Counterculture Kaleidoscope: Musical and Cultural Perspectives on Late Sixties San Francisco

Counterculture Kaleidoscope: Musical and Cultural Perspectives on Late Sixties San Francisco Review

Forty years after the fact, 1960s counterculture---personified by hippies, protest, and the Summer of Love---basks in a nostalgic glow in the popular imagination as a turning point in modern American history and the end of the age of innocence. Yet, while the era has come to be synonymous with rebellion and opposition, its truth is much more complex.

In a bold reconsideration of the late sixties San Francisco counterculture movement, Counterculture Kaleidoscope takes a close look at the cultural and musical practices of that era. Addressing the conventional wisdom that the movement was grounded in rebellion and opposition, the book exposes two myths: first, that the counterculture was an organized social and political movement of progressives with a shared agenda who opposed the mainstream (dubbed "hippies"); and second, that the counterculture was an innocent entity hijacked by commercialism and transformed over time into a vehicle of so-called "hip consumerism."

Seeking an alternative to the now common narrative, Nadya Zimmerman examines primary source material including music, artwork, popular literature, personal narratives, and firsthand historical accounts. She reveals that the San Francisco counterculture wasn't interested in commitments to causes and made no association with divisive issues---that it embraced everything in general and nothing in particular.

"Astute and accessible, Counterculture Kaleidoscope provides thought-provoking insights into the historical, cultural and social context of the San Francisco counter-culture and its music scene, including discussions of Vietnam and student protest, the Haight-Ashbury Diggers, the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, Altamont, and Charlie Manson. A must for students and scholars of socio-musical activity and for all of us to whom music matters."
---Sheila Whiteley, author of The Space Between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture and Too Much Too Young: Popular Music, Age and Gender

"The hippie counterculture has never garnered the scholarly attention accorded the new left and the black freedom struggle. Overviews of the period ritualistically mention it as part and parcel of that apparently incandescent era---the Sixties---but rarely capture its distinctiveness. Counterculture Kaleidoscope is a timely and provocative intervention in Sixties scholarship that significantly deepens our understanding of this important but understudied phenomenon."
—Alice Echols, Associate Professor, University of Southern California, and author of Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin

Popular Performer Standards (The Best Selections From The Great American Songbook) (Popular Performer Series)

Popular Performer Standards (The Best Selections From The Great American Songbook) (Popular Performer Series) Review

Popular Performer Standards (The Best Selections From The Great American Songbook) (Popular Performer Series) Feature

• Book Pages: 40
• Arr. Jan Sanborn
• Format Book

Arranged For Advanced Piano by Jan Sanborn. Rich textures, sophisticated harmonies and inventive rhythms make these arrangements ideal for hobbyists, advancing students, professional musicians or any Popular Performer. Titles include: Ain t She Sweet, As Time Goes By, Bidin My Time, Dancing in the Dark, The Days of Wine and Roses, Embraceable You, Over the Rainbow, Theme from New York, New York, When I Fall In Love , You Make Me Feel So Young

American Popular Music

American Popular Music Review

This text provides an overview of the four major areas of American contemporary music: jazz, rock, country, and musical theater. Each genre is approached chronologically with the emphasis on the socio-cultural aspects of the music. Readers will appreciate Joyner's engaging writing style and come away with the fundamental skills needed to listen critically to a variety of popular music styles.

Oh Joy! Oh Rapture!: The Enduring Phenomenon of Gilbert and Sullivan

Oh Joy! Oh Rapture!: The Enduring Phenomenon of Gilbert and Sullivan Review

In Oh Joy! Oh Rapture! expert and enthusiast Ian Bradley explores the world of Gilbert and Sullivan over the last four and a half decades, looking at the way this "phenomenon" is passed from generation to generation. Taking as his starting point the expiry of copyright on the opera libretti at the end of 1961 and using fascinating hitherto unpublished archive material, Bradley reveals the extraordinary story of the last years of the old D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, the guardian of Savoy tradition for over a hundred years, and the troubled history of its successor. He explores the rich vein of parodies, spoofs, and spin-offs of the songs, as well as their influence on twentieth century lyricists and composers. He analyzes professional productions across the world, looks at the unique place of G&S in schools, colleges, and universities, and lovingly explores the culture of amateur performance. He also uncovers the largely male world of the obsessive fans, those collecting memorabilia, the myriad magazines, journals, websites, and festivals devoted to G&S, and the arcane interests of some of the faithful "inner brotherhood."

