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.