Subversive Sounds probes New Orleans’s history, uncovering a web of racial interconnections and animosities that was instrumental to the creation of a vital American art form—jazz. Drawing on oral histories, police reports, newspaper accounts, and vintage recordings, Charles Hersch brings to vivid life the neighborhoods and nightspots where jazz was born. This volume shows how musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Nick La Rocca, and Louis Armstrong negotiated New Orleans’s complex racial rules to pursue their craft and how, in order to widen their audiences, they became fluent in a variety of musical traditions from diverse ethnic sources. These encounters with other music and races subverted their own racial identities and changed the way they played—a musical miscegenation that, in the shadow of Jim Crow, undermined the pursuit of racial purity and indelibly transformed American culture. “More than timely . . . Hersch orchestrates voices of musicians on both sides of the racial divide in underscoring how porous the music made the boundaries of race and class.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune

Queer Tracks describes motifs in popular music that deviate from heterosexual orientation, the binary gender system and fixed identities. This exciting cutting-edge work deals with the key concepts of current gender politics and queer theory in rock and pop music, including irony, parody, camp, mask/masquerade, mimesis/mimicry, cyborg, transsexuality, and dildo. Based on a constructivist concept of gender, Leibetseder asks: ’Which queer-feminist strategies are used in rock and pop music?’ ’How do they function?’ ’Where do they occur?’ Leibetseder's methodological process is to discover subversive strategies in queer theory, which are also used in rock and pop music, without assuming that these tactics were first invented in theory. Furthermore, this book explains where exactly the subversiveness is situated in those strategies and in popular music. With the help of a new kind of knowledge transfer the author combines sociological and cultural theories with practical examples of rock and pop music. The subversive character of these queer motifs is shown in the work of contemporary popular musicians and is at the same time related to classical discourses of the humanities. Queer Tracks is a revised translation of Queere Tracks. Subversive Strategien in Rock- und Popmusik, originally published in German.

This book draws from a rich history of scholarship about the relations between music and cities, and the global flows between music and urban experience. The contributions in this collection comment on the global city as a nexus of moving people, changing places, and shifting social relations, asking what popular music can tell us about cities, and vice versa. Since the publication of the first Sounds and the City volume, various movements, changes and shifts have amplified debates about globalization. From the waves of people migrating to Europe from the Syrian civil war and other conflict zones, to the 2016 “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union and American presidential election of Donald Trump. These, and other events, appear to have exposed an anti-globalist retreat toward isolationism and a backlash against multiculturalism that has been termed “post-globalization.” Amidst this, what of popular music? Does music offer renewed spaces and avenues for public protest, for collective action and resistance? What can the diverse​​ histories, hybridities, and legacies of popular music tell us about the ever-changing relations of people and cities?

Making the Scene in the Garden State explores New Jersey's rich musical heritage through stories about the musicians, listeners and fans who came together to create sounds from across the American popular music spectrum. From the beginnings of recording in Thomas Edison's factories to Bruce Springsteen's early years at the Upstage Club, and beyond, the book examines the sounds, sights and textures of music scenes in New Jersey.

"A dauntingly ambitious, obsessively researched" (Los Angeles Times) global history of music that reveals how songs have shifted societies and sparked revolutions. Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions and instead celebrate the mainstream assimilators who borrowed innovations, diluted their impact, and disguised their sources. In Music: A Subversive History, Ted Gioia reclaims the story of music for the riffraff, insurgents, and provocateurs. Gioia tells a four-thousand-year history of music as a global source of power, change, and upheaval. He shows how outcasts, immigrants, slaves, and others at the margins of society have repeatedly served as trailblazers of musical expression, reinventing our most cherished songs from ancient times all the way to the jazz, reggae, and hip-hop sounds of the current day. Music: A Subversive History is essential reading for anyone interested in the meaning of music, from Sappho to the Sex Pistols to Spotify.

