Books in the Pop Music, Culture and Identity series

This book addresses the issue of music consumption in the digital era of technologies. It explores how individuals use music in the context of their everyday lives and how, in return, music acquires certain roles within everyday contexts and more broadly in their life narratives.

This book makes a case for the synergetic union between reality TV and the music industry. It delves into technological change in popular music, and the role of music reality TV and social media in the pop production process. It challenges the current scholarship which does not adequately distinguish the economic significance of these developments.

This book explores the significance of reggae and hip hop in Southern Italy from the beginning of the 1980s to the present.

Why do rap MCs present their studio recorded lyrics as ¿live and direct¿? Why do they so insistently define abilities or actions, theirs or someone else¿s, against a pre-existing signifier? This book examines the compositional practice of rap lyricists and offers compelling answers to these questions. Through a 40 year-span analysis of the music, it argues that whether through the privileging of chanted call-and-response phrases or through rhetorical strategies meant to assist in getting one¿s listening audience open, the focus of the first rap MCs on community building and successful performer-audience cooperation has remained prevalent on rap records with lyrics and production techniques encouraging the listener to become physically and emotionally involved in recorded performances. Relating rap¿s rhetorical strategy of posing inferences through intertextuality to early call-and-response routines and crowd-controlling techniques, this study emphasizes how the dynamic and collective elements from the stage performances and battles of the formative years of rap have remained relevant in the creative process behind this music. It contends that the customary use of identifiable references and similes by rap lyricists works as a fluid interchange designed to keep the listener involved in the performance. Like call-and-response in live performances, it involves a dynamic form of communication and places MCs in a position where they activate the shared knowledge of their audience, making sure that they ¿know what they mean,¿ thus transforming their mediated lyrics into a collective and engaging performance.

In the 1960s, as gentrification took hold of New York City, Jane Jacobs predicted that the city would become the true player in the global system. Based on case studies of Melbourne, Austin and Berlin, this book is the first in-depth study to combine academic and industry analysis of the music cities phenomenon.

By conducting original research, including interviews and examining archival material, the authors take issue with certain assumptions prevailing in the existing studies on popular music in Eastern Europe, namely that it was largely based on imitation of western music and that this music had a distinctly anti-communist flavour.

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'.

This book examines the post-1960s era of popular music in the Anglo-Black Atlantic through the prism of historical theory and methods. By using a series of case studies, this book mobilizes historical theory and methods to underline different expressions of alternative music functioning within a mainstream musical industry.

By conducting original research, including interviews and examining archival material, the authors take issue with certain assumptions prevailing in the existing studies on popular music in Eastern Europe, namely that it was largely based on imitation of western music and that this music had a distinctly anti-communist flavour.

This collection presents a range of essays on contemporary music distribution and consumption patterns and practices. The contributors to the collection use a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, discussing the consequences and effects of the digital distribution of music as it is manifested in specific cultural contexts.The widespread circulation of music in digital form has far-reaching consequences: not least for how we understand the practices of sourcing and consuming music, the political economy of the music industries, and the relationships between format and aesthetics. Through close empirical engagement with a variety of contexts and analytical frames, the contributors to this collection demonstrate that the changes associated with networked music are always situationally specific, sometimes contentious, and often unexpected in their implications. With chapters covering topics such as the business models of streaming audio, policy and professional discourses around the changing digital music market, the creative affordances of format and circulation, and local practices of accessing and engaging with music in a range of distinct cultural contexts, the book presents an overview of the themes, topics and approaches found in current social and cultural research on the relations between music and digital technology.

The Beatles are probably the most photographed band in history and are the subject of numerous biographical studies, but a surprising dearth of academic scholarship addresses the Fab Four.

This collection presents a contemporary evaluation of the changing structures of music delivery and enjoyment. Exploring the confluence of music consumption, burgeoning technology, and contemporary culture; this volume focuses on issues of musical communities and the politics of media.

This volume explores the ways in which music scenes are not merely physical spaces for the practice of collective musical life but are also inscribed with and enacted through the articulation of cultural memory and emotional geography.

This book is a timely examination of the tension between being a rock music fan and being a woman. From the media representation of women rock fans as groupies to the widely held belief that hard rock and metal is masculine music, being a music fan is an experience shaped by gender.

This book studies the long-term developments in the South African recording industry and adds to the existing literature an understanding of the prevalence of informal negotiations over rights, rewards and power in the recording industry. It argues that patronage features often infiltrate the contractual relationships in the industry.

On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements comprises eleven essays that explore the myriad ways in which popular music is entwined within social, cultural, musical, historical, and media networks.

Music, magic and myth are elements essential to the identities of New Orleans musicians. and membership in the city's musical community entails participation in the myth of New Orleans, breathing new life into its storied traditions.

An ethnographic study of gender, place and belonging, Affective Intensities introduces readers to the embodied sensations, flows and experiences of being in extreme music scenes in Australia and Japan.

Literature scholars apply textual and cultural analysis to a selection of Anglo-Canadian music - from Joni Mitchell to Peaches, via such artists as Neil Young, Rush, and the Tragically Hip - to explore the generic borrowings and social criticism, the desires and failures of Canada's musical relationship with the USA.

Relocating Popular Music uses the lens of colonialism and tourism to analyse types of music movements, such as transporting music from one place or historical period to another, hybridising it with a different style and furnishing it with new meaning. It discusses music in relation to music video, film, graphic arts, fashion and architecture.

New Wave: Image is Everything traces the evolution of the often neglected pop music genre, new wave. Using artists from Elvis Costello to Cyndi Lauper as illustrations, the book argues that new wave was among the first flowerings of postmodern theory in popular culture.

The night and popular music have long served to energise one another, such that they appear inextricably bound together as trope and topos. Nocturnes: Popular Music and the Night is one of the first volumes to examine the relationship between night and popular music.

Kurt Cobain and Ian Curtis. Through death, they became icons. However, the lead singers have been removed from their humanity, replaced by easily replicated and distributed commodities bearing their image. This book examines how the anglicised singers provide secular guidance to the modern consumer in an ever more uncertain world.

Literature scholars apply textual and cultural analysis to a selection of Anglo-Canadian music - from Joni Mitchell to Peaches, via such artists as Neil Young, Rush, and the Tragically Hip - to explore the generic borrowings and social criticism, the desires and failures of Canada's musical relationship with the USA.

The first section provides a critical overview of theories addressing popular music and digital technology, while the second section offers an analysis of the relationship between musical cultures, taste, constructions of authenticity, and technology.

This book uncovers how music experience-live and recorded-is changing along with the use of digital technology in the 2000s. Digital technology has also introduced new distribution and consumption technologies that allow record listening to be more closely linked to the live music experience.

This book explores the significance of reggae and hip hop in Southern Italy from the beginning of the 1980s to the present.