The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology)

The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology) Review

At the heart of The Republic of Love are the voices of three musicians—queer nightclub star Zeki Müren, arabesk originator Orhan Gencebay, and pop diva Sezen Aksu—who collectively have dominated mass media in Turkey since the early 1950s. Their fame and ubiquity have made them national icons—but, Martin Stokes here contends, they do not represent the official version of Turkish identity propagated by anthems or flags; instead they evoke a much more intimate and ambivalent conception of Turkishness.

Using these three singers as a lens, Stokes examines Turkey’s repressive politics and civil violence as well as its uncommonly vibrant public life in which music, art, literature, sports, and journalism have flourished. However, Stokes’s primary concern is how Müren, Gencebay, and Aksu’s music and careers can be understood in light of theories of cultural intimacy. In particular, he considers their contributions to the development of a Turkish concept of love, analyzing the ways these singers explore the private matters of intimacy, affection, and sentiment on the public stage.

Music to My Ears: The Billboard Essays : Portraits of Popular Music in the '90s

Music to My Ears: The Billboard Essays : Portraits of Popular Music in the '90s Review

Collected in one volume, Timothy White's "Music to My Ears" columns from BILLBOARD magazine provide the best available overview of popular music in the 90s, through a remarkably prophetic series of commentaries. This expanded paperback edition features twelve additional essays on groundbreaking artists such as Everything but the Girl, Skeleton Key, and Kim Richey. 85 photos .

A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song

A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song Review

All too often an incident or accident, such as the eruption in Crown Heights with its legacy of bitterness and recrimination, thrusts Black-Jewish relations into the news. A volley of discussion follows, but little in the way of progress or enlightenment results--and this is how things will remain until we radically revise the way we think about the complex interactions between African Americans and Jews. A Right to Sing the Blues offers just such a revision.

"Black-Jewish relations," Jeffrey Melnick argues, has mostly been a way for American Jews to talk about their ambivalent racial status, a narrative collectively constructed at critical moments, when particular conflicts demand an explanation. Remarkably flexible, this narrative can organize diffuse materials into a coherent story that has a powerful hold on our imagination. Melnick elaborates this idea through an in-depth look at Jewish songwriters, composers, and perfomers who made "Black" music in the first few decades of this century. He shows how Jews such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and others were able to portray their "natural" affinity for producing "Black" music as a product of their Jewishness while simultaneously depicting Jewishness as a stable white identity. Melnick also contends that this cultural activity competed directly with Harlem Renaissance attempts to define Blackness.

Moving beyond the narrow focus of advocacy group politics, this book complicates and enriches our understanding of the cultural terrain shared by African Americans and Jews.

Popualr Performer 1960's (The Best Songs from Broadway, Movies And Radio Of The 1960s (Popular Performer Series)

Popualr Performer 1960's (The Best Songs from Broadway, Movies And Radio Of The 1960s (Popular Performer Series) Review

Popualr Performer 1960's (The Best Songs from Broadway, Movies And Radio Of The 1960s (Popular Performer Series) Feature

• Book Pages: 40
• Arr. Mike Springer
• Format Book

Arranged for Intermediate Piano by Mike Springer. Rich textures, sophisticated harmonies and inventive rhythms make these arrangements ideal for hobbyists, advancing students, professional musicians or any Popular Performer. Titles include: Blue Moon, The Days of Wine and Roses, The James Bond Theme, People, The Pink Panther, The Second Time Around, The Shadow of Your Smile, Try to Remember, What a Wonderful World

God Bless America: Tin Pan Alley Goes to War

God Bless America: Tin Pan Alley Goes to War Review

" After Pearl Harbor, Tin Pan Alley songwriters rushed to write the Great American War Song -- an "Over There" for World War II. The most popular songs, however, continued to be romantic ballads, escapist tunes, or novelty songs. To remedy the situation, the federal government created the National Wartime Music Committee, an advisory group of the Office of War Information (OWI), which outlined "proper" war songs, along with tips on how and what to write. The music business also formed its own Music War Committee to promote war songs. Neither group succeeded. The OWI hoped that Tin Pan Alley could be converted from manufacturing love songs to manufacturing war songs just as automobile plants had retooled to assemble planes and tanks. But the OWI failed to comprehend the large extent by which the war effort would be defined by advertisers and merchandisers. Selling merchandise was the first priority of Tin Pan Alley, and the OWI never swayed them from this course. Kathleen E.R. Smith concludes the government's fears of faltering morale did not materialize. Americans did not need such war songs as "Goodbye, Mama, I'm Off To Yokohama", "There Are No Wings On a Foxhole", or even "The Sun Will Soon Be Setting On The Land Of The Rising Sun" to convince them to support the war. The crusade for a "proper" war song was misguided from the beginning, and the music business, then and now, continues to make huge profits selling love -- not war -- songs.

