How Music Empowers argues that empowerment is the key to unlocking the long-standing mystery of how music moves us. Drawing upon cutting-edge research in embodied cognitive science, psychology, and cultural studies, the book provides a new way of understanding how music affects listeners. The argument develops from our latest conceptions of what it is to be human, investigating experiences of listening to popular music in everyday life. Through listening, individuals have the potential to redefine themselves, gain resilience, connect with other people, and make a difference in society. Applying a groundbreaking theoretical framework to postmillennial rap and metal, the book uncovers why vast numbers of listeners engage with music typically regarded as 'social problems' or dismissed as 'extreme'. In the first ever comparative analytical treatment of rap and metal music, twenty songs are analysed as case studies that reveal the empowering potential of listening. The book details how individuals interact with rap and metal communities in a self-perpetuating process which keeps these thriving music cultures - and the listeners themselves - alive and well. Can music really change the world? How Music Empowers answers: yes, because it changes us. How Music Empowers will interest scholars and researchers of popular music, ethnomusicology, music psychology, music therapy, and music education.

In Breaks in the Air John Klaess tells the story of rap's emergence on New York City's airwaves by examining how artists and broadcasters adapted hip hop's performance culture to radio. Initially, artists and DJs brought their live practice to radio by buying time on low-bandwidth community stations and building new communities around their shows. Later, stations owned by New York's African American elite, such as WBLS, reluctantly began airing rap even as they pursued a sound rooted in respectability, urban sophistication, and polish. At the same time, large commercial stations like WRKS programmed rap once it became clear that the music attracted a demographic that was valuable to advertisers. Moving between intimate portraits of single radio shows and broader examinations of the legal, financial, cultural, and political forces that indelibly shaped the sound of rap radio, Klaess shows how early rap radio provides a lens through which to better understand the development of rap music as well as the intertwined histories of sounds, institutions, communities, and legal formations that converged in the post-Civil Rights era.

THE ILLUSTRATED STORY OF SUN RECORDS AND THE 70 RECORDINGS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD Sun Records: the company that launched Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Carl Perkins. This is where Rock 'n Roll was born. Written by two of the most acclaimed music writers of our time, The Birth of Rock n' Roll: 70 Years of Sun Records looks at this history of this legendary label through the lens of 70 of its most iconic recordings. Accompanying the recordings is the label's origin story and a look at the mission of the label today, as well as fascinating dives into subjects such as the legendary Million Dollar Quartet, and how the song "Harper Valley, PTA" funded the purchase of the label. Featuring hundreds of rare images from the Sun archives as well as a foreword by music legend Jerry Lee Lewis, this is a one-of-a-kind book for anyone who wants to know where it all started.

When Genres Collide is a provocative history that rethinks the relationship between jazz and rock through the lens of the two oldest surviving and most influential American popular music periodicals: Down Beat and Rolling Stone. Writing in 1955, Duke Ellington argued that the new music called rock 'n' roll "is the most raucous form of jazz, beyond a doubt." So why did jazz and rock subsequently become treated as separate genres? The rift between jazz and rock (and jazz and rock scholarship) is based on a set of received assumptions about their fundamental differences, but there are other ways popular music history could have been written. By offering a fresh examination of key historical moments when the trajectories and meanings of jazz and rock intersected, overlapped, or collided, it reveals how music critics constructed an ideological divide between jazz and rock that would be replicated in American musical discourse for decades to follow. Recipient of and Honorable Mention in the PROSE Award, Music & the Performing Arts 2018.

* explores the creative dialogue between John Lennon and Paul McCartney * employs the author's own 'Songscape' analysis, a multi-layered approach designed to engage a recorded work on its own terms, that does not require any specialist knowledge. * discusses the move towards more intimate sound spaces made possible by the recording process itself. *draws together evidence that Lennon and McCartney's uniquely eclectic approach, which came to encompass music, recording, film, literature, theatre, and painting, can be traced back to the Liverpool College of Art.

Electronic dance music was once the utopian frontier of pop culture. But three decades after the acid house 'summer of love', it has gone from subculture to the global mainstream. Does it still have the same power to inspire?

