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Books > Music > Contemporary popular music > Rock & pop
Turkish Metal journeys deep into the heart of the Turkish heavy metal scene, uncovering the emergence, evolution, and especially the social implications of this controversial musical genre in a Muslim society. The book applies an ethnographic approach in order to study social and cultural change in a Muslim society that is stricken with conflict over the, by turns, religious or secular nature of the state. Turkish Metal explores how Turkish metalheads, against all odds, manage to successfully claim public spaces of their own, thereby transforming the public face of the city. The book raises the question of how and why the young dare to rebel against the prevalent social and moral restrictions in Turkish society; and it examines whether they succeed in asserting their individual freedom in a society that is still well-known for sanctioning any kind of behaviour deviating from the norm. Above all, the book investigates the Turkish metal scene's potential for contesting Islamic concepts of morality, its relevance within the field of female emancipation, and its capacity to foster social relations that cut across national, religious and ethnic boundaries.
Music has been used as a cure for disease since as far back as King David's lyre, but the notion that it might be a serious cause of mental and physical illness was rare until the late eighteenth century. At that time, physicians started to argue that excessive music, or the wrong kind of music, could over-stimulate a vulnerable nervous system, leading to illness, immorality and even death. Since then there have been successive waves of moral panics about supposed epidemics of musical nervousness, caused by everything from Wagner to jazz and rock 'n' roll. It was this medical and critical debate that provided the psychiatric rhetoric of "degenerate music" that was the rationale for the persecution of musicians in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By the 1950s, the focus of medical anxiety about music shifted to the idea that "musical brainwashing" and "subliminal messages" could strain the nerves and lead to mind control, mental illness and suicide. More recently, the prevalence of sonic weapons and the use of music in torture in the so-called War on Terror have both made the subject of music that is bad for the health worryingly topical. This book outlines and explains the development of this idea of pathological music from the Enlightenment until the present day, providing an original contribution to the history of medicine, music and the body.
Religion and Hip Hop brings together the category of religion, Hip Hop cultural modalities and the demographic of youth. Bringing postmodern theory and critical approaches in the study of religion to bear on Hip Hop cultural practices, this book examines how scholars in religious and theological studies have deployed and approached religion when analyzing Hip Hop data. Using existing empirical studies on youth and religion to the cultural criticism of the Humanities, Religion and Hip Hop argues that common among existing scholarship is a thin interrogation of the category of religion. As such, Miller calls for a redescription of religion in popular cultural analysis - a challenge she further explores and advances through various materialist engagements. Going beyond the traditional and more common approach of analyzing rap lyrics, from film, dance, to virtual reality, Religion and Hip Hop takes a fresh approach to exploring the paranoid posture of the religious in popular cultural forms, by going beyond what "is" religious about Hip Hop culture. Rather, Miller explores what rhetorical uses of religion in Hip Hop culture accomplish for various and often competing social and cultural interests.
This fascinating biography provides a detailed portrait of the high-energy, charismatic international superstar and frontman of the ever-popular band, Bon Jovi. The book charts Jon's relationship with the other band members who have their fair share of rock and roll stories - sex, booze, burnouts, health and women problems. Although rock music is Jon Bon Jovi's first love, he has more recently developed an interest in acting - starring in various hit TV shows such as Ally McBeal and Sex and the City and attracting critical acclaim for his role in World War II hit film, U-571. He has also scored film music, with his score for Young Guns earning him an Oscar nomination. Bestselling writer Laura Jackson explores the personality, character, drive and the determination that have taken him from playing New Jersey clubs through all the groupie excess and glamorous indulgence to where the band is today. Two new chapters in this updated edition detail his recent work for charity, his involvement in politics and football and also give an update on the band's new albums and tours.
An electrifying collection of the finest, most entertaining, and illuminating writing on and from the rock and roll scene--from its earliest days to the present, from the brightest moments of the biggest stars to obscure but compellingly significant treasures. The crazy, exhilarating, endlessly creative world of rock and roll has fascinated us--and some of our best writers--since the earliest days of the genre. William McKeen has assembled in this book the writing of those who played the music and pushed it to new limits, as well as those who were on the scene to witness and celebrate its magic. The story of rock and roll music and the rock and roll life lifts from these pages with marvelous immediacy, in selections ranging from Bruce Springsteen on his experience of backing up Chuck Berry, to Joan Didion sitting in on a Doors recording session, to Henry Rollins on Madonna, to Roddy Doyle's The Commitments. Tom Wolfe, Patti Smith, Don DeLillo, John Lennon, Frank Zappa, Nick Hornby, and many others contribute to this portrait of the music and its culture from its ancestors in the blues to its latest variants beyond grunge and rap. The book is organized into sections that create provocative and eye-opening juxtapositions, from "Superstardom" to "Weirdness," from "Present at the Creation" to "Soul." A section on rock critics shows how these writers matched the music with their own sharp rhythm, while "Tributes" rounds off the volume by remembering in their glory some of the greats who are making noise in the hereafter.
