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Laurie Anderson's Big Science
"Shimmering in maximal minimalism, joyful bleakness, and bodiless intimacy, Laurie Anderson's Big Science diagnosed crises of meaning, scale, and identity in 1982. Decades later, the challenging and strange questions it poses loom even larger: How do we remain human when our identities are digitally distributed? Does technology bring us closer together or further apart? Can we experience the stillness of "now" when time is always moving? How do experiences become memories? This book attends closely to Anderson's artistic voice, detailing its unique capacities for ambiguity and revelation. It traces the sonic histories etched in the record's grooves, from the Cold War to a burning future, fro...
They Might Be Giants' Flood
For a few decades now, They Might Be Giants' album Flood has been a beacon (or at least a nightlight) for people who might rather read than rock out, who care more about science fiction than Slayer, who are more often called clever than cool. Neither the band's hip origins in the Lower East Side scene nor Flood's platinum certification can cover up the record's singular importance at the geek fringes of culture. Flood's significance to this audience helps us understand a certain way of being: it shows that geek identity doesn't depend on references to Hobbits or Spock ears, but can instead be a set of creative and interpretive practices marked by playful excess-a flood of ideas. The album also clarifies an historical moment. The brainy sort of kids who listened to They Might Be Giants saw their own cultural options grow explosively during the late 1980s and early 1990s amid the early tech boom and America's advancing leftist social tides. Whether or not it was the band's intention, Flood's jubilant proclamation of an identity unconcerned with coolness found an ideal audience at an ideal turning point. This book tells the story.
Assimilate
More extreme than punk, industrial music revolted against the very ideas of order and reason. This book traces industrial music's attitudes and practices from their earliest articulations-a hundred years ago-through the genre's mid-1970s formation and beyond.
“A Hero Will Endure”: Essays at the Twentieth Anniversary of 'Gladiator'
This volume adds to previous historical and political studies about 'Gladiator' with essays about the movie’s relation to pop culture and contemporary discourses. It not only relates 'Gladiator' to traditional cinema aspects such as heroism, music, acting, studio culture, and visual effects, but it also connects the film to sports, religion, and the environment, expanding the ways in which the film can be evaluated by modern audiences. The volume can be read by individuals or in classroom settings, especially as a recommended text for students studying the ancient world in film.
What Is Post-Punk?
Is post-punk a genre? Where did it come from? And what does it mean?
This is the Sound of Irony: Music, Politics and Popular Culture
The use of irony in music is just beginning to be defined and critiqued, although it has been used, implied and decried by composers, performers, listeners and critics for centuries. Irony in popular music is especially worthy of study because it is pervasive, even fundamental to the music, the business of making music and the politics of messaging. Contributors to this collection address a variety of musical ironies found in the ’notes themselves,’ in the text or subtext, and through performance, reception and criticism. The chapters explore the linkages between irony and the comic, the tragic, the remembered, the forgotten, the co-opted, and the resistant. From the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, through America, Europe and Asia, this provocative range of ironies course through issues of race, religion, class, the political left and right, country, punk, hip hop, folk, rock, easy listening, opera and the technologies that make possible our pop music experience. This interdisciplinary volume creates new methodologies and applies existing theories of irony to musical works that have made a cultural or political impact through the use of this most multifaceted of devices.
Goth Music
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 harsh distortion of goth industrial. Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture argues that within this variegated musical landscape a number of key consistencies exist. Not only do all these goth substyles share a number of musical and textual characteristics, but more importantly these aspects of the music are constitutive of goth social reality. Drawing on their own experiences in the European and American got...
Music, Narrative and the Moving Image
In extending the traditional field of Word and Music Studies to include research on film and other forms of moving visualizations, this volume focuses on innovative discussions of artistic works showing relationships between three individual communicative media. This trifocal, interdisciplinary perspective is reflected in seventeen essays that cover the historical space from the 19th to the 21st centuries and discuss a wide variety of individual genres in the represented media. These range from Parisian cabaret to ‘revolutionary’ Peking opera, from silent film to Holocaust narration, from documentary propaganda movies to opera film interludes, and more. The investigation of historical cases is broadened by reflections on theoretical and functional issues, primarily in film music, which show a remarkable breadth of technical and perceptual varieties. The essays here collected are of relevance to scholars and students of film studies, musicology, and literature, as well as readers generally interested in Intermediality Studies.
Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks
Country music of late 1960s and early 1970s was a powerful symbol of staunch conservative resistance to the flowering hippie counterculture. But in 1972, the city of Austin, Texas became host to a growing community of musicians, entrepreneurs, journalists, and fans who saw country music as a part of their collective heritage and sought to reclaim it for their own progressive scene. These children of the Cold War, post-World War II suburban migration, and the Baby Boom escaped the socially conservative world their parents had created, to instead create for themselves an idyllic rural Texan utopia. Progressive country music--a hybrid of country music and rock--played out the contradictions at ...
