Popular Music and Human Rights (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

Popular Music and Human Rights (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series) Review

Popular music has long understood that human rights, if attainable at all, involve a struggle without end. The right to imagine an individual will, the right to some form of self-determination and the right to self-legislation have long been at the forefront of popular music's approach to human rights. In Eastern Europe, where states often tried to control music, the hundreds of thousands of Estonians who gathered in Tallinn between 1987 and 1991 are a part of the 'singing revolutions' that encouraged a sense of national consciousness, which had years earlier been crushed when Soviet policy declared Baltic folk music dead and ordered its replacement with mass song. Examples of this nature, where music has the power to enlighten, to mobilize, and perhaps even to change, suggest that popular music's response to issues of human rights has and will continue to be profound and sustained. This is the second volume published by Ashgate on Popular Music and Human Rights (the first volume covered British and American music). Contributors to this significant volume cover topics such as Movimento 77, Nepal's heavy metal scene, music and memory in Mozambique and Swaziland, hybrid metal in the muslim world, folksong in Latvia, popular music in the former Yugoslavia, indigenous human rights in Australia, Victor Jara, protest and gender in Ireland, rock and roll in China, and the anti-rock campaigns and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

Popular Music and the Myths of Madness (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

Popular Music and the Myths of Madness (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series) Review

Studies of opera, film, television, and literature have demonstrated how constructions of madness may be referenced in order to stigmatise but also liberate protagonists in ways that reinforce or challenge contemporaneous notions of normality. But to date very little research has been conducted on how madness is represented in popular music. In an effort to redress this imbalance, Nicola Spelman identifies links between the anti-psychiatry movement and representations of madness in popular music of the 1960s and 1970s, analysing the various ways in which ideas critical of institutional psychiatry are embodied both verbally and musically in specific songs by David Bowie, Lou Reed, Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper, the Beatles, and Elton John. She concentrates on meanings that may be made at the point of reception as a consequence of ideas about madness that were circulating at the time. These ideas are then linked to contemporary conventions of musical expression in order to illustrate certain interpretative possibilities. Supporting evidence comes from popular musicological analysis - incorporating discourse analysis and social semiotics - and investigation of socio-historical context. The uniqueness of the period in question is demonstrated by means of a more generalised overview of songs drawn from a variety of styles and eras that engage with the topic of madness in diverse and often conflicting ways. The conclusions drawn reveal the extent to which anti-psychiatric ideas filtered through into popular culture, offering insights into popular music's ability to question general suppositions about madness alongside its potential to bring issues of men's madness into the public arena as an often neglected topic for discussion.

Popular Music in France from Chanson to Techno: Culture, Identity and Society (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

Popular Music in France from Chanson to Techno: Culture, Identity and Society (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series) Review

In France during the 1960s and 1970s, popular music became a key component of socio-cultural modernization as the music/record industry became increasingly important in both economic and cultural terms in response to demographic changes and the rise of the modern media. As France began questioning traditional ways of understanding politics and culture before and after May 1968, music as popular culture became an integral part of burgeoning media activity. Press, radio and television developed free from de Gaulle's state domination of information, and political activism shifted its concerns to the use of regional languages and regional cultures, including the safeguard of traditional popular music against the centralizing tendencies of the Republican state. The cultural and political significance of French music was again revealed in the 1990s, as French-language music became a highly visible example of France's quest to maintain her cultural "exceptionalism" in the face of the perceived globalizing hegemony of English and US business and cultural imperialism. Laws were passed instituting minimum quotas of French-language music. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed developing issues raised by new technologies, as compact discs, the minitel telematics system, the Internet and other innovations in radio and television broadcasting posed new challenges to musicians and the music industry. These trends and developments are the subject of this volume of essays by leading scholars across a range of disciplines including French studies, musicology, cultural and media studies and film studies. It constitutes an attempt to provide a complete and up-to-date overview of the place of popular music in modern France and the reception of French popular music abroad.

Sonic Synergies: Music, Technology, Community, Identity (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

Sonic Synergies: Music, Technology, Community, Identity (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series) Review

"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.

Taking Popular Music Seriously (Ashgate Contemporary Thinkers on Critical Musicology)

Taking Popular Music Seriously (Ashgate Contemporary Thinkers on Critical Musicology) Review

As a sociologist Simon Frith takes the starting point that music is the result of the play of social forces, whether as an idea, an experience or an activity. The essays in this important collection address these forces, recognising that music is an effect of a continuous process of negotiation, dispute, and agreement between the individual actors who make up a music world. The collection includes nineteen essays, some of which have had a major impact on the field, along with an autobiographical introduction.

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.

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.

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.

