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?

The definitive guide to the world of contemporary and electronic music by the media's top music pundit 'An exhilarating history of pop - a brilliant and joyous book' Guardian 'A passionate, irresistible encouragement to listen more, and to listen better' Sunday Times Has pop burnt itself out? Inspired by the video for Kylie Minogue's hit single 'Can't Get You Out of My Head', acclaimed rock journalist Paul Morley is driving with Kylie towards a virtual city built of sound and ideas in search of the answer. Their journey bridges the various paradoxes of twentieth-century culture, as they encounter a succession of celebrities and geniuses - including Madonna, Kraftwerk, Wittgenstein and the ghost of Elvis Presley - and explore the iconic and the obscure, the mechanical and the digital, the avant-garde and the very nature of pop itself.

Music in Words is a compact guide to researching and writing about music, addressing all the issues that anyone who writes about music--from students to professional musicians and critics--may confront when putting together anything from brief program notes to a lengthy thesis. The book is a writing guide and a reference manual in one: the first part, a "how to" section, offers a clear explanation of the purpose of music research and how it is to be done, including basic introductions to the most necessary tools for musical inquiry (with special emphasis on strategic use of the internet), and how they can be accessed and used. The second part is a compendium of information on style and sources for quick reference, including a straightforward presentation of the purpose and use of citation and reference systems as they are applied to and in music. As a whole, the volume gives readers a clear picture of how to write about music at different levels and for different purposes in a handy, thoroughly cross-referenced format. This American edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded, and features an extensive section on writing for the Internet and new sections on writing for jazz, popular music, world musics, and ethnography. Additionally, a companion website presents a broad range of writing samples and links to key resources.

A deep look at the work of one of the most insightful and incisive critics of late 20th-century American culture.

How do we know music? We perform it, we compose it, we sing it in the shower, we cook, sleep and dance to it. Eventually we think and write about it. This book represents the culmination of such shared processes. Each of these essays, written by leading writers on popular music, is analytical in some sense, but none of them treats analysis as an end in itself. The books presents a wide range of genres (rock, dance, TV soundtracks, country, pop, soul, easy listening, Turkish Arabesk) and deals with issues as broad as methodology, modernism, postmodernism, Marxism and communication. It aims to encourage listeners to think more seriously about the 'social' consequences of the music they spend time with and is the first collection of such essays to incorporate contextualisation in this way.

New York Times Bestseller An NPR Best Book of the Year Winner of the Chicago Tribune Literary Award Finalist for the Marfield Prize, National Award for Arts Writing "Reads the way Mr. Glass's compositions sound at their best: propulsive, with a surreptitious emotional undertow." —Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, New York Times Philip Glass has, almost single-handedly, crafted the dominant sound of late-twentieth-century classical music. Yet in Words Without Music, his critically acclaimed memoir, he creates an entirely new and unexpected voice, that of a born storyteller and an acutely insightful chronicler, whose behind-the-scenes recollections allow readers to experience those moments of creative fusion when life so magically merged with art. From his childhood in Baltimore to his student days in Chicago and at Juilliard, to his first journey to Paris and a life-changing trip to India, Glass movingly recalls his early mentors, while reconstructing the places that helped shape his creative consciousness. Whether describing working as an unlicensed plumber in gritty 1970s New York or composing Satyagraha, Glass breaks across genres and re-creates, here in words, the thrill that results from artistic creation. Words Without Music ultimately affirms the power of music to change the world.

"The Words and Music of Sting subdivides Sting's life and works into rough periods of creative activity and offers a fantastic opportunity to view Sting's many stylistic changes within a coherent general framework. After analyzing Sting's musical output album by album and song by song, author Christopher Gable sums up Sting's accomplishments and places him on the continuum of influential singer-songwriters, showing how he differs from and relates to other artists of the same period. A discography, filmography, and bibliography conclude the work." --Book Jacket.

An analysis of the songs, recordings, and influence of one of the most colorful and controversial American artists of the past quarter century.

Ice Cube is one of the most influential figures in the history of rap and hip-hop. Best known for the vitriol of his angry black man recordings of the late 1980s and mid 1990s, Ice Cube epitomizes the genre often referred to as gangsta rap. Much of his music from these years is focused on the disturbing realities of life in black urban ghettos, and as a result it chronicles such complex and controversial issues as racial stereotypes, street gangs, racial profiling, black on black crime, teen pregnancy, absentee fathers, and male-female relationships. His recordings with NWA are noteworthy for their sardonic humor in discussing dire issues. The group's landmark CD Straight Outta Compton (1988) is a palette of urban woes recounted in aggressive and hostile street vernacular, while Ice Cube's recordings of the 1990s now represent paradigms of the gangsta style. The first three chapters of The Words and Music of Ice Cube explore Ice Cube's recordings between 1988 and 1996 and situate Ice Cube in the context of other rappers of this period-most notably Public Enemy, Ice-T, Tupac, Biggie, and Snoop Dogg-whose music also chronicled explosive issues in urban ghettos. The fourth chapter considers Ice Cube's career in film, beginning with a discussion of his performance in Boyz n the Hood and ending with a look at his most recent films, Barber Shop, Barber Shop II, Are We There Yet? And Are We Done Yet? The fifth and final chapter looks back over all of Ice Cube's work to date and considers his impact and his legacy in music and popular culture at large. .