From the pleasure palaces of Ibiza and Las Vegas to 'new frontiers' like Shanghai and Dubai, raving is now a multi-million-dollar business. But there are still hardcore believers upholding its DIY ethos - the techno idealists of Berlin and Detroit and the queer subcults of New York, the post-apartheid party people of South Africa and the outlaw techno travellers of France.

In Rave On, Matthew Collin travels the world to experience these unique scenes first-hand, talk to the key players and hear the story of how dance culture went global - and find out if its maverick spirit can survive its own success.

Woodstock University addresses the educational interface of 1969's iconic Woodstock Festival, as a number of its attendees and performers would later become academics 'with a touch of gray,' and it also considers the role of music in Woodstock's legacy as the embodiment of 1960s countercultural idealism, escapism, and activism. A self-mythologizing event, as indicated by congratulatory stage announcements, Woodstock made a real-time claim for its own historic importance. Elevated by its remarkable (and in some cases doctored) audio, celluloid, and oral history afterlives, Woodstock would enhance the aura of rock star celebrity, and in the process expose the counterculture as a cash cow and weaponize the machinery of corporate rock. The essays in this collection are the participant observations of performers and attendees of Woodstock and related festivals, and also the reflections of cultural historians on aspects of the festival, its representation, and its ambiguous legacy. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Popular Music and Society.

Vibe Merchants offers an insider's perspective on the development of Jamaican Popular Music, researched and analysed by a thirty-year veteran with a wide range of experience in performance, production and academic study. This rare perspective, derived from interviews and ethnographic methodologies, focuses on the actual details of music-making practice, rationalized in the context of the economic and creative forces that locally drive music production. By focusing on the work of audio engineers and musicians, recording studios and recording models, Ray Hitchins highlights a music creation methodology that has been acknowledged as being different to that of Europe and North America. The book leads to a broadening of our understanding of how Jamaican Popular Music emerged, developed and functions, thus providing an engaging example of the important relationship between music, technology and culture that will appeal to a wide range of scholars.

This book offers a detailed analysis of the history of female musicians in the Highlife music tradition of the Republic of Ghana, particularly the challenges and constraints these women faced and overcame. Highlife - a form of West African music infusing Ghana's traditional Akan dance rhythms and melodies with European instruments and harmonies - grew in popularity throughout the 20th century and hit its peak in the 1970s and 1980s. Although women played significant roles in the evolution and survival of the genre, few of their contributions have been thoroughly explored or documented. Despite being disregarded and ignored in many spheres, female Highlife musicians thrived and became trailblazers in the Ghanaian music industry, making particularly vibrant contributions to Highlife music in the 1970s. This book presents the voices of female Highlife artists and documents the ideological transformations expressed through their musical works, exploring the challenges they confronted throughout their musical careers and their contributions to music and culture in Ghana.

Williams locates the roots of contemporary definitions of traditional music, including UNESCO-designated intangible cultural heritage, in the theory of English folk music developed in 1907 by Cecil Sharp. For scholars and graduate students in musicology, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology, the book is an ambitious and provocative challenge to entrenched habits of thought in the study of traditional music and the historiography of England's folk revival.

Emphasizing the diversity of twentieth-century collage practices, Rona Cran's book explores the role that it played in the work of Joseph Cornell, William Burroughs, Frank O'Hara, and Bob Dylan. For all four, collage was an important creative catalyst, employed cathartically, aggressively, and experimentally. Collage's catalytic effect, Cran argues, enabled each to overcome a potentially destabilizing crisis in representation. Cornell, convinced that he was an artist and yet hampered by his inability to draw or paint, used collage to gain access to the art world and to show what he was capable of given the right medium. Burroughs' formal problems with linear composition were turned to his advantage by collage, which enabled him to move beyond narrative and chronological requirement. O'Hara used collage to navigate an effective path between plastic art and literature, and to choose the facets of each which best suited his compositional style. Bob Dylan's self-conscious application of collage techniques elevated his brand of rock-and-roll to a level of heightened aestheticism. Throughout her book, Cran shows that to delineate collage stringently as one thing or another is to severely limit our understanding of the work of the artists and writers who came to use it in non-traditional ways.

