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.
Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence
1st Edition
By Bruce Johnson, Martin Cloonan
September 28, 2009
Written against the academically dominant but simplistic romanticization of popular music as a positive force, this book focuses on the 'dark side' of the subject. It is a pioneering examination of the ways in which popular music has been deployed in association with violence, ranging from what ...
Genesis and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
1st Edition
By Kevin Holm-Hudson
November 21, 2008
In 1974 the British progressive rock group Genesis released their double concept album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The story was described by Genesis's then front-man Peter Gabriel as a 'moral fable' about Rael, a half-Puerto-Rican New York City street tough who is engulfed by a solid cloud ...
Kate Bush and Hounds of Love
1st Edition
By Ron Moy
September 28, 2007
Kate Bush is widely respected as one of the most unique solo female performers to have ever emerged in the field of popular music. She has achieved that rare combination of great commercial success and critical acclaim, with Hounds of Love considered widely to be her masterpiece. The album ...
A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest
1st Edition
Edited
By Robert Deam Tobin, Ivan Raykoff
July 28, 2007
The world's largest and longest-running song competition, the Eurovision Song Contest is a significant and extremely popular media event throughout the continent and abroad. The Contest is broadcast live in over 30 countries with over 100 million viewers annually. Established in 1956 as a televised...
European Film Music
1st Edition
Edited
By Miguel Mera, David Burnand
September 28, 2006
The vast majority of writing on film music is concentrated on Hollywood in particular and on a canon of North American scores and films more generally. Recent scholarship acknowledges other traditions of film scoring but little has been written about European film music specifically. Miguel Mera ...
White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock
1st Edition
By Matthew Bannister
September 22, 2006
To what extent do indie masculinities challenge the historical construction of rock music as patriarchal? This key question is addressed by Matthew Bannister, involving an in-depth examination of indie guitar rock in the 1980s as the culturally and historically specific production of white men. ...
The Resisting Muse: Popular Music and Social Protest
1st Edition
Edited
By Ian Peddie
April 28, 2006
Popular music has traditionally served as a rallying point for voices of opposition, across a huge variety of genres. This volume examines the various ways popular music has been deployed as anti-establishment and how such opposition both influences and responds to the music produced. Implicit in ...
Performance and Popular Music: History, Place and Time
1st Edition
Edited
By Ian Inglis
February 28, 2006
Since the emergence of rock'n'roll in the early 1950s, there have been a number of live musical performances that were not only memorable in themselves, but became hugely influential in the way they shaped the subsequent trajectory and development of popular music. Each, in its own way, introduced ...
The Music and Art of Radiohead
1st Edition
Edited
By Joseph Tate
April 28, 2005
The Music and Art of Radiohead provides compelling close readings of the English band's music, lyrics, album cover art and music videos as well as critical commentary on interviews, reviews and the documentary film Meeting People is Easy. Established and emerging academic scholars engage with ...
Madonna's Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to her Cultural Transformations, 1983–2003
1st Edition
By Santiago Fouz-Hernández, Freya Jarman-Ivens
July 20, 2004
Madonna is perhaps one of the most consistently transgressive and self-transforming artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The recent release of two critically acclaimed and best-selling albums and a sold-out world tour have renewed media and academic interest in the artist. Madonna ...
Remembering Woodstock
1st Edition
Edited
By Andy Bennett
June 17, 2004
The Woodstock festival of 1969, which featured such groups and artists as the Who, Country Joe and the Fish, Ten Years After, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, is remembered as much for its 'bringing together' of the counter-cultural generation as for the music performed. The event represented a ...
The English Traditional Ballad: Theory, Method, and Practice
1st Edition
By David Atkinson
August 21, 2002
Ballads are a fascinating subject of study not least because of their endless variety. It is quite remarkable that ballads taken down or recorded from singers separated by centuries in time and by hundreds of kilometres in distance, should be both different and yet recognizably the same. In The ...