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"Rock music in literature."
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The Birth of Rock and Roll
When rock and roll first burst onto the scene in the 1950s, it was more than a new form of music--it was a rebellion against the past. With the music of such artists as Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and the Supremes came a new attitude that allowed fans--many of them young--to look past the social norms of the time, a shift that included a greater interaction with and understanding between the races. This stunning, story-filled volume examines the phenomenon of rock and roll--the way it was before it crept into the mainstream it had once retaliated against--and the many musicians who made it into an art.
eBook
Writing the Record
During the mid1960s, a small group of young journalists made it their mission to write about popular music, especially rock, as something worthy of serious intellectual scrutiny. Their efforts not only transformed the perspective on the era’s music but revolutionized how Americans have come to think, talk, and write about popular music ever since. In Writing the Record, Devon Powers explores this shift by focusing on The Village Voice, a key publication in the rise of rock criticism. Revisiting the work of early pop critics such as Richard Goldstein and Robert Christgau, Powers shows how they stood at the front lines of the mass culture debates, challenging old assumptions and hierarchies and offering pioneering political and social critiques of the music. Part of a collegeeducated generation of journalists, Voice critics explored connections between rock and contemporary intellectual trends such as postmodernism, identity politics, and critical theory. In so doing, they became important forerunners of the academic study of popular culture that would emerge during the 1970s. Drawing on archival materials, interviews, and insights from media and cultural studies, Powers not only narrates a story that has been long overlooked but also argues that pop music criticism has been an important channel for the expression of public intellectualism. This is a history that is particularly relevant today, given the challenges faced by criticism of all stripes in our current media environment. Powers makes the case for the value of wellinformed cultural criticism in an age when it is often suggested that “everyone is a critic.”
eBook
Novel sounds : Southern fiction in the age of rock and roll
\"Around the time that Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley put their electric spin on Southern vernacular ballads, a canonical group of white American authors native to rock's birthplace began to write fiction about the electrification of those ballads, translating into literary form key cultural changes that gave rise to the infectious music coming out of their region. In [this book], Florence Dore tells the story of how these forms of expression became intertwined and shows how Southern writers turned to rock music and its technologies--tape, radio, vinyl--to develop the 'rock novel'\"--Publisher marketing.
Book
Reading the Beatles
Despite the enormous amount of writing devoted to the Beatles during the last few decades, the band's abiding intellectual and cultural significance has received scant attention. Using various modes of literary, musicological, and cultural criticism, the essays in Reading the Beatles firmly establish the Beatles as a locus of serious academic and cultural study. Exploring the group's resounding impact on how we think about gender, popular culture, and the formal and poetic qualities of music, the contributors trace not only the literary and musicological qualities of selected Beatles songs but also the development of the Beatles' artistry in their films and the ways in which the band has functioned as a cultural, historical, and economic product. In a poignant afterword, Jane Tompkins offers an autobiographical account of the ways in which the Beatles afforded her with the self-actualizing means to become less alienated from popular culture, gender expectations, and even herself during the early 1960s.
eBook
On the life cycles of successful rock bands
A typical feature of life cycles of rock bands is that they seem to consist of two distinct stages. A first stage associates with initial entry and a second stage seems to be related to more mainstream success. This paper proposes a simple model to describe these two stages in the life cycles. The model is put to an empirical test by analyzing the numbers of annual shows of forty-nine heavy metal bands. It is found that initial peak success is attained, on average, after seven years, and that the second wave of success occurs after twenty years, again on average. The second peak associates with twice as much success as the first.
Journal Article
White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock
To what extent do indie masculinities challenge the historical construction of rock music as patriarchal? This key question is addressed by Matthew Bannister, involving an in-depth examination of indie guitar rock in the 1980s as the culturally and historically specific production of white men. Through textual analysis of musical and critical discourses, Bannister provides the first book-length study of masculinity and ethnicity within the context of indie guitar music within US, UK and New Zealand ‘scenes’.
Bannister argues that past theorisations of (rock) masculinities have tended to set up varieties of working-class deviance and physical machismo as ‘straw men’, oversimplifying masculinities as ‘men behaving badly’. Such approaches disavow the ways that masculine power is articulated in culture not only through representation but also intellectual and theoretical discourse. By re-situating indie in a historical/cultural context of art rock, he shows how masculine power can be rearticulated through high, avant-garde, bohemian culture and aesthetic theory: canonism, negation (Adorno), passivity, voyeurism and camp (Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground), and primitivism and infantilism (Lester Bangs, Simon Reynolds). In a related vein, he also assesses the impact of Freud on cultural theory, arguing that reversing binary conceptions of gender by associating masculinities with an essentialised passive femininity perpetuates patriarchal dualism.
Drawing on his own experience as an indie musician, Bannister surveys a range of indie artists, including The Smiths, The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and The Go-Betweens; from the US, R.E.M., The Replacements, Dinosaur Jr, Hüsker Dü, Nirvana and hardcore; and from NZ, Flying Nun acts, including The Chills, The Clean, the Verlaines, Chris Knox, Bailter Space, and The Bats, demonstrating broad continuities between these apparently disparate scenes, in terms of gender, aesthetic theory and approaches to popular musical history. The result is a book which raises some important questions about how gender is studied in popular culture and the degree to which alternative cultures can critique dominant representations of gender.
eBook
Gothic music
Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny traces sonic Gothic through history and genres from the eighteenth-century ghost story through the spooky soundtracks of cinema, television and video games to the dark music of the Goth subculture.
eBook
Like a frog in a sock: The challenges and opportunities of Australian heavy metal vocalists learning to growl
The academic study of harsh vocals has been gaining traction of late, as the physiology (Eckers et al., 2009), creative attributes (Di Lorenzo and Trantino, 2016) and socio-political ramifications (Heesch, 2019) of usage have been covered in some depth by existing literature. However, formalised pedagogical study around the technique is somewhat lacking, as each vocalist has a unique path to the style and it is highly unlikely to be the result of formal training. In Australia this situation is exacerbated by the relative isolation of the individuals learning due to its small population, large geographic size and relative lack of popularity of heavy metal. This research involved interviewing five active harsh vocalists about their journey to learning and revealed that individuals were unlikely to engage in formal training and were more likely to experiment, seek access to information online and engage with strategies from other vocal styles in order to develop their own sound.
Journal Article