Studies of opera, film, television, and literature have demonstrated how constructions of madness may be referenced in order to stigmatise but also liberate protagonists in ways that reinforce or challenge contemporaneous notions of normality. But to date very little research has been conducted on how madness is represented in popular music. In an effort to redress this imbalance, Nicola Spelman identifies links between the anti-psychiatry movement and representations of madness in popular music of the 1960s and 1970s, analysing the various ways in which ideas critical of institutional psychiatry are embodied both verbally and musically in specific songs by David Bowie, Lou Reed, Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper, The Beatles, and Elton John. She concentrates on meanings that may be made at the point of reception as a consequence of ideas about madness that were circulating at the time. These ideas are then linked to contemporary conventions of musical expression in order to illustrate certain interpretative possibilities. Supporting evidence comes from popular musicological analysis - incorporating discourse analysis and social semiotics - and investigation of socio-historical context. The uniqueness of the period in question is demonstrated by means of a more generalised overview of songs drawn from a variety of styles and eras that engage with the topic of madness in diverse and often conflicting ways. The conclusions drawn reveal the extent to which anti-psychiatric ideas filtered through into popular culture, offering insights into popular music's ability to question general suppositions about madness alongside its potential to bring issues of men's madness into the public arena as an often neglected topic for discussion.
Throughout the world, the number of festivals has grown exponentially in the last two decades, as people celebrate local and regional cultures, but perhaps more importantly as local councils and other groups seek to use festivals both to promote tourism and to stimulate rural development. However, most studies of festivals have tended to focus almost exclusively on the cultural and symbolic aspects, or on narrow modelling of economic multiplier impacts, rather than examining their long-term implications for rural change. This book therefore has an original focus. It is structured in two parts: the first discusses broad issues affecting music festivals globally, especially in the context of rural revitalisation. The second part looks in more detail at a range of types of festivals commonly found throughout North America, Europe and Australasia, such as country music, jazz, opera and alternative music festivals. The authors draw on in-depth research undertaken over the past five years in a range of Australian places, which traces the overall growth of festivals of various kinds, examines four of the more important and distinctive music festivals, and makes clear conclusions on their significance for rural and regional change.
Memphis Boys chronicles the story of the rhythm section at Chips Moman's American Studios from 1964, when the group began working together, until 1972, when Moman shut down the studio and moved the entire operation to Atlanta. Utilizing extensive interviews with Moman and the group, as well as additional comments from the songwriters, sound engineers, and office staff, author Roben Jones creates a collective biography combined with a business history and a critical analysis of important recordings. She reveals how the personalities of the core group meshed, how they regarded newcomers, and how their personal and musical philosophies blended with Moman's vision to create timeless music based on themes of suffering and sorrow. Recording sessions with Elvis Presley, the Gentrys, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, the Box Tops, Joe Tex, Neil Diamond, B. J. Thomas, Dionne Warwick, and many others come alive in this book. Jones provides the stories behind memorable songs composed by group writers, such as "The Letter," "Dark End of the Street," "Do Right Woman," "Breakfast in Bed," and "You Were Always on My Mind." Featuring photographs, personal profiles, and a suggested listening section, Memphis Boys details a significant phase of American music and the impact of one amazing studio. Roben Jones of Gallipolis, Ohio, has published poetry in various magazines and in Wild Sweet Notes: Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry, 1950-1999.
An updated reissue of what, along with England's Dreaming, has become the acknowledged seminal work on punk. Cain was at every major gig and interviewed all of the acts at the time. He was viewed as an 'insider' and his access was unrivalled. This book is a vibrant and fast-paced trip through an extraordinary year. Includes major new interviews with Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten, Strangler Hugh Cornwell and Rat Scabies of The Damned.
