Music : Popular

The first history of the music that binds together Mexican immigrant communities more...

Price: $29.95

Few journalists have staked a territory as definitively and passionately as Mikal Gilmore in his twenty-year career writing about rock and roll. Now, for the first time, this collection gathers his cultural criticism, interviews, reviews, and assorted musings. more...

Price: $19.00

* Every major singer from Frank Sinatra to Christina Aguilera * Every major composer from Irving Berlin to Stephen Sondheim * Every major song from a century of favorites * Every major musician and lyricist * Every major styling from blues, jazz, and country to folk, big band, and rock and roll * The most recorded songs of all time * A guide to understanding the "standard" lingo * The evolution of popular music from Tin Pan Alley to contemporary musical theater, and more. more...

Price: $13.95

Pitch Perfect is a behind-the-scenes look at the bizarre, often inspiring world of collegiate a cappella groups. The first collegiate a cappella group, the Yale Whiffenpoofs, was founded by Cole Porter back in 1909. But what had been largely an Ivy League phenomenon has, in the past fifteen years, exploded. And itas not what you think. There are now more than 1,200 a cappella groups at colleges across the country. The very best of these collegiate groups square off in the annual International Championship of Collegiate A Cappellaaa showdown marked by wrenching close calls and exhilarating triumphs. And, really, where else can you hear Michael Jacksonas aBada in four-part harmony?. In Pitch Perfect, GQ editor Mickey Rapkin follows a season in a cappella through all its twists and turns, covering the breathtaking displays of vocal talent, the groupies (yes, a cappella singers have groupies), the rockstar partying (and run-ins with the law), and all the bitter rivalries. Along the way are encounters with boldfaced names such as President George W. Bush, Prince, David Letterman, Barack Obama, Barbra Streisand, Hillary Clinton, Marisa Tomei, Amanda Bynes, Nick Lachey, Merv Griffin, Jim Carrey, Microsoftas Paul Allen, John Legend, and Jessica Biel. At the heart of the narrative are three a cappella groups whose interactions are anything but harmonious: the historic Tufts Beelzebubs, founded more than forty years ago with 40,000 albums sold sinceaand struggling to record a new album that lives up to the hype; Divisi of the University of Oregon, a relatively new, all-female group attempting to overcome a loss in the 2005 championship; and the University of Virginia Hullabahoos, the so-called bad boys of collegiate a cappella, who will attempt to compete on a higher level this year while retaining their casual soul. Bringing a lively new twist to Americaas fascination with talent showdowns and peerless performers, Pitch Perfect is sure to strike a chord with readers. more...

Price: $15.00

Pop Fiction's unique essays individually consider one song within a cinematic context. Unlike previous collected volumes about pop music in film, where a generalised approach has been adopted, this offers instead a close examination of two pervasive and significant mediums in combination. The collection introspects, assembling the pop song into various guises and documenting how individuals dissemble the multiple roles that the pop song plays in cinematic moments. The song as: role-play, memory trigger, narrator, ghost, marketing device, translator, alienator, membership rite etc. All provide fresh insight towards the inter-textual fusion of film and song. Additionally the books form reduces the area of analysis to expose differences and similarities between these contrasting fields of study. Innovative yet accessible, this exciting document would appeal to students, lecturers and researchers offering a diverse set of models with which to investigate the 'ideogram' of image/text/sound - a relationship which sits at the heart of most cultural production. For beginners, the book provides comforting areas of familiarity (pop song and film) while exploring areas of respective discipline and inter-disciplinary practice in an original manner. more...

Price: $10.00