Music : Popular

A unique Israeli national culture--indeed, the very nature of "Israeliness"--remains a matter of debate, a struggle to blend vying memories and backgrounds, ideologies and wills. Identifying popular music as an important site in this wider cultural endeavor, this book focuses on the three major popular music cultures that are proving instrumental in attempts to invent Israeliness: the invented folk song repertoire known as Shirei Eretz Israel; the contemporary, global-cosmopolitan Israeli rock; and the ethnic-oriental musica mizrahit. more...

Price: $15.95

While music lovers from all over the world have tried to recreate the ambience of French cafés by playing music from stars such as Piaf, Trénet and Chevalier, intellectuals, sociologists and policy makers in France have been embroiled in passionate d ebate about just what constitutes ‘real’ French music. In the late 1950s and 1960s a wave of Anglo-American rock ‘n’ roll and pop hit Europe and disrupted French popular music forever. The cherished sounds of the chanson were sidelined, fragmented or merged with pop styles and instrumentation. From this point on, French music and music culture have been splintered into cultural divides – pop culture vs high culture; mass culture vs ‘authentic’ popular culture; national culture vs Americanization . This book investigates the exciting and innovative segmentation of the French music scene and the debates it has spawned. From an analysis of the chanson as national myth, to pop, rap, techno and the State, this book is the first full-length study to make sense of the complexity behind the history of French popular music and its relation to ‘authentic’ cultural identity. more...

Price: $95.00

This collection of thirteen essays examines cultural, political, economic, technological and institutional aspects of popular music across Asia, from India to Japan. more...

Price: $195.00

Celebrates thirty-one of the author's favorite songs in a collection of essays about such musical renditions as Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road," Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker," and Van Morrison's "Caravan.". more...

Price: $15.00

'Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style is so important: complex and remarkably lucid, it's the first book dealing with punk to offer intellectual content. Hebdige ... is concerned with the UK's postwar, music-centred, white working-class subcultures, from teddy boys to mods and rockers to skinheads and punks.' - Rolling Stone 'With enviable precision and wit Hebdige has addressed himself to a complex topic - the meanings behind the fashionable exteriors of working-class youth subcultures - approaching them with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus that combines semiotics, the sociology of devience and Marxism and come up with a very stimulating short book' - Time Out 'This book is an attempt to subject the various youth-protest movements of Britain in the last 15 years to the sort of Marxist, structuralist, semiotic analytical techniques propagated by, above all, Roland Barthes. The book is recommended whole-heartedly to anyone who would like fresh ideas about some of the most stimulating music of the rock era' - The New York Times more...

Price: $28.95