Hip-Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

Hip-Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason (Popular Culture and Philosophy) Review

Is there too much violence in hip-hop music? What’s the difference between Kimberly Jones and the artist Lil' Kim? Is hip-hop culture a "black" thing? Is it okay for N.W.A. to call themselves niggaz and for Dave Chappelle to call everybody bitches? These witty, provocative essays ponder these and other thorny questions, linking the searing cultural issues implicit — and often explicit — in hip-hop to the weighty matters examined by the great philosophers of the past. The book shows that rap classics by Lauryn Hill, OutKast, and the Notorious B.I.G. can help uncover the meanings of love articulated in Plato's Symposium; that Rakim, 2Pac, and Nas can shed light on the conception of God's essence expressed in St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica; and explores the connection between Run-D.M.C., Snoop Dogg, and Hegel. Hip-Hop and Philosophy proves that rhyme and reason, far from being incompatible, can be mixed and mastered to contemplate life's most profound mysteries.

The Lyrics of Civility (Garland Studies in American Popular History and Culture)

The Lyrics of Civility (Garland Studies in American Popular History and Culture) Review

This book is the first comprehensive scholarly study of religious images in popular music. Examining bestsellers from 1906 to 1971, the work explores the role religious images have in the secularization of American culture. Popular music lyrics that express an adherence to a sacred order are couched in inoffensive, content-less language. These lyrics of civility reflect and shape the increasing secularization of American culture in the twentieth century. The analysis focuses primarily on the way these lyrics reduce the meaning of the terms and theology of the Biblical faith. The aesthetic of civility carries over into theology, the narratives, and the accompanying instrumental arrangements of songs that adhere to the Biblical sacred order. On the other hand, lyrics that reject the Biblical tradition use content-filled, offensive language. The result is that displaced adherents withdraw from the Biblical tradition and turn to alternative cultural religions, or idols of attraction, including popular music, that offer meaning to fill a void in the individual. The secularization of American society, therefore, is not a withdrawal from the idea of religion itself. The analysis focuses on the two dominant themes in songs that include religious images: prayer and heaven. The author explores the songs of the two world wars, the hit parade era, the rhythm and blues and doo-wop of the 1950s, the new folk singer movement, soul music and rock music of the 1960s, and the revival rock of the early 1970s. The work demonstrates the capacity of one form of popular culture to separate adherents from a subculture through diluting the meaning of the language of the subculture's elemental thought.

Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album: How to Disappear Completely (Profiles in Popular Music)

Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album: How to Disappear Completely (Profiles in Popular Music) Review

How the British rock band Radiohead subverts the idea of the concept album in order to articulate themes of alienation and anti-capitalism is the focus of Marianne Tatom Letts's analysis of Kid A and Amnesiac. These experimental albums marked a departure from the band's standard guitar-driven base layered with complex production effects. Considering the albums in the context of the band's earlier releases, Letts explores the motivations behind this change. She places the two albums within the concept-album/progressive-rock tradition and shows how both resist that tradition. Unlike most critics of Radiohead, who focus on the band's lyrics, videos, sociological importance, or audience reception, Letts focuses on the music itself. She investigates Radiohead's ambivalence toward its own success, as manifested in the vanishing subject of Kid A on these two albums.

(2011)

Mystic Chords: Mysticism and Psychology in Popular Music

Mystic Chords: Mysticism and Psychology in Popular Music Review

Rock and roll, and archetypal symbolism? Citing baby-boomer favorites including Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, the Beatles and other Rock greats, the author shows that they have drawn on the same primal source from which mythology, dreams, and poetic insight arise. Does today?s music of the masses deserve a place in the pantheon of traditional art forms, next to classical music, literature, and painting? Manish Soni shows that it does. Using illustrative references to passages from the Bhagavad Gita and the Bible, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, Joseph Campbell and the Tao Te Ching,, he highlights some of the parallels between psychology, mysticism, religion, and contemporary art forms, as they all contribute to our human quest for greater meaning. He is persuasive in demonstrating how the same elemental well from which poetic revelation surfaced in ancient mythology is nowadays the inspirational spring for popular music. The author?s Indian heritage and his deep immersion in the Western culture, in which he was raised and educated, has given him a special perspective from which to synthesize both cultures and religious outlooks. * Manish Soni was born in New Delhi, and has lived in Moscow, Cairo, Kuala Lumpur, London, Sydney, and Boston. His formal education includes a BS degree from the University of Sydney, Australia, and an MS degree from Tufts University, Massachusetts.

