In studies of gender and sexuality in popular music, the concept of difference is often a crucial analytic used to detect social agency; however, the alternative analytic of ambiguity has never been systematically examined. While difference from heterosexual norms is taken to be the multivalent sign of resistance, oppression, and self-invention, it can lead to inflated claims of the degree and power of difference. This book offers critically-oriented case studies that examine the theory and politics of ambiguity. Ambiguity means that there are both positive and negative implications in any gender and sexuality practices, both sameness and difference from heteronormativity, and unfixed possibility in the diverse nature of discourse and practice (rather than just "difference" among fixed multiplicities). Contributors present a diverse array of approaches through music, sound, psyche, body, dance, performance, race, ethnicity, power, discourse, and history. A wide variety of popular music genres are broached, including gay circuit remixes, punk rock, Goth music, cross-dress performance, billboard 100 songs, global pop, and nineteenth-century minstrelsy. The authors examine the ambiguities of performance and reception, and address the vexed question of whether it is possible for genuinely new forms of gender and sexuality to emerge musically. This book makes a distinctive contribution to studies of gender and sexuality in popular music, and will be of interest to fields including Popular Music Studies, Musicology/Ethnomusicology, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, and Media Studies.

Following the 1960's sexual revolution, rock and pop have continued to map the societal understanding of sexuality, feminism, and gender studies. Although scholarship has well established how early rock and roll encouraged and affected issues of sex in the baby boomer generation, this book asks how subsequent pop music has maintained that tradition. The text discusses the gendered performances and biographical experiences of individual musicians, including Patti Smith, Rufus Wainwright, Etta James, and Frank Ocean, and how their invented personae contribute to musical representations of sexuality. It evaluates lyric structure and symbolic language of these artists, and overall emphasizes how pop music, while a commodity art form, reflects the diversity of human sex and gender.

Global Popular Music: A Research and Information Guide offers an essential annotated bibliography of scholarship on popular music around the world in a two-volume set. Featuring a broad range of subjects, people, cultures, and geographic areas, and spanning musical genres such as traditional, folk, jazz, rock, reggae, samba, rai, punk, hip-hop, and many more, this guide highlights different approaches and discussions within global popular music research. This research guide is comprehensive in scope, providing a vital resource for scholars and students approaching the vast amount of publications on popular music studies and popular music traditions around the world. Thorough cross-referencing and robust indexes of genres, places, names, and subjects make the guide easy to use. Volume 1, Global Perspectives in Popular Music Studies, situates popular music studies within global perspectives and geocultural settings at large. It offers over nine hundred in-depth annotated bibliographic entries of interdisciplinary research and several topical categories that include analytical, critical, and historical studies; theory, methodology, and musicianship studies; annotations of in-depth special issues published in scholarly journals on different topics, issues, trends, and music genres in popular music studies that relate to the contributions of numerous musicians, artists, bands, and music groups; and annotations of selected reference works.

In today’s culture, popular music is a vital site where ideas about gender and sexuality are imagined and disseminated. Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions explores what that means with a wide-ranging collection of chapters that consider the many ways in which contemporary pop music performances of gender and sexuality are politically engaged and even radical. With analyses rooted in feminist and queer thought, contributors explore music from different genres and locations, including Beyoncé’s Lemonade, A Tribe Called Red’s We Are the Halluci Nation, and celebrations of Vera Lynn’s 100th Birthday. At a bleak moment in global politics, this collection focuses on the concept of critical hope: the chapters consider making and consuming popular music as activities that encourage individuals to imagine and work toward a better, more just world. Addressing race, class, aging, disability, and colonialism along with gender and sexuality, the authors articulate the diverse ways popular music can contribute to the collective political projects of queerness and feminism. With voices from senior and emerging scholars, this volume offers a snapshot of today’s queer and feminist scholarship on popular music that is an essential read for students and scholars of music and cultural studies.

On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements comprises eleven essays that explore the myriad ways in which popular music is entwined within social, cultural, musical, historical, and media networks. The authors discuss genres as diverse as mainstream pop, hip hop, classic rock, instrumental synthwave, video game music, amateur ukelele groups, and audiovisual remixes, while also considering the music’s relationship to technological developments, various media and material(itie)s, and personal and social identity. The collection presents a range of different methodologies and theoretical positions, which results in an eclecticism that aptly demonstrates the breadth of contemporary popular music research. The chapters are divided into three major sections that address: wider theoretical and analytical issues (“Broad Strokes”), familiar repertoire or concepts from a new perspective (“Second Takes”), and the meanings to arise from music’s connections with other media forms (“Audiovisual Entanglements”).

