Atomic Tunes presents a musical history of the Cold War, analyzing the songs that capture the fear of those who lived under the shadow of Stalin, Sputnik, mushroom clouds, and missiles.
Emerging in the 1920s, the Japanese pop scene gained a devoted following, and the soundscape of the next four decades became the audible symbol of changing times. In the first English-language ...history of this Japanese industry, Hiromu Nagahara connects the rise of mass entertainment with Japan’s transformation into a postwar middle-class society.
Sweet Air rewrites the history of early twentieth-century pop music in modernist terms. Tracking the evolution of popular regional genres such as blues, country, folk, and rockabilly in relation to ...the growth of industry and consumer culture, Edward P. Comentale shows how this music became a vital means of exploring the new and often overwhelming feelings brought on by modern life. Comentale examines these rural genres as they translated the traumas of local experience--the racial violence of the Delta, the mass exodus from the South, the Dust Bowl of the Texas panhandle--into sonic form. Considering the accessibility of these popular music forms, he asserts the value of music as a source of progressive cultural investment, linking poor, rural performers and audiences to an increasingly vast network of commerce, transportation, and technology.
Jiří Fukač (1936–2002) was one of the most prominent Czech musicologists. His ability to approach topics in classical music from a complex perspective in wide artistic and societal contexts was a ...characteristic feature of his work. He was known as a prolific author of journal articles and scholarly studies, a skilful orator, a charismatic debater, as well as an inspiring teacher. His contribution to the field of research in popular music, being spread over a number of individual works, has not been, however, all that visible up until now. The present study maps the individual stages of Fukač’s interest in this field, analyses his contributions in the form of shorter journal articles, more extensive essay writing and scholarly research. The sources used for the investigation included published texts in journals, books, and other media, as well as publications related to Fukač’s musicological legacy published after his untimely death, including entries in encyclopaedias and the personal memories of his colleagues. The study confirms that Fukač focused a significant amount of his scholarly activities on research into popular-music culture. The highlights of his legacy are a taxonomy of music providing an option for terminological delimitation of art music and popular music, elaborated in cooperation with Ivan Poledňák, and the appeal to integral and equal incorporation of both spheres of musical culture in all the existing disciplines of musicology.
Popular music scholars generally agree that the popular music studies discipline emerged between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s in Western Europe and North America, mainly on the initiative of ...young sociologists, and that it focuses primarily on modern pop-rock music. Many academics from the former Eastern bloc countries share this narrative. Consequently, the history of popular music’s systematic exploration in this region remains largely unknown. Recent years, however, have witnessed growing interest in the history of popular music research in East-Central Europe, as shown by a few (Czech, Slovakian, Polish, and Hungarian) texts, albeit focusing exclusively on local issues. The present study is the first to deal with the history of popular music research between 1918 and 1998 in a wider Central European context, and the Czech lands and Hungary in particular. It provides a detailed analysis of an extensive collection of Czech and Hungarian sources (archival materials and published texts of both an academic and non-academic nature – monographs, individual studies, articles in popular music magazines, and so on). It aims to show the specifics of theoretical reflection on popular music in both states and the manner and extent of the contacts between the respective scholarly communities in light of developments in popular music and cultural policy.
This paper, locating itself within the locus of Southern Perspectives, examines how TikTok, rehabilitating the local memories imbued in the African popular song genre, re-situates African popular ...knowledge at the centre of dialogues around the human question. The paper used a lit-crit methodology to show how African female content creators, by creatively archiving and curating Black voices into what was the realm of Northern thought, have used TikTok’s space to dissolve epistemological and ontological boundaries. This paper posits that TikTok is the new canvas for espousing indigenous knowledge within popular literary meditations in Africa and provides a veritable space that has placed contemporary African art forms at the centre of transformative possibilities. The paper concludes that African music on TikTok is an epistemological tool that communicates context and community-specific knowledges.
Listen to This stands out as the first book exclusively dedicated to Davis’s watershed 1969 album, Bitches Brew . Victor Svorinich traces its incarnations and inspirations for ten-plus years before ...its release. The album arrived as the jazz scene waned beneath the rise of rock and roll and as Davis (1926–1991) faced large changes in social conditions affecting the African-American consciousness. This new climate served as a catalyst for an experiment that many considered a major departure. Davis’s new music projected rock and roll sensibilities, the experimental essence of 1960s’ counterculture, yet also harsh dissonances of African-American reality. Many listeners embraced it, while others misunderstood and rejected the concoction.
Listen to This is not just the story of Bitches Brew . It reveals much of the legend of Miles Davis—his attitude and will, his grace under pressure, his bands, his relationship to the masses, his business and personal etiquette, and his response to extraordinary social conditions seemingly aligned to bring him down. Svorinich revisits the mystery and skepticism surrounding the album, and places it into both a historical and musical context using new interviews, original analysis, recently found recordings, unearthed session data sheets, memoranda, letters, musical transcriptions, scores, and a wealth of other material. Additionally, Listen to This encompasses a thorough examination of producer Teo Macero’s archives and Bitches Brew’s original session reels in order to provide the only complete day-to-day account of the sessions.
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,Audiotopiaforges a new understanding of sound that will stoke debates about music, race, identity, and culture for many years to come.
