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.

The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought offers the first comprehensive collection of chapters in multidisciplinary irony scholarship. These chapters explore the significance of irony, both verbal and situational, in language, thought, human action, and artistic expression. They cover five main themes: the scope of irony in human experience; irony's impact (both personal and in social life); irony in linguistic communication; irony and affect, and irony in expressive contexts. Contributions come from a wide range of academic disciplines, including psychology, linguistics, philosophy, literature, computer science, film and media studies, and music, making this a truly cross-disciplinary collection of benefit to a wide range of students and researchers.

Global Popular Music: A Research and Information Guide offers an essential annotated bibliography of scholarship on popular music around the world in a two-volume set. Featuring a broad range of subjects, people, cultures, and geographic areas, and spanning musical genres such as traditional, folk, jazz, rock, reggae, samba, rai, punk, hip-hop, and many more, this guide highlights different approaches and discussions within global popular music research. This research guide is comprehensive in scope, providing a vital resource for scholars and students approaching the vast amount of publications on popular music studies and popular music traditions around the world. Thorough cross-referencing and robust indexes of genres, places, names, and subjects make the guide easy to use. Volume 1, Global Perspectives in Popular Music Studies, situates popular music studies within global perspectives and geocultural settings at large. It offers over nine hundred in-depth annotated bibliographic entries of interdisciplinary research and several topical categories that include analytical, critical, and historical studies; theory, methodology, and musicianship studies; annotations of in-depth special issues published in scholarly journals on different topics, issues, trends, and music genres in popular music studies that relate to the contributions of numerous musicians, artists, bands, and music groups; and annotations of selected reference works.

Music videos promote popular artists in cultural forms that circulate widely across social media networks. With the advent of YouTube in 2005 and the proliferation of handheld technologies and social networking sites, the music video has become available to millions worldwide, and continues to serve as a fertile platform for the debate of issues and themes in popular culture. This volume of essays serves as a foundational handbook for the study and interpretation of the popular music video, with the specific aim of examining the industry contexts, cultural concepts, and aesthetic materials that videos rely upon in order to be both intelligible and meaningful. Easily accessible to viewers in everyday life, music videos offer profound cultural interventions and negotiations while traversing a range of media forms. From a variety of unique perspectives, the contributors to this volume undertake discussions that open up new avenues for exploring the creative changes and developments in music video production. With chapters that address music video authorship, distribution, cultural representations, mediations, aesthetics, and discourses, this study signals a major initiative to provide a deeper understanding of the intersecting and interdisciplinary approaches that are invoked in the analysis of this popular and influential musical form.

The study of television and music has expanded greatly in recent years, yet to date no book has focused on the genre of comedy television as it relates to music. Music in Comedy Television: Notes on Laughs fills that gap, breaking new critical ground. With contributions from an array of established and emerging scholars representing a range of disciplines, the twelve essays included cover a wide variety of topics and television shows, spanning nearly fifty years across network, cable, and online structures and capturing the latest research in this growing area of study. From Sesame Street to Saturday Night Live, from Monty Python to Flight of the Conchords, this book offers the perfect introduction for students and scholars in music and media studies seeking to understand the role of music in comedy onscreen and how it relates to the wider culture.

The displacement of Chou Wen-chung from his native China in 1948 forced him into Western-European culture. Ultimately finding his vocation as a composer, he familiarized himself with classical and contemporary techniques but interpreted these through his traditionally oriented Chinese cultural perspective. The result has been the composition of a unique body of repertoire that synthesizes the most progressive Western compositional idioms with an astonishingly traditional heritage of Asian approaches, not only from music, but also from calligraphy, landscape painting, poetry, and more. Chou’s importance rests not only in his compositions, but also in his widespread influence through his extensive teaching career at Columbia University, where his many students included Bright Sheng, Zhou Long, Tan Dun, Chen Yi, Joan Tower, and many more. During his tenure at Columbia, he also founded the U.S.-China Arts Exchange, which continues to this day to be a vital stimulus for multicultural interaction. The volume will include an inventory of the Chou collection in the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland.

The Cold War was a media phenomenon. It was a daily cultural political struggle for the hearts and minds of ordinary people—and for government leaders, a struggle to undermine their enemies’ ability to control the domestic public sphere. This collection examines how this struggle played out on screen, radio, and in print from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, a time when breaking news stories such as Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program and Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost captured the world’s attention. Ranging from the United States to the Soviet Union and China, these essays cover photojournalism on both sides of the Iron Curtain, Polish punk, Norwegian film, Soviet magazines, and more, concluding with a contribution from Stuart Franklin, one of the creators of the iconic “Tank Man” image during the Tiananmen Square protests. By investigating an array of media actors and networks, as well as narrative and visual frames on a local and transnational level, this volume lays the groundwork for writing media into the history of the late Cold War.

In The Walking Dead, human beings are pushed to their limits by a zombie apocalypse and have to decide what really matters. Good and evil, freedom and slavery, when one life has to be sacrificed for another, even the nature of religion—all the ultimate questions of human existence are posed afresh as the old society crumbles away and a new form of society emerges, with new beliefs and new rules. The Ultimate Walking Dead and Philosophy brings together twenty philosophers with different perspectives on the imagined world of this addictive TV show. How can we keep our humanity when faced with such extreme life-or-death choices? Did Dr. Jenner do the right thing in committing suicide, when all hope seemed to be lost? Does the Governor, as the new Machiavelli, prove that willingness to repeatedly commit murder is the best technique for getting and keeping political power? Why do most characters place such importance on keeping particular individuals alive, especially children? What can we learn about reality from Rick’s haunting hallucinations?

The essay collection Americana poses the basic question of how American music can be described and analyzed as such, as American music. Situated at the intersection between musicology and American Studies, the essays focus on the categories of aesthetics, authenticity, and performance in order to show how popular music is made American-from Alaskan hip hop to German Schlager, from Creedence Clearwater Revival to film scores, from popular opera to U2, from the Rolling Stones to country rap, and from Steve Earle to the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles.

Away from the spotlight of the pop charts and the demands of mainstream audiences, original music is still being played and audiences continue to engage with innovative artists. This collection of fresh essays gathers together critical writing on such genres as Power Electronics, Black Metal, Neo-Folk, Martial Industrial, Hard-Core Punk and Horrorcore. The contributors report from the periphery of the music world, seeking to understand these new genres, how fans connect with artists and how artists engage with their audiences. Diverse music scenes are covered, from small-town New Zealand to Washington, D.C., and Ljubljana, Slovenia. Artists discussed include Coil, Laibach, Whitehouse, Insane Clown Posse, Wolves in the Throne Room, Turisas, Tyr, GG Allin and many others.