Music
The Intellect Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies
The Intellect Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies attempts a comprehensive overview of methodological approaches within the field of popular music studies. Alongside contributions from key thinkers already established in popular music studies the strength of the collection lies in its inclusion of many new and emerging writers in the field. Therefore the collection incorporates a wide range of practitioners pedagogues and academics from an extensive range of disciplines and thus drawing from a diversity of methodological approaches. These include those that are perhaps more established such as semiotics ethnography and psychology alongside exciting new approaches within popular music including eco-musicology religion intersectionality and archeology. Although previous books have provided an overall of concepts studied within popular music studies this will be the first comprehensive Handbook of popular music methodologies.
Hip-Hop Archives
The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production
This book focuses on the culture and politics involved in building hip-hop archives. It addresses practical aspects including methods of accumulation curation preservation and digitization and critically analyzes institutional power community engagement urban economics public access and the ideological implications associated with hip-hop culture’s enduring tensions with dominant social values.
The collection of essays are divided into four sections; Doing the Knowledge Challenging Archival Forms Beyond the Nation and Institutional Alignments: Interviews and Reflections. The book covers a range of official unofficial DIY and community archives and collections and features chapters by scholar practitioners educators and curators.
A wide swath of hip-hop culture is featured in the book including a focus on dance graffiti clothing and battle rap. The range of authors and their topics span countries in Asia Europe the Caribbean and North America.
Make the Dream Real
World-Building Performance by El Vez, The Mexican Elvis
El Vez performances present a powerful message of social justice and inclusion in changing US and social contexts. Make the Dream Real interrogates how this message is activated through world-building: the use of a variety of theoretical theatrical and musical tactics that bring into being a progressive social space that refutes the current economic political social and cultural configurations of the United States.
World-building in an El Vez show “makes the dream real” by imagining a society in which equal rights are guaranteed inclusivity is fostered difference is valued and the violence of economic inequality is mitigated. But world-building through performance is not content to reside exclusively in the individual imagination or the social imaginary; it temporarily creates this new social space in actual time and space for the audience to experience. Using a dramaturgical methodology which marries theoretical inquiry to theatrical practice based on dramaturgical thinking critical proximity and intellectual flexibility the book delves into the theoretical foundations that inform artist Robert Lopez’s work and each chapter analyzes a different performative component he uses.
Make the Dream Real interrogates how El Vez’s playful engagements hold the United States to its egalitarian promises voicing and enacting - however fleetingly - a just and richly inclusive social space through performance.
Analyzing NES Music
Harmony, Form, and the Art of Technological Constraint
Faced with severe technological constraints on system memory composers of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) sought ways to disguise repetition in music that repeats extensively. Their efforts gave rise to a set of compositional techniques for creating the illusion of variety.
This book distills these techniques into a theory of harmony and form for the analysis of NES music. It then uses this theory to analyze five landmark scores of the NES era: Super Mario Bros. Dragon Warrior Metroid Mega Man 2 and Silver Surfer. Both theory and analysis are scaffolded by a detailed description of the NES hardware and its attendant constraints highlighting the ever-evolving dialogue between technology commercial demand and artistic sensibility that characterizes video game music of the 1980s and 1990s.
Urban Music Governance
What Busking Can Teach Us about Data, Policy and Our Cities
What happens when precarious urban cultural labourers take data collection laws and policymaking into their own hands? Buskers have been part of our cities for hundreds of years but they remain invisible to governments and in datasets. From nuisance to public art this cultural practice can help us understand the politics of data collection archives regulatory frameworks and urban planning. Busking also responds to underlying questions on the boundaries of the right to the city – and who has a voice in shaping how our cities are planned and governed.
A transnational exploration of street performance Urban Music Governance examines the intricate limits of legality data visibility and resistance from the perspective of those working at the social and regulatory margins of society. Based on fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro and Montreal spanning across a decade the book puts forward a lively account on why such an often-overlooked practice matter in the 21st century.
By investigating the role of busking in contemporary society Urban Music Governance presents an original interdisciplinary study that exposes how power dynamics in policymaking decide issues of access – and exclusion – around us above and below ground.
Shock Factory
The Visual Culture of Industrial Music
Industrial music appeared in the mid-1970s and far from being a simple sound experimentation phenomenon it quickly spawned a coherent visual culture operating at the intersection of a multitude of media (collage mail art installation film performance sound video) and initiated a close inspection of the legacy of modernity and the growing pervasive influence of technology.
Originally British the movement soon outgrew Europe extending into the United States and Japan during the 1980s. The sound experiments conducted by industrial bands – designing synthesizers manipulating and transforming recorded sounds from audio tapes either recycled or laid down by the artists – were backed up by a rich array of radical visual productions deriving their sources from the modernist utopias of the first part of the 20th century. Such saturated sounds were translated into abrasive images manipulated through the détournement of reprographic techniques (Xerox art) that investigated polemical themes: mental control criminality occultism pornography psychiatry and totalitarianism among others.