Limited to only 150 copies, this is the deluxe edition of Telling Stories: Photographs of The Fall - the ultimate visual history of iconic band from renowned photographer Kevin Cummins, with a foreword by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. 'No one has captured the look of alternative UK music over the past half a century more tellingly than Kevin Cummins.' - Simon Armitage 'Kevin Cummins is a true master in being able to capture the essence of music, the soul of the band. Whatever he does however he does it is a mystery to me but it's pure genius.' - Rankin 'Few photographers had such a close connection to The Fall as Manchester-based Kevin Cummins, and his new book, Telling Stories, is a rich visual history of one of the city's most beloved and enduring bands.' - Record Collector Magazine 'Kevin has the uncanny ability of capturing the inner mood of musicians. Be it the dynamics within a pensive Joy Division, or the sense surrounding the fledgeling Fall that something special was around the corner for us all. Kevin's book is nothing less than a remarkable document of a bewildering and defiant anti-fashion movement born in Prestwich, north Manchester in the grimy mid-70s.' - Marc Riley 'Capturing forty years of the band's career via his archive, the legendary photographer (whose recent book, Juvenes, documented the story of Joy Division) gives his take on the phenomenon of The Fall and the late, great Mark E. Smith.' - Vive le Rock Contains never-before-seen images. Foreword by Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate. From chaotic early gigs to their final years, NME photographer Kevin Cummins provides a definitive, unique perspective on cult favourites The Fall. In this stunning visual history spanning four decades, discover how and why they emerged as one of the most innovative, boundary-breaking bands in modern music. With a foreword by Poet Laureate and Fall fan Simon Armitage and an interview with Eleni Poulou, as well as never-before-seen images from Cummins' archive, this is the ultimate visual companion to The Fall.
Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983), Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) and Grace Williams (1906-1977) were contemporaries at the Royal College of Music. The three composers' careers were launched with performances in the Macnaghten-Lemare Concerts in the 1930s - a time when, in Britain, as Williams noted, a woman composer was considered 'very odd indeed'. Even so, by the early 1940s all three had made remarkable advances in their work: Lutyens had become the first British composer to use 12-note technique, in her Chamber Concerto No. 1 (1939-40); Maconchy had composed four string quartets of outstanding quality and was busy rethinking the genre; and Williams had won recognition as a composer with great flair for orchestral writing with her Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes (1940) and Sea Sketches (1944). In the following years, Lutyens, Maconchy and Williams went on to compose music of striking quality and to attain prominent positions within the British music scene. Their respective achievements broke through the 'sound ceiling', challenging many of the traditional assumptions which accompanied music by female composers. Rhiannon Mathias traces the development of these three important composers through analysis of selected works. The book draws upon previously unexplored material as well as radio and television interviews with the composers themselves and with their contemporaries. The musical analysis and contextual material lead to a re-evaluation of the composers' positions in the context of twentieth-century British music history.
Susan Burney (1755-1800) was the third daughter of the music historian Charles Burney and the younger sister of the novelist Frances (Fanny) Burney. She grew up in London, where she was able to observe at close quarters the musical life of the capital and to meet the many musicians, men of letters, and artists who visited the family home. After her marriage in 1782 to Molesworth Phillips, a Royal Marines officer who served with Captain Cook on his last voyage, she lived in Surrey and later in rural Ireland. Burney was a knowledgeable enthusiast for music, and particularly for opera, with discriminating tastes and the ability to capture vividly musical life and the personalities involved in it. Her extensive journals and letters, a selection from which is presented here, provide a striking portrait of social, domestic and cultural life in London, the Home Counties and in Ireland in the late eighteenth century. They are of the greatest importance and interest to music and theatre historians, and also contain much that will be of significance and interest for Burney scholars, social historians of England and Ireland, women's historians and historians of the family.
Migrating Music considers the issues around music and cosmopolitanism in new ways. Whilst much of the existing literature on 'world music' questions the apparently world-disclosing nature of this genre - but says relatively little about migration and mobility - diaspora studies have much to say about the latter, yet little about the significance of music. In this context, this book affirms the centrality of music as a mode of translation and cosmopolitan mediation, whilst also pointing out the complexity of the processes at stake within it. Migrating music, it argues, represents perhaps the most salient mode of performance of otherness to mutual others, and as such its significance in socio-cultural change rivals - and even exceeds - literature, film, and other language and image-based cultural forms. This book will serve as a valuable reference tool for undergraduate and postgraduate students with research interests in cultural studies, sociology of culture, music, globalization, migration, and human geography.
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.
Million Dollar Quartet' is the name given to recordings made on Tuesday December 4, 1956 in the Sun Record Studios in Memphis, Tennessee. The recordings were of an impromptu jam session among Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash.The events of the session. Very few participants survive. Includes interviews with the drummer and the sound engineer. A detailed analysis of the music played - and its relevance to subsequent popular music. The early lives and careers of the quartet - where they were in 1956. Relevant social and economic factors which meant that a massive audience of young people were keenly looking for a new kind of music they could call their own. The "reunions" of surviving members of the quartet. The emergence of the tapes, first on bootleg and then on legitimate CDs. The genesis of the stage show and its reception - the enduring appeal of the music.