No music scholar has made as profound an impact on contemporary thought as Susan McClary, a central figure in what has been termed the 'new musicology'. In this volume seventeen distinguished scholars pay tribute to her work, with essays addressing three approaches to music that have characterized her own writings: reassessing music's role in identity formation, particularly regarding gender, sexuality, and race; exploring music's capacity to define and regulate perceptions and experiences of time; and advancing new modes of analysis more appropriate to those aspects and modes of musicking ignored by traditional methods. Contributors include, in overlapping categories, many fellow pioneers, current colleagues, and former students, and their essays, like McClary's own work, address a wide range of repertories ranging from the established canon to a variety of popular genres. The collection represents the generational arrival of the 'new' musicology into full maturity, dividing fairly evenly between pre-eminent scholars of music and a group of younger scholars who have already made their mark in significant ways. But the collection is also, and fundamentally, interdisciplinary in nature, in active conversation with such fields as history, anthropology, philosophy, aesthetics, media studies, film music studies, dramatic criticism, women's studies, and cultural studies.

Black Sea Sketches is a portrait of some of the diverse musical cultures surrounding the Black Sea and in its hinterlands. Its six separate chapters follow a very broad trajectory from close-ups of traditional music (chapters 1-4) towards wide-angle studies of art music (chapters 5-6), and each of them opens windows to big, border-crossing themes about music and place. A wide variety of repertoires is discussed: ancient layers of polyphonic music, bardic songs, traditional music from the coasts and mountains, the sacred music of Islam and Orthodox Christianity, the art music of Europe and West Asia, and present-day popular music 'scenes'. The usual practice is for each chapter to begin with a Black Sea coastal location before reaching out into the hinterlands. The result is a collection of six relatively discrete essays on different locations and topics, but with underlying thematic continuities, and offering a wide-ranging commentary on cultural difference. Firmly grounded in ethnographic and documentary research, this is an important study for scholars and researchers of Ethnomusicology, as also of Caucasian and Russian/East European Studies.

Taking as a thread the concept of national identity, this book elucidates the sound transformations that have taken place in the world of the Latin American art song since its appearance in the late nineteenth century to the present day. The book focuses in the art songs of Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia. The book addresses the subject of performance practice of the Latin American song and ends with a proposal for its interpretation. In songs, spaces of representation and cathartic tools thought, language and music have been at the service of some interests, fulfilling specific functions in the construction of the nation. In them, we observe that the construction of identity is a continuous, constant and changing process in which different stories are superimposed. Seen this way, songs are historical texts where social interactions are reflected, and the past, the present and the future are constantly negotiated. The book also addresses the subject of performance practice of the Latin American song and ends with a proposal for its interpretation.

"Bob Batchelor writes with great eloquence and insight about the Doors, the greatest hard-rock band we have ever had, and through this book, we plunge deeply into the mystery that surrounds Jim Morrison. It is Batchelor's warmth and compassion that ignites Roadhouse Blues and helps explain Morrison's own miraculous dark fire."-Jerome Charyn, PEN/Faulkner Award finalist Shrouded in mystery and the swirling psychedelic sounds of the Sixties, the Doors have captivated listeners across seven decades. Jim Morrison-haunted, beautiful, and ultimately doomed-transformed from rock god to American icon. With each successive generation of fans, the Doors become more popular and transcendent. Yet the band's full significance is buried beneath layers of mythology and folklore. In Roadhouse Blues, Bob Batchelor presents an epic tale of one of rock's (and America's) most significant periods, as the Age of Aquarius gave way to a new age of mayhem, presidential misdeeds, and murder. Batchelor combines cultural history, musical and lyrical analysis, and a broad stroke of pop-culture mythos to give fresh perspective on a pivotal time. Candid, authoritative, and utterly absorbing, Roadhouse Blues is a biography of a man, a band, and an era that set the tone for the contemporary world. Beyond the mythology, the hype, and the mystique around Morrison's untimely death, this book takes readers on a roller-coaster ride, examining the impact the band had on America as the nation veered from decadence to debauchery. "We're gonna have a real good time!"

