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Researching popular music started off in Germany with comparable problems and a lack of institutional and general academic appreciation as it did in the rest of the world. Since music is now being considered a complex economic, aesthetic and cultural system and practice, a variety of disciplines have engaged in the field of popular music studies in the past few decades. For the first time, native popular musicologists from Germany, Austria and Switzerland focus on their own popular music. The book will show close connections between international and national popular music and diverse traditions of study, and will contribute to a better understanding of the music.

This collection of essays, documented by an international and interdisciplinary array of scholars, represents the first academically focused volume exploring the creative idiolect of Frank Zappa. Several of the authors are known for contributing significantly to areas such as popular music, cultural, and translation studies, with expertise and interests ranging from musicology to poetics. The publication presents the reader with an understanding of the ontological depth of Zappa''s legacy by relating the artist and his texts to a range of cultural, social, technological and musicological factors, as encapsulated in the book''s title - Frank Zappa and the And. Zappa''s interface with religion, horror, death, movies, modernism, satire, freaks, technology, resistance, censorship and the avant-garde are brought together analytically for the first time, and approached non chronologically, something that strongly complies with the non linear perspective of time Zappa highlights in both his autobiography and recordings. The book employs a variety of analytical approaches, ranging from literary and performance theory, ''horrality'' and musicology, to post modern and textually determined readings, and serves as a unique and invaluable guide to Zappa''s legacy and creative force.

Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction presents new insights into the study of musical rhythm through investigations of the micro-rhythmic design of groove-based music. The main purpose of the book is to investigate how technological mediation - in the age of digital music production tools - has influenced the design of rhythm at the micro level. Through close readings of technology-driven popular music genres, such as contemporary R&B, hip-hop, trip-hop, electro-pop, electronica, house and techno, as well as played folk music styles, the book sheds light on how investigations of the musical-temporal relationships of groove-based musics might be fruitfully pursued, in particular with regard to their micro-rhythmic features. This book is based on contributions to the project Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction (RADR), a five-year research project running from 2004 to 2009 that was funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

Heavy metal has developed from a British fringe genre of rock music in the late 1960s to a global mass market consumer good in the early twenty-first century. Early proponents of the musical style, such as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest, Saxon, Uriah Heep and Iron Maiden, were mostly seeking to reach a young male audience. Songs were often filled with violent, sexist and nationalistic themes but were also speaking to the growing sense of deterioration in social and professional life. At the same time, however, heavy metal was seriously indebted to the legacies of blues and classical music as well as to larger literary and cultural themes. The genre also produced mythological concept albums and rewritings of classical poems. In other words, heavy metal tried from the beginning to locate itself in a liminal space between pedestrian mass culture and a rather elitist adherence to complexity and musical craftsmanship, speaking from a subaltern position against the hegemonic discourse. This collection of essays provides a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary look at British heavy metal from its beginning through The New Wave of British Heavy Metal up to the increasing internationalization and widespread acceptance in the late 1980s. The individual chapter authors approach British heavy metal from a textual perspective, providing critical analyses of the politics and ideology behind the lyrics, images and performances. Rather than focus on individual bands or songs, the essays collected here argue with the larger system of heavy metal music in mind, providing comprehensive analyses that relate directly to the larger context of British life and culture. The wide range of approaches should provide readers from various disciplines with new and original ideas about the study of this phenomenon of popular culture.

Examines the issues of gender and emotion that underpin the classical style of film scoring. This book considers the effects of this association by progress through three stages: cultural-historical precedents, the generic parameters of melodrama and the woman's film, and the narrativization of music in film through diegetic performance.

The Rolling Stones¿ Beggars Banquet is one of the seminal albums in rock history. Arguably it not only marks the advent of the `mature¿ sound of the Rolling Stones but lays out a new blueprint for an approach to blues-based rock music that would endure for several decades.

In this book, native popular musicologists focus on their own popular music cultures from Germany, Austria and Switzerland for the first time: from subcultural to mainstream phenomena; from the 1950s to contemporary acts. Starting with an introduction and two chapters on the histories of German popular music and its study, the volume then concentrates on focused, detailed and yet concise close readings from different perspectives (including particular historical East and West German perspectives), mostly focusing on the music and its protagonists. The book, as a consequence, will show close connections between global and local popular music cultures and diverse traditions of study.

What did popular song mean to people across the world during the First World War? For the first time, song repertoires and musical industries from countries on both sides in the Great War as well as from neutral countries are analysed in one exciting volume. Experts from around the world, and with very different approaches, bring to life the entertainment of a century ago, to show the role it played in the lives of our ancestors. The reader will meet the penniless lyricist, the theatre chain owner, the cross-dressing singer, fado composer, stage Scotsman or rhyming soldier, whether they come from Serbia, Britain, the USA, Germany, France, Portugal or elsewhere, in this fascinating exploration of showbiz before the generalization of the gramophone. Singing was a vector for patriotic support for the war, and sometimes for anti-war activism, but it was much more than that, and expressed and constructed debates, anxieties, social identities and changes in gender roles. This work, accompanied by many links to online recordings, will allow the reader to glimpse the complex role of popular song in peopleΓÇÖs lives in a period of total war.

This volume identifies and interrogates the musical, linguistic, social and ideological elements that configure the singer-songwriter and its various equivalents in Europe. The book's polycentric approach redresses the hitherto Anglophone bias in scholarship on the singer-songwriter.

Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality brings together a collection of original, interdisciplinary, critical essays exploring the negotiated place of gender and sexuality in heavy metal music and its culture.

Turbo-folk music is the most controversial form of popular culture in the new states of former Yugoslavia. Beginning with 1970s Socialist Yugoslavia, Uro' ?voro explores the cultural and political paradoxes of turbo-folk. Taking as its starting point turbo-folk's popularity across national borders.

Bringing together exciting new interdisciplinary work from emerging and established scholars in the UK and beyond, Litpop addresses the question: how has writing past and present been influenced by popular music, and vice versa? Contributions explore how various forms of writing have had a crucial role to play in making popular music what it is.

Simon Frith has been one of the most important figures in the emergence and subsequent development of popular music studies. The contributions to this volume of essays and memoirs seek to honour Frith's achievements, but they are not merely 'about Frith'. Rather, they are important interventions by leading scholars in the field.

Examines the cultural and musical antecedents of jazz, including minstrel shows and musical theatre, within the context of musical life in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book concludes in 1930s by which time the availability of records enabled the spread of hot music, affecting the repertoire in Britain.

This book contributes significantly to the debate surrounding the importance of Ewan MacColl to the English folk revival. MacColl gave two extended interviews with co-editor Giovanni Vacca in 1987 and 1988 and these provide the impetus for a re-examination of his methods, his politics and his aesthetic aims.

Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens and Leo Ferre are three emblematic figures of post-war French popular music who have been constantly associated with each other by the public and the media. They have been described as the epitome of chanson, and of 'Frenchness'. But there is more to the trio than a musical trinity.

Bringing together in twelve focused case studies, this book explores both instrumental and operatic art music in the first section and devotes the second section to popular music in film, showing how very similar the functions of popular music in film are to the supposedly more 'elite' classical music and opera.