Musicians, both fictional and real, have long been subjects of cinema. From biopics of composers Beethoven and Mozart to the rise (and often fall) of imaginary bands in The Commitments and Almost Famous, music of all types has inspired hundreds of films. The Encyclopedia of Musicians and Bands on Film features the most significant productions from around the world, including straightforward biographies, rockumentaries, and even the occasional mockumentary. The wide-ranging scope of this volume allows for the inclusion of films about fictional singers and bands, with emphasis on a variety of themes: songwriter-band relationships, the rise and fall of a career, music saving the day, the promoter's point of view, band competitions, the traveling band, and rock-based absurdity. Among the films discussed in this book are Amadeus, The Blues Brothers, The Buddy Holly Story, The Commitments, Dreamgirls, The Glenn Miller Story, A Hard Day's Night, I'm Not There, Jailhouse Rock, A Mighty Wind, Ray, 'Round Midnight, The Runaways, School of Rock, That Thing You Do!, and Walk the Line. With entries that span the decades and highlight a variety of music genres, The Encyclopedia of Musicians and Bands on Film is a valuable resource for moviegoers and music lovers alike, as well as scholars of both film and music.

Pink Floyd are one of the world's most successful rock bands of all time. After their breakthrough record, "The Dark Side Of The Moon", brought prog rock to the masses, they have never looked back, and their influence continues today in rock, ambient and techno music. "Pink Floyd: Glorious Torment" is an unofficial, intriguing review of their path to mega success, tracking too the dismay of Syd Barrett's decline and the battles and the glory of their music. Covering all the major events in their long career this great new book is accompanied by revealing and evocative images of the band.

Author Nick Johnstone unravels the all too short life and career of one of Britain's most brilliant and troubled stars. Amy Amy Amy tracks Winehouse's erratic journey to fame from her North London Jewish family home, detailing her meteoric rise to stardom and the two albums that catapulted her to the top. Her well-publicised problems with alcohol and drugs, anorexia, bulimia and personal relationships kept her in the headlines, always threatening to obscure her extraordinary musical gifts. Amy Amy Amy redresses the imbalance, giving full measure to Winehouse's talent while offering an honest account of her multiple personal crises. This updated edition of Amy Amy Amy takes the story up to July 2011 and Amy's tragic and unexpected death at her home in Camden Town following an aborted European tour and her final appearance on stage with her goddaughter at the Roundhouse in Camden.

The Great American Songbooks shows how popular music shapes and permeates a host of modernism's hallmark texts. Austin Graham begins his study of 20th-century texts with a discussion of American popular music and literature in the 19th century. He posits Walt Whitman as a proto-modernist who drew on his love of opera to create the epic free-verse poetry that would heavily influence his bardic successors. One can witness this in T. S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land relies on Whitman's verse style to emphasize how 19th-century structures of feeling regarding music persist into the 20th century. From opera and standards of the Victorian musical hall, Graham moves to the blues to reveal the multifaceted ways it shaped works in the Harlem Renaissance, most notably in the verse of Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer's stream-of-consciousness masterpiece, Cane. The second half of Songbooks advances an argument for a musical eclecticism that arose alongside rapid industrialization. Writers like Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos, Graham argues, developed a notion of musical eclecticism to help them process-or cope-with the unprecedented invasiveness of popular music, particularly in major cities. This eclecticism runs counter to critics like Adorno who equate popular music with mass produced mechanisms such as the phonograph and radio, and thus with degraded, cultural forms. In conclusion, Graham suggests how modernist writers experienced, and sometimes theorized, a more nuanced, sophisticated, and fluid mode of interaction with popular music.

In an era when performing live is more essential than ever, this is the go-to guidebook for getting your show on the road and making a living from music. Previously published as The Tour Book, this new edition has been extensively revised, reorganized, and updated to reflect today's music industry. Written by a touring professional with over 25 years of experience.

