Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
556
result(s) for
"Frith, Simon"
Sort by:
Living Politics, Making Music
The late Jan Fairley (1949-2012) was a key figure in making world music a significant topic for popular music studies and an influential contributor to such world music magazines as fRoots and Songlines. This book celebrates her contribution to popular music scholarship by gathering her most important work together in a single place. The result is a richly informed and entertaining volume that will be of interest to all scholars in the field while also serving as an excellent introduction for students interested in popular music as a global phenomenon. Fairley's work was focused on the problems and possibilities of cross-cultural musical influences, fantasies and flows and on the importance of performing circuits and networks. Her interest in the details of music-making and in the lives of music-makers means that this collection is also an original and illuminating study of music and politics. In drawing on Jan Fairley's journalism, this volume also offers students a guide to various genres of world music, from Cuban son to flamenco, as well as an insight into the lives of such world music stars as Mercedes Sosa and Silvio RodrÃguez. This is inspiring as well as essential reading.
eBook
The lives and work of Bob Dylan
According to the website Come writers and critics, which keeps a running list of all ‘documents related to Bob Dylan printed on paper’, by the end of 2021 (Dylan's 80th year), there were 829 books about him in English and 723 in 36 other languages (from 175 in German to one each in Bulgarian and Vietnamese).1 The list is indiscriminate in terms of the various books’ quality, originality or readability, but looking at the bibliographies of the various works I'm reviewing here, it seems that there are at least 50 Dylan books that academic Dylanologists take seriously (and many more journal articles).2 From this perspective, my four titles provide a useful cross-section of the most common academic Dylan studies in disciplinary terms: biography, literary criticism, musicology and cultural studies. I should also note that in March 2016 the George Kaiser Family Foundation bought Bob Dylan's personal archive (for $22 million according to Heylin) and gave it a permanent home in Tulsa. This has opened up significant new research possibilities. In its own words:
The Bob Dylan Archive® highlights the unique artistry and worldwide cultural significance of Bob Dylan. Housed at the University of Tulsa's Helmerich Center for American Research at Gilcrease Museum, the archive includes decades of never-before-seen handwritten manuscripts, notebooks and correspondence; films, videos, photographs and artwork; memorabilia; personal documents; unrecorded song lyrics and chords.
Like the writer and composer archives to be found in many university libraries, the Bob Dylan collection is accessible onsite (and by appointment) to ‘individuals with qualified research projects’, and The World of Bob Dylan is, in effect, a celebration of a new era for Dylan scholarship. Its editor, Sean Latham, is the Director of the related Institute for Bob Dylan Studies.3 However, the first book to draw on the Bob Dylan Archive systematically is Clinton Heylin's The Double Life.
Journal Article
Noves consideracions sobre Performing Rites
Performing Rites. On the Value of Popular Music es va publicar fa vint-i-cinc anys. L’objectiu del llibre era abordar qüestions de valor musical i demostrar que els arguments que qualificaven la música de bona o dolenta eren tan necessaris per a la cultura musical popular com per a l’art culte. Aquest article examina els canvis en les pràctiques i estudis de la música popular durant l’últim quart de segle i reflexiona sobre els efectes d’aquests canvis en el discurs de valor. Els canvis que m’interessen són la transformació digital de la comunicació musical, que origina formes noves de crear, consumir i compartir música; les forces demogràfiques que han remodelat tant la geografia com l’ecosistema del mercat musical, i l’aparició de la música electrònica de ball en una nova economia de la música «en viu». Què significa, des d’un enfocament sociològic de l’estètica, que la gent ja no es veja obligada a escoltar música que no li agrada? Que els algorismes hagen minat un sistema d’autoritat musical (ràdio musical i premsa musical) que fa un temps es donava per descomptat? Que ballar siga una manera tan important d’escoltar? Què és un «músic» en l’era digital? A l’hora d’abordar aquestes qüestions, també reconec que, de la mateixa manera que les possibilitats històriques i discursives configuren els qui creen i escolten música popular, aquestes possibilitats també configuren els qui l’estudien. Tenim la llibertat d’estudiar el que ens agrada i de la manera que ens agrada, però només en les circumstàncies en les quals ens trobem. Com han canviat aquestes circumstàncies des de 1996?
Journal Article
Are workers musicians?
Working in Music: The Musicians Union, Musical Labour and Employment was a conference organised by Martin Cloonan and John Williamson at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow in January 2016. Highlights of the event are presented.
Journal Article
Remembrance of Things Past: Marxism and the Study of Popular Music
This article considers the role of Marxism in the history of popular music studies. Its approach combines the sociology of knowledge with a personal memoir and its argument is that in becoming a field of scholarly interest popular music studies drew from both Marxist theoretical arguments about cultural ideology in the 1950s and 1960s and from rock writers’ arguments about the role of music in shaping socialist bohemianism in the 1960s and 1970s. To take popular music seriously academically meant taking it seriously politically. Once established as an academic subject, however, popular music studies were absorbed into both established music departments and vocational, commercial music courses. Marxist ideas and ideologues were largely irrelevant to the subsequent development of popular music studies as a scholarly field.
Journal Article
What has the BBC ever done for us?
[...]it was overwhelmed by Covid-19 Boris Johnson's government was on course to realise a long-held dream of the party's free market ideologues: to bring to an end the UK's unique version of public service broadcasting. The dire effects of the BBC concept of ‘light entertainment’ have long been mocked: think, for example, of Smashie and Nicey, the DJs from Radio Fab FM. Less amusingly, the cosiness of the BBC's entertainment establishment can also be seen in its promotion and protection of the predatory children's entertainers Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris. From these critical perspectives it is easy enough to agree with the free market view that as an overweening monopoly broadcaster with a reactionary cultural sensibility what the BBC needs is proper competition. [...]the familiar celebrations of ‘pirate’ broadcasters, whether those on the offshore boats of the 1960s or those at the top of London council blocks in the 1990s. [...]BBC schedules, on both its national and local stations, necessarily featured live studio recordings.
Journal Article