Books in the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series series

Grunge has been perceived as the music that defined 'Generation X'. 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 demonstrates how different groups can use and shape memory as part of a struggle for power in society.

Scottish traditional music has been through a revival in the mid-twentieth century and has now entered a professionalised public space. Devolution in the UK and a surge of cultural debate surrounding the independence referendum in Scotland led to a greater study of identities in the UK, set within a wider context of cultural globalization. Tradi

Traces the development of government attitudes and policies towards popular music. This book examines the development of policy under New Labour; numerous reports which have charted the economics of the industry; and the Deal for Musicians scheme and the impact of devolution on music policy in Scotland.

A song tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages and troubadours of the 12th and 13th centuries, chanson is part of the texture of everyday life in France - a part of the national identity and a barometer of popular taste. This study examines the background and development of the genre.

Focusing on four principal areas in which TV organizes and presents popular music, this book investigates a diverse range of musical genres and styles, factual and fictional programming, historical and geographical demographics, and the constraints of commerce and technology to give an account of the place of popular music on British television.

Presents a collection of essays that explore British Heavy Metal from its beginning through The New Wave of British Heavy Metal up to the increasing internationalization and widespread acceptance in the late 1980s. This book offers a critical analysis of the politics and ideology behind the lyrics, images and performances.

Explores the symptomatic reflections of canonical values, terms and mechanisms from the canons of literature and classical music in the reception of rock music. This book examines the concept of the canon as theorized by scholars in the fields of literary criticism and musicology.

A study of how popular music became a medium for political communication and contested identification during and after Croatia's war of independence from Yugoslavia. It extends cultural studies literature on music, politics, and the state, which has largely been grounded in Western European and North American political systems.

Comparing the characteristics of informal popular music learning and those of formal music education, this study is based on the outcomes of research from interviews which took place between October 1998 and May 1999 with 14 popular musicians living in and around London, aged from 15 to 50.

Looks at the practices of film soundtrack composition for non- Hollywood films made after 1980. Annette Davision argues that since the mid-1970's the model of the classical Hollywood score has functioned as a form of dominant ideology in relation to which alternative scoring & soundtrack practices may assert themselves.

This volume brings together original studies from international scholars to identify and evaluate the productive dimensions of Idols. As one of the world's most successful television formats, Idols offers a unique case for the study of cultural globalization.

Examines how and why Musica Popular Brasileira (MPB) has come to have such a high status, and why the musical tradition (including MPB) within Brazil has been defended with such vigour for so long. This title emphasizes the importance of musical nationalism as an underlying ideology to discussions about Brazilian popular music since the 1920s.

The late Jan Fairley was a key figure in making world music a significant topic for popular music studies and this book celebrates her contribution to popular music scholarship by gathering her most important work together in a single place.

With the espousal of a discrete Ulster Scots tradition since the signing of the Belfast (or 'Good Friday') Agreement in 1998, the characteristics of the traditional music performed in Northern Ireland, and the place of Protestant musicians within popular Irish culture, clearly require a thoroughgoing analysis. This book provides such analysis.

Blackface Minstrelsy had a marked impact on popular music, dance and other aspects of popular culture, both in Britain and the United States. This book provides a counter-argument to the assumption among writers in the United States that blackface was exclusively American and its British counterpart purely imitative.

Sonic Synergies: Music, Technology, Community, Identity focuses on the new and emerging synergies of music and digital technology within the new knowledge economies. Eighteen scholars representing six international perspectives explore the global and local ramifications of rapidly changing new technologies on creative industries, local communities, music practitioners and consumers. Diverse areas are considered, such as production, consumption, historical and cultural context, legislation, globalization and the impact upon the individual. Drawing on a range of musical genres from jazz, heavy metal, hip-hop and trance, and through several detailed case studies reflecting on the work of professional and local amateur artists, this book offers an important discussion of the ways in which the face of music is changing. Approaching these areas from a cultural studies perspective, this text will be a valuable tool for anyone engaged in the study of popular culture, music or digital technologies.

At times it appears that a whole industry exists to perpetuate the myth of origin of the Beatles. This book tells the history of the disparate and now partially hidden musical strands that contributed to Liverpool's musical countenance. It is also a critique of Beatles-related institutionalized popular music mythology.

Michael Scott argues that New Zealand's pop music renaissance of the early 2000s was supported by state policies. He shows how the state built market opportunities for popular musicians through public-private partnerships and organisational affinity with existing music industry institutions.

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. This book explores how Turkish metalheads, against all odds, manage to successfully claim public spaces of their own.

Queer Tracks describes motifs in popular music that deviate from heterosexual orientation, the binary gender system and fixed identities. This cutting-edge work deals with the key concepts of current gender politics and queer theory in rock and pop music, including irony, parody, camp, mask/masquerade, mimesis/mimicry, cyborg, transsexuality.

These essays bring together the stories of 23 debut albums over a nearly fifty year span, ranging from Buddy Holly and the Crickets in 1957 to The Go! Team in 2004. In addition to biographical background and a wealth of historical information about the genesis of each album, essayists look back at the albums and place them within multiple contexts, particularly the artist's career development. In this way, the book will be of as much interest to sociologists and historians as to culture critics and musicologists.

This is the first book to explore the creative and collaborative processes of groups of DJs working together as hip-hop turntable teams. Focusing on a variety of subjects - from the history of turntable experimentation and the development of innovative sound manipulation techniques, to turntable team formation.

The cover phenomenon may be viewed as a postmodern manifestation in music as artists revisit, reinterpret and re-examine a significant cross section of musical styles, periods, genres, individual records and other artists and their catalogues of works. This title offers critical perspectives on the many facets of cover songs in popular music.

Fado, often described as 'urban folk music' emerged from the streets of Lisbon in the mid-nineteenth century and went on to become Portugal's 'national' music during the twentieth. This title considers the ways in which fado songs bear witness to the city of Lisbon, in relation to the construction and maintenance of the local.

Throughout his 40-year career, Michael Jackson intrigued and captivated public imagination through musical ingenuity, sexual and racial spectacle, savvy publicity stunts, odd behaviours, and a seemingly apolitical (yet always political) offering of popular art. This book includes essays that aim to understand Jackson from multiple perspectives.

To date there has been a significant gap in existing knowledge about the social history of music in Britain from 1950 to the present day. The three volumes of The History of Live Music in Britain address this gap and do so from the unique perspective of the music promoter. The books offer new insights into a variety of issues.