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.

American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950

American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 Review

When Alec Wilder's American Popular Song first appeared, it was almost universally hailed--from The New York Times to The New Yorker to Down Beat--as the definitive account of the classic era of American popular music. It has since become the standard work of the great songwriters who dominated popular music in the United States for half a century. Now Wilder's classic is available again, with a new introduction by Gene Lees.
Uniquely analytical yet engagingly informal, American Popular Song focuses on the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic qualities that distinguish American popular music and have made it an authentic art form. Wilder traces the roots of the American style to the ragtime music of the 1890s, shows how it was incorporated into mainstream popular music after 1900, and then surveys the careers of every major songwriter from World War I to 1950. Wilder devotes desparate chapters to such greats as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and Harold Arlen. Illustrated with over seven hundred musical examples, Wilder's sensitive analyses of the most distinctive, creative, and original songs of this period reveal unexpected beauties in songs long forgotten and delightful subtleties in many familiar standards. The result is a definitive treatment of a strangely unsung and uniquely American art.

We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture

We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture Review

Consider this paradox: for many people, rock is dead, crushed by the weight of its own success and popularity, little more than of mainstream commercial entertainment. But for many others, especially among the new conservative Right, rock poses a greater threat now than ever before. What is it about rock that makes it so important in contemporary political struggles? Bringing together cultural, political and economic analyses, Lawrence Grossberg offers an original and bold interpretation of the contemporary politics of both rock and popular culture. We Gotta Get Out of This Place explores four histories: the changing role of rock in everyday life; the emergence of an affective and popular conservatism; the crisis of contemporary capitalism; and the apparent inability of the Left to respond to these changes. These critical developments are bound together by their concern with postmodernity, understood as both a structure of everyday life and as a sensibility of popular culture. Everyone wants to get out of this place, but only the Right seems to have found a way to benefit from where we are.

The Hollywood War Machine: U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture

The Hollywood War Machine: U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture Review

In this unique book, the authors provide a hard-hitting, radical critique of the growing culture of American militarism, focusing on the post Cold War years. Analyzed in historical context and drawing on a broad mix of theoretical, political, and cultural sources, The Hollywood War Machine explores the U.S. film industry and its deepening impact on the popular and political culture. Through the lens of filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, Michael Bay, Jonathan Mostrow, Edward Zwick, Tony Scott, and John Woo, the volume deconstructs the narratives and images of nearly 200 combat and war-related movies, along with related consumer fare such as television and video games, in the context of the permanent war economy, security state, recurrent military interventions abroad, and the expansion of U.S. global power. Topics include cinematic representations of terrorism, the return of good war motifs, the phenomenon of disguised militarism, the relationship between cinema and technowar, depictions of the Gulf War and the current war in Iraq, and general media spectacles of warfare as well as unique perspectives on films related to World War II, the Cold War, and Vietnam.

The Politics of Medical Encounters: How Patients and Doctors Deal With Social Problems

The Politics of Medical Encounters: How Patients and Doctors Deal With Social Problems Review

Examining the interactions between patients and doctors, this book aims to show how physicians' focus on physical complaints often fails to address patients' underlying concerns and also reinforces the societal problems that cause or aggravate these maladies.

James Bond and Philosophy: Questions Are Forever (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

James Bond and Philosophy: Questions Are Forever (Popular Culture and Philosophy) Review

“Bond. James Bond.” Since Sean Connery first uttered that iconic phrase in Dr. No, more than one quarter of the world’s population has seen a 007 film. Witty and urbane, Bond seduces and kills with equal ease — often, it seems, with equal enthusiasm. This enthusiasm, coupled with his freedom to do what is forbidden to everyone else, evokes fascinating philosophical questions. Here, 15 witty, thought-provoking essays discuss hidden issues in Bond’s world, from his carnal pleasures to his license to kill. Among the lively topics explored are Bond’s relation to existentialism, including his graduation “beyond good and evil”; his objectification of women; the paradox of breaking the law in order to ultimately uphold it like any “stupid policeman”; the personality of 007 in terms of Plato’s moral psychology; and the Hegelian quest for recognition evinced by Bond villains. A reference guide to all the Bond movies rounds out the book’s many pleasures.

Put Your Big Girl Panties On and Deal with It

Put Your Big Girl Panties On and Deal with It Review

With this insightful, touching, and often hilarious guide, Roz takes you from Training Pants straight through to Big Girl Panties, with plenty of laughs and lots of valuable advice along the way. Rife with deeply personal, perhaps slightly embarrassing and often hysterical personal stories from the author herself, Put Your Big Girl Panties On and Deal With It is the guidebook for real women ready to take charge of their own lives.

Inside, discover:

--How to shuck those procrastination panties: Action Antidotes to the Top 10 Procrastination Perpetuator
--How to untwist your knickers: Stressbusting for the rest of us
--Aunties in your panties: What we can learn from the Big Girl Panty-Wearers who have gone before us
--Big girl Valentine panties: Plenty of romance revivers and passion primers
--Bodacious Beauty Britches: How to celebrate your unique gorgeousness

Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908

Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908 Review

In this highly original study, Gregory Downs argues that the most American of wars, the Civil War, created a seemingly un-American popular politics, rooted not in independence but in voluntary claims of dependence. Through an examination of the pleas and petitions of ordinary North Carolinians, Declarations of Dependence contends that the Civil War redirected, not destroyed, claims of dependence by exposing North Carolinians to the expansive but unsystematic power of Union and Confederate governments, and by loosening the legal ties that bound them to husbands, fathers, and masters.
Faced with anarchy during the long reconstruction of government authority, people turned fervently to the government for protection and sustenance, pleading in fantastic, intimate ways for attention. This personalistic, or what Downs calls patronal, politics allowed for appeals from subordinate groups like freed blacks and poor whites, and also bound people emotionally to newly expanding postwar states. Downs's argument rewrites the history of the relationship between Americans and their governments, showing the deep roots of dependence, the complex impact of the Civil War upon popular politics, and the powerful role of Progressivism and segregation in submerging a politics of dependence that--in new form--rose again in the New Deal and persists today.