Finally back in print--David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's
exuberant exploration of rap music and culture.
We remember the 1980s as the era of Ronald Reagan, a conservative decade populated by preppies and yuppies dancing to a soundtrack of electronic synth pop music (the "MTV generation"). But the decade also produced some of the most creative works of punk rock - not just the music of bands like the Minutemen and the Dead Kennedys, but also visual arts, literature, poetry, and film. Kevin Mattson documents what Kurt Cobain once called a "punk rock world." He shows just how widespread the movement became, and how democratic (not at all New York-centric), due to its commitment to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethics. Mattson puts this movement into a wider context, telling about a culture war that punks opened up against the sitting president. Reagan's talk about end days and nuclear warfare made kids panic; his tax cuts for the rich and simultaneous slashing of school lunch program funding made punks seethe at his meanness. The anger went deep, since punks saw Reagan as the country's entertainer-in-chief - his career (from radio to Hollywood and television) synched to the very world punks rejected. Through deep archival research, Mattson reignites the heated debates that punk's opposition generated - about everything from "straight edge" ethics to anarchism to the art of dissent. By reconstructing the world of punk, Mattson shows that it was more than just a style of purple hair and torn jeans. And in so doing, he reminds readers of its importance and its challenge to simplistic assumptions about the 1980s as a one-dimensional, conservative epoch.
Megadeth's run of thrash classics from the mid eighties through to the nineties continue to be celebrated in the metal community long after leader Dave Mustaine's band mates have been discarded to the sands of time-save one, Dave "Jr" Ellefson. Along the way there's Mustaine's pathology with his ex-friends in Metallica but also a hell of a lot of killer metal as the band works its way up through Peace Sells and So Far, So Good... So What! through to the superlative metal classics, namely Rust In Peace and Countdown To Extinction. Later came Cryptic Writings and Risk that threatened to kill the band but the reconstitution of Megadeth after its demoralising decline and then deflating dispersal at the destructive hand of Mustaine is a story untold... until now. But it's a tale worth telling for its instructiveness on how to rebuild and maintain a career. Quite simply the recent Megadeth story spanning the albums The World Needs A Hero through to Super Collider includes some of the beast and heaviest Megadeth ever committed to record. Celebrate Mustaine's vision track-by-track with top author Martin Popoff. With over sixty books to his name, Popoff applies his tried and tested methodology to a head-crunching canon of work that is truly as strong at the recent end of the spectrum as it is with the classics you all know and love.
International Who's Who in Popular Music 2012 gives biographical information and contact details for some of the most talented and influential artists and individuals from the world of popular music. Now in its fourteenth edition, there are over 7,000 biographies charting the careers and achievements of artists in pop, rock, folk, jazz, dance, world, country music and much more. Key Features: each entry includes full biographical information: principal career details, recordings and compositions, honours and contact information where available each entrant is given the opportunity to update his or her information spans the full range of the popular music industry, from rock to jazz and dance to country provides information on established names as well as up-and-coming artists a directory section provides details of music festivals, awards, organizations within the industry, and digital music sources for ease of reference, the book includes an index of music group members. In one accessible volume the International Who's Who in Popular Music 2012 offers users a vast collection of information on the most famous and influential people in the popular music industry.
You will hear a Nile Rodgers song today. It will make you happy. Legendary producer and co-founder of Chic, Nile wrote 'We are Family' for Sister Sledge and 'I'm Coming Out' for Diana Ross, and then produced Let's Dance for David Bowie and Like a Virgin for Madonna. But before he reinvented pop music Nile Rodgers invented himself. Le Freak is an astonishing, exuberant and inspiring story of a creative genius. It is also a stunning recreation of a time and place - by the man who wrote its soundtrack.
Richard Egues and Jose Fajardo are universally regarded as the leading exponents of charanga flute playing, an improvisatory style that crystallized in 1950s Cuba with the rise of the mambo and the chachacha. Despite the commercial success of their recordings with Orquesta Aragon and Fajardo y sus Estrellas and their influence not only on Cuban flute players but also on other Latin dance musicians, no in-depth analytical study of their flute solos exists. In Cuban Flute Style: Interpretation and Improvisation, Sue Miller-music historian, charanga flute player, and former student of Richard Egues-examines the early-twentieth-century decorative style of flute playing in the Cuban danzon and its links with the later soloistic style of the 1950s as exemplified by Fajardo and Egues. Transcriptions and analyses of recorded performances demonstrate the characteristic elements of the style as well as the styles of individual players. A combination of musicological analysis and ethnomusicological fieldwork reveals the polyrhythmic and melodic aspects of the Cuban flute style, with commentary from flutists Richard Egues, Joaquin Oliveros, Polo Tamayo, Eddy Zervigon, and other renowned players. Miller also covers techniques for flutists seeking to learn the style-including altissimo fingerings for the Boehm flute and fingerings for the five-key charanga flute-as well as guidance on articulation, phrasing, repertoire, practicing improvisation, and working with recordings. Cuban Flute Style will appeal to those working in the fields of Cuban music, improvisation, music analysis, ethnomusicology, performance and performance practice, popular music, and cultural theory.