American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950

American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 Review

When Alec Wilder's American Popular Song first appeared, it was almost universally hailed--from The New York Times to The New Yorker to Down Beat--as the definitive account of the classic era of American popular music. It has since become the standard work of the great songwriters who dominated popular music in the United States for half a century. Now Wilder's classic is available again, with a new introduction by Gene Lees.
Uniquely analytical yet engagingly informal, American Popular Song focuses on the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic qualities that distinguish American popular music and have made it an authentic art form. Wilder traces the roots of the American style to the ragtime music of the 1890s, shows how it was incorporated into mainstream popular music after 1900, and then surveys the careers of every major songwriter from World War I to 1950. Wilder devotes desparate chapters to such greats as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and Harold Arlen. Illustrated with over seven hundred musical examples, Wilder's sensitive analyses of the most distinctive, creative, and original songs of this period reveal unexpected beauties in songs long forgotten and delightful subtleties in many familiar standards. The result is a definitive treatment of a strangely unsung and uniquely American art.

Play it Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

Play it Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series) Review

Covering - the musical practice of one artist recording or performing another composer's song - has always been an attribute of popular music. In 2009, the internet database Second Hand Songs estimated that there are 40,000 songs with at least one cover version. Some of the more common variations of this 'appropriationist' method of musical quotation include traditional forms such as patriotic anthems, religious hymns such as Amazing Grace, Muzak's instrumental interpretations, Christmas classics and children's songs. Novelty and comedy collections from parodists such as Weird Al Yankovic also align in the cover category, as does the 'larcenous art' of sampling, and technological variations in dance remixes and mash-ups. Film and television soundtracks and advertisers increasingly rely on versions of familiar pop tunes to assist in marketing their narratives and products. The cover phenomenon in popular culture 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. Covering also embraces cultural, commercial and creative contexts. The cover complex, with its multiple variations, issues, contexts and re-contextualizations comprises an important and rich popular culture text. These re-recordings represent artifacts which embody artistic, social, cultural, historical, commercial, biographical, and novel meanings. Through homage, allusion, apprenticeship, and parody, among other modes, these diverse musical quotations express, preserve, and distribute popular culture, popular music and their intersecting historical narratives. "Play it Again" represents the first collection of critical perspectives on the many facets of cover songs in popular music.

Popular Music Genres

Popular Music Genres Review

An accessible introduction to the study of popular music, this book takes a schematic approach to a range of popular music genres, and examines them in terms of their antecedents, histories, visual aesthetics and socio-political contexts. At the centre of each chapter is a textual analysis of key examples of the genres concerned: soul, psychedelia, progressive rock, reggae, funk, heavy metal, punk rock, rap, synthpop, indie, jungle. Within this interdisciplinary and genre-based focus, readers will gain insights into the relationships between popular music, cultural history, economics, politics, iconography, production techniques, technology, marketing, and musical structure. Features *Introduces key terms and concepts in the study of popular music *Includes recommended further readings and audio texts at the end of each chapter *Provides a glossary of key theoretical terms for reference.

Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright: The Bob Marley Reader

Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright: The Bob Marley Reader Review

Throughout Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and America, Bob Marley represents far more than just the musician who translated spiritual and political beliefs into hypnotic, hard-hitting songs such as "Get Up, Stand Up," "No Woman, No Cry," and "Jammin'." Marley was born in rural Jamaica and reared in the mean streets of Kingston's Trenchtown; his ascent to worldwide acclaim, first with The Wailers--Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingstone--and later as a solo artist, is a riveting story of the spiritual awakening of a uniquely talented individual.Now, for the first time, a symphony of voices has joined together to offer perspective on one of this century's most compelling figures. Dealing with Bob Marley as a man and myth, from his "rude boy" teens to international fame and his tragic death at the age of thirty-six, Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright then explores the larger picture, examining Marley as the spokesman for Jamaica's homegrown religion of Rastafarianism, as a flash point for the pressure cooker of Jamaican politics, and his unique status as the first pop musical superstar of the so-called "Third World."

Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music

Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music Review

For the last twenty years The Wire has fearlessly bypassed fashion in it's search to expose the most innovative, radical, and compelling music from every genre all across the world. As listeners have grown increasingly eclectic and adventurous in their tastes, The Wire has emerged as the most authoritative source on modern music. In Undercurrents some of the best music writers of our time uncover the hidden wiring of the past century's most influential music. Ian Penman discusses how the microphone transformed the human voice and made phantom presences of great singers such as Billie Holiday, Robert Johnson, and Brian Wilson. Christoph Cox demonstrates how the pioneers of live electronic music, the West Coast ensemble Sonic Arts Union, redefined virtuosity for the electronic age. Philip Smith and Peter Shapiro examine Harry Smith's Smithsonian Anthology of American Folk Music, which led to a massive reappraisal of musical values that went far beyond the folk music revival. >Music explored in Undercurrents ranges through avant rock, jazz, hiphop, electronica, global music, and contemporary "classical.">

Elvis and Gladys (Southern Icons)

Elvis and Gladys (Southern Icons) Review

Who on the planet doesn't know that Elvis Presley gave electrifying performances and enthralled millions? Who doesn't know that he was the King of Rock 'n' Roll? But who knows that the King himself lived in the thrall of one dominant person?

This was Gladys Smith Presley, his protective, indulgent, beloved mother.

Elvis and Gladys, one of the best researched and most acclaimed books on Elvis's early life, reconstructs the extraordinary role Gladys played in her son's formative years.

Uncovering facts not seen by other biographers, Elvis and Gladys reconstructs for the first time the history of the mother and son's devoted relationship and reveals new information about Elvis--his Cherokee ancestry, his boyhood obsession with comic books, and his early compulsion to rescue his family from poverty.

Coming to life in the compelling narrative is the poignant story of a unique boy and the maternal tie that bound him. It is at once an intimate psychological portrait of a tragic relationship and a mesmerizing tale of the early years of an international idol.

"For once, a legend is presented to us by the mind and heart of a literate, careful biographer who cares," wrote Liz Smith in the New York Daily News when Elvis and Gladys was originally published in 1985. This is the book, Smith says, "for any Elvis lover who wants to know more about what made Presley the man he was and the mama's boy he became."

The Boston Globe called this thoughtful, informative biography of one of popular music's most enduring stars "nothing less than the best Elvis book yet."

Elaine Dundy is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Dud Avocado; Finch, Bloody Finch; Ferriday, Louisiana; and the memoir Life Itself!

Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series) Review

Nick Cave is now widely recognized as a songwriter, musician, novelist, screenwriter, curator, critic, actor and performer. From the band, The Boys Next Door (1976-1980), to the spoken-word recording, "The Secret Life of the Love Song" (1998), to the recently acclaimed screenplay of "The Proposition" (2005) and the "Grinderman" project (2008), Cave's career spans thirty years and has produced a comprehensive (and sometimes controversial) body of work that has shaped contemporary alternative culture. Despite intense media interest in Cave, there have been remarkably few comprehensive appraisals of his work, its significance and its impact on understandings of popular culture. In addressing this absence, the present volume is both timely and necessary. "Cultural Seeds" brings together an international range of scholars and practitioners, each of whom is uniquely placed to comment on an aspect of Cave's career. The essays collected here not only generate new ways of seeing and understanding Cave's contributions to contemporary culture, but set up a dialog between fields all-too-often separated in the academy and in the media. Topics include Cave and the Presley myth; the aberrant masculinity projected by The Birthday Party; the post colonial Australian-ness of his humor; his interventions in film and his erotics of the sacred. These essays offer compelling insights and provocative arguments about the fluidity of contemporary artistic practice.

Popular Performer Christmas- Advanced Piano

Popular Performer Christmas- Advanced Piano Review

Popular Performer Christmas- Advanced Piano Feature

• Book Pages: 40
• Arr. Jan Sanborn
• Format Book

Arranged For Advanced Piano. Rich textures, sophisticated harmonies and inventive rhythms make these arrangements ideal for hobbyists, advancing students, professional musicians or any Popular Performer. Titles include: The Christmas Waltz * Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas * I ll Be Home for Christmas * It s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year * Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! * Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town * Sleigh Ride * Winter Wonderland