Routledge Studies in Popular Music
About the Book Series
This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections covering Popular Music. Considering music performance, theory, and culture alongside topics such as gender, race, celebrity, fandom, tourism, fashion, and technology, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
Britishness, Popular Music, and National Identity: The Making of Modern Britain
1st Edition
By Irene Morra
October 14, 2024
This book offers a major exploration of the social and cultural importance of popular music to contemporary celebrations of Britishness. Rather than providing a history of popular music or an itemization of indigenous musical qualities, it exposes the influential cultural and nationalist rhetoric ...
The Places of Van Morrison’s Songwriting: Venturing in the Slipstream
1st Edition
By Geoff Munns
August 26, 2024
What can we learn about Van Morrison’s life and work as a songwriter through his songs? This book looks closely at the lyrics and music from a selection of his songs. Some are very well-known - ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, ‘Cleaning Windows’ and ‘The Healing Game’. Others are less familiar. Through these ...
Peak Music Experiences: A New Perspective on Popular music, Identity and Scenes
1st Edition
By Ben Green
May 31, 2023
Peak music experiences are a recurring feature of popular music journalism, biography and fan culture, where they are often credited as pivotal in people’s relationships with music and in their lives more generally. Ben Green investigates the phenomenon from a social and cultural perspective, ...
Reading Smile: History, Myth and American Identity in Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks’ Long-Lost Album
1st Edition
By Dale Carter
January 09, 2023
First conceived in 1966 but only completed in 2004, Brian Wilson Presents Smile has been called "the best-known unreleased album in pop music history" and "an American Sergeant Pepper." Reading Smile offers a close analysis of the recording in its social, cultural and historical contexts. It ...
Radiohead and the Journey Beyond Genre: Analysing Stylistic Debates and Transgressions
1st Edition
By Julia Ehmann
June 30, 2021
Radiohead and the Journey Beyond Genre traces the uses and transgressions of genre in the music of Radiohead and studies the band’s varied reception in online and offline media. Radiohead’s work combines traditional rock sounds with a unique and experimental approach towards genre that sets the ...
Aging and Popular Music in Europe
1st Edition
By Abigail Gardner, Ros Jennings
March 31, 2021
Opening up the dialogue between popular music studies and aging studies, this book offers a major exploration of age and popular music across Europe. Using a variety of methods to illustrate how age within popular music is contingent and compelling, the volume explores how it provokes curation and ...
Metal, Rap, and Electro in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia: A Fragile Underground
1st Edition
By Stefano Barone
December 18, 2020
Metal, Rap, and Electro in Tunisia is a trip into the music scenes of Tunisia after the Arab Springs. Based on extensive field research, the book explores the social life of heavy metal, rap, and electronic music in a North African country whose mass revolution of 2010/2011 led the way to a ...
Sites of Popular Music Heritage: Memories, Histories, Places
1st Edition
Edited
By Sara Cohen, Robert Knifton, Marion Leonard, Les Roberts
September 30, 2020
This volume examines the location of memories and histories of popular music and its multiple pasts, exploring the different ‘places’ in which popular music can be situated, including the local physical site, the museum storeroom and exhibition space, and the digitized archive and display space ...
Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture
1st Edition
By Isabella van Elferen, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
August 14, 2020
Is "goth music" a genre, and if so, how does it relate to the goth subculture? The music played at goth club nights and festivals encompasses a broad range of musical substyles, from gloomy Batcave reverberations to neo-medieval bagpipe drones and from the lush vocals of goth metal to the ...
Popular Music Industries and the State: Policy Notes
1st Edition
By Shane Homan, Martin Cloonan, Jennifer Cattermole
August 14, 2020
This volume studies the relationships between government and the popular music industries, comparing three Anglophone nations: Scotland, New Zealand and Australia. At a time when issues of globalization and locality are seldom out of the news, musicians, fans, governments, and industries are forced...
Queerness in Pop Music: Aesthetics, Gender Norms, and Temporality
1st Edition
By Stan Hawkins
June 30, 2020
This book investigates the phenomenon of queering in popular music and video, interpreting the music of numerous pop artists, styles, and idioms. The focus falls on artists, such as Lady Gaga, Madonna, Boy George, Diana Ross, Rufus Wainwright, David Bowie, Azealia Banks, Zebra Katz, Freddie Mercury...
Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music: Theory and Politics of Ambiguity
1st Edition
Edited
By Gavin Lee
June 30, 2020
In studies of gender and sexuality in popular music, the concept of difference is often a crucial analytic used to detect social agency; however, the alternative analytic of ambiguity has never been systematically examined. While difference from heterosexual norms is taken to be the multivalent ...