Rockin Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (5th Edition)

Rockin Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (5th Edition) Review

Rockin' Out offers a comprehensive social history of popular music in the United States that takes the reader from the invention of the phonograph to the promise of the Internet, from the heyday of Tin Pan Alley to the present day sounds of singer-songwriters, pop country crossovers, rock, and contemporary hip hop. It offers an analysis and critique of the music itself as well as how it is produced and marketed, including such recent phenomena as the rise of television idols, the introduction of reggaeton, and the return of protest music. 

 

Accessibly written, this text is organized chronologically and thematically around particular genres/styles of music and addresses such dimensions as race, class, gender, ethnicity, technology, copyright and the structure of the music industry as they affect the development of the music.

The Voices that Are Gone: Themes in Nineteenth-Century American Popular Song

The Voices that Are Gone: Themes in Nineteenth-Century American Popular Song Review

The Voices that Are Gone: Themes in Nineteenth-Century American Popular Song Feature

• ISBN13: 9780195113822
• Condition: Used - Like New
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In this unique and readable study, Jon Finson views the mores and values of nineteenth-century Americans as they appear in their popular songs. The author sets forth lyricists' and composers' notions of courtship, technology, death, African Americans, Native Americans, and European ethnicity by grouping songs topically. He goes on to explore the interaction between musical style and lyrics within each topic. The lyrics and changing musical styles present a vivid portrait of nineteenth-century America. The composers discussed in the book range from Henry Russell ("Woodman, Spare That Tree"), Stephen Foster ("Oh! Susanna"), and Dan Emmett ("I Wish I Was in Dixie's Land"), to George M. Cohan and Maude Nugent ("Sweet Rosie O'Grady"), and Gussie Lord Davis ("In the Baggage Coach Ahead"). Readers will recognize songs like "Pop Goes the Weasel," "The Yellow Rose of Texas," "The Fountain in the Park," "After the Ball," "A Bicycle Built for Two," and many others which gain significance by being placed in the larger context of American history.

All That Glitters: Country Music in America (Popular Music Series)

All That Glitters: Country Music in America (Popular Music Series) Review

This collection of essays examines modern country music in America, from its roots to today’s music. Contributors look at aspects of the music as diverse as the creation of country culture in the honky tonk; the development of the Nashville music industry; and why country music singers are similar to the English romantic poets. Historians, sociologists, musicologists, folklorists, anthropologists, ethnographers, communication specialists, and journalists are all represented.

Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music (Cornell East Asia, Vol. 57) (Cornell East Asia Series Number 57)

Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music (Cornell East Asia, Vol. 57) (Cornell East Asia Series Number 57) Review

The first comprehensive study of Chinese popular music in a Western language. Drawing on extensive interviews with singers, songwriters and critics, as well as cultural, sociological, musical, and textual analysis, the book portrays the disparate ways in which China's state-run popular music industry and burgeoning underground rock music subculture represented by Cui Jian have been instrumental to the cultural and political struggles that culminated in the Tienanmen democracy movement of 1989. It also examines the links between popular music and contemporary debates about cultural identity and modernization, as well as the close connections between rock music, youth culture, and student protest.

Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music

Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music Review

Who's better? Billie Holiday or P. J. Harvey? Blur or Oasis? Dylan or Keats? And how many friendships have ridden on the answer? Such questions aren't merely the stuff of fanzines and idle talk; they inform our most passionate arguments, distill our most deeply held values, make meaning of our ever-changing culture. In Performing Rites, one of the most influential writers on popular music asks what we talk about when we talk about music. What's good, what's bad? What's high, what's low? Why do such distinctions matter? Instead of dismissing emotional response and personal taste as inaccessible to the academic critic, Simon Frith takes these forms of engagement as his subject--and discloses their place at the very center of the aesthetics that structure our culture and color our lives.

Taking up hundreds of songs and writers, Frith insists on acts of evaluation of popular music as music. Ranging through and beyond the twentieth century, Performing Rites puts the Pet Shop Boys and Puccini, rhythm and lyric, voice and technology, into a dialogue about the undeniable impact of popular aesthetics on our lives. How we nod our heads or tap our feet, grin or grimace or flip the dial; how we determine what's sublime and what's "for real"--these are part of the way we construct our social identities, and an essential response to the performance of all music. Frith argues that listening itself is a performance, both social gesture and bodily response. From how they are made to how they are received, popular songs appear here as not only meriting aesthetic judgments but also demanding them, and shaping our understanding of what all music means.

Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography

Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography Review

The prolific creator of such classic popular works as Romeo and Juliet, Peter and the Wolf, and Cinderella, Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) was one of the most important and influential composers of the twentieth century.

Drawing on unprecedented access to previously unknown or unavailable Russian-language sources, including extensive archival material, Harlow Robinson traces Prokofiev's extraordinary life from the fairy-tale world of Czarist Russia, through his many years abroad in America and Europe, to his perlexing permanent return to Moscow in 1936 under the Soviet Regime. That Prokofiev died on the very day as Josef Stalin, his principal persecutor, was the final irony of his intense and enigmatic career.

Analyzing Popular Music

Analyzing Popular Music Review

How do we "know" music? We perform it, compose it, sing it in the shower; cook, sleep and dance to it. Eventually we think and write about it. This book represents the culmination of such shared processes. Portraying a wide range of genres (rock, dance, TV soundtracks, country, pop, soul, easy listening, Turkish Arabesk), the essays cover methodology, modernism, postmodernism, Marxism and communication.