The late Jan Fairley (1949-2012) was a key figure in making world music a significant topic for popular music studies and an influential contributor to such world music magazines as fRoots and ...Songlines. This book celebrates her contribution to popular music scholarship by gathering her most important work together in a single place. The result is a richly informed and entertaining volume that will be of interest to all scholars in the field while also serving as an excellent introduction for students interested in popular music as a global phenomenon. Fairley's work was focused on the problems and possibilities of cross-cultural musical influences, fantasies and flows and on the importance of performing circuits and networks. Her interest in the details of music-making and in the lives of music-makers means that this collection is also an original and illuminating study of music and politics. In drawing on Jan Fairley's journalism, this volume also offers students a guide to various genres of world music, from Cuban son to flamenco, as well as an insight into the lives of such world music stars as Mercedes Sosa and Silvio RodrÃguez. This is inspiring as well as essential reading.
How do we know music? We perform it, we compose it, we sing it in the shower, we cook, sleep and dance to it. Eventually we think and write about it. This book represents the culmination of such ...shared processes. Each of these essays, written by leading writers on popular music, is analytical in some sense, but none of them treats analysis as an end in itself. The books presents a wide range of genres (rock, dance, TV soundtracks, country, pop, soul, easy listening, Turkish Arabesk) and deals with issues as broad as methodology, modernism, postmodernism, Marxism and communication. It aims to encourage listeners to think more seriously about the 'social' consequences of the music they spend time with and is the first collection of such essays to incorporate contextualisation in this way.
Explains what happened to music--for both artists and fans--when music went online. Playing to the Crowd explores and explains how the rise of digital communication platforms has transformed ...artist-fan relationships into something closer to friendship or family. Through in-depth interviews with musicians such as Billy Bragg and Richie Hawtin, as well as members of the Cure, UB40, and Throwing Muses, Baym reveals how new media has facilitated these connections through the active, and often required, participation of the artists and their devoted, digital fan base. Before the rise of social sharing and user-generated content, fans were mostly seen as an undifferentiated and unidentifiable mass, often mediated through record labels and the press. However, in today's networked era, musicians and fans have built more active relationships through social media, fan sites, and artist sites, giving fans a new sense of intimacy and offering artists unparalleled information about their audiences. However, this comes at a price. For audiences, meeting their heroes can kill the mystique. And for artists, maintaining active relationships with so many people can be both personally and financially draining, as well as extremely labor intensive. Drawing on her own rich history as an active and deeply connected music fan, Baym offers an entirely new approach to media culture, arguing that the work musicians put in to create and maintain these intimate relationships reflect the demands of the gig economy, one which requires resources and strategies that we must all come to recognize and appreciate.
This book is a cultural history of the nineteenth-century songster: pocket-sized anthologies of song texts, usually without musical notation. It examines the musical, social, commercial and aesthetic ...functions songsters served and the processes by which they were produced and disseminated, the repertory they included, and the singers, printers and entrepreneurs that both inspired their manufacture and facilitated their consumption. Taking an international perspective, chapters focus on songsters from Ireland, North America, Australia and Britain and the varied public and private contexts in which they were used and exploited in oral and print cultures.
Centered on the musical experiences of homosexual men in St. Petersburg and Moscow, this ground-breaking study examines how post-Soviet popular music both informs and plays off of a corporeal ...understanding of Russian male homosexuality.
How are national identities constructed and articulated through music? Popular music has long been associated with political dissent, and the nation state has consistently demonstrated a ...determination to seek out and procure for itself a stake in the management of 'its' popular musics. Similarly, popular musics have been used 'from the ground up' as sites for both populist and popular critiques of nationalist sentiment, from the position of both a globalizing and a 'local' vernacular culture. The contributions in this book arrive at a critical moment in the development of the study of national cultures and musicology. The book ranges from considerations of the ideological focus of cultural nationalism through to analyses of musical hybridity and musical articulations of other kinds of identities at odds with national identity. The processes of global homogenization are thereby shown to have brought about a transitional crisis for national cultural identities: the evolution of these identities, particularly with reference to the concept of 'authenticity' in music, is situated within broader debates on power, political economy and constructions of the self. Theorizations of practice are employed after the manner of Bourdieu, Gramsci, Goffman, Gadamer, Habermas, Bhabha, Lacan and Zizek. Each contribution acts as a case study to characterize the strategies through which differing modes of musical discourse engage, critique or obscure discourses on national identity. The studies include discussions of: musical representations of Irishness; the relationship between Afropop and World Music; Norwegian club music; the revival of traditional music in Serbia; resistance to cultural homogeneity in Brazil; contemporary Uyghur song in Northwest China; rap and race in French society; technobanda from the barrios of Los Angeles, and Spanish/Moroccan raï. In this way, the book seeks to characterize the ideological configurations that help to activate and sustain hegemonic, amb
Refashioning Pop Music in Asia Chun, Allen; Rossiter, Ned; Shoesmith, Brian
2004, 20040731, 2004-04-09, 2004-07-31
eBook
Examining the cultural, political, economic, technological and institutional aspects of popular music throughout Asia, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of Asian popular music and its ...cultural industries. Concentrating on the development of popular culture in its local socio-political context, the volume highlights how local appropriations of the pop music genre play an active rather than reactive role in manipulating global cultural and capital flows.
Broad in geographical sweep and rich in contemporary examples, this work will appeal to those interested in Asian popular culture from a variety of perspectives including, political economy, anthropology, communication studies, media studies and ethnomusicology.
Publications on form in popular music have largely assumed the formal sections germane to pop-rock to be the formal designs of "popular music." But the most popular music of our time-music charting ...on the Billboard Top-40-has absorbed the influence of electronic dance music (EDM) in a way that has fundamentally changed its formal structure. This results in "Top-40 EDM," a genre defined by collaborations between seasoned EDM producers and A-list pop singers. This article begins by defining EDM's three core formal functions (verse, riser, and drop), and compares them to more familiar functions heard in pop-rock music (verse, prechorus, chorus, and postchorus). Part two draws on de Clercq's (2017) concept of blended formal functions to define Top-40 EDM's most recognizable section, the "riserchorus." Part three examines the larger structure of these tracks, including their "compound AAA" forms, in which each of the song's rotations feature the same formal functions, though presented differently. Finally, the article demonstrates how Top-40 EDM producers regularly combine samples at the end of their tracks, resulting in cumulative hyper-blended sections like "riserchorus-bridge" and "riserchorusdrop."
