Popular Music and the Politics of Hope PDF Download

Author: Susan Fast
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351677810
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In today’s culture, popular music is a vital site where ideas about gender and sexuality are imagined and disseminated. Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions explores what that means with a wide-ranging collection of chapters that consider the many ways in which contemporary pop music performances of gender and sexuality are politically engaged and even radical. With analyses rooted in feminist and queer thought, contributors explore music from different genres and locations, including Beyoncé’s Lemonade, A Tribe Called Red’s We Are the Halluci Nation, and celebrations of Vera Lynn’s 100th Birthday. At a bleak moment in global politics, this collection focuses on the concept of critical hope: the chapters consider making and consuming popular music as activities that encourage individuals to imagine and work toward a better, more just world. Addressing race, class, aging, disability, and colonialism along with gender and sexuality, the authors articulate the diverse ways popular music can contribute to the collective political projects of queerness and feminism. With voices from senior and emerging scholars, this volume offers a snapshot of today’s queer and feminist scholarship on popular music that is an essential read for students and scholars of music and cultural studies.

Author: Pete Dale
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501307053
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Popular music, today, has supposedly collapsed into a 'retromania' which, according to leading critic Simon Reynolds, has brought a 'slow and steady fading of the artistic imperative to be original.' Meanwhile, in the estimation of philosopher Alain Badiou, a significant political event will always require 'the dictatorial power of a creation ex nihilo'. Everywhere, it seems, at least amongst commentators of a certain age and type, pessimism prevails with regards to the predominant aesthetic preferences of the twenty first century: popular music, supposedly, is in a rut. Yet when, if ever, did the political engagement kindled by popular music amount to more than it does today? The sixties? The punk explosion of the late 1970s? Despite an on-going fixation upon these periods in much rock journalism and academic writing, this book demonstrates that the utilisation of popular music to promote political causes, on the one hand, and the expression of dissent through the medium of 'popular song', on the other hand, remain widely in practice today. This is not to argue, however, for complacency with regards to the need for expressions of political dissent through popular culture. Rather, the book looks carefully at actual usages of popular music in political processes, as well as expressions of political feeling through song, and argues that there is much to encourage us to think that the demand for radical change remains in circulation. The question is, though, how necessary is it for politically-motivated popular music to offer aesthetic novelty?

Author: Samuel Craig Watkins
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807009826
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Avoiding the easy definitions and caricatures that tend to celebrate or condemn the hip hop generation, Hip Hop Matters focuses on the fierce and far-reaching battles being waged in politics, pop culture, and academe to assert greater control over the movement. At stake, Watkins argues, is the impact hip hop will have in the lives of the young people who live and breathe the culture. The story unfolds through revealing profiles, looking at such players as Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, widely recognized as Americas first hip-hop mayor; Chuck D, the self-described -rebel without a pause- who championed the Internet as a way to keep socially relevant rap music alive; and young activists who represent hip hops insurgent voice. Watkins also presents incisive analysis of the corporate takeover of hip hop; the cultures march into Americas colleges and universities; and the rampant misogyny that undermines the movements progressive claims.Ultimately, we see how the struggle for hip hop reverberates with a larger world: global media consolidation and conglomeration; racial and demographic flux; generational cleavages; the reinvention of the pop music industry; and the ongoing struggle to enrich the lives of ordinary youth.

Author: Catherine Hoad
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000556654
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The political has always been part of popular music, but how does that play out in today’s musical and political landscape? Mixing Pop and Politics: Political Dimensions of Popular Music in the 21st Century provides an innovative exploration of the complex politics of popular music in its contemporary formations. Amid the shifting paradigms of power in the 2020s, the chapters in this book go beyond the idea of popular music as protest to explore how resistance, subversion, containment, and reconciliation all interact in the popular music realm. Covering a wide range of international artists and genres, from South African hip-hop to Polish punk, and addressing topics such as climate change and environmentalism, feminism, diasporic identity, political parties, music-making as labour, the far right, conservatism and nostalgia, and civic engagement, the contributors expand our understanding of how popular music is political. For students and scholars of music, popular culture, and politics, the volume offers a broad, exciting snapshot of the latest scholarship on contemporary popular music and politics.

