How do musicians play and talk to audiences? Why do audiences listen and what happens when they talk back? How do new (and old) technologies affect this interplay? This book presents a long overdue examination of the turbulent relationship between musicians and audiences. Focusing on a range of areas as diverse as Ireland, Greece, India, Malta, the US, and China, the contributors bring musicological, sociological, psychological, and anthropological approaches to the interaction between performers, fans, and the industry that mediates them. The four parts of the book each address a different stage of the relationship between musicians and audiences, showing its processual nature: from conceptualisation to performance, and through mediation to off-stage discourses. The musician/audience conceptual division is shown, throughout the book, to be as problematic as it is persistent.

* 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.

The song remains the most basic unit of modern pop music. Shaped into being by historical forces-cultural, aesthetic, and technical-the song provides both performer and audience with a world marked off by a short, discrete, and temporally demarcated experience. One-Track Mind: Capitalism, Technology, and the Art of the Pop Song brings together 16 writers to weigh in on 16 iconic tracks from the history of modern popular music. Arranged chronologically in order of release of the tracks, and spanning nearly five decades, these essays zigzag across the cultural landscape to present one possible history of pop music. There are detours through psychedelic rock, Afro-pop, Latin pop, glam rock, heavy metal, punk, postpunk, adult contemporary rock, techno, hip-hop, and electro-pop here. More than just deep histories of individual songs, these essays all expand far beyond the track itself to offer exciting and often counterintuitive histories of transformative moments in popular culture. Collectively, they show the undiminished power of the individual pop song, both as distillations of important flashpoints and, in their afterlives, as ghostly echoes that persist undiminished but transform for succeeding generations. Capitalism and its principal good, capital, help us frame these stories, a fact that should surprise no one given the inextricable relationship between art and capitalism established in the twentieth century. At the root, readers will find here a history of pop with unexpected plot twists, colorful protagonists, and fitting denouements.

Listening to the sound practices of bands and musicians such as the Asian Dub Foundation or M.I.A., and spanning three decades of South Asian dance music production in the UK, Transcultural Sound Practices zooms in on the concrete sonic techniques and narrative strategies in South Asian dance music and investigates sound as part of a wider assemblage of cultural technologies, politics and practices. Carla J. Maier investigates how sounds from Hindi film music tunes or bhangra tracks have been sampled, cut, looped and manipulated, thus challenging and complicating the cultural politics of sonic production. Rather than conceiving of music as a representation of fixed cultures, this book engages in a study of music that disrupts the ways in which ethnicity has been written into sound and investigates how transcultural sound practices generate new ways of thinking about culture.

How has a group conceived as a short-lived commodity outlived many more 'real' bands by nearly fifty years? Why are The Monkees still important, and what does this tell us about their music, their TV show, and our understanding of popular culture today? Despite being built in Hollywood, and not necessarily to last, that is precisely what their music, TV, and cinematic output has done. They in many ways unique-as the first 'made for TV' band, their success introduced methods of marketing pop that have since become standard industry practice; their 'big screen' use of film and images in live performance is likewise now a firmly established principle of concert staging; and in the way they changed the rules of the game, taking control over their own affairs at the height of the success, risking magnificent failure by doing so. The Monkees invented a new kind of TV, gave a new model to the music industry, and left behind one of the most enigmatic movies of the modern era, Head. This book is about all that and more. Beginning by exploring the origins and personalities of the four Monkees before looking in depth at their work together on screen, on stage, and on record, this is the first serious study of the band and the first to fully acknowledge their importance to the development of pop as we now know it.

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.

The Routledge Handbook of Pink Floyd is intended for scholars and researchers of popular music, as well as music industry professionals and fans of the band. It brings together international researchers to assess, evaluate and reformulate approaches to the critical study and interpretation of one of the world's most important and successful bands. For the first time, this Handbook will 'tear down the wall,' examining the band's collective artistic creations and the influence of social, technological, commercial and political environments over several decades on their work. Divided into five parts, the book provides a thoroughly contextualised overview of the musical works of Pink Floyd, including coverage of performance and sound; media, reception and fandom; genre; periods of Pink Floyd's work; and aesthetics and subjectivity. Drawing on art, design, performance, culture and counterculture, emergent theoretical resources and analytical frames are evaluated and discussed from across the social sciences, humanities and creative arts. The Handbook is intended for scholars and researchers of popular music, as well as music industry professionals. It will appeal across a range of related subjects from music production to cultural studies and media/communication studies.

