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The Many Lives of Andy Warhol is more than a biography: it’s a look into Warhol’s greatest creation: himself. Warhol was known as the king of pop art, but the famous artist was secretly never satisfied with a single style and his journey took him from graphic designs of shoes, women’s fashions and glamour magazines to owning and publishing his own film and gossip magazine, Interview. Stuart Lenig takes us behind the scenes to explore Warhol’s many innovations in the art world. Warhol was a titanic technician, making art from new techniques. His designs for Glamour and Vogue used a innovative blotted line technique for drawing and blotting the illustrations to make them appear printed...
Covering four decades of music history, this engaging book explores a genre of pop music that has been overlooked, under-reported, and ineffectively characterized—but which nevertheless remains immensely popular. The very qualities that made glam unusual and undervalued are now being reintroduced into our culture through video, music, and cyber and computer mediums, while artists such as Lady Gaga have made glam popular once more. Carefully explaining this misunderstood genre, The Twisted Tale of Glam Rock explores glam's attraction and the reasons it has endured. With the help of copious examples, the book covers the style from the pre-glam British invasion of 1964-69 through the classica...
Covering—the musical practice of one artist recording or performing another composer's song—has always been an attribute of popular music. In 2009, the internet database Second Hand Songs estimated that there are 40,000 songs with at least one cover version. Some of the more common variations of this "appropriationist" method of musical quotation include traditional forms such as patriotic anthems, religious hymns such as Amazing Grace, Muzak's instrumental interpretations, Christmas classics, and children's songs. Novelty and comedy collections from parodists such as Weird Al Yankovic also align in the cover category, as does the "larcenous art" of sampling, and technological variations...
How do reality television programs shape our view of the world and what we perceive as real and normal? This book explores the bizarre and highly controversial world of reality television, including its early history, wide variety of subject matter, and social implications. In recent decades, reality television shows ranging from Keeping up with the Kardashians to Duck Dynasty have become increasingly popular. Why are these "unscripted" programs irresistible to millions of viewers? And what does the nearly universal success of reality shows say about American culture? This book covers more than 100 major and influential reality programs past and present, discussing the origins and past of re...
A longstanding, successful and frequently controversial career spanning more than four decades establishes David Bowie as charged with contemporary cultural relevance. That David Bowie has influenced many lives is undeniable to his fans. He requisitions and challenges his audiences, through frequently indirect lyrics and images, to critically question sanity, identity and essentially what it means to be 'us' and why we are here. Enchanting David Bowie explores David Bowie as an anti-temporal figure and argues that we need to understand him across the many media platforms and art spaces he intersects with including theatre, film, television, the web, exhibition, installation, music, lyrics, video, and fashion. This exciting collection is organized according to the key themes of space, time, body, and memory - themes that literally and metaphorically address the key questions and intensities of his output.
Cover songs are a familiar feature of contemporary popular music. Musicians describe their own performances as covers, and audiences use the category to organize their listening and appreciation. However, until now philosophers have not had much to say about them. In A Philosophy of Cover Songs, P.D. Magnus demonstrates that philosophy provides a valuable toolbox for thinking about covers; in turn, the philosophy of cover songs illustrates some general points about philosophical method. Lucidly written, the book is divided into three parts: how to think about covers, appreciating covers, and the metaphysics of covers and songs. Along the way, it explores a range of issues raised by covers, from the question of what precisely constitutes a cover, to the history and taxonomy of the category, the various relationships that hold between songs, performances, and tracks, and the appreciation and evaluation of covers. This unique and engaging book will be of interest to those working in philosophy of art, philosophy of music, popular music studies, music history, and musicology, as well as to readers with a general interest in popular music, covers, and how we think about them.
Punk Rock examines the history of punk rock in its totality. Punk became a way of thinking about the role of culture and community in modern life. Punks forged real alternatives to producing popular music and built community around their music. This punk counterpublic, forged in the late Cold War period, spanned the globe and has provided a viable cultural alternative to alienated young people over the years. This book starts with the rise of modernity and places the emergence of punk as a musical subculture into that longer historical narrative. It also reveals how punk itself became a contested terrain, as participants sought to imbue the production of music with greater meaning. It highlights all styles of punk and its wide variety of creators around the world, including from the LGBTQ+, feminist, and alternative communities. Punk was and remains a transnational phenomenon that influences music production and shapes our understanding of culture’s role in community building.
This book is the first to explore style and spectacle in glam popular music performance from the 1970s to the present day, and from an international perspective. Focus is given to a number of representative artists, bands, and movements, as well as national, regional, and cultural contexts from around the globe. Approaching glam music performance and style broadly, and using the glam/glitter rock genre of the early 1970s as a foundation for case studies and comparisons, the volume engages with subjects that help in defining the glam phenomenon in its many manifestations and contexts. Glam rock, in its original, term-defining inception, had its birth in the UK in 1970/71, and featured at its ...
This book focuses on the human aspects of wearable technologies and game design, which are often neglected. It shows how user centered practices can optimize wearable experience, thus improving user acceptance, satisfaction and engagement towards novel wearable gadgets. It describes both research and best practices in the applications of human factors and ergonomics to sensors, wearable technologies and game design innovations, as well as results obtained upon integration of the wearability principles identified by various researchers for aesthetics, affordance, comfort, contextual-awareness, customization, ease of use, ergonomy, intuitiveness, obtrusiveness, information overload, privacy, reliability, responsiveness, satisfaction, subtlety, user friendliness and wearability. The book is based on the AHFE 2018 Conference on Human Factors and Wearable Technologies and the AHFE 2018 Conference on Human Factors in Game Design and Virtual Environments , held on July 21–25, 2018 in Orlando, Florida, and addresses professionals, researchers, and students dealing with the human aspects of wearable, smart and/or interactive technologies and game design research.