At the end of his life, Pierre Schaeffer commented that his musical and sound experiments had attempted to go beyond 'do-re-mi'. This had a direct bearing on EinstA1/4rzende Neubauten's musical philosophy and work, with the musicians always striving to extend the boundaries of music in sound, instrumentation and purpose. The group are one of the few examples of 'rock-based' artists who have been able to sustain a breadth and depth of work in a variety of media over a number of years while remaining experimental and open to development. Jennifer Shryane provides a much-needed analysis of the group's important place in popular/experimental music history. She illustrates their innovations with found- and self-constructed instrumentation, their Artaudian performance strategies and textual concerns, as well as their methods of independence. EinstA1/4rzende Neubauten have also made a consistent and unique contribution to the development of the independent German Language Contemporary Music scene, which although often acknowledged as influential, is still rarely examined.

A Pitchfork Best Music Book of 2022 When Tom Breihan launched his Stereogum column in early 2018, "The Number Ones"-a space in which he has been writing about every #1 hit in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, in chronological order-he figured he'd post capsule-size reviews for each song. But there was so much more to uncover. The column has taken on a life of its own, sparking online debate and occasional death threats. The Billboard Hot 100 began in 1958, and after four years of posting the column, Breihan is still in the early aughts. But readers no longer have to wait for his brilliant synthesis of what the history of #1s has meant to music and our culture. In The Number Ones, Breihan writes about twenty pivotal #1s throughout chart history, revealing a remarkably fluid and connected story of music that is as entertaining as it is enlightening. The Numbers Ones features the greatest pop artists of all time, from the Brill Building songwriters to the Beatles and the Beach Boys; from Motown to Michael Jackson, Prince, and Mariah Carey; and from the digital revolution to the K-pop system. Breihan also ponders great artists who have never hit the top spot, like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and James Brown. Breihan illuminates what makes indelible ear candy across the decades-including dance crazes, recording innovations, television phenomena, disco, AOR, MTV, rap, compact discs, mp3s, social media, memes, and much more-leaving readers to wonder what could possibly happen next.

For over thirty years, Saxon has been led from the front by charismatic and larger-than-life vocalist Biff Byford. In 'Never Surrender', he tells his story for the first time, from his working class childhood as a terribly shy schoolboy in Yorkshire through the mega-days of the early Eighties to the bands Twenty-First Century rise to fame once more. Sometimes tragic, sometimes funny, but always brutally honest, 'Never Surrender' lifts the lid on the myths surrounding Saxon, as well as revealing the hard work and heartaches it takes to make it to the top and stay there.

- A comprehensive guide to musicals that are based on musicians' existing back catalogues - how they work, why they work and why they are so successful. - Written for musical theatre students at all levels - primarily on the 150 BA degrees across the UK and North America. - The first book to address this relatively new genre of musical theatre, doing so with in-depth and wide ranging analysis.

Black Music, Black Poetry offers readers a fuller appreciation of the diversity of approaches to reading black American poetry. It does so by linking a diverse body of poetry to musical genres that range from the spirituals to contemporary jazz. The poetry of familiar figures such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes and less well-known poets like Harryette Mullen or the lyricist to Pharaoh Sanders, Amos Leon Thomas, is scrutinized in relation to a musical tradition contemporaneous with the lifetime of each poet. Black music is considered the strongest representation of black American communal consciousness; and black poetry, by drawing upon such a musical legacy, lays claim to a powerful and enduring black aesthetic. The contributors to this volume take on issues of black cultural authenticity, of musical imitation, and of poetic performance as displayed in the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Amiri Baraka, Michael Harper, Nathaniel Mackey, Jayne Cortez, Harryette Mullen, and Amos Leon Thomas. Taken together, these essays offer a rich examination of the breath of black poetry and the ties it has to the rhythms and forms of black music and the influence of black music on black poetic practice.