She's So Fine explores the music, reception and cultural significance of 1960s girl singers and girl groups in the US and the UK. Using approaches from the fields of musicology, women's studies, film and media studies, and cultural studies, this volume is the first interdisciplinary work to link close musical readings with rigorous cultural analysis in the treatment of artists such as Martha and the Vandellas, The Crystals, The Blossoms, Brenda Lee, Dusty Springfield, Lulu, Tina Turner, and Marianne Faithfull. Currently available studies of 1960s girl groups/girl singers fall into one of three categories: industry-generated accounts of the music's production and sales, sociological commentaries, or omnibus chronologies/discographies. She's So Fine, by contrast, focuses on clearly defined themes via case studies of selected artists. Within this analytical rather than historically comprehensive framework, this book presents new research and original observations on the 60s girl group/girl singer phenomenon.
Grunge has been perceived as the music that defined 'Generation X'. Twenty years after the height of the movement there is still considerable interest in its rise and fall, and its main figures such as Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. As a form of 'retro' music it is even experiencing a resurgence, and Cobain remains an icon to many young music fans today. But what was grunge, and what has it become? This book explores how grunge has been remembered by the fans that grew up with it, and asks how memory is both formed by and forms popular culture. It looks at the relationship between media, memory and music fans and demonstrates how different groups can use and shape memory as part of an ongoing struggle for power in society. Grunge was the site of such a struggle, as popular music so often is, with the young people of the time asking questions about their place in the world and the way society is organized. This book examines what these questions were, and what has happened to them over time. It shows that although grunge challenged many social structures, the way it, and youth itself, are remembered often work to reinforce the status quo.
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL 2018** WHO IS VERNON SUBUTEX? An urban legend. A fall from grace. The mirror who reflects us all. Vernon Subutex was once the proprietor of Revolver, an infamous music shop in Bastille. His legend spread throughout Paris. But by the 2000s his shop is struggling. With his savings gone, his unemployment benefit cut, and the friend who had been covering his rent suddenly dead, Vernon Subutex finds himself down and out on the Paris streets. He has one final card up his sleeve. Even as he holds out his hand to beg for the first time, a throwaway comment he once made on Facebook is taking the internet by storm. Vernon does not realise this, but the word is out: Vernon Subutex has in his possession the last filmed recordings of Alex Bleach, the famous musician and Vernon's benefactor, who has only just died of a drug overdose. A crowd of people from record producers to online trolls and porn stars are now on Vernon's trail. Translated from the French by Frank Wynne "Thrilling, magnificently audacious" Irish Times "Brimming with sex, violence and deviant behaviour" Sunday Times "Virginie Despentes's Vernon Subutex trilogy is the zeitgeistiest thing I ever read" NELL ZINK
What does it mean to think of Western Art music - and the Austro-German contribution to that repertory - as a tradition? How are men and masculinities implicated in the shaping of that tradition? And how is the writing of the history (or histories) of that tradition shaped by men and masculinities? This book seeks to answer these and other questions by drawing both on a wide range of German-language writings on music, sound and listening from the so-called long nineteenth century (circa 1800-1918), and a range of critical-theoretical texts from the post-war continental philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions, including Lacan, Zizek, Serres, Derrida and Kittler. The book is focussed in particular on bringing the object of historical writing itself into scrutiny by engaging in what Zizek has called a 'historicity' or a way of writing about the past that not merely acknowledges the ahistorical kernel of historical writing, but brings that kernel into the light of day, takes account of it and puts it into play. The book is thus committed to a kind of historical writing that is open-ended - though not ideologically naA-ve - and that does not fix or stabilize the nature of the relationship between so-called 'primary' and 'secondary' texts. The book consists of an introduction, which places the study of classical music and the Austro-German tradition within broader debates about the value of that tradition, and four extensive case studies: an analysis of the cultural-historical category of listening around 1800; a close reading of A. B. Marx's Beethoven monograph of 1859; a consideration of Heinrich Schenker's attitudes to the mob and the vernacular more broadly and an examination, through Franz Kafka, of the figure of Mahler's body. |
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