As Heard on TV: Popular Music in Advertising (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

As Heard on TV: Popular Music in Advertising (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series) Review

The use of popular music in advertising represents one of the most pervasive mergers of cultural and commercial objectives in the modern age. Steady public response to popular music in television commercials, ranging from the celebratory to the outraged, highlights both unresolved tensions around such partnerships and the need to unpack the complex issues behind everyday media practice. Through an analysis of press coverage and interviews with musicians, music supervisors, advertising creatives, and licensing managers, "As Heard on TV" considers the industrial changes that have provided a foundation for the increased use of popular music in advertising, and explores the critical issues and debates surrounding media alliances that blur cultural ambitions with commercial goals.The practice of licensing popular music for advertising revisits and continues a number of key themes in cultural and media studies, among them the connection between authorship and ownership in popular music, the legitimization of advertising as art, industrial transformations in radio and music, the role of music in branding, and the restructuring of meaning that results from commercial exploitation of popular music. "As Heard on TV" addresses these topics by exploring cases involving artists from the Beatles to the Shins and various dominant corporations of the last half-century.As one example within a wider debate about the role of commerce in the production of culture, the use of popular music in advertising provides an entry point through which a range of practices can be understood and interrogated. This book attends to the relationship between popular culture and corporate power in its complicated variation: at times mutually beneficial and playfully suspicious of constructed boundaries, and at others conceived in strain and symbolic of the triumph of hypercommercialism.

Mariachi

Mariachi Review

MARIACHI
MARIACHI IS MORE THAN THE MUSIC of trumpets and violins: it is the makings of a celebration, a party, a wedding, a festival, or a concert. The author's narrative captures the world of mariachi and its development through her interviews with many mariachis, who give unique perspectives on the culture. Tales of life as a mariachi are interwoven with enlightening biographies of mariachi greats, favorite song lyrics, and forty recipes from the mariachi culture.
PROFILES OF CLASSIC AND CONTEMPORARY PERFORMERS, FEATURING LYRICS FROM THEIR SONGS, INCLUDE:
Jorge Negrete
Pedro Infante
Miguel Aceves Mejía
Javier Solís
José Alfredo Jiménez
Miguel Martínez and Mariachi Tolteca
Jesús Rodríguez de Híjar
Rubén Fuentes
Nati Cano
Rigoberto Alfaro
Heriberto Molina
And more!

Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music

Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music Review

Most pop songs are short-lived. They appear suddenly and, if they catch on, seem to be everywhere at once before disappearing again into obscurity. Yet some songs resonate more deeply—often in ways that reflect broader historical and cultural changes.

 

In Footsteps in the Dark, George Lipsitz illuminates these secret meanings, offering imaginative interpretations of a wide range of popular music genres from jazz to salsa to rock. Sweeping changes that only remotely register in official narratives, Lipsitz argues, can appear in vivid relief within popular music, especially when these changes occur outside mainstream white culture. Using a wealth of revealing examples, he discusses such topics as the emergence of an African American techno music subculture in Detroit as a contradictory case of digital capitalism and the prominence of banda, merengue, and salsa music in the 1990s as an expression of changing Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican nationalisms. Approaching race and popular music from another direction, he analyzes the Ken Burns PBS series Jazz as a largely uncritical celebration of American nationalism that obscures the civil rights era’s challenge to racial inequality, and he takes on the infamous campaigns to censor hip-hop and the radical black voice in the early 1990s.

 

Teeming with astute observations and brilliant insights about race and racism, deindustrialization, and urban renewal and their connections to music, Footsteps in the Dark puts forth an alternate history of post–cold war America and shows why in an era given to easy answers and clichéd versions of history, pop songs matter more than ever.

 

George Lipsitz is professor of black studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his many books are Life in the Struggle, Dangerous Crossroads, and American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minnesota, 2001).

Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (American Crossroads)

Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (American Crossroads) Review

Ranging from Los Angeles to Havana to the Bronx to the U.S.-Mexico border and from klezmer to hip hop to Latin rock, this groundbreaking book injects popular music into contemporary debates over American identity. Josh Kun insists that America is not a single chorus of many voices folded into one, but rather various republics of sound that represent multiple stories of racial and ethnic difference. To this end he covers a range of music and listeners to evoke the ways that popular sounds have expanded our idea of American culture and American identity. Artists as diverse as The Weavers, Café Tacuba, Mickey Katz, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Bessie Smith, and Ozomatli reveal that the song of America is endlessly hybrid, heterogeneous, and enriching--a source of comfort and strength for populations who have been taught that their lives do not matter. Kun melds studies of individual musicians with studies of painters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and of writers such as Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes. There is no history of race in the Americas that is not a history of popular music, Kun claims. Inviting readers to listen closely and critically, Audiotopia forges a new understanding of sound that will stoke debates about music, race, identity, and culture for many years to come.

