Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Focus of Place (Haymarket Series)

Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Focus of Place (Haymarket Series) Review

In a wild tour across the globe, touching down in Havana, Port-au-Prince, Kingston, Budapest, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo, George Lipsitz explores the fusion of immigrant and mainstream cultures displayed in world music, including rap, jazz, reggae, zouk, bhangra, juju, swamp pop, and Puerto Rican bugalu and Chicago punk.

Interpreting Popular Music

Interpreting Popular Music Review

There is a well-developed vocabulary for discussing classical music, but when it comes to popular music, how do we analyze its effects and its meaning? David Brackett draws from the disciplines of cultural studies and music theory to demonstrate how listeners form opinions about popular songs, and how they come to attribute a rich variety of meanings to them. Exploring several genres of popular music through recordings made by Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Hank Williams, James Brown, and Elvis Costello, Brackett develops a set of tools for looking at both the formal and cultural dimensions of popular music of all kinds.

Youth Identities and Argentine Popular Music: Beyond Tango

Youth Identities and Argentine Popular Music: Beyond Tango Review

What are the main music preferences among the youth in Argentina? How do these preferences fit into Argentine society, culture, and politics? The essays in this volume show how religion, class, ethnic, generational, and gender issues in Argentina are constructed and negotiated through a variety of musical practices. Rock, cumbia, and romantic music articulate gender, sexual, class, and ethnic identities for young people, whose socio-musical life goes beyond the traditional stereotypes of Argentina, tango, and passion.

Popular Music Perspectives: Ideas, Themes, and Patterns in Contemporary Lyrics

Popular Music Perspectives: Ideas, Themes, and Patterns in Contemporary Lyrics Review

In thirteen essays, this book probes ideas and themes that are prominent in contemporary song lyrics. The essays take social change, human interaction, technology, and intellectual development as points of departure for specific examinations of public education, railroads, death, automobiles, and rebels. The essays also examine humor, traditions, and historical events found in answer songs, cover recordings, nursery rhyme adaptations, and novelty tunes.

Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music

Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music Review

Musicians strive to “keep it real”; listeners condemn “fakes”; ... but does great music really need to be authentic? Did Elvis sing from the heart, or was he just acting? Were the Sex Pistols more real than disco? Why do so many musicians base their approach on being authentic, and why do music buffs fall for it every time? By investigating this obsession in the last century through the stories of John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Jimmie Rodgers, Donna Summer, Leadbelly, Neil Young, Moby, and others, Faking It rethinks what makes popular music work. Along the way, the authors discuss the segregation of music in the South, investigate the predominance of self-absorption in modern pop, reassess the rebellious ridiculousness of rockabilly and disco, and delineate how the quest for authenticity has not only made some music great and some music terrible but also shaped in a fundamental way the development of popular music in our time.

Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil

Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil Review

“Hello, hello Brazil” was the standard greeting Brazilian radio announcers of the 1930s used to welcome their audience into an expanding cultural marketplace.  New genres likesamba and repackaged older ones like choro served as the currency in this marketplace, minted in the capital in Rio de Janeiro and circulated nationally by the burgeoning recording and broadcasting industries. Bryan McCann chronicles the flourishing of Brazilian popular music between the 1920s and the 1950s. Through analysis of the competing projects of composers, producers, bureaucrats, and fans, he shows that Brazilians alternately envisioned popular music as the foundation for a unified national culture and used it as a tool to probe racial and regional divisions.

McCann explores the links between the growth of the culture industry, rapid industrialization, and the rise and fall of Getúlio Vargas’sEstado Novo dictatorship. He argues that these processes opened a window of opportunity for the creation of enduring cultural patterns and demonstrates that the understandings of popular music cemented in the mid–twentieth century continue to structure Brazilian cultural life in the early twenty-first.

Call Me the Seeker: Listening to Religion in Popular Music

Call Me the Seeker: Listening to Religion in Popular Music Review

·One of very few books on religion and popular music ·Covers a wide range of musical styles, from heavy metal and rap to country, jazz and Broadway musicals ·The essays are written by academics and informed by their enthusiasm for the music Many books have explored the relationship between religion and film, but few have yet examined the significance of religion to popular music. Call Me The Seeker steps into that gap. Michael Gilmour’s introductory essay gives a state-of-the-discipline overview of research in the area. He argues that popular songs frequently draw from and “interpret” themes found in the conceptual and linguistic worlds of the major religions and reveal underlying attitudes in those who compose and consume them. He says these “texts” deserve more serious study. The essays in the book start an on-going conversation in this area, bringing a variety of methodologies to bear on selected artists and topics. Musical styles covered range from heavy metal and rap to country, jazz, and Broadway musicals.