Sixties British rock and pop changed music history. While American popular music dominated the record industry in the late fifties and early sixties, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who, and numerous other groups soon invaded the world at large and put Britain at the center of the modern musical map. Please Please Me offers an insider's view of the British pop-music recording industry during the seminal period of 1956 to 1968, based on personal recollections, contemporary accounts, and all relevant data that situate this scene in the economic, political, and social context of postwar Britain. Author Gordon Thompson weaves issues of class, age, professional status, gender, and ethnicity into his narrative, beginning with the rise of British beat groups and the emergence of teenagers as consumers in postwar Britain, and moving into the competition between performers and the recording industry for control over the music. He interviews session musicians who recorded anonymously with the Beatles, Hermans Hermits, and the Kinks, professional musicians who toured with British bands promoting records or providing dance music, songwriters, music directors, and producers and engineers who worked with the best-known performers of the era. The consequences of World War Two for pop music in the late fifties and early sixties form the backdrop for discussion of recording equipment, musical instruments, and new jet-age transportation, all contributors to the rise of British pop-music alongside the personalities that more famously made entertainment news. And these famous personalities traverse the pages of Please Please Me as well: performing songwriters John Carter and Ken Lewis, Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Ray Davies, and Pete Townshend took center stage while the production teams and session musicians created the art of recording behind the doors of Londons studios. Drawing his interpretation of the processes at work during this musical revolution into a wider context, Thompson unravels the musical change and innovation of the time with an eye on understanding what traces individuals leave in the musical and recording process. Opening up important new historical and musical understandings in a repertoire that is at the core of rock music's history, Please Please Me will appeal to all students, scholars, and fans of popular music.

The story of The Wailers is a litany of betrayal and greed that's rarely been reported elsewhere. Written in collaboration with Family Man and other surviving members, "The Wailers' Story" reveals the truth behind the Marley legacy. The Wailers played with Bob Marley on all of his hit singles and albums - records that have sold an estimated 250 million copies worldwide, and established Marley himself as a cultural and musical icon. This book traces the early lives of the Barrett brothers before they joined Marley in the '60s and discusses how reggae artists like Lee 'Scratch' Perry influenced the band. It includes insider accounts of the assassination attempt on Marley's life and his exile in London. It examines how hits like 'Exodus', 'Waiting In Vain', 'No Woman No Cry', and 'I Shot The Sheriff' were made - songs that have helped change the face of popular music.

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.

* 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.

There were only a handful of people in the world who still really believed in Suede at the time, and five of them were in the band. Brett Anderson, Suede. Suede were Marmite at the time, and I was expecting the press to trash them. Every meeting I had with the record company, I was told they were done for. Ed Buller, Coming Up producer. How did they do that? Comeback of the century. Select magazine cover, November 1996. Here They Come with Their Make-Up On examines in exquisite detail how Suede emerged from the chaotic, ruined remnants of their career and somehow managed to conjure up their most joyously evocative and celebrated album to date. Coming Up the extraordinary record in question stumped the band s most ardent critics and hit the jackpot, with sales that eclipsed those of their first two releases combined. As the band s publicist throughout that period, Jane is uniquely placed to reveal exactly how they did it. This book is also a personal journey into the heart of an album that Jane loves if not unconditionally then as a piece of work that has ultimately survived the ravages of time and the brutish, nasty, and not-so-short nature of the media scrutiny that had threatened to confine the band to the dustbin of history. In addition, it features yet more outlandish tales from Jane s time with Suede and those around them back then, as well as new interviews with band members Brett Anderson, Richard Oakes, and Neil Codling, and Coming Up s producer, Ed Buller.

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.

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.

The last major interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, conducted by New York Times bestselling author David Sheff, featuring a new introduction that reflects on the fortieth anniversary of Lennon's death.

Originally published in Playboy in 1981 just after John Lennon's assassination, All We Are Saying is a rich, vivid, complete interview with Lennon and Yoko Ono, covering art, creativity, the music business, childhood beginnings, privacy, how the Beatles broke up, how Lennon and McCartney collaborated (or didn't) on songs, parenthood, money, feminism, religion, and insecurity. Of course, at the heart of the conversation is the deep romantic and spiritual bond between Lennon and Ono.

Sheff's insightful questions set the tone for Lennon's responses and his presence sets the scene, as he goes through the kitchen door of Lennon and Yoko's apartment in the Dakota and observes moments at Lennon's famous white piano and the rock star's work at the stove, making them grilled cheese sandwiches. Sheff's new introduction looks at his forty-year-old interview afresh, and examines how what he learned from Lennon has resonated with him as a man and a parent. This is a knockout interview: unguarded, wide-ranging, alternately frisky and intense.