In Hungary, jazz was at the forefront of heated debates sparked by the racialised tensions between national music traditions and newly emerging forms of popular culture that challenged the prevailing status quo within the cultural hierarchies of different historical eras. Drawing on an extensive, four-year field research project, including ethnographic observations and 29 in-depth interviews, this book is the first to explore the hidden diasporic narrative(s) of Hungarian jazz through the system of historically formed distinctions linked to the social practices of assimilated Jews and Romani musicians. The chapters illustrate how different concepts of authenticity and conflicting definitions of jazz as the "sound of Western modernity" have resulted in a unique hierarchical setting. The book's account of the fundamental opposition between US-centric mainstream jazz (bebop) and Bartok-inspired free jazz camps not only reveals the extent to which traditionalism and modernism were linked to class- and race-based cultural distinctions, but offers critical insights about the social logic of Hungary's geocultural positioning in the 'twilight zone' between East and West to use the words of Maria Todorova. Following a historical overview that incorporates comparisons with other Central European jazz cultures, the book offers a rigorous analysis of how the transition from playing 'cafehouse music' to bebop became a significant element in the status claims of Hungary's 'significant others', i.e. Romani musicians. By combining the innovative application of Pierre Bourdieu's cultural sociology with popular music studies and postcolonial scholarship, this work offers a forceful demonstration of the manifold connections of this particular jazz scene to global networks of cultural production, which also continue to shape it.

The Beatles' evolution from a Liverpool rock 'n' roll group into one of the twentieth century's defining images has been repeatedly chronicled but rarely analysed; a critical appreciation of their music and career, and the issues and debates they provoked, is long overdue. This book provides the first investigation of some of the many historical, cultural, musical and sociological facets of the group's career. Written by an international group of writers on popular music, it is an essential book for those wishing to understand not only the phenomenon of the Beatles, but the broader social contexts within which popular music continues to be practised and studied.

Reflect upon the conflict between commercial and artistic imperatives in cultural production generally. Bridges the gap between academic scholarship and popular consumption. Utilizes cultural criticism and sound studies as well as contemporary and archival texts. This book offers a fresh perspective on the Stooges that will appeal both to rock fans and scholars (especially in the fields of cultural studies, the long Sixties, musicology, punk studies, and performance studies).

Music and World-Building in the Colonial City investigates how nineteenth-century migrants to Australia used music as a resource for world-building, focusing on coalmining regions of New South Wales. It explores how music-making helped British migrants to create communities in unfamiliar country, often with little to no infrastructure. Its key themes are as follows: people's relationships to music within specific contexts; how music-making intersects with class, gender and ethnic background; identity through music. Situated within a wider discourse on music and identity, music and well-being and music and emotions, this is an authoritative study of historical communities and their relationship with music. It will be of particular interest to scholars and researchers working in the fields of sociomusicology, colonial studies and cultural studies.

So this is permanence, edited by Jon Savage with a foreword by Deborah Curtis, presents the intensely personal writings of one of the most enigmatic and influential songwriters and performers of the late twentieth century, Joy Division's Ian Curtis. The songs of Joy Division, infused with the energy of punk but steeped in a resigned longing, were born of Manchester in the late seventies - a once flourishing industrial city in decline. They were the songs too of Ian Curtis's inner tragedies, as he battled depression, epilepsy and debilitating stage fright. Ian Curtis committed suicide in 1980, on the eve of the band's first American tour. Interspersed with the lyrics are previously unpublished facsimile pages of Ian's notebooks, which throw his highly emotive lyrics into fascinating relief and cast light on the creative process of this singularly poetic songwriter.

The origin story of hip-hop-one that involves Kool Herc DJing a house party on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx-has become received wisdom. But Joseph C. Ewoodzie Jr. argues that the full story remains to be told. In vibrant prose, he combines never-before-used archival material with searching questions about the symbolic boundaries that have divided our understanding of the music. In Break Beats in the Bronx, Ewoodzie portrays the creative process that brought about what we now know as hip-hop and shows that the art form was a result of serendipitous events, accidents, calculated successes, and failures that, almost magically, came together. In doing so, he questions the unexamined assumptions about hip-hop's beginnings, including why there are just four traditional elements-DJing, MCing, breaking, and graffiti writing-and not others, why the South Bronx and not any other borough or city is considered the cradle of the form, and which artists besides Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash founded the genre. Ewoodzie answers these and many other questions about hip-hop's beginnings. Unearthing new evidence, he shows what occurred during the crucial but surprisingly underexamined years between 1975 and 1979 and argues that it was during this period that the internal logic and conventions of the scene were formed.

