The Popular Music Studies Reader

The Popular Music Studies Reader Review

The Popular Music Studies Reader maps the changing nature of popular music over the last decade and considers how popular music studies has expanded and developed to deal with these changes.

A wide range of international contributors featuring some of the biggest names in popular music and cultural studies including Philip Auslander, Paul Gilroy and Kodwo Eshun and discuss:

* the increasing participation of women in the industry
* the changing role of gender and sexuality in popular music
* the role of new technologies, especially in production and distribution
* the changing nature of the relationship between music production and consumption.

The Popular Music Studies Reader places popular music in its cultural context, looks at the significance of popular music in our everyday lives, and examines the global nature of the music industry.

The Rhetorical Power of Popular Culture: Considering Mediated Texts

The Rhetorical Power of Popular Culture: Considering Mediated Texts Review

Can television shows like Desperate Housewives, popular songs like Shaggy’s It Wasn’t Me, advertisements for Samuel Adams beer, and films such as Harry Potter help us understand rhetorical theory and criticism? The Rhetorical Power of Popular Culture is chock full of familiar examples like these to make rhetorical theory and criticism accessible, relevant, and meaningful to readers. Author Deanna Sellnow offers a step-by-step introduction to rhetorical theory and criticism by focusing on the powerful roles TV programs, advertisements, music, comics, and movies play in persuading us on what to believe and how to behave.

Key Features

• Clarifies theoretical concepts using a broad range of familiar examples from TV, film, music, advertisements, and comics
• Proposes a consistent step-by-step approach to conducting a rhetorical analysis of popular culture texts focused on describing, interpreting, and evaluating
• Engages readers in the hands-on process of popular cultural criticism with end-of-chapter sample essays and challenge exercises
• Fosters critical thinking and retention of key concepts by encouraging readers to actively apply concepts through “Applying What You’ve Learned” boxes embedded in each chapter

Intended Audience
This pragmatic book makes an excellent text for courses exploring the intersections of popular culture, communication, sociology, and identity. It is a must-have for anyone interested in examining the powerfully persuasive rhetorical messages that pervade our daily lives.

American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 Includes two CDs

American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 Includes two CDs Review

In American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3, Second Edition, Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman examine popular music in the United States from its beginnings into the 21st century, offering a comprehensive look at the music, the cultural history of the times, and the connections between them. Using well-chosen examples, insightful commentaries, and an engaging writing style, this text traces the development of jazz, blues, country, rock, Motown, hip-hop, and other popular styles, highlighting the contributions of diverse groups to the creation of distinctly American styles. It combines an in-depth treatment of the music itself--including discussions of stylistic elements and analyses of musical examples--with solid coverage of the music's attendant historical, social, and cultural circumstances. The authors incorporate strong pedagogy including numerous boxed inserts on significant individuals, recordings, and intriguing topics; coverage of early American popular music; and a rich illustration program. Detailed listening charts explain the most important elements of recordings discussed at length in the text. The charts are complemented by two in-text audio CDs and--new to this edition--an iMix published at iTunes, which makes most of the songs immediately available to students and instructors.

Features of the Second Edition

* Integrates full color throughout
* Provides more coverage of women artists, with new material on women in rock 'n' roll in Chapter 8 and a box on Queen Latifah in Chapter 14
* Reorganizes the discussion of post-1970s music: disco is now included with mainstream 70s pop, while hip-hop is treated in two chapters (12 and 14) in order to emphasize its significance and diversity
* Adds new material on the recent alternative country music explosion
* Includes new developments in music technology in the thoroughly revised concluding chapter
* Offers revised and more vivid visual elements, including more than 100 new photos (most in full color) and an illustrated timeline
* Provides redesigned listening guides, enhanced by an iMix published at iTunes (accessible at www.oup.com/us/popmusic)
* Supplemented by a Companion Website at www.oup.com/us/popmusic (containing both student and instructor resources) and an Instructor's Manual and a Computerized Test Bank on CD
* FREE with the purchase of this book: a 6-month subscription to Grove Music Online (www.grovemusic.com)--a 0 value

Remarkably accessible, American Popular Music, Second Edition, is ideal for courses in American Popular Music, the History of Popular Music, Popular Music in American Culture, and the History of Rock 'n' Roll. Its welcoming style and warm tone will captivate readers, encouraging them to become more critically aware listeners of popular music.

Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar (Studies in Popular Culture)

Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar (Studies in Popular Culture) Review

This well focused and perceptive analysis of a phenomenon in our popular culture--the new respectability of the comic book form--argues that the comics medium has a productive tradition of telling true stories with grace and economy. It details vividly the outburst of underground comics in the late 1960s and '70s, whose cadre of artistically gifted creators were committed to writing comic books for adults, an audience they made aware that comic books can offer narratives of great power and technical sophistication.

In this study Joseph Witek examines the rise of the comic book to a position of importance in modern culture and assesses its ideological and historical implications. Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar are among the creators whom Witek credits for the emergence of the comic book as a serious artistic medium. As American codes of ethics, aesthetics, and semiotics have evolved, so too has the comic book as a mode for presenting the weightier matters of history. It is safe to claim that comic books are not just for kids anymore.

Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe

Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe Review

Long neglected by historians, the concept of cultural history has in the last few decades come to the fore of historical research into early modern Europe. Due in no small part to the pioneering work of Peter Burke, the tools of the cultural historian are now routinely brought to bear on every aspect of history, and have transformed our understanding of the past.First published in 1978, this study examines the broad sweep of pre-industrial Europe's popular culture. From the world of the professional entertainer to the songs, stories, rituals and plays of ordinary people, it shows how the attitudes and values of the otherwise inarticulate shaped - and were shaped by - the shifting social, religious and political conditions of European society between 1500 and 1800.This third edition of Peter Burke's groundbreaking study has been published to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the book's publication in 1978. It provides a new introduction reflecting the growth of cultural history, and its increasing influence on 'mainstream' history, as well as an extensive supplementary bibliography which further adds to the information about new research in the area.

Popular Fiction by Women 1660-1730: An Anthology

Popular Fiction by Women 1660-1730: An Anthology Review

Popular Fiction by Women 1660-1730 gathers together for the first time a sparkling selection of shorter fiction by the most successful women writers of the period, from Aphra Behn, the first important English female professional writer, to Penelope Aubin and Eliza Haywood, who with Daniel Defoe dominated prose fiction in the 1720s. The texts included were among the best-selling titles of their time, and played a key role in the expanding market for narrative in the early eighteenth century. Crucial to the development of the longer novel of manners and morals that emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, these novellas have been much neglected by literary historians, but now--with the impetus of feminist criticism--have been reestablished as an essential chapter in the history of the novel in English. All lovers of fiction will find much here to delight, stimulate, and educate.

Gods and Guitars: Seeking the Sacred in Post-1960s Popular Music

Gods and Guitars: Seeking the Sacred in Post-1960s Popular Music Review

Though American attitudes toward religion changed dramatically during the 1960s, interest in spirituality itself never diminished. If we listen closely, Michael Gilmour contends, we can hear an extensive religious vocabulary in the popular music of the decades that followedarticulating each generations spiritual quest, a yearning for social justice, and the emotional highs of love and sex.
Probing the lyrical canons of seminal artists including Cat Stevens, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, U2, Ozzy Osbourne, Pearl Jam, Madonna, and Kanye West, Gilmour considers the ways--and reasons why--pop music's secular poets and prophets adopted religious phrases, motifs, and sacred texts.