This book fills the gap in existing literature by exploring other forms of political discourses in non-Western rap music. Theoretically, it challenges and explores resistance, arguing towards the need for different epistemological frameworks in which to look at narratives of cultural resistance in the Arabic-speaking world. Empirically, it provides an in-depth look at the politics of rap culture in Morocco. Rap Beyond Resistance bridges the humanities and social sciences in order to de-Westernize cultural studies, presenting the political narratives of the Moroccan rap scene beyond secular liberal meanings of resistance. By exploring what is political, this book brings light to a vibrant and varied rap scene diverse in its political discourses-with an emphasis on patriotism and postcolonial national identity-and uncovers different ways in which young artists are being political beyond 'radical lyrics'.

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.

In Heavy Metal Music in Latin America: Perspectives from the Distorted South, the editors bring together scholars engaged in the study of heavy metal music in Latin America to reflect on the heavy metal genre from a regional perspective. The contributors' southern voices diversify metal scholarship in the global north. An extreme musical genre for an extreme region, the contributors explore how issues like colonialism, dictatorships, violence, ethnic extermination and political persecution have shaped heavy metal music in Latin America, and how music has helped shape Latin American culture and politics.

The Poetry and Music of Joaquin Sabina: An Angel with Black Wings is a thoroughly researched exploration of the life, music, and song lyrics of the celebrated Spanish singer-songwriter Joaquin Sabina. Often called "the Spanish Dylan," Sabina has established his own highly poetic space over the course of his forty-plus years as a recording artist. Using selected song lyrics from his fifteen studio and three major live albums, Daniel J. Nappo analyzes Sabina's use of antithesis, simile, metaphor, synesthesia, rhyme, and other rhetorical and poetic devices. Nappo also devotes a chapter to Sabina's ability as a narrator and concludes the book with a comparison of Sabina's best work with that of the American singer-songwriter and Nobel laureate, Bob Dylan.

The music, image, performances, and cultural impact of some of the most enduring figures in popular music are explored in Rock Music Icons: Musical and Cultural Impacts. A rock music icon is readily recognizable-but intriguing and little-known stories lie behind the public's enchantment. Readers of Rock Music Icons will encounter new perspectives on notable recording artists ranging from Elvis Presley, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, and Bob Marley to Elton John, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Metallica, and Kurt Cobain. One meets Pink Floyd upon the fall of the Berlin Wall, the drama of Freddie Mercury, Ozzy Osborne, and Madonna, and the musical craft of Billy Joel. Rock Music Icons investigates authenticity, identity, and the power of the voices and images of these widely circulated and shared artists that have become the soundtrack of our lives. Rock Music Icons brings a reader an inside look into the creativity of some of the most prominent rock stars of our time.

This book offers a unique examination of the development of popular music function in film. It assesses the contribution of popular music to the interpretation of the most significant films, covering the period from rock 'n' roll's initial introduction at the opening of Blackboard Jungle, to the backlash against disco, which followed soon after the release of Saturday Night Fever. By dividing this period into five phases-The Classical American Musical Phase, The British Invasion Phase, The New Hollywood Alienation Phase, The Disco Phase and The Post-Disco Conservative Phase-the book pinpoints key moments at which individual developments occurred and lays out a path of expansion in popular music function. Each chapter offers close analyses of this period's most innovative films; examines the cultural, historical, technical and industrial factors peculiar to each phase and considers the influence of these upon the specific timing of functional advances.

If I had not kissed anyone, or danced with anyone, or had a reason to cry, the music made me feel as if I had gone through all that anyway . . . the music attracted and repelled, organised and disturbed and then let us into the night, clusters of emotion ready to dissolve into sleep. In The Importance of Music to Girls, Lavinia Greenlaw tells the story of the adventures that music leads us into: getting drunk, falling in love, dying of boredom, cutting our hair, terrifying our parents, wanting to change the world. This is a vivid memoir unlike any other, recalling the furious passion of being young, female, and coming alive through music.

The paperback edition of the bestselling biography. The Kinks are the quintessential British sixties band, revered for an incredible series of classic songs ('You Really Got Me', 'Waterloo Sunset' and 'Lola' to name but a few) and critically acclaimed albums (The Village Green Preservation Society). Featuring original interviews with key band members Ray Davies, his brother Dave and Mick Avory, as well as Chrissie Hynde and many others close to the group, every stage of their career is covered in fascinating detail: the hits, the American successes of the 1970s and the legendary band in-fighting. Nearly 50 years after they formed, The Kinks influence is still being felt today as strongly as ever.