Uncompromising and innovative, hardcore punk in Washington, DC, birthed a new sound and nurtured a vibrant subculture aimed at a specific segment of the city's youth. Shayna L. Maskell explores DC's hardcore scene during its short but storied peak. Led by bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat, hardcore in the nation's capital unleashed music as angry and loud as it was fast and minimalistic. Maskell examines the music's aesthetics and the unique impact of DC's sociopolitical realities on the sound and the scene that emerged. As she shows, aspects of the music's structure merged with how bands performed it to put across distinctive representations of race, class, and gender. But those representations could be as complicated and contradictory as they were explicit. A fascinating analysis of a punk rock hotbed, Politics as Sound tells the story of how a generation created music that produced--and resisted--politics and power.

Uncompromising and innovative, hardcore punk in Washington, DC, birthed a new sound and nurtured a vibrant subculture aimed at a specific segment of the city's youth. Shayna L. Maskell explores DC's hardcore scene during its short but storied peak. Led by bands like Bad Brains and Minor Threat, hardcore in the nation's capital unleashed music as angry and loud as it was fast and minimalistic. Maskell examines the music's aesthetics and the unique impact of DC's sociopolitical realities on the sound and the scene that emerged. As she shows, aspects of the music's structure merged with how bands performed it to put across distinctive representations of race, class, and gender. But those representations could be as complicated and contradictory as they were explicit. A fascinating analysis of a punk rock hotbed, Politics as Sound tells the story of how a generation created music that produced--and resisted--politics and power.

It is common to hear talk of how music can inspire crowds, move individuals and mobilise movements. We know too of how governments can live in fear of its effects, censor its sounds and imprison its creators. At the same time, there are other governments that use music for propaganda or for torture. All of these examples speak to the idea of music's political importance. But while we may share these assumptions about music's power, we rarely stop to analyse what it is about organised sound - about notes and rhythms - that has the effects attributed to it. This is the first book to examine systematically music's political power. It shows how music has been at the heart of accounts of political order, at how musicians from Bono to Lily Allen have claimed to speak for peoples and political causes. It looks too at the emergence of music as an object of public policy, whether in the classroom or in the copyright courts, whether as focus of national pride or employment opportunities. The book brings together a vast array of ideas about music's political significance (from Aristotle to Rousseau, from Adorno to Deleuze) and new empirical data to tell a story of the extraordinary potency of music across time and space. At the heart of the book lies the argument that music and politics are inseparably linked, and that each animates the other.

The story of one musician's journey to discover how music can be used as a political tool, for good and bad.

Experiencing disco, hip hop, house, techno, drum 'n' bass and garage, Discographies plots a course through the transatlantic dance scene of the last last twenty-five years. It discusses the problems posed by contemporary dance culture of both academic and cultural study and finds these origins in the history of opposition to music as a source of sensory pleasure. Discussing such issues as technology, club space. drugs, the musical body, gender, sexuality and pleasure, Discographies explores the ecstatic experiences at the heart of contemporary dance culture. It suggests why politicians and agencies as diverse as the independent music press and public broadcasting should be so hostile to this cultural phenomenon.

Written in two parts, part 1 explores the development of Calypso, from it's emergence in the pre-colonial period to the post colonial period. In part 2, the focus is on the new Carnival musical practices of soca, rapso, chutney, soca and ragga soca, and the ways in which they contirbuted to the redefination of Trinidadian cultural politics in the neoliberal era. The new rationailities, contigencies, desires and musical experments that animated the new musics and enabled them to gradually displace calypso from its centrality as national expression is examined.

How does the state separate music from noise? How can such filtering apparatus shape the content and form of sound production in the city? As a marker of co-presence to the hearing body, sound is always open to (or rather opens up) the politics of shared existence. In the throes of the post-dictatorship period, Brazil's legislative and executive branches implemented a series of sweeping measures to address quality of life concerns, including environmental pollution and urban inequality. In São Paulo, noise control became a recurrent controversy, growing in size and scale between the 1990s and 2010s. Together with the much-debated fear of crime and the socioeconomic and cultural tensions between the rich urban center and the poor peripheries, such ecological agendas against noise as a harmful pollutant have reconfigured the presence of environmental sounds in the city. In this book, Cardoso argues that the framing of specific sounds as unavoidable, unnecessary, or as harmful "noise" has been an effective strategy to organize spaces and administer group behavior in this rapidly expanding city. He focuses on two interrelated processes. First, the series of institutional regulatory mechanisms that turn sounds into the all-embracing "noise" susceptible to state intervention. Second, the constant attempts of interested groups in either attaching or detaching specific sounds (musical events, industrial noise, traffic noise, religious sounds, etc.) from regulatory scrutiny. Sound-politics is the dynamics that emerges from both processes - the channels through which sounds enter (and leave) the sphere of state regulation.

Explores how radio broadcasting and the emerging audio culture transformed the dynamics of French politics during the tumultuous interwar decades.

American newspapers have faced competition from new media for over ninety years. Today digital media challenge the printed word. In the 1920s, broadcast radio was the threatening upstart. At the time, newspaper publishers of all sizes turned threat into opportunity by establishing their own stations. Many, such as the Chicago Tribune's WGN, are still in operation. By 1940 newspapers owned 30 percent of America's radio stations. This new type of enterprise, the multimedia corporation, troubled those who feared its power to control the flow of news and information. In Sound Business, historian Michael Stamm traces how these corporations and their critics reshaped the ways Americans received the news. Stamm is attuned to a neglected aspect of U.S. media history: the role newspaper owners played in communications from the dawn of radio to the rise of television. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources, he recounts the controversies surrounding joint newspaper and radio operations. These companies capitalized on synergies between print and broadcast production. As their advertising revenue grew, so did concern over their concentrated influence. Federal policymakers, especially during the New Deal, responded to widespread concerns about the consequences of media consolidation by seeking to limit and even ban cross ownership. The debates between corporations, policymakers, and critics over how to regulate these new kinds of media businesses ultimately structured the channels of information distribution in the United States and determined who would control the institutions undergirding American society and politics. Sound Business is a timely examination of the connections between media ownership, content, and distribution, one that both expands our understanding of mid-twentieth-century America and offers lessons for the digital age.

Noted journalist and historian Alterman provides a compelling look at John McLaughlin, William Safire, Pat Buchanan, and others who shape the political discourse of this country.