The Highland Bagpipe (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music)

The Highland Bagpipe (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music) Review

The Highland bagpipe, widely considered 'Scotland's national instrument', is one of the most recognized icons of traditional music in the world. It is also among the least understood. But Scottish bagpipe music and tradition - particularly, but not exclusively, the Highland bagpipe - has enjoyed an unprecedented surge in public visibility and scholarly attention since the 1990s. A greater interest in the emic led to a diverse picture of the meaning and musical iconicism of the bagpipe in communities in Scotland and throughout the Scottish diaspora. This interest has led to the consideration of both the globalization of Highland piping and piping as rooted in local culture. It has given rise to a reappraisal of sources which have hitherto formed the backbone of long-standing historical and performative assumptions. And revivalist research which reassesses Highland piping's cultural position relative to other Scottish piping traditions, such as that of the Lowlands and Borders, today effectively challenges the notion of the Highland bagpipe as Scotland's 'national' instrument. "The Highland Bagpipe" provides an unprecedented insight into the current state of Scottish piping studies. The contributors - from Scotland, England, Canada and the United States - discuss the bagpipe in oral and written history, anthropology, ethnography, musicology, material culture and modal aesthetics. The book will appeal to ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, as well as those interested in international bagpipe studies and traditions.

Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures: Record Collecting as a Social Practice (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures: Record Collecting as a Social Practice (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series) Review

The term 'record collecting' is shorthand for a variety of related practices. Foremost is the collection of sound recordings in various formats - although often with a marked preference for vinyl - by individuals, and it is this dimension of record collecting that is the focus of this book. Record collecting, and the public stereotypes associated with it, is frequently linked primarily with rock and pop music. Roy Shuker focuses on these broad styles, but also includes other genres and their collectors, notably jazz, blues, exotica and 'ethnic' music. Accordingly, the study examines the history of record collecting; profiles collectors and the collecting process; considers categories - especially music genres - and types of record collecting and outlines and discusses the infrastructure within which collecting operates. Shuker situates this discussion within the broader literature on collecting, along with issues of cultural consumption, social identity and 'the construction of self' in contemporary society. Record collecting is both fascinating in its own right, and provides insights into broader issues of nostalgia, consumption and material culture.

The British Folk Revival: 1944-2002 (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series) (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

The British Folk Revival: 1944-2002 (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series) (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series) Review

This work considers the post-war folk revival in Britain from a popular music studies perspective. Michael Brocken provides a historical narrative of the folk revival from the 1940s up until the 1990s, beginning with the emergence of the revival from within and around the left-wing movements of the 1940s and 1950s. Key figures and organizations such as the Workers' Music Association, the BBC, the English Folk Dance and Song Society, A.L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl are examined closely. By looking at the work of British Communist Party splinter groups it is possible to see the refraction of folk music as a political tool. Brocken openly challenges folk historicity and internal narrative by discussing the convergence of folk and pop during the 1950s and 1960s. The significant development of the folk/rock hybrid is considered alongside "class", "Americana", radio and the strength of pop culture. Brocken shows how the dichotomy of artistic (natural) versus industry (mass-produced) music since the 1970s has led to a fragmentation and constriction of the folk revival. The study concludes with a look at the upsurge of the folk music industry, the growth of festivals and the implications of the Internet for the British folk revival. Brocken suggests the way forward should involve an acknowledgement that folk music is not superior to but is, in fact, a form of popular music.

The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880 - 1935 (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880 - 1935 (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series) Review

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As a popular music, the evolution of jazz is tied to the contemporary sociological situation. Jazz was brought from America into a very different environment in Britain and resulted in the establishment of parallel worlds of jazz by the end of the 1920s: within the realms of institutionalized culture and within the subversive underworld. Parsonage demonstrates the importance of image and racial stereotyping in shaping perceptions of jazz, and leads to the significant conclusion that the evolution of jazz in Britain was so much more than merely an extension or reflection of that in America. The book examines the cultural and musical antecedents of the genre, including minstrel shows and black musical theatre, within the context of musical life in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Parsonage is particularly concerned with the public perception of jazz in Britain and provides close analysis of the early European critical writing on the subject. The processes through which an evolution took place are considered by looking at the methods of introducing jazz in Britain, through imported revue shows, sheet music, and visits by American musicians. Subsequent developments are analysed through the consideration of modernism and the Jazz Age as theoretical constructs and through the detailed study of dance music on the BBC and jazz in the underworld of London. The book concludes in the 1930s by which time the availability of records enabled the spread of 'hot' music, affecting the live repertoire in Britain. Parsonage therefore sheds entirely new light on the development of jazz in Britain, and provides a deep social and cultural understanding of the early history of the genre.

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Jul 24, 2011 13:12:35

Remembering Woodstock (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music) (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music)

Remembering Woodstock (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music) (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music) Review

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The Woodstock festival of 1969, which featured such groups and artists as the Who, Country Joe and the Fish, Ten Years After, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, is remembered as much for its 'bringing together' of the counter-cultural generation as for the music performed. The event represented a milestone in the use of music as a medium for political expression, while simultaneously acting as a springboard for the more expressly commercial of rock and pop events which were to follow. In the thirty years since the festival took place, Woodstock has become the subject of many books, magazine articles and documentaries which have served to mythologise the event in the public imagination. These different aspects of the Woodstock festival are discussed in this wide ranging book which brings together a number of established and new writers in the fields of sociology, media studies and popular music studies. Each of the five chapters focus on a specific aspect of the Woodstock festival and its continuing significance in relation to the music industry, the rock festival 'tradition', sixties nostalgia and the cultural impact of popular music.

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• Woodstock - Peace, Music & Memories
• Woodstock Vision: The Spirit of a Generation
• Woodstock: The Oral History (Excelsior Editions)
• The Road to Woodstock
• The Bedford Reader

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Jul 15, 2011 16:36:10