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.
Level Up: Live Performance and Creative Process in Grime Music
1st Edition
By Alex de Lacey
November 28, 2024
Grime music has been central to British youth culture since the beginning of the 21st century. Performed by MCs and DJs, it is an Afrodiasporic form that developed on street corners, on pirate radio and at raves. Level Up: Live Performance and Creative Process in Grime Music offers the first ...
Bee Gees, Process and Latent Elements in Music Production
1st Edition
By Pat O’Grady
November 26, 2024
This book examines the creative process of the Bee Gees and the latent elements that shaped their sound. From their formative Australian work to the highs of their disco years and the scores of songs they wrote and produced for other artists, the Bee Gees’ catalogue is vast and varied. It is also ...
Electro Swing: Resurrection, Recontextualisation, and Remix
1st Edition
By Chris Inglis
October 08, 2024
Electro swing is a relatively recent musical style and scene which combines the music of the swing era with that of the age of electronic dance music. Chris Inglis considers key questions about electro swing’s place in contemporary society, including what it may mean for a contemporary genre to be ...
How to Make Music in an Epidemic: Popular Music Making During the AIDS Crisis, 1981-1996
1st Edition
By Matthew Jones
June 07, 2024
This volume examines responses to the epidemic of HIV/AIDS in Anglophone popular musicians and music video during the AIDS crisis (1981–1996). Through close reading of song lyrics, musical texts, and music videos, this book demonstrates how music played an integral part in the artistic-activist ...
Community-based Traditional Music in Scotland: A Pedagogy of Participation
1st Edition
By Josephine L. Miller
May 27, 2024
This book examines the community-based learning and teaching of ‘traditional’ music in contemporary Scotland, with implications for transnational theoretical issues. The book draws on a broad range of scholarship and a local case study of a large organisation. A historical perspective provides an ...
One-Track Mind: Capitalism, Technology, and the Art of the Pop Song
1st Edition
Edited
By Asif Siddiqi
May 27, 2024
The song remains the most basic unit of modern pop music. Shaped into being by historical forces—cultural, aesthetic, and technical—the song provides both performer and audience with a world marked off by a short, discrete, and temporally demarcated experience. One-Track Mind: Capitalism, ...
Paul Weller and Popular Music: Identity, Idiolect and Image
1st Edition
By Andrew West
May 27, 2024
Using research, analysis and a range of historical sources, Paul Weller and Popular Music immerses the reader in the excitement of Paul Weller’s unique creative journey, covering topics such as the artist’s position within his field; his creative processes; the contexts in which the music was made;...
The Genesis and Structure of the Hungarian Jazz Diaspora
1st Edition
By Ádám Havas
January 29, 2024
In Hungary, jazz was at the forefront of heated debates sparked by the racialised tensions between national music traditions and newly emerging forms of popular culture that challenged the prevailing status quo within the cultural hierarchies of different historical eras. Drawing on an ...
The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967-71: Lost in the Future
1st Edition
By Michael S. Begnal
May 31, 2023
The Stooges have come to be considered one of the most important rock bands, especially in regard to the formation of punk. By emphasizing their influence on later developments, however, critics tend to overlook the significance of the band in their own context and era. The Music and Noise of...
Studies in Maltese Popular Music
1st Edition
By Philip Ciantar
January 09, 2023
This book examines the diverse facets of popular music in Malta, paying special attention to għana (Malta’s folk song), the wind band tradition, and modern popular music. Ciantar provides intriguing discussions and examples of how popular music on this small Mediterranean island country interacts ...
The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume III, 1985-2015: From Live Aid to Live Nation
1st Edition
By Simon Frith, Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan, Emma Webster
January 09, 2023
To date there has been a significant gap in existing knowledge about the social history of music in Britain from 1950 to the present day. The three volumes of Live Music in Britain address this gap and do so through a unique prism—that of live music. The key theme of the books is the changing ...
Vibe Merchants: The Sound Creators of Jamaican Popular Music
1st Edition
By Ray Hitchins
August 29, 2022
Vibe Merchants offers an insider’s perspective on the development of Jamaican Popular Music, researched and analysed by a thirty-year veteran with a wide range of experience in performance, production and academic study. This rare perspective, derived from interviews and ethnographic methodologies,...