Popular Music Theory Grade 3

Popular Music Theory Grade 3 Review

This book is part of an unrivalled series that is designed specifically for students of popular music. Improve your musicianship and gain a qualification. Studying this series will enable you to gain internationally recognized qualifications that are equivalent in stature to those available in the classical music education field. As well as helping you to pass the London College of Music grade examinations in popular music theory, the series will help you improve your musicianship (whether or not you intend to take an examination). All topics are covered in a way that is directly relevant to the music you play, with the focus very much upon how to apply the oretical knowledge in a practical music making context. Regardless of which instrument you play and which ever style of popular music you like, if you have any interest in learning about the musical foundations of popular music then this series is for you!

Music, Sound and Multimedia: From the Live to the Virtual (Music and the Moving Image)

Music, Sound and Multimedia: From the Live to the Virtual (Music and the Moving Image) Review

Music and other sound effects have been central to a whole host of media forms throughout the twentieth century, either as background, accompaniment, or main driving force. With the widespread growth of digital technologies, such interactions will continue to mutate in new directions.

Despite the expansion of research into the use of music and sound in film, the investigation of sonic interactions with other media forms has been a largely under-researched area. Music, Sound and Multimedia provides a unique study of how music and other sounds play a central part in our understandings and uses of a variety of communications media. It focuses on four areas of sound and music within broader multimedia forms—music videos, video game music, performance and presentation, and production and consumption—and addresses the centrality of such aural concerns within our everyday experiences. Charting historical developments, mapping contemporary patterns, and speculating on future possibilities, this book is essential for courses on sound and media within media and communications studies, cultural studies, and popular music studies.

Key features: Charts a number of key developments in music and multimedia interactions

Provides both historical overviews and theoretical analyses

Features a number of in-depth case studies of important issues.

Heavy Metal: The Music And Its Culture, Revised Edition

Heavy Metal: The Music And Its Culture, Revised Edition Review

Few forms of music elicit such strong reactions as does heavy metal. Embraced by millions of fans, it has also attracted a chorus of critics, who have denounced it as a corrupter of youth—even blamed it for tragedies like the murders at Columbine. Deena Weinstein argues that these fears stem from a deep misunderstanding of the energetic, rebellious culture of metal, which she analyzes, explains, and defends. She interprets all aspects of the metal world—the music and its makers, its fans, its dress code, its lyrics—and in the process unravels the myths, misconceptions, and truths about an irreverent subculture that has endured and evolved for twenty years.

Word Crazy: Broadway Lyricists from Cohan to Sondheim

Word Crazy: Broadway Lyricists from Cohan to Sondheim Review

This volume surveys the development of the American musical during the 20th century by focusing on one of the most important yet least recognized members of the creative team: the lyricist. From George M. Cohan and Irving Berlin through Oscar Hammerstein II, Alan Jay Lerner, Ira Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim, and others, Word Crazy examines both well-known and obscure writers who have shaped one of America's most beloved theatrical forms. The author offers an overview of each lyricist's career and works and evaluates his or her strengths, weaknesses, patterns, temperament, and personal vision. The result is an unusual critical history of the Broadway musical that will be of significant interest to students of the theatre as well as to anyone who wishes to learn more about the unique craft of the theatre lyricist. Beginning with George M. Cohan, the American theatre's first important lyricist, and continuing up into the 1980s, the book presents an overall history of the musical theatre during this century. Hischak explores the various trends and movements, from the early operettas through the arrival of jazz, and up through the conceptual musicals of the last 30 years. The treatment is chronological with most chapters focusing on a single lyricist. A bibliography and index complete the volume. By reviewing the careers and works of America's most influential theatre lyricists, Hischak offers a fresh new perspective on the evolution of musical theatre in America.

Caribbean Popular Music: An Encyclopedia of Reggae, Mento, Ska, Rock Steady, and Dancehall

Caribbean Popular Music: An Encyclopedia of Reggae, Mento, Ska, Rock Steady, and Dancehall Review

Reggae music is more than just steel drum bands on white sand beaches. Its history is rich with culture and evolution, helping to tell the story of Jamaica's past. Due to its depth and extensive coverage, this book is the most complete and up to date encyclopedia about reggae, mento, ska, rocksteady, and dancehall music on the market today. Ideal for reggae lovers and college students studying music, this encyclopedia is comprehensive for high school students and non-music students as well. From Bob Marley to Wayne Wonder, this easy to use encyclopedia contains over 700 entries. Indices in both the front and back of the book make navigating through entries extremely user-friendly.

