While more than 80 percent of the world's commercial music is controlled by four multinational firms, most music is made and enjoyed in diverse situations divorced from such corporate behemoths. These fourteen original essays examine the fascinating world of "music scenes," those largely inconspicuous sites where clusters of musicians, producers, and fans explore their common musical tastes and distinctive lifestyle choices. Although most music scenes come and go with hardly a trace, they nevertheless give immense satisfaction to their participants, and a few - New York bop jazz, Merseybeat, Memphis rockabilly, London punk, Bronx hiphop - achieve fame and spur musical innovations. To date, serious study of the scenes phenomenon has focused mainly on specific music scenes while paying less attention to recurrent dynamics of scene life, such as how individuals construct and negotiate scenes to the various activities. This volume remedies that neglect. The editors distinguish between three types of scenes - local, translocal, and virtual - which provide the organizing framework for the essays. Aspects of local scenes, which are confined to specific areas, are explored through essays on Chicago blues, rave, karaoke, teen pop, and salsa. The section on translocal scenes, which involve the coming together of scattered local scenes around a particular type of music and lifestyle, includes articles on Riot Grrrls, goths, art music, and anarcho-punk. Aspects of virtual scenes, in which fans communicate via the internet, are illustrated using alternative country, the Canterbury sound, postrock, and Kate Bush fans. Also included is an essay that shows how the social conditions in places where jazz was made influenced that music's development.

What does it mean to be young in a changing world? How are migration, settlement and new urban cultures shaping young lives? And in particular, are race, place and class still meaningful to contemporary youth cultures? This path-breaking book shows how young people are responding differently to recent social, economic and cultural transformations. From the spirit of white localism deployed by de-industrialized football supporters, to the hybrid multicultural exchanges displayed by urban youth, young people are finding new ways of wrestling with questions of race and ethnicity. Through globalization is whiteness now being displaced by black culture -- in fashion, music and slang -- and if so, what impact is this having on race politics? Moreover, what happens to those people and places that are left behind by changes in late modernity? By developing a unique brand of spatial cultural studies, this book explores complex formations of race and class as they arise in the subtle textures of whiteness, respectability and youth subjectivity. This is the first book to look specifically at young ethnicities through the prism of local-global change. Eloquently written, its riveting ethnographic case studies and insider accounts will ensure that this book becomes a benchmark publication for writing on race in years to come.

This book examines music stores as sites of cultural production in contemporary India. Analyzing social practices of selling music in a variety of retail contexts, it focuses upon the economic and social values that are produced and circulated by music retailers in the marketplace. Based upon research conducted over a volatile ten-year period of the Indian music industry, Beaster-Jones discusses the cultural histories of the recording industry, the social changes that have accompanied India’s economic liberalization reforms, and the economic realities of selling music in India as digital circulation of music recordings gradually displaced physical distribution. The volume considers the mobilization of musical, economic, and social values as a component of branding discourses in neoliberal India, as a justification for new regimes of legitimate use and intellectual property, as a scene for the performance of cosmopolitanism by shopping, and as a site of anxiety about transformations in the marketplace. It relies upon ethnographic observation and interviews from a variety of sources within the Indian music industry, including perspectives of executives at music labels, family-run and corporate music stores, and hawkers in street markets selling counterfeit recordings. This ethnography of the practices, spaces, and anxieties of selling music in urban India will be an important resource for scholars in a wide range of fields, including ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music studies, and South Asian studies.

Popular music is a cultural form much rooted in space and place. This book interprets the meaning of music from a spatial perspective and, in doing so it furthers our understanding of broader social relations and trends, including identity, attachment to place, cultural economies, social activism and politics. The book's editors have brought together a team of scholars to discuss the latest innovative thinking on music and its geographies, illustrated with a fascinating range of case studies from the USA, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia and Great Britain.

Popular music is a cultural form much rooted in space and place. This book interprets the meaning of music from a spatial perspective and, in doing so it furthers our understanding of broader social relations and trends, including identity, attachment to place, cultural economies, social activism and politics. The book's editors have brought together a team of scholars to discuss the latest innovative thinking on music and its geographies, illustrated with a fascinating range of case studies from the USA, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia and Great Britain.

Global Jazz: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography that explores the global impact of jazz, detailing the evolution of the African American musical tradition as it has been absorbed, transformed, and expanded across the world’s historical, political, and social landscapes. With more than 1,300 annotated entries, this vast compilation covers a broad range of subjects, people, and geographic regions as they relate to interdisciplinary research in jazz studies. The result is a vivid demonstration of how cultures from every corner of the globe have situated jazz—often regarded as America’s classical music—within and beyond their own musical traditions, creating new artistic forms in the process. Global Jazz: A Research and Information Guide presents jazz as a common musical language in a global landscape of diverse artistic expression.

Ultimately, what really does it mean to be creative? How can we see ourselves as participating in the creativity of God for mission? All people are creative. Sadly, however, for many, creativity is stifled and remains stunted due to several reasons—social, economic, political, cultural, and even spiritual. This study explores how ICMs—indigenous cosmopolitan musicians—negotiate their creativity amid the liminal spaces they occupy as they share in the creativity of God for mission through their music. But what exactly does it mean to share in the creativity of God for mission? Contrary to popular notion, ICMs evidence that creativity is not merely innovation; it is not a psychological metric for measuring human potential; it is certainly not the “icing on the cake” reserved for a few so-called creatives or artists. Rather, “theological creativity” is participation in the creatio Dei; it is theologically prior to mission. As a missiological framework, creatio Dei is understood here in terms of creative being, creative construction (design), and creative performance. Hopefully, this book can help clarify and expand our understanding of what it means to be truly creative and, thereby, with the help of the Creator, put into practice principles of theological creativity as we share in the creativity of God in the world, with others.

Written specifically for students, this introductory textbook explores the history and meaning of rock and popular music. Roy Shuker's study provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the production, distribution, consumption and meaning of popular music and examines the difficulties and debates which surround the analysis of popular culture and popular music. This heavily revised and updated third edition includes: new case studies on the iPod, downloading, and copyright the impact of technologies, including on-line delivery and the debates over MP3 and Napster new chapters on music genres, cover songs and the album canon as well as music retail, radio and the charts case studies and lyrics of artists such as Robert Johnson, The Who, Fat Boy Slim and The Spice Girls a comprehensive discography, suggestions for further reading, listening and viewing and a directory of useful websites. With chapter related guides to further reading, listening and viewing, a glossary, and a timeline, this textbook is the ideal introduction for students.

Music after the Fall is the first book to survey contemporary Western art music within the transformed political, cultural, and technological environment of the post–Cold War era. In this book, Tim Rutherford-Johnson considers musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing connections with the other arts, in particular visual art and architecture, he expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Each chapter is a critical consideration of a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions, and develops a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from electroacoustic music studios in South America to ruined pianos in the Australian outback. Rutherford-Johnson puts forth a new approach to the study of contemporary music that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique than on the comparison of different responses to common themes of permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.

Throughout the history of popular music, the careers of many culturally significant artists and groups began on the small stages of local bars clubs, pubs, and discotheques. When the stories of The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and the New York punk hardcore and post punk scenes are told, iconic venues such as The Cavern, The Marquee and CBGB's serve as the settings of their early chapters Small live music venues such as these are pivotal in the narratives and history of popular music. However, very few of them survive. This book focusses on the role of small live music venues as incubators for emerging talent and social hubs for music scene participants. Such venues are grassroots spaces of cultural labor and production that often struggle with issues of financial precarity yet are fundamental to the live music ecology of a city, acting both as platforms for emergent performers and spaces of sociality for local music scenes.