Popular Musicology and Identity paves new paths for studying popular music’s entwinement with gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, locality, and a range of other factors. The book consists of original essays in honour of Stan Hawkins, whose work has been a major influence on the musicological study of gender and identity since the early 1990s. In the new millennium, musicological approaches have proliferated and evolved alongside major shifts in the music industry and popular culture. Reflecting this plurality, the book reaches into a range of musical contexts, eras, and idioms to critically investigate the discursive structures that govern the processes through which music is mobilised as a focal point for negotiating and assessing identity. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, Popular Musicology and Identity accounts for the state of popular musicology at the onset of the 2020s while also offering a platform for the further advancement of the critical study of popular music and identity. This collection of essays thus provides an up-to-date resource for scholars across fields such as popular music studies, musicology, gender studies, and media studies.

Words, Music, and the Popular: Global Perspectives on Intermedial Relations opens up the notion of the popular, drawing useful links between wide-ranging aspects of popular culture, through the lens of the interaction between words and music. This collection of essays explores the relation of words and music to issues of the popular. It asks: What is popularity or ‘the’ popular and what role(s) does music play in it? What is the function of the popular, and is ‘pop’ a system? How can popularity be explained in certain historical and political contexts? How do class, gender, race, and ethnicity contribute to and complicate an understanding of the ‘popular’? What of the popularity of verbal art forms? How do they interact with music at particular times and throughout different media?

Opening up the dialogue between popular music studies and aging studies, this book offers a major exploration of age and popular music across Europe. Using a variety of methods to illustrate how age within popular music is contingent and compelling, the volume explores how it provokes curation and devotion across a variety of sites and artists who record in several European languages, and genres including waltz music, electronica, pop, folk, rap, and the French ‘chanson.’ Visiting the many ways in which age is problematized, revered, and performed within Europe in relation to popular music, case studies analyze: French touring shows of popular music stars from the 1960s; André Rieu’s annual Vrijthof concerts in the Netherlands; Kraftwerk and Björk’s appearances at renowned art museums as curated objects; queer approaches to popular music space and time; British folk music inheritances; pan-European strategies of stardom and career longevity; and inheritance and post-colonial hauntings of race and identity. The book works with the notion of travelling, across borders, genres, sexualities, and media, highlighting the visibility of the aging body across a variety of European sites in order to establish popular music through the lens of age as a positive methodology with which to approach popular music cultures, and to offer a counter-narrative to age as decline. This book will appeal to scholars of popular music, popular culture, media studies, cultural studies, aging studies, and cultural gerontology.

"Queer Ear brings together for the first time a collection of music theorists who issue queer challenges to both music theory and musicology. To queer musicology, which has often presumed that music theory has nothing valuable to contribute to queer music studies, we demonstrate how music theory can be appropriated for queer ends. We show that queerness is integral to our music-theoretical practice, and can change the field of music theory. Queers have always listened widely, repurposing straight sounds for the "queer ear," a concept which stands in contrast with queer soundings, by queer composers, who are also investigated in this volume. Privileging provisional, idiosyncratic, and nonnormative listening practices, a queer ear enables us to counter music theory's hoary and continuing tendencies towards rationality, unity, unilinearity, teleology, and logical certainty. What unites the investigation of queer ear and queer soundings is the repurposing of "hard" music-theoretical apparatuses, as well as "soft" apparatuses like narratology and cultural theory, for queer ends. These repurposings contribute to the search for general principles-or a "theory"-of queering that counters mainstream music theory's proclivities, encouraging everyone to experiment with queer ways of listening instead. But ultimately, the queer ear is an expression of what queers have always had to do, often learning from a young age to collect scraps from our families's heteronormative table, recycling and reusing bits and pieces of an often hostile world to build habitable futures for ourselves. Through the lenses of queer temporality, queer narratology, and queer music analyses, we examine a wide variety of sounds from Sun Ra to Cowell, Czernowin, and Henze, as well as Schubert and Schumann; theories ranging from Schenker to queer shame, disability studies, and posthumanism; and writings from Edward Cone to Edward Prime-Stevenson"--

Pop Masculinities explores the many ways in which twenty-first century pop artists perform masculinity through their songs, music videos, and public appearances. This offers a point of entry for addressing broader gender issues in contemporary popular culture and society.