Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series
About the Book Series
Popular musicology embraces the field of musicological study that engages with popular forms of music, especially music associated with commerce, entertainment and leisure activities. The Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series aims to present the best research in this field. Authors are concerned with criticism and analysis of the music itself, as well as locating musical practices, values and meanings in cultural context. The focus of the series is on popular music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a remit to encompass the entirety of the world’s popular music.
Critical and analytical tools employed in the study of popular music are being continually developed and refined in the twenty-first century. Perspectives on the transcultural and intercultural uses of popular music have enriched understanding of social context, reception and subject position. Popular genres as distinct as reggae, township, bhangra, and flamenco are features of a shrinking, transnational world. The series recognizes and addresses the emergence of mixed genres and new global fusions, and utilizes a wide range of theoretical models drawn from anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, media studies, semiotics, postcolonial studies, feminism, gender studies and queer studies.
Women and Femme Voices in Metal Music, Culture, and Scholarship: Feminist Strategies of Resistance
1st Edition
Edited
By Jasmine Hazel Shadrack, Francesca Stevens
April 24, 2026
Where are the women and femmes in metal music, culture, and scholarship? What are the modes of address and engagement when, as Laina Dawes stated, ‘you love a music form that doesn’t love you back’? This interdisciplinary edited collection focuses on centring women and femme voices in metal music, ...
Nordic Noise: Hip-Hop, Culture, and Community in Northern Europe
1st Edition
Edited
By Susan Lindholm, Kristine Ringsager
January 22, 2026
Based on empirical research on hip-hop cultures, scenes, and artists in the Nordic countries, this book provides new perspectives on how hip-hop has been intertwined with wider societal and political contexts and discussions. Hip-hop started to emerge in the Nordic countries, such as Denmark, ...
Interrogating Popular Music and the City
1st Edition
Edited
By Shane Homan, Catherine Strong, Seamus O'Hanlon, John Tebbutt
December 26, 2025
How does popular music influence the culture and reputation of a city, and what does a city do to popular music? Interrogating Popular Music and the City examines the ways in which urban environments and music cultures intersect in various locales around the globe. Music and cities have been ...
Pub Rock in the UK and Australia: From the 1970s to the Twenty-First Century
1st Edition
Edited
By Andy Bennett, Jon Stratton
November 20, 2025
This book critically examines two versions of the genre identified as pub rock as they evolved in the UK and Australia. Both developed in the communal spaces of pubs and both had their heyday in the mid‑ to‑late 1970s. Indeed, the two have so much in common that AC/DC, sometimes thought of as the ...
The Language of Music: Minority Languages in Popular Music
1st Edition
Edited
By Gareth R. Schott
September 23, 2025
This collection delves into the politics of language choice when composing and performing popular music in punk, metal, Hip-Hop and rap and provides fascinating examples of language change, resistance, reclamation and revitalisation from across the globe, giving readers insights into the work of ...
The Vinyl Revival, Gender, and Collecting Aesthetics
1st Edition
By Veronica Skrimsjö
September 08, 2025
The book explores record collecting and vinyl consumption in the 21st century within the context of the vinyl revival. The book highlights gender, and how gender disparity is expressed in vinyl communities. Veronica Skrimsjö considers vinyl consumerism and collecting and how the collector ...
The Beatles and Vocal Expression
1st Edition
By Bláithín Duggan
July 31, 2025
The Beatles and Vocal Expression examines popular song through the topic of paralanguage – a sub-category of nonverbal communication that addresses characteristics of speech that modify meaning and convey emotion. It responds to the general consensus regarding the limitations of Western art music ...
Black British Music in America, 1967–2000: Atlantic Crossover
1st Edition
By Mike Alleyne
March 11, 2025
Black British Music in America 1967–2000: Atlantic Crossover historically examines musical and cultural relationships through popular music recordings, exploring the transatlantic journeys via academic, critical, and commercial reception of the music. It addresses an overlooked area of Black ...
Popular Music in Spanish Cinema
1st Edition
Edited
By Lidia López Gómez
January 30, 2025
Popular Music in Spanish Cinema analyses the aesthetics and stylistic development of soundtracks from national productions, considering how political instability and cultural diversity in Spain determined the ways of making art and managing culture. As a pioneering study in this field, the ...
Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask
2nd Edition
By Harriet J. Manning
December 18, 2024
Michael Jackson challenged the power structure of the American music industry and struck at the heart of blackface minstrelsy, America’s first form of mass entertainment. The response was a derisive caricature that over time Jackson subverted through his art. In this expanded, all-new edition, ...
Musical Psychedelia: Research at the Intersection of Music and Psychedelic Experience
1st Edition
Edited
By Gemma L. Farrell
December 18, 2024
Psychedelic music is a fascinating yet under-researched field of study. This thought-provoking collection offers a broad introduction to the field of psychedelic music studies, bringing together scholarly work on psychedelic music in genres like rock, folk, electronic dance music and pop. Through ...
The Evolution of Chinese Popular Music: Modernization and Globalization, 1927 to the Present
1st Edition
By Ya-Hui Cheng
December 18, 2024
Ya-Hui Cheng examines the emergence of popular music genres – jazz, rock, and hip-hop – in Chinese society, covering the social underpinnings that shaped the development of popular music in China and Taiwan, from imperialism to westernization and from modernization to globalization. The political ...