Over the course of the twentieth century, African Americans in New Orleans helped define the genres of jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, and funk. In recent decades, younger generations of New Orleanians have created a rich and dynamic local rap scene, which has revolved around a dance-oriented style called "bounce." Hip-hop has been the latest conduit for a "New Orleans sound" that lies at the heart of many of the city's best-known contributions to earlier popular music genres. Bounce, while globally connected and constantly evolving, reflects an enduring cultural continuity that reaches back and builds on the city's rich musical and cultural traditions. In this book, the popular music scholar and filmmaker Matt Miller explores the ways in which participants in New Orleans's hip-hop scene have collectively established, contested, and revised a distinctive style of rap that exists at the intersection of deeply rooted vernacular music traditions and the modern, globalized economy of commercial popular music. Like other forms of grassroots expressive culture in the city, New Orleans rap is a site of intense aesthetic and economic competition that reflects the creativity and resilience of the city's poor and working-class African Americans.

Expanding the Space for Improvisation Pedagogy in Music is a critical, research-based anthology exploring improvisation in music pedagogy. The book broadens the understanding of the potentials and possibilities for improvisation in a variety of music education contexts and stimulates the development of knowledge and reflection on improvisation. The book critically examines the challenges, cultural values, aims and methods involved in improvisation pedagogy. Written by international contributors representing a variety of musical genres and research methodologies, it takes a transdisciplinary approach and outlines a way ahead for improvisation pedagogy and research, by providing a space for the exchange of knowledge and critique. This book will be of great interest to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students in the fields of arts education, music education, improvisation, music psychology, musicology, ethnomusicology, artistic research and community music. It will also appeal to music educators on all levels in the field of music education and music psychology.

As a member of Poster Children, Rose Marshack took part in entwined revolutions. Marshack and other women seized a much-elevated profile in music during the indie rock breakthrough while the advent of new digital technologies transformed the recording and marketing of music. Touring in a van, meeting your idols, juggling a programming job with music, keeping control and credibility, the perils of an independent record label (and the greater perils of a major)—Marshack chronicles the band’s day-to-day life and punctuates her account with excerpts from her tour reports and hard-learned lessons on how to rock, program, and teach while female. She also details the ways Poster Children applied punk’s DIY ethos to digital tech as a way to connect with fans via then-new media like pkids listservs, internet radio, and enhanced CDs. An inside look at a scene and a career, Play Like a Man is the evocative and humorous tale of one woman’s life in the trenches and online.

"Introduction Steve Reich pitched up in San Francisco in September 1961. He was a young musician, one who had been taken by the early-century work of the Hungarian composer and folklorist Béla Bartók, and he had journeyed west from New York in the hope of studying with Leon Kirchner, a composer in the rough-lyric Bartók tradition who'd been teaching at Mills College. But Kirchner had just left for Harvard, so Reich ended up working at Mills under Luciano Berio. Over the course of the previous decade, Berio had become identified as a figurehead of the European post-war avant-garde: his ultramodern serialist work was quite a different proposition to Kirchner's own"--

Transnational Cinematic & Popular Music Icons: Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, & Queen Latifah, 1917-2017 centers twentieth and twenty-first century black-transnational stereotypes, celebrities, and symbols Lena Horne's, Dorothy Dandridge;s, and Queen Latifah’s transnational popular cultural struggles between domination and autonomy, with a particular emphasis on their films and popular music. Linking each performer to twentieth century U.S., African-American, and global gender histories and noting the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and empire in their overlapping transnational biographies, Transnational Cinematic & Popular Music Icons: Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, & Queen Latifah, 1917-2017 connects Horne, Dandridge, and Latifah to each other and legacies of Hollywood stereotypes and popular music’s internationally-routed politics. Through a close reading of Horne's, Dandridge's, and Latifah’s films and popular music, the performers tie to historic black-transnational caricatures, from the “tragic mulatto” to Sapphire, Mammy, and Jezebel, and additional, non-white female performers, from Josephine Baker to Halle Berry, maneuvering within transnational popular culture industrial matrices and against white supremacist and hetero-patriarchal forces.