In Mavericks of Sound: Conversations with the Artists Who Shaped Indie and Roots Music, music scholar David Ensminger offers a collection of vivid and compelling interviews with legendary roots rock and indie artists who bucked mainstream trends and have remained resilient in the face of enormous shifts in the music world. As the success of the concerts at Austin City Limits have revealed, the fan bases and crowds for indie and roots music often blur and overlap. In Mavericks of Sound, Ensminger brings to light the highways and byways trod by these music icons over the course of their careers and the ways in which their music-making has been affected by, and influenced, the burgeoning indie and roots music movements. Ranging from seminal modern singer-songwriters to rockabilly renegades and indie rockers, Mavericks of Sound features a set of broad, penetrating, and insightful conversations imbued with a sense of musical history and heritage. Ensminger captures firsthand accounts from singer songwriters like Texas Country musician Tom Russell and first wave indie artist and folk rocker Peter Case; rockabilly artists Junior Brown and the Reverend Horton Heat; American indie rock icons such as 11th Dream Day's Janet Bean, Pere Ubu's Dave Thomas, Apples in Stereo's Robert Schneider, and Swans members Michael Gira and Jarboe; English and New Zealand figures such as folk legend Richard Thompson, The Clean's David Kilgour and The Waterboys' Mike Scott; and folk, country and rock legends such as Merle Haggard, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Ralph Stanley, Neko Case, and Yo La Tengo. Mavericks of Sound is the perfect work for contemporary indie, roots, Americana, country, and folk music fans who want to understand the unique artistry and unbound passion behind America's musical innovators that readily broke and remolded rules.

The seminal British band Motorhead have been rocking since 1975 and, led by the legendary Lemmy, show no signs of letting up. From early classics "Ace Of Spades," "Overkill" and "No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith" the band have racked up an incredible 25 albums, with 2011's "The World Is Yours" the latest success.
"Overkill" tells the whole story of the ultimate rock 'n' roll trip, through original interviews with those that were there. The book also features an exclusive foreword by rock legend Glenn Hughes (Black Sabbath, Deep Purple).

This book is a backstage pass to the ups, downs, and all-out craziness of arena rock-deep discussions with Rod Stewart, jamming with legends like Mick Jagger and Justin Timberlake, gaining groupies, and striking out solo. Stevie Salas was one of many boys coming of age in the 1980s-when the American dream was rock superstardom. As lead guitarist for a San Diego band, Salas played backyard parties and school dances and even scored the music for the cult classic Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. When he auditioned for Rod Stewart-where he was the youngest band member by a decade-Salas's life truly hit a turning point. Salas pulls no punches to describe the initial skepticism and hazing he faced as the youngest member of Stewart's band, the night he stood up for himself on the tour plane, and the emotional late-night talk with Rod Stewart that restored the frontman's faith in his young, untested guitar player and his new group that was struggling to find its groove. Yet they became a band of brothers and formed a camaraderie they share to this day. When We Were the Boys revolves around the year Salas began as an inexperienced musical prodigy and finished as a seasoned rock 'n' roll veteran-more mature as a man and musician.

" With a foreword by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards Chosen by the The Amelia Bloomer Project committee for their 2005 list of recommended feminist books for young readers. Girls Rock explores the many ways women have defined themselves as rock musicians in an industry once dominated and controlled by men. Integrating history, feminist analysis, and developmental theory, the authors describe how and why women have become rock musicians -- what inspires them to play and perform, how they write, what their music means to them, and what they hope their music means to listeners. As these musicians tell their stories, topics emerge that illuminate broader trends in rock's history. From Wanda Jackson's revolutionary act of picking up a guitar to the current success of independent artists such as Ani DiFranco, Girls Rock examines the shared threads of these performers' lives and the evolution of women's roles in rock music since its beginnings in the 1950s. This provocative investigation of women in rock is based on numerous interviews with a broad spectrum of women performers -- those who have achieved fame and those just starting bands, those playing at local coffeehouses and those selling out huge arenas. Girls Rock celebrates what female musicians have to teach about their experiences as women, artists, and rock musicians.