an innovator; and photographers adored him. This book pays homage to this ultimate icon.

Fela Anikulapo Kuti was the Afrobeat music maestro whose life and time provide the lens through which we can outline the postcolonial trajectory of the Nigerian state as well as the dynamics of most other African states. Through the Afrobeat music, Fela did not only challenge consecutive governments in Nigeria, but his rebellious Afrobeat lyrics facilitate a philosophical subtext that enriches the more intellectual Afrocentric discourses. Afrobeat and the philosophy of blackism that Fela enunciated place him right beside Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, and all the others who champion a black and African mode of being in the world. This book traces the emergence of Fela on the music scene, the cultural and political backgrounds that made Afrobeat possible, and the philosophical elements that not only contributed to the formation of Fela's blackism, but what constitutes Fela's philosophical sensibility too.

This volume explores the ways in which music scenes are not merely physical spaces for the practice of collective musical life but are also inscribed with and enacted through the articulation of cultural memory and emotional geography. The book draws on empirical data collected in cites throughout Australia. In terms of understanding the relationship between music scenes and participants, much of the existing popular music literature tends to avoid one key aspect of scene: its predominant past-tense and memory-based nature. Nascent music scenes may be emergent and on-going but their articulation in the present is often based on past events, ideas and histories. There is a noticeable gap between the literature concerning popular music ethnography and the growing body of work on cultural memory and emotional geography. This book is a study of the conceptual formation and use of music scenes by participants. It is also an investigation of the structures underpinning music scenes more generally.

Best day of my life is the matching artist approved songbook to Tom Odell's fifth studio album, released 28th October 2022. The album is intentionally minimalistic, with just Tom's voice and piano. He says: "One year ago, almost exactly to the day, I set myself the challenge to write and record an entire album using only my voice and my piano with absolutely nothing else. I found myself digging deeper than I ever have before both with my words and piano playing. I am so proud of the way this record has turned out and I really cannot wait for you all to hear it." Featuring an introduction from Tom himself, these songs are transcribed for piano and voice, with guitar chords and match the original recordings.

The Beatles and Duke Ellington's Orchestra stand as the two greatest examples of collaboration in music history. Thomas Brothers delivers a portrait of the creative process at work, demonstrating that the cooperative method at the foundation of these two artist-groups was the primary reason for their unmatched musical success. While clarifying the historical record of who wrote what, with whom and how, Brothers brings the past to life with photos, anecdotes and more than thirty years of musical knowledge, and analysis of songs from "Strawberry Fields Forever" to "Chelsea Bridge". Help! describes in rich detail the music and mastery of two cultural leaders whose popularity has never dimmed, and the process of collaboration that allowed them to achieve an artistic vision greater than the sum of their parts.

In Portraying Performer Image in Record Album Cover Art, Ken Bielen explains how album cover art authenticates recording artists by using elements that authenticate the performer in the particular genre. He considers albums issued from the 1950s to the 1980s, the golden era of record album cover art. The whole album package is studied including the front and back covers, the inside cover, the inner sleeve, and the text (liner notes) on the album jacket. Performers in rock and roll, folk and folk rock, soul and disco, psychedelic, Americana nostalgia, and singer-songwriter genres are included in this study of hundreds of record album covers.

Canadian-American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright (b. 1973) is famous around the world for his multi-faceted musical style, shown through both his recorded output and his engaging live performances. In this book, Katherine Williams combines his aspects of his life story with scholarly readings drawn from several methodologies. Popular music studies, opera, queer studies, music and geography, the sound-box: all combine to give a rich biographical and interpretative overview of Wainwright's life and music. Williams brings together close musical analysis with such varied disciplinary perspectives with a tone that is both in-depth and scholarly, and accessible. The book is a must-read for fans, students and scholars alike.