This is the first textbook on Pop Music to be written after the start of the iPod era. The book is organized in accessible sections which cover the main themes of research and teaching. It examines the key approaches to understanding popular music, the main settings of exchange and consumption, the role of technology in the production of popular music, the main genres of popular music, and the key debates of the present day. Barbazon writes with verve and penetration. Her approach starts with how most people actually consume music today and transfers this onto the plain of study. The organization of the material enables teachers and students to shuffle from one topic to the next. Yet the book provides an unparalleled network to the core library of concepts and issues in the field. As such, it is the perfect study guide for undergraduates located in this exciting and expanding field.

Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism begins by tracing the migration of cynical academic ideas about postmodernism into music journalism. The result has been a widespread fatalism over the presumed ability of the music industry to absorb any expression of defiance in hiphop and rock. Commercial "incorporation" supposedly makes a charade of musical outrage, somehow disconnecting anger in music from any meaning or significance. Author Neil Nehring documents the considerable damage done by the journalistic employment of this tenet of postmodern theory, particularly in the case of the late Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, whose emotional intensity was repeatedly belittled for its purported incoherence. As a rebuttal to academic postmodernism and its exploitation by the mass media, Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism emphasizes that emotion and reason are mutually interdependent. Though mistakes can occur in the conscious choice of an object at which to direct oneÆs feelings, the preverbal appraisal of social situations that generates emotions is always perfectly rational. Nehring also surveys work in literary criticism, psychology, and especially feminist philosophy that argues on the basis for the political significance of anger even prior to its full articulation. The emotional performance in popular music, he concludes, cannot be discounted on the grounds, for example, that lyrics such as CobainÆs are difficult to understand. After detailing more and less progressive approaches to emotion in music criticism, Nehring focuses on recent punk rock by women, including the Riot Grrrls.

Nearly 500 popular songs of 1996 are featured in this volume, which contains a lyricists and composers index, important performances index, and awards index.

Japanese popular culture has been steadily increasing in visibility both in Asia and beyond in recent years. This book examines Japanese popular music, exploring its historical development, technology, business and production aspects, audiences, and language and culture. Based both on extensive textual and aural analysis, and on anthropological fieldwork, it provides a wealth of detail, finding differences as well as similarities between the Japanese and Western pop music scenes. Carolyn Stevens shows how Japanese popular music has responded over time to Japan's relationship to the West in the post-war era, gradually growing in independence from the political and cultural hegemonic presence of America. Similarly, the volume explores the ways in which the Japanese artist has grown in independence vis-à-vis his/her role in the production process, and examines in detail the increasingly important role of the jimusho, or the entertainment management agency, where many individual artists and music industry professionals make decisions about how the product is delivered to the public. It also discusses the connections to Japanese television, film, print and internet, thereby providing through pop music a key to understanding much of Japanese popular culture more widely.

Now in an updated fourth edition, this popular A-Z student handbook provides a comprehensive survey of key ideas and concepts in popular music culture. With new and expanded entries on genres and subgenres, the text comprehensively examines the social and cultural aspects of popular music, taking into account the digital music revolution and changes in the way that music is manufactured, marketed and delivered. New and updated entries include: Age and youth Black music Digital music culture K-Pop Mash-ups Philadelphia Soul Pub music Religion and spirituality Remix Southern Soul Streaming Vinyl With further reading and listening included throughout, Popular Music: The Key Concepts is an essential reference text for all students studying the social and cultural dimensions of popular music.

Popular music in Japan has been under the overwhelming influence of American, Latin American and European popular music remarkably since 1945, when Japan was defeated in World War II. Beginning with gunka and enka at the turn of the century, tracing the birth of hit songs in the record industry in the years preceding the War, and ranging to the adoption of Western genres after the War--the rise of Japanese folk and rock, domestic exoticism as a new trend and J-Pop--Popular Music in Japan is a comprehensive discussion of the evolution of popular music in Japan. In eight revised and updated essays written in English by renowned Japanese scholar Toru Mitsui, this book tells the story of popular music in Japan since the late 19th century when Japan began positively embracing the West.

The historical significance of music-makers, music scenes, and music genres has long been mediated through academic and popular press publications such as magazines, films, and television documentaries. Media Narratives in Popular Music examines these various publications and questions how and why they are constructed. It considers the typically linear narratives that are based on simplifications, exaggerations, and omissions and the histories they construct - an approach that leads to totalizing “official” histories that reduce otherwise messy narratives to one-dimensional interpretations of a heroic and celebratory nature. This book questions the basis on which these mediated histories are constructed, highlights other, hidden, histories that have otherwise been neglected, and explores a range of topics including consumerism, the production pressure behind documentaries, punk fanzines, Rolling Stones covers, and more.