The Routledge Handbook to the Popular Music Cover Song: Vivid Versions and Musica Subjectivities examines histories, contexts, and critical perceptions of cover song practices that manifest in mimetic homages, nuanced reinterpretations, or radical transformations. Aimed at exploring genre variations, gendered and intersectional expressions, political implications, and international dimensions, the analyses collectively interrogate the implicit and explicit meanings of popular musi...

This Handbook illustrates the many ways that progressive rock and metal music forge striking engagements with literary texts and themes.The authors and their objects of analytic inquiry offer global and diverse perspectives on these genres and their literary connections: from ancient times to the modern world, from children’s literature to epic poetry, from mythology to science fiction, and from esoteric fantasy to harsh political criticism. The musical treatments of these literary...

The Routledge Handbook to Metal Music Composition: Evolution of Structure, Expression, and Production examines metal music composition as a distinct practice that combines a complex array of formal musical, expressive, and technological elements. Reaching beyond the limitations of applying common-practice theories of tonality to metal, this volume brings together a wide range of established and emerging scholars to address the building blocks of metal composition in the context of...

Analyzing Recorded Music: Collected Perspectives on Popular Music Tracks is a collection of essays dedicated to the study of recorded popular music, with the aim of exploring "how the record shapes the song" (Moylan, Recording Analysis, 2020) from a variety of perspectives. Introduced with a Foreword by Paul Théberge, the distinguished editorial team has brought together a group of reputable international contributors to write about a rich collection of recordings.

Teachers the world over are discovering the importance and benefits of incorporating popular culture into the music classroom. The cultural prevalence and the students' familiarity with recorded music, videos, games, and other increasingly accessible multimedia materials help enliven course content and foster interactive learning and participation. Pop-Culture Pedagogy in the Music Classroom: Teaching Tools from American Idol to YouTube provides ideas and techniques for teaching music clas...

Disruptive Divas focuses on four female musicians: Tori Amos, Courtney Love, Me'Shell Ndegéocello and P. J. Harvey who have marked contemporary popular culture in unexpected ways have impelled and disturbed the boundaries of "acceptable" female musicianship.

Within popular music there are entire genres (jazz “standards”), styles (hip hop), techniques (sampling), and practices (covers) that rely heavily on references between music of different styles and genres. This interdisciplinary collection of essays covers a wide range of musical styles and artists to investigate intertextuality—the shaping of one text by another—in popular music. The Pop Palimpsest offers new methodologies and frameworks for the analysis of intertextuality in po...

This vivid ethnography of the musical lives of heavy metal, rock, and jazz musicians in Cleveland and Akron, Ohio shows how musicians engage with the world of sound to forge meaningful experiences of music. Unlike most popular music studies, which only provide a scholar's view, this book is based on intensive fieldwork and hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews. Rich descriptions of the musical life of metal bars and jazz clubs get readers close to the people who make and listen to the m...

During the last few decades, most cultural critics have come to agree that the division between "high" and "low" art is an artificial one, that Beethoven's Ninth and "Blue Suede Shoes" are equally valuable as cultural texts. In Who Needs Classical Music?, Julian Johnson challenges these assumptions about the relativism of cultural judgements. The author maintains that music is more than just "a matter of taste": while some music provides entertainment, or serves as background nois...

Classic sociological analyses of 'deviance' and rebellion; studies of technology; subcultural and feminist readings, semiotic and musicological essays and close readings of stars, bands and the fans themselves by Adorno, Barthes and other well-known contributors

Why does music move us? How do the immediate situation and larger social contexts influence the meanings that people find in stories, rituals, or films? How do people engage with the images and sounds of a performance to make them come alive in sensuous, lived experience? Exploring these questions, Stance presents a major new theory of emotion, style, and meaning for the study of expressive culture. In clear language, the book reveals dimensions of lived experience that everyone is aware o...

What is Literary Theory? What is the relationship between literature and culture? In fact, what is Literature, and does it matter? These are the sorts of questions addressed by Jonathan Culler in a book which steers a clear path through a subject often perceived to be impenetrable. It offers insights into theories about the nature of language and meaning, whether literature is a form of self-expression or a method of appeal to an audience, and outlines the ideas behind a number ofdifferent...