Geek Rock: An Exploration of Music and Subculture examines the relationship between geek culture and popular music, tracing a history from the late 1960s to the present day. The term "geek rock" refers to forms of popular music that celebrate all things campy, kitschy, and quirky. In this collection of essays, contributors explore the evolution of this music genre, from writing songs about poodles, girls, monster movies, and outer space to just what it means to be "white and nerdy." Editors Alex DiBlasi and Victoria Willis have gathered eleven essays from across the world, covering every facet of geek culture from its earliest influences, including *Frank Zappa *Captain Beefheart *Devo *They Might Be Giants *Weird Al Yankovic *Present-day advocates of "Nerdcore" Geek Rock offers a working history of this subgenre, which has finally begun to come under academic study. The essays take a variety of scholarly approaches, encompassing musicology, race, gender studies, sociology, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Geek Rock will be of interest to readers of all backgrounds: music scholars, college and university professors, sociologists, and die-hard fans.

An insightful study of seven great pop musicians who expanded the boundaries of musical creativity in their own different ways during the peaks of their careers in the second half of the 20th Century. The musicians discussed in this work are Yoko Ono, Frank Zappa, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Sun Ra, James Brown, and Sigmund Snopek III. The author Bob Mielke teaches American Literature and Culture at Truman State University.

Elaborating on themes of resilience, memory, critique and metal beyond metal, this volume highlights how the development and future of metal music scholarship is predicated on the engagement with other forms of popular culture such as comics, documentaries, and popular music. Drawing from a range of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, Heavy Metal Studies and Popular Culture's transnational approach and rootedness in metal scholarship provides the collection with a breadth and depth that makes it a critical resource for academics and students interested in the theories and trends shaping the future of Metal Music Studies.

Experimentalisms in Practice explores the multiple sites in which experimentalism emerges and becomes meaningful beyond Eurocentric interpretative frameworks. Challenging the notion of experimentalism as defined in conventional narratives, contributors take a broad approach to a wide variety of Latin@ and Latin American music traditions conceived or perceived as experimental. The conversation takes as starting point the 1960s, a decade that marks a crucial political and epistemological moment for Latin America; militant and committed aesthetic practices resonated with this moment, resulting in a multiplicity of artistic and musical experimental expressions. Experimentalisms in Practice responds to recent efforts to reframe and reconceptualize the study of experimental music in terms of epistemological perspective and geographic scope, while also engaging traditional scholarship. This book contributes to the current conversations about music experimentalism while providing new points of entry to further reevaluate the field.

Improbasen is a Norwegian private learning centre that offers beginner's instrumental tuition within jazz improvisation for children between the ages of 7 and 15. This book springs out of a two-year ethnographic study of the teaching and learning activity at Improbasen, highlighting features from the micro-interactions within the lessons, the organisation of Improbasen, and its international activity. Music teachers, students, and scholars within music education as well as jazz research will benefit from the perspectives presented in the book, which shows how children systematically acquire tools for improvisation and shared codes for interplay. Through a process of guided participation in jazz culture, even very young children are empowered to take part in a global, creative musical practice with improvisation as an educational core. This book critically engages in current discussions about jazz pedagogy, inclusion and gender equity, beginning instrumental tuition, creativity, and authenticity in childhood.

The political has always been part of popular music, but how does that play out in today's musical and political landscape? Mixing Pop and Politics: Political Dimensions of Popular Music in the 21st Century provides an innovative exploration of the complex politics of popular music in its contemporary formations. Amid the shifting paradigms of power in the 2020s, the chapters in this book go beyond the idea of popular music as protest to explore how resistance, subversion, containment, and reconciliation all interact in the popular music realm. Covering a wide range of international artists and genres, from South African hip-hop to Polish punk, and addressing topics such as climate change and environmentalism, feminism, diasporic identity, political parties, music-making as labour, the far right, conservatism and nostalgia, and civic engagement, the contributors expand our understanding of how popular music is political. For students and scholars of music, popular culture, and politics, the volume offers a broad, exciting snapshot of the latest scholarship on contemporary popular music and politics.

