Popular Music in Contemporary France: Authenticity, Politics, Debate (French Studies)

Popular Music in Contemporary France: Authenticity, Politics, Debate (French Studies) Review

While music lovers from all over the world have tried to recreate the ambience of French cafés by playing music from stars such as Piaf, Trénet and Chevalier, intellectuals, sociologists and policy makers in France have been embroiled in passionate debate about just what constitutes 'real' French music. In the late 1950s and 1960s a wave of Anglo-American rock 'n' roll and pop hit Europe and disrupted French popular music forever. The cherished sounds of the chanson were sidelined, fragmented or merged with pop styles and instrumentation. From this point on, French music and music culture have been splintered into cultural divides - pop culture vs high culture; mass culture vs 'authentic' popular culture; national culture vs Americanization. This book investigates the exciting and innovative segmentation of the French music scene and the debates it has spawned. From an analysis of the chanson as national myth, to pop, rap, techno and the State, this book is the first full-length study to make sense of the complexity behind the history of French popular music and its relation to 'authentic' cultural identity.

Music, Power, and Politics

Music, Power, and Politics Review

Music, Power, and Politics presents sixteen different cultural perspectives on the concept of music as a site of socio-political struggle. Essays by scholars from around the world explore the means by which music's long-acknowledged potential to persuade, seduce, indoctrinate, rouse, incite, or even silence listeners, has been used to advance agendas of power and protest. The essays included examine: music used to convey political ideology in Nazi Germany, apartheid-era South Africa, and modern-day North Korea postcolonial musical efforts to reclaim ethnic heritage in Serbia and the Caribbean music as a means of establishing new cultural identities for recently empowered social groups in the UK and Brazil the subversion of racial stereotypes through popular music in the USA music as a tool of popular resistance to oppressive government policies in modern day Iran and the Bolivian Andes

Flamenco: Passion, Politics and Popular Culture (Explorations in Anthropology)

Flamenco: Passion, Politics and Popular Culture (Explorations in Anthropology) Review

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Flamenco is renowned for its passion and flamboyance. Yet because it generates such visceral responses, it is often overlooked as a site for subtler discourses.

This absorbing book articulates powerful and convincing arguments on such key subjects as ethnicity, irony, authenticity, the body and resistance. Franco's 'politics of original sin' had left its mark on every aspect of Spanish life between 1936 and 1975, and flamenco music was no exception. Although widely portrayed as an apolitical, even frivolous form of entertainment, flamenco is shown here to have played a role in both the strategies of Franco's supporters and of those who opposed him. The author explores how the meaning of flamenco shifts according to the social, cultural and historical contexts within which it appears. In so doing, he demonstrates that flamenco is an ideal subject for analyzing the construction and appropriation of popular culture, given the way in which it was developed for middle-class audiences, converted into grand spectacle, and conscripted to serve political ends.

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Rerate Products

• Gypsies and Flamenco: The Emergence of the Art of Flamenco in Andalusia, Interface Collection Volume 6
• Flamenco: Conflicting Histories of the Dance

Customer Review

Jul 31, 2011 10:04:04