Sports and popular music are synergistic agents in the construction of identity and community. They are often interconnected through common cross-marketing tactics and through influence on each other's performative strategies and stylistic content. Typically only studied as separate entities, popular music and sport cultures mutually 'play' off each other in exchanges of style, ideologies and forms. Posing unique challenges to notions of mind - body dualities, nationalism, class, gender, and racial codes and sexual orientation, Dr Ken McLeod illuminates the paradoxical and often conflicting relationships associated with these modes of leisure and entertainment and demonstrates that they are not culturally or ideologically distinct but are interconnected modes of contemporary social practice. Examples include how music is used to enhance sporting events, such as anthems, chants/cheers, and intermission entertainment, music that is used as an active part of the athletic event, and music that has been written about or that is associated with sports. There are also connections in the use of music in sports movies, television and video games and important, though critically under-acknowledged, similarities regarding spectatorship, practice and performance. Despite the scope of such confluences, the extraordinary impact of the interrelationship of music and sports on popular culture has remained little recognized. McLeod ties together several influential threads of popular culture and fills a significant void in our understanding of the construction and communication of identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Covers the topic of sports and music from the ancient to the post-modern.

Despite the close and longstanding links between sport and music, the relationships between these two significant cultural forms have been relatively neglected. This book addresses the oversight with a series of highly original essays written by authors from a range of academic disciplines including history, psychology, musicology and cultural studies. It deals with themes including sport in music; music in sport; the use of music in mass sporting events; and sport, music and protest. In so doing, the book raises a range of important themes such as personal and collective identity, cultural value, ideology, globalisation and the commercialisation of sport. As well as considering the sport/music nexus in Great Britain, the collection examines sport and music in Ireland, the United States, Germany and the former Soviet Union, as well as in the Olympic movement. Musical styles and genres discussed are diverse and include classical, rock, music hall and football-terrace chants. For anybody with an interest in sport, music or both, this collection will prove an enjoyable and stimulating read. This book was previously published as a Special Issue of Sport in Society.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research is the first comprehensive academic survey of the field of rock music as it stands today. More than 50 years into its life and we still ask - what is rock music, why is it studied, and how does it work, both as music and as cultural activity? This volume draws together 37 of the leading academics working on rock to provide answers to these questions and many more. The text is divided into four major sections: practice of rock (analysis, performance, and recording); theories; business of rock; and social and culture issues. Each chapter combines two approaches, providing a summary of current knowledge of the area concerned as well as the consequences of that research and suggesting profitable subsequent directions to take. This text investigates and presents the field at a level of depth worthy of something which has had such a pervasive influence on the lives of millions.

"Rock and Rhapsodies is the first book-length musicological study of British rock band Queen. It primarily addresses the material written, recorded, and released between 1973 and 1991. The text provides readers with a nuanced analytical account of the group's songs and illuminates the varied the stylistic and historical contexts in which Queen's music was created. The key conceptual basis for the analysis is an idiolect, which refers to the distinct musical style of a single artist. Having documented the key features of Queen's idiolect, the book further explores the nature of specific musical characteristic and uses them to respond to a range of wider analytical and discursive issues as pertaining to style, genre, form, time, voice, and historiography. Rock and Rhapsodies comprises twelve chapters. The introduction documents Queen's place in scholarly literature and unfolds the principal analytical methodology. The following three chapters address the structural details of Queen's idiolect and songs, before analyzing the voices of Queen's singers. The vocal techniques are related to discourses of authenticity and, in the case of Freddie Mercury, the queer voice. The five subsequent chapters identify the changing and myriad stylistic influences on Queen, as well as relate the band to the major rock movements of the 1970s: hard, glam, and progressive. The final chapter explores the replacement singers, Queen in wider popular media, and the influence of the band, since Mercury's death in 1991"--