Late nineteenth-century France was a nation undergoing an identity crisis: the uncertain infancy of the Third Republic and shifting alliances in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War forced France to interrogate the fundamental values and characteristics at the heart of its own national identity. Music was central to this national self-scrutiny. It comes as little surprise to us that Oriental fears, desires, and anxieties should be a fundamental part of this, but what has been overlooked to date is that Britain, too, provided a thinking space in the French musical world; it was often - surprisingly and paradoxically - represented through many of the same racialist terms and musical tropes as the Orient. However, at the same time, its shared history with France and the explosions of colonial rivalry between the two nations introduced an ever-present tension into this musical relationship. This book sheds light on this forgotten musical sphere through a rich variety of contemporary sources. It visits the cafe-concert and its tradition of 'Englishing up' with fake hair, mocking accents, and unflattering dances; it explores the reactions, both musical and physical, to British evangelical bands as they arrived in the streets of France and the colonies; it considers the French reception of, and fascination with, folk music from Ireland and Scotland; and it confronts the culture shock felt by French visitors to Britain as they witnessed British music-making for the first time. Throughout, it examines the ways in which this music allowed French society to grapple with the uncertainty of late nineteenth-century life, providing ordinary French citizens with a means of understanding and interrogating both the Franco-British relationship and French identity itself.

Appearing in early 70s New York City as primal prototype street punks, Suicide are now hailed as one of the most important and influential groups of the 20th century, inspiring that decade's major musical movements but too feared and shunned to be awarded their rightful acclaim at the time. Confronting shocked audiences with their electronic "New York blues", singer Alan Vega and instrumentalist Martin Rev fearlessly mirrored the city's sleazy underbelly and decay on blood-freezing gutter-scapes such as 'Ghost Rider' and 'Frankie Teardrop' while invoking doo-wop purity on timeless love songs like 'Cheree' and 'Dream Baby Dream'.The book charts Suicide's uncompromising roller coaster from formative days in performance art and avant garde experimentation to chaotic early shows at drug-infested downtown hotbed the Project of Living Artists.Along with detailed accounts of Suicide's influences, contemporaries and environment which spawned them, the book will position the duo as one of New York's most pivotal but derided outfits as the story moves through their pioneering first album, 1978's shockingly violent UK tour supporting The Clash and subsequent recordings, live sorties and respective parallel solo careers, going up to the present day. The author's eye witness accounts and extensive first-hand interviews with Alan Vega and Martin Rev are joined by conversations with producers Craig Leon, Marty Thau and Bob Blank, contemporaries including Blondie, Jayne County and the New York Dolls and fans such as Nick Cave, Bobby Gillespie and The Clash; adding to a definitive account of this most unique group. With an introduction by Lydia Lunch

The political has always been part of popular music, but how does that play out in today's musical and political landscape? Mixing Pop and Politics: Political Dimensions of Popular Music in the 21st Century provides an innovative exploration of the complex politics of popular music in its contemporary formations. Amid the shifting paradigms of power in the 2020s, the chapters in this book go beyond the idea of popular music as protest to explore how resistance, subversion, containment, and reconciliation all interact in the popular music realm. Covering a wide range of international artists and genres, from South African hip-hop to Polish punk, and addressing topics such as climate change and environmentalism, feminism, diasporic identity, political parties, music-making as labour, the far right, conservatism and nostalgia, and civic engagement, the contributors expand our understanding of how popular music is political. For students and scholars of music, popular culture, and politics, the volume offers a broad, exciting snapshot of the latest scholarship on contemporary popular music and politics.