Entries cover singers and songwriters, producers, record labels, and different styles of music that evolved from reggae. Moskowitz truly captures the history and evolution of Jamaican music in this extensive, illuminating encyclopedia, while all the while making it accessible to both high school and college students.

Nordic Art Music: From the Middle Ages to the Third Millennium

Nordic Art Music: From the Middle Ages to the Third Millennium Review

The five countries that make up Northern Europe—Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland—have, over the course of the last several centuries, developed and unique and viable art music history that easily rivals that of their continental neighbors. Nordic Art Music: From the Middle Ages to the Third Millennium provides an informative and accessible overview of the fascinating historical and aesthetic developments of this music and its creators, from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, through the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras, to the beginning of this new century. Though some Nordic composers, including Edvard Grieg, Carl Nielsen, and Jean Sibelius, have found great acclaim in all parts of the world, author Frederick Key Smith lays the foundation for their work in his discussion of the many composers relatively unknown outside of Northern Europe.

Smith ably discusses the composers, styles, and representative works of each era in language that makes for a highly readable musical history as well as a superior reference guide. The first English-language book of its type in nearly 40 years, Smith's study brings into focus this broad and exciting aspect of music history.

Popular Sheet Music Hits

Popular Sheet Music Hits Review

Popular Sheet Music Hits Feature

• Book
• Format Book

Titles include: Back at One * Because You Loved Me * God Bless the U.S.A. * The Greatest Love of All * I Turn to You * I Will Always Love You * Lean on Me * Now and Forever * Over the Rainbow * The Prayer * The Rose * Somewhere Out There * Theme from New York, New York * A Thousand Miles * Time to Say Goodbye * To Where You Are * Un-Break My Heart * You Needed Me * Your Song.

A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music (American Made Music)

A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music (American Made Music) Review

From the smiling, sentimental mothers portrayed in 1930s radio barn dance posters, to the sexual shockwaves generated by Elvis Presley, to the female superstars redefining contemporary country music, gender roles and imagery have profoundly influenced the ways country music is made and enjoyed. Proper male and female roles have influenced the kinds of sounds and images that could be included in country music; preconceptions of gender have helped to determine the songs and artists audiences would buy or reject; and gender has shaped the identities listeners made for themselves in relation to the music they revered.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays is the first book-length effort to examine how gender conventions, both masculine and feminine, have structured the creation and marketing of country music. The essays explore the uses of gender in creating the personas of stars as diverse as Elvis Presley, Patsy Cline, and Shania Twain. The authors also examine how deeply conventions have influenced the institutions and everyday experiences that give country music its image: the popular and fan press, the country music industry in Nashville, and the line dance crazes that created the dance hall boom of the 1990s.

From Hank Thompson's "The Wild Side of Life" to Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue," from Tammy Wynette's "Stand by Your Man" to Loretta Lynn's ode to birth control, "The Pill," A Boy Named Sue demonstrates the role gender played in the development of country music and its current prominence.

Kristine M. McCusker is a professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University.

Diane Pecknold is an independent scholar in Chicago, Illinois.

East African Hip Hop: Youth Culture and Globalization (Interp Culture New Millennium)

East African Hip Hop: Youth Culture and Globalization (Interp Culture New Millennium) Review

East African Hip Hop: Youth Culture and Globalization (Interp Culture New Millennium) Feature

• ISBN13: 9780252076534
• Condition: New
• Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

In this book, Mwenda Ntarangwi analyzes how young hip hop artists in the East African nations of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania showcase the opportunities and challenges brought by the globalization of music. Combining local popular music traditions with American and Jamaican styles of rap, East African hip hop culture reflects the difficulty of creating commercially accessible music while honoring tradition and East African culture. Ntarangwi pays special attention to growing cross-border exchanges within East African hip hop, collaborations in recording music and performances, and themes and messages that transcend local geographic boundaries.

 

In using hip hop as a medium for discussing changes in East African political, economic, and social conditions, artists vocalize their concerns about economic policies, African identity, and political establishments, as well as important issues of health (such as HIV/AIDS), education, and poverty. Through three years of fieldwork, rich interviews with artists, and analysis of live performances and more than 140 songs, Ntarangwi finds that hip hop provides youth an important platform for social commentary and cultural critique and calls attention to the liberating youth music culture in East Africa.