Books in the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series series

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.

Political Rock is a comparative, cultural history of luminary figures in rock music who have played important roles in social movements. Individual chapters are devoted to The Clash and Fugazi, Billy Bragg, Bob Dylan, Rage Against the Machine, Pearl Jam, Sinead O'Connor, Peter Gabriel, Ani DiFranco, Bruce Cockburn, Steve Earle and Kim Gordon.

'Counterculture' emerged as a term in the late 1960s and has been re-deployed in more recent decades in relation to other forms of cultural and socio-political phenomena. This volume provides an essential new academic scrutiny of the concept of 'counterculture' and a critical examination of the period and its heritage.

These essays investigate the relation of traditional music to Irish modernity.

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.

The emergence of Thatcherism around 1980, which ushered in a period of neo-liberalism in British politics that still resonates today, led musicians, like other artists, to respond to their context of production. This book uses the early work of one of these musicians, Elvis Costello.

This book provides a rich historical and ethnographic account of step dancing, step dancers, and Irish cultural institutions. Catherine Foley tells the story of step dance from its roots in eighteenth-century Ireland to its modern globalized appeal. Foley applies a regional focus to her examination of step dace.

Joanna Newsom, Will Oldham (AKA 'Bonnie Prince Billy'), and Devendra Banhart are perhaps the best known of a generation of independent artists who use elements of folk music in contexts which are far from traditional. New folk artists challenge our notions of 'finished product' through their recordings.

The term 'flow' refers to experiences where the musician moves into a consciousness in which time seems to be suspended and perception of reality is blurred by unconscious forces. An essential part of the jazz tradition.

Invisible Now describes Bob Dylan's transformative inspiration as artist and cultural figure in the 1960s. John Hughes combines close discussions of Dylan's mercurial art with related discussions of his humour, voice, photographs, and self-presentation, as well as with the singularities of particular performances.

This book studies the working efficacy of Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah in the context of today's network culture. Especially as recorded on YouTube, k.d. lang's interpretation(s) of Cohen's Hallelujah embody, acoustically and visually/viscerally, what Nietzsche named the 'spirit of music'. Today.

This book traces the evolution of the recording format from its roots in the first sound recording experiments, to its survival in the world of digital technologies. Each chapter explores a different element: the groove, the disc shape, the label, vinyl itself, the album, the single, the b-side and the 12" single, the sleeve.

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.

Drawing on methodologies and approaches from media and cultural studies, sociology, social history and the study of popular music, this book outlines the development of the study of men and masculinities, and explores the role of cultural texts in bringing about social change. It is against this backdrop that The Beatles, as a cultural phenomenon.

For more than three decades, a punk underground has repeatedly insisted that anyone can do it. This underground punk movement has evolved via several micro-traditions, each offering distinct and novel presentations of what punk is, isn't, or should be. This title examines the cultural history and politics of punk.

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.

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.

Presents an examination of the ways in which popular music has been deployed in association with violence, ranging from what appears to be an incidental relationship, to one in which music is explicitly applied as an instrument of violence.

Explores how, and why, the blues became a central component of English popular music in the 1960s. This work analyses the transmission of blues records to England, from the first recordings to hit English shores to the end of the sixties. It also maps the influences on British blues and blues-rock performers.

By surveying the development of Welsh-language popular music from 1945-2000, this work examines those moments of crisis in Welsh cultural life which signalled a burgeoning sense of national identity, which challenged paradigms of linguistic belonging, and out of which emerged different expressions of Welshness.

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.

Explores a range of issues relating to technology, production, authorship, grain of the voice, iconography, critical and commercial impact, collaboration, gender, sexuality, narrative, and social and cultural context.

In Britain during the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new phenomenon emerged, with female guitarists, bass-players, keyboard players and drummers playing in bands. This book investigates the social and commercial reasons for how these women became lost from the rock music record, and rewrites this period in history in the context of other periods.