This book aims to introduce the visual and aesthetic elements of industrial culture to a general history of contemporary art by analysing the different approaches taken and topics addressed by the primary protagonists of the movement who perceptively anticipated the current discourse concerning the media and their collective coercive power.
Popular Music Ethnographies
Practice, Places and Identities
This edited collection offers evocative ways into a range of fascinating worlds of popular music from the Ecuadorian indie scene to Chinese rock. In exploring the experiences of musicians fans industry professionals and academics the rich complexity of popular music is brought to life through ethnography as an immersive approach to undertaking and communicating research.
Experimenting with ethnography through the joys and tribulations of musical production fandom and scholarship these collated studies critically consider what it means to be a popular music ethnographer and to take an ethnographic approach to studying popular music.
Alongside these chapters musicians venue owners music writers live music photographers and fans add their voices and experience in the form of shorter vignettes ordering the content into three overlapping themes: practices; places; and identities.
The Capitalist Imaginaries of Popular Music
Traditionally popular music has long been said to intrinsically contest resist and defy the powers that be. This new book challenges this long-standing orthodoxy arguing that popular music more often participates in the social reproduction of the biggest power there is: neoliberal capitalism. This is done mainly through the widespread mediation of a very particular and remarkably cohesive ideology of greatness and value. This ideology is drawn from principles and prescriptions that have long been constitutive of neoliberal capitalism. We have been told this story over and over again for decades.
The music is real. The music is powerful. The music is defiant.
It is a story that has gradually spread to encompass everything from classic rock to contemporary pop to hip hop to dance music. This suite of ideas came to dominance since the mid-1980s and persist to the present an era in which the vast majority of people have been disempowered impoverished and marginalised at home at work and in politics. This book explains why such a robust pervasive and persistent set of ideas about popular music has taken such a tenacious hold in a historical era which has repeatedly and thoroughly demonstrated the utter falseness of those same ideas nearly everywhere they have been experienced.
Gender, Race and Religion in Video Game Music
This book provides semiotically-focused analyses and interpretations of video game music focusing specifically on musical representation of three demographic diversity traits. Adopting a narratologist orientation to supplement existing ludological scholarship these analyses apply music semiotics to crucial modern-day issues such as representation of gender race and religion in video games.
An original and welcome contribution to the field it considers musical meaning in relation to the aspects of gender race and religion. This book will help readers to develop language and context in which to consider video game music in terms of society and representation and will encourage future research in these critical areas.
Yee analyses music's contributions to video games' narrative and thematic meanings specifically concerning three master categories of identity – gender race and religion. Containing twenty-five detailed analytical case studies of musical representation in video game music it sets out theoretical and conceptual frameworks beneficial for interpreting musical meaning from video game soundtracks. Though players and commentators may be tempted to view a game's soundtrack as mere 'background music' this research demonstrates video game music's social relevance as a major factor impacting players' cultural attitudes values and beliefs.
Part I explores immersion interactivity and interpretation in video game music proposing a theory of 'interpretative interactivity' to account for players' semiotic agency in dialogue with their ludic agency. Part II explores gender representation in a trajectory from conventional gender construction alternative femininities/masculinities and potential for non-binary representational possibilities. Part III explores musical representation of nationality culture and race proposing the concept of 'racialised fantasy' and applying frameworks from race scholarship to connect media representations of race to real world racial justice movements. Part IV examines religion introducing the concept of 'sonic iconography' to connect theological
meanings to the use of sacred music in video game music.
Sight Readings
Photographers and American Jazz, 1900-60
Jazz photography has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Photographs of musicians are popular with enthusiasts while historians and critics are keen to incorporate photographs as illustrations. Yet there has been little interrogation of these photographs and it is noticeable that what has become known as the jazz photography 'tradition' is dominated by a small number of well-known photographers and 'iconic' images.
Many photographers including African American photojournalists studio photographers early twentieth-century émigrés the Jewish exiles of the 1930s and vernacular snapshots are frequently overlooked. Drawing on ideas from contemporary photographic theory supported by extensive original archival research Sight Readings is a thorough exploration of twentieth century jazz photography and it includes discussions of jazz as a visual subject its attraction to different types of photographers and offers analysis of why and how they approached the subject in the way they did.
One of the remarkable things about this book is its movement back and forth between detailed archive research the empirical documentation of photographers their techniques working practices equipment etc. and cultural theory the sophisticated discussion of aesthetics cultural sociology the politics of identity etc. The result is both a fine scholarly achievement and an engaging labour of love.