Author: Ann Werner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501368516
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
What does it mean, in a polarized political climate, that feminism was popular in mainstream popular music of the 2010s? Engaging with feminist theory and previous research about gender and music, this book investigates the meaning of current trends relating to gender, feminism and woman-identified artists in mediated popular music. The examples discussed throughout the book include Netflix documentaries by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, the Swedish music industry #MeToo petition #närmusikentystnar, music streaming services' gender equality work and the project Keychange striving to bring underrepresented genders to the stage. The volume discusses the media specificity of the different examples, introduces and explains feminist theories and concepts and analyzes the position of women, gender politics and feminisms in popular music.

Author: Dale A. Olsen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135858500
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Based on the author’s research in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, and other urban areas in Vietnam, this study of contemporary Vietnamese popular music explores the ways globalization and free market economics have influenced the music and subcultures of Vietnamese youth, focusing on the conflict between the politics of remembering, nurtured by the Vietnamese Communist government, and the politics of forgetting driven by the capitalist interests of the music industry. Vietnamese youth at the end of the second and beginning of the third millennium are influenced by the challenges generated by a number of seemingly opposite ideologies and realities, such as "the past" versus "the present," socialism versus capitalism, and cultural traditionalism versus globalization. Vietnam has undergone a radical demographic shift with a very pronounced youth movement, and consequently, Vietnamese popular culture has been radically reshaped by a young population coming of age in the twenty-first century. As Olsen reveals, the way Vietnamese young people cope with these opposing and contrasting forces is often expressed in their active and passive music making.

Author: Harry Morgan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009232290
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Music was everywhere in ancient Rome. Wherever one went in the sprawling city, the sound of singing and piping, drumming and strumming was never far out of earshot. This book examines the role of music in Roman politics and society, focusing on the period from the Roman conquest of Greece in the second century BCE to the end of the reign of Nero in 68 CE. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts, inscriptions and material artefacts, Harry Morgan uncovers the tensions between elite and popular attitudes towards music and shows how music was exploited as a tool by political leaders and emperors. Far from being a marginal aspect of daily life, music was fundamental to Roman political culture and social relations, shaping debates about class, gender and ethnicity. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of ancient music and Roman history.

Author: Neil Nehring
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1506339204
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
The migration of cynical academic ideas about postmodernism into music journalism are traced in this book. The result of this migration is a widespread fatalism over the ability of the music industry to absorb any expression of defiance in popular music. The book synthesizes a number of fields: American and British academic and journalistic music criticism; aesthetic and literary history and theory from romanticism through postmodernism; alternative music such as feminist punk and grunge; political economy, which has fueled the obsession with commercial incorporation; and subcultural sociology.

Author: John Street
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745635431
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
"This book examines music's political power. It shows how music has been at the heart of accounts of political order, how musicians from Bono to Blue have claimed to speak for peoples and political causes. It looks at the emergence of music as an object of public policy, in the classroom or in the copyright courts, as the focus of national pride or employment opportunities. The book brings together ideas about music's political significance (from Aristotle to Rousseau, to Adorno and beyond) to tell of the extraordinary potency of music across time and space. At its heart lies the argument that music and politics are inseparably linked, and that each animates the other"--Back cover.

Author: Lee Marshall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317078039
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Simon Frith has been one of the most important figures in the emergence and subsequent development of popular music studies. From his earliest academic publication, The Sociology of Rock (1978), through to his recent work on the live music industry in the UK, in his desire to ’take popular music seriously’ he has probably been cited more than any other author in the field. Uniquely, he has combined this work with a lengthy career as a music critic for leading publications on both sides of the Atlantic. The contributions to this volume of essays and memoirs seek to honour Frith’s achievements, but they are not merely ’about Frith’. Rather, they are important interventions by leading scholars in the field, including Robert Christgau, Antoine Hennion, Peter J. Martin and Philip Tagg. The focus on ’sociology and industry’ and ’aesthetics and values’ reflect major themes in Frith’s own work, which can also be found within popular music studies more generally. As such the volume will become an essential resource for those working in popular music studies, as well as in musicology, sociology and cultural and media studies.