This book presents a linear track-by-track musical analysis of Kate Bush's albums released between 1978 and 2005. It focuses on the 1985 album Hounds of Love and explores several important critical issues raised by the artist's work and position as a solo, female artist in an industry.

An accessible introduction to the study of popular music, this book takes a schematic approach to a range of popular music genres, and examines them in terms of their antecedents, histories, visual aesthetics, and sociopolitical contexts. Within this interdisciplinary and genre-based focus, readers will gain insights into the relationships between popular music, cultural history, economics, politics, iconography, production techniques, technology, marketing, and musical structure.

Authorship Roles in Popular Music applies the critical concept of auteur theory to popular music via different aspects of production and creativity. Through critical analysis of the music itself, this book contextualizes key concepts of authorship relating to gender, race, technology, originality, uniqueness, and genius and raises important questions about the cultural constructions of authenticity, value, class, nationality, and genre. Using a range of case studies as examples, i...

This book features written work by graduate students in popular music studies.

“...achieves the difficult feat of capturing the multiple layers of Abba...with a deftness unusual in a rock biography.” Sunday Times As generations of new fans discover ABBA’s timeless music, Frida, Agnetha, Benny and Björn remain rather shadowy, secretive figures. Their marriages, personal break-ups and superficial biographical details are well known…but who exactly are ABBA? How did Norwegian orphan Anni-Frid become a real-life princess? How did Benny and Björn b...

'An exquisite portrait' MOJO'A riveting account of the golden-boy genius' EVENING STANDARDNick Drake was barely twenty-six years old when he died in 1974, but in his short lifetime he recorded three albums that are now recognised as classics: Five Leaves Left, Bryter Later and Pink Moon.Several decades after his death, he has amassed a huge following; his haunting songs cast a pervasive influence over the contempor...

Think "Woodstock" and the mind turns to the seminal 1969 festival that crowned a seismic decade of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. But the town of Woodstock, New York, the original planned venue of the concert, is located over 60 miles from the site to which the fabled half a million flocked. Long before the landmark music festival usurped the name, Woodstock-the tiny Catskills town where Bob Dylan holed up after his infamous 1966 motorcycle accident-was already a key location in the '60s r...

W - Sweeney called me and said that Johnny Cash just recorded ' I See A Darkness .' We had a Bowery Ballroom show a week or two later, and he invited Rick Rubin to come to the show; he came to the show . . . and asked if I wanted to play piano on the song.A - Which you agreed to do despite not knowing how to play piano.W - Yes . . .A man who acts under the name Will Oldham and a singer-songwriter who performs under the name Bonnie...

One of the most tangible aftershocks of Punk was its urgency to prompt individuals into action. Document your reality: do it yourself. From this, a generation of young men were inspired and, with often zero financial planning or business sense, in a bedroom, garage or shed, labels such as Factory, Rough Trade, Mute, 4AD, Beggars Banquet, Warp, Domino and Creation began, shifting the musical landscape and trading on an ethos and identity no brand consultant would now dare dream of. Musician...

From 1987 to 1995, Bristol, England's Sarah Records was a modest underground success and, for the most part, a critical laughingstock in its native country-sneeringly dismissed as the sad, final repository for a fringe style of music (variously referred to as “indie-pop,” “C86,” “cutie” and “twee”) whose moment had passed. Yet now, more than 20 years after its founders symbolically “destroyed” it, Sarah is among the most passionately fetishized record labels of all time. Its rare releases ...

Dangerous is Michael Jackson's coming of age album. Granted, that's a bold claim to make given that many think his best work lay behind him by the time this record was made. It offers Jackson on a threshold, at long last embracing adulthood-politically questioning, sexually charged-yet unable to convince a skeptical public who had, by this time, been wholly indoctrinated by a vicious media. Even though the record sold well, few understood or were willing to accept the depth and br...

The story of Malcolm McLaren is the story of England in the last half century. Expelled from a string of art colleges, he met and fell in love with designer Vivienne Westwood. They became the Bonnie and Clyde of punk as they set out to turn the fashion world upside down with their Kings Road boutique SEX and its eye-popping creations.It was also the birthplace of the Sex Pistols and in 26 short months blew the music business apart. McLaren masterminded it all: discovering lead singer John ...