The Popular Music Studies Reader maps the changing nature of popular music over the last decade and considers how popular music studies has expanded and developed to deal with these changes.

A wide range of international contributors featuring some of the biggest names in popular music and cultural studies including Philip Auslander, Paul Gilroy and Kodwo Eshun and discuss:

* the increasing participation of women in the industry
* the changing role of gender and sexuality in popular music
* the role of new technologies, especially in production and distribution
* the changing nature of the relationship between music production and consumption.

The Popular Music Studies Reader places popular music in its cultural context, looks at the significance of popular music in our everyday lives, and examines the global nature of the music industry.

In The Political Force of Musical Beauty, Barry Shank shows how musical acts and performances generate their own aesthetic and political force, creating, however fleetingly, a shared sense of the world among otherwise diverse listeners. Rather than focusing on the ways in which music enables the circulation of political messages, he argues that communities grounded in the act and experience of listening can give rise to new political ideas and expression. Analyzing a wide range of "beautiful music" within popular and avant-garde genres-including the Japanese traditions in the music of Takemitsu Toru and Yoko Ono, the drone of the Velvet Underground, and the insistence of hardcore punk and Riot grrrl post-punk-Shank finds that when it fulfills the promise of combining sonic and lyrical differences into a cohesive whole, musical beauty has the power to reorganize the basis of social relations and produce communities that recognize meaningful difference.

The Popular Music Studies Reader maps the changing nature of popular music over the last decade and considers how popular music studies has expanded and developed to deal with these changes.

A wide range of international contributors featuring some of the biggest names in popular music and cultural studies including Philip Auslander, Paul Gilroy and Kodwo Eshun and discuss:

* the increasing participation of women in the industry
* the changing role of gender and sexuality in popular music
* the role of new technologies, especially in production and distribution
* the changing nature of the relationship between music production and consumption.

The Popular Music Studies Reader places popular music in its cultural context, looks at the significance of popular music in our everyday lives, and examines the global nature of the music industry.

In The Political Force of Musical Beauty, Barry Shank shows how musical acts and performances generate their own aesthetic and political force, creating, however fleetingly, a shared sense of the world among otherwise diverse listeners. Rather than focusing on the ways in which music enables the circulation of political messages, he argues that communities grounded in the act and experience of listening can give rise to new political ideas and expression. Analyzing a wide range of beautiful music within popular and avant-garde genres--including the Japanese traditions within the music of Takemitsu Toru and Yoko Ono, the drone of the Velvet Underground, and the insistence of hardcore punk and Riot grrrl post-punk--Shank finds that when it fulfills the promise of combining sonic and lyrical differences into a cohesive whole, musical beauty has the power to reorganize the basis of social relations and produce communities that recognize meaningful difference.

Music of the bars and clubs of Austin, Texas has long been recognized as defining one of a dozen or more musical "scenes" across the country. In Dissonant Identities, Barry Shank, himself a musician who played and lived in the Texas capital, studies the history of its popular music, its cultural and economic context, and also the broader ramifications of that music as a signifying practice capable of transforming identities.
While his focus is primarily on progressive country and rock, Shank also writes about traditional country, blues, rock, disco, ethnic, and folk musics. Using empirical detail and an expansive theoretical framework, he shows how Austin became the site for "a productive contestation between two forces: the fierce desire to remake oneself through musical practice, and the equally powerful struggle to affirm the value of that practice in the complexly structured late-capitalist marketplace."