"...the holy grail of information on Big Star and the late Chris Bell. An oral history spanning 400 pages, There Was A Light is exhaustive in its detail and entrancing in its storytelling." -Under the Radar Available for the first time as a traditional paperback, this revised and updated edition contains new and archival interviews with those closest to Chris Bell and the Big Star circle: their friends, family, former bandmates-even fans, exes, classmates, and coworkers. "Bell's and Big Star's existence was short, but the wealth of stories and quotes here provides a healthy sustenance for the truth seekers. A top-notch biography." -San Francisco Book Review The varied cast of voices-many from the band's hometown of Memphis-comprises all the members of Big Star, including Chris Bell, the iconic Alex Chilton, Andy Hummel, and Jody Stephens. In the following decades after its 1975 breakup, the obscure group somehow reached and inspired some of rock's most important bands, including R.E.M., the Replacements, Yo La Tengo, Teenage Fanclub, Beck, and Wilco. With Chris Bell at the center of the Big Star universe, this book carefully reveals the production of the band's masterful 1972 debut LP, #1 Record, for Ardent/Stax Records. Despite stellar reviews, the record suffered abysmal sales. Soon after, toxic personality conflicts and turmoil tore the band apart while Bell battled drug abuse and depression. There Was A Light then delves into Big Star's second and third albums, while recounting Bell's second act as a struggling solo musician and born-again Christian. During several trips to Europe, he produced ambitious recordings and pitched himself to record labels-even crossing paths with Paul McCartney. From this fertile era arose Bell's lone solo album, the posthumously released I Am the Cosmos-his swan song and masterpiece. There Was A Light details the pop culture phenomenon that made Big Star legendary and divulges how its staunch fanbase saved the band from obscurity. "... an encyclopedic compendium...illuminating Bell's life from a thousand angles." -Memphis Flyer

A comprehensive, engaging and timely Bakhtinian examination of the ways in which the music and lyrics of Pacific reggae, aspects of performance, a record album cover and the social and political context construct social commentary, resistance and protest. Framed predominantly by the theory and philosophy of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, this innovative investigation of the discourse of Pacific reggae in New Zealand produces a multi-faceted analysis of the dialogic relationships that create meaning in this genre of popular music. It focuses on the award-winning EP What's Be Happen? by the band Herbs, which has been recognised for its ground-breaking music and social commentary in the early 1980s. Herbs' songs address the racism and ideology of the apartheid regime in South Africa and the relationship between sport and politics, as well as universally relevant conflicts over race relations, the experiences of migrants, and the historic and ongoing loss of indigenous people's lands. The book demonstrates the striking compatibility between Bakhtin's theorisation of utterances as ethical acts and reggae music, along with the Rastafari philosophy that underpins it, which speaks of resistance to social injustice, of ethical values and the kind of society people seek to achieve. It will appeal to a cross-disciplinary audience of scholars in Bakhtin studies; discourse analysis; popular cultural studies; the literary analysis of popular music and lyrics, and those with an interest in the culture and politics of Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific region.

This book explores the growing phenomenon of music tourism - instances of people visiting places because of a connection with music. Asking how an abstract art form such as music can lead to tourism and how the popularity of music tourism in contemporary culture might be explained, it presents a comparative study of musical tourism in various locations across Europe, in relation to a range of musical genres. Through the concept of 'musical topophilia', the author offers a timely and insightful analysis of the affective attachment to place and music, showing how and why music literally moves people. This account enables us to grasp the complex ways in which music, place, and tourism are connected in practice. Based on empirical case studies, Contemporary Music Tourism lays the foundation for a theoretical grounding of music tourism as a research field and, as such, will appeal to scholars of geography, music, sociology, tourism, and cultural studies.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE The celebrated first memoir from arguably the most influential singer-songwriter in the country, Bob Dylan. 'I'd come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.' So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career. Through Dylan's eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan's New York is a magical city of possibilities - smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book's side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota, and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times. By turns revealing, poetical, passionate, and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan's thoughts and influences. Dylan's voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful, and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art. 'Chronicles stunned everyone . . . [it's] clear, apparently frank, unremittingly serious about his musical influences and exquisitely written. It is, in fact, a masterpiece' Sunday Times 'Entertaining and surprisingly deprecating... The book's structure is elegant . . . Chronicles is tautly written, vividly cinematic, and funny . . . a courageous little book' Financial Times 'There is something on every page, in every paragraph, that demands attention . . . In rock and roll terms, this book is like discovering the lost diaries of Shakespeare. It may be the most extraordinarily intimate autobiography by a 20th-century legend' Daily Telegraph