Popular music scholars have long been interested in the connection between place and music. This collection brings together a number of key scholars in order to introduce readers to concepts and theories used to explore the relationships between place and music. An interdisciplinary volume, drawing from sociology, geography, ethnomusicology, media, cultural, and communication studies, this book covers a wide-range of topics germane to the production and consumption of place in popular music. Through considerations of changes in technology and the mediascape that have shaped the experience of popular music (vinyl, iPods, social media), the role of social difference and how it shapes sociomusical encounters (queer spaces, gendered and racialised spaces), as well as the construction and representations of place (musical tourism, city branding, urban mythologies), this is an up-to-the-moment overview of central discussions about place and music. The contributors explore a range of contexts, moving from the studio to the stage, the city to the suburb, the bedroom to festival, from nightclub to museum, with each entry highlighting the diverse and complex ways in which music and place are mutually constitutive.

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.

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Advertising is an essential guide to the crucial role that music plays in relation to the audio or audiovisual advertising message, from the perspectives of its creation, interpretation, and reception. The book's unique three-part organization reflects this life cycle of an advertisement, from industry inception to mass-mediated text to consumer behaviour. Experts well versed in the practice, analysis, and empirical studies of the commercial message have contributed to the collection's forty-two chapters, which collectively represent the most ambitious and comprehensive attempt to date to address the important intersections of music and advertising. Handbook chapters are self-contained yet share borders with other contributions within a given section and across the major sections of the book, so readers can either study one topic of particular interest or read through to gain an understanding of the broader issues at stake. Within the book's Introduction, each editor has provided an overview of the unifying themes for the section for which they were responsible, with brief summaries of individual contributions at the beginnings of the sections. The lists of recommended readings at the end of chapters are intended to assist readers in finding further literature about the topic. An overview of industry practices by a music insider is provided in the Appendix, giving context for the three parts of the book.

Driving Identities examines long-standing connections between popular music and the automotive industry and how this relationship has helped to construct and reflect various socio-cultural identities. It also challenges common assumptions regarding the divergences between industry and art, and reveals how music and sound are used to suture the putative divide between human and non-human. This book is a ground-breaking inquiry into the relationship between popular music and automobiles, and into the mutual aesthetic and stylistic influences that have historically left their mark on both industries. Shaped by new historicism and cultural criticism, and by methodologies adapted from gender, LGBTQ+, and African-American studies, it makes an important contribution to understanding the complex and interconnected nature of identity and cultural formation. In its interdisciplinary approach, melding aspects of ethnomusicology, sociology, sound studies, and business studies, it pushes musicological scholarship into a new consideration and awareness of the complexity of identity construction and of influences that inform our musical culture. The volume also provides analyses of the confluences and coactions of popular music and automotive products to highlight the mutual influences on their respective aesthetic and technical evolutions. Driving Identities is aimed at both academics and enthusiasts of automotive culture, popular music, and cultural studies in general. It is accompanied by an extensive online database appendix of car-themed pop recordings and sheet music, searchable by year, artist, and title.

This book explores some of disco’s other lives which thrived between the 1970s and the 1980s, from oil-boom Nigeria to socialist Czechoslovakia, from post-colonial India to war-torn Lebanon. It charts the translation of disco as a cultural form into musical, geo-political, ideological and sociological landscapes that fall outside of its original conditions of production and reception, capturing the variety of scenes, contexts and reasons for which disco took on diverse dimensions in its global journey. With its deep repercussions in visual culture, gender politics, and successive forms of popular music, art, fashion and style, disco as a musical genre and dance culture is exemplary of how a subversive, marginal scene – that of queer and Black New York undergrounds in the early 1970s – turned into a mainstream cultural industry. As it exploded, atomised and travelled, disco served a number of different agendas; its aesthetic rootedness in ideas of pleasure, transgression and escapism and its formal malleability, constructed around a four-on-the-floor beat, allowed it to permeate a variety of local scenes for whom the meaning of disco shifted, sometimes in unexpected and radical ways.