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Software mediates a great deal of human musical activity. The writing, running, and maintenance of code lies at the heart of such software. Code Musicology: From Hardwired to Software argues why it is time for a “code musicology,” then outlines what that should entail. A code musicology opens a conduit between musicology and software studies, providing insights into both of these now interlinked fields along the way. It extends an ethnomusicology of technoculture from the world of hardware and the hardwired to software, code, and algorithms. For popular music studies, it helps direct attention to a newly relevant industrial focus—IT and software-centered transnational commerce—as a r...
An autobiography by Henry 'Seaman' Dan, which explores his working life as musician, pearl-shell diver, boat skipper, drover, prospector and taxi driver.
The untimely deaths of Amy Winehouse (2011) and Whitney Houston (2012), and the ’resurrection’ of Tupac Shakur for a performance at the Coachella music festival in April 2012, have focused the media spotlight on the relationship between popular music, fame and death. If the phrase ’sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’ ever qualified a lifestyle, it has left many casualties in its wake, and with the ranks of dead musicians growing over time, so the types of death involved and the reactions to them have diversified. Conversely, as many artists who fronted the rock’n’roll revolution of the 1950s and 1960s continue to age, the idea of dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse (which gave...
Homesick Blues explores how artists, fans, amateur practitioners, and others have used music to tell stories of everyday life in Japan from the late 1940s to 2018, a practice that author Scott Aalgaard calls “musical storytelling.” At its core, musical storytelling is a political practice, presenting world-producing potentials as social actors generate and share stories of themselves and others in ways that intersect with and inform social and political life. Sometimes, musical storytelling is used by powerful entities to reinforce dominant geopolitical, cultural, or economic visions. More often, it is deployed as a means of interfering in or redirecting those visions. In all cases, atte...
Music videos are available on more channels, in more formats, and in more countries than ever before. While MTV—the network that introduced music video to most viewers—is moving away from music video programming, other media developments signal the longevity and dynamism of the form. Among these are the proliferation of niche-based cable and satellite channels, the globalization of music video production and programming, and the availability of videos not just on television but also via cell phones, DVDs, enhanced CDs, PDAs, and the Internet. In the context of this transformed media landscape, Medium Cool showcases a new generation of scholarship on music video. Scholars of film, media, ...
Pandemic Playlist: An Exploration of COVID-inspired Popular Music takes readers back to 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the music industry. Focusing on those artists who responded directly to the pandemic with their music, Kevin Farrell explores a selection of songs written and recorded about COVID-19. These songs range from the hilariously tongue-in-cheek to the painfully earnest to the self-righteously angry, coming from musicians obscure, world famous, and up-and-coming. Farrell argues that these songs, both originals and repurposed covers, are best classified by rhetorical approach, rather than musical style, identifying four basic categories of COVID-inspired popular m...
In Composing for the Revolution: Nie Er and China’s Sonic Nationalism, Joshua Howard explores the role the songwriter Nie Er played in the 1930s proletarian arts movement and the process by which he became a nationalist icon. Composed only months before his untimely death in 1935, Nie Er’s last song, the “March of the Volunteers,” captured the rising anti-Japanese sentiment and was selected as China’s national anthem with the establishment of the People’s Republic. Nie was quickly canonized after his death and later recast into the “People’s Musician” during the 1950s, effectively becoming a national monument. Howard engages two historical paradigms that have dominated the ...
From Björn Again to the Illegal Eagles, from Black Stabbath to the Essex Pistols and the Bootleg Beatles, tribute bands comprise a significant sector of many national music scenes. Access All Eras is the first book to examine the tribute and cover band phenomenon and its place within the global popular music industry. The ability of tributes to reinforce or challenge the very idea of stardom is explored through studies of imitations of various iconic pop and rock performers, including Elvis, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, ABBA and the Beach Boys. Analysis of such tribute acts can tell us much about how the meanings of performers and performance circulate globally, and are resisted or accommodat...
Traces the role of song and dance in the societies of Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands.
Much has been written about Papua New Guinea over the last century and too often in ways that legitimated or served colonial interests through highly pejorative and racist descriptions of Papua New Guineans. Paying special attention to early travel literature, works of fiction, and colonial reports, laws, and legislation, Regis Tove Stella reveals the complex and persistent network of discursive strategies deployed to subjugate the land and its people.