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A Song for Europe
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 204

A Song for Europe

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2017-07-05
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  • Publisher: Routledge

The world's largest and longest-running song competition, the Eurovision Song Contest is a significant and extremely popular media event throughout the continent and abroad. The Contest is broadcast live in over 30 countries with over 100 million viewers annually. Established in 1956 as a televised spectacle to unify postwar Western Europe through music, the Contest features singers who represent a participating nation with a new popular song. Viewers vote by phone for their favourite performance, though they cannot vote for their own country's entry. This process alone reveals much about national identities and identifications, as voting patterns expose deep-seated alliances and animosities...

Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 292

Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest

Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest examines how the Eurovision Song Contest has reflected and become intertwined with the history of postwar Europe from a political perspective. Established in 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest is the world's largest popular music event and one of the most popular television programmes in Europe, currently attracting a global audience of around 200 million people. Eurovision is often mocked as cultural kitsch because of its over-the-top performances and frivolous song lyrics. Yet there is no cultural medium that connects Europeans more than popular music, the development of which has always been tied to cultural, economic, political, social and te...

A Song for Europe
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 224

A Song for Europe

The world's largest and longest-running song competition, the Eurovision Song Contest is a significant and extremely popular media event throughout the continent and abroad. Here, an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplines, explore how the contest sheds light on issues of European politics, national and European identity, race, gender and sexuality, and the aesthetics of camp. Eurovision is sometimes regarded as a low-brow camp spectacle of little aesthetic or intellectual value. The essays in this collection often contradict this assumption, demonstrating that the contest has actually been a significant force and forecaster for social, cultural and political transformations in postwar Europe.

Made in Yugoslavia
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 360

Made in Yugoslavia

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2020-06-01
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  • Publisher: Routledge

Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of popular music in Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav region across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book consists of chapters by leading scholars and covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of music in the region that for most of the past century was known as Yugoslavia. Exploring the role played by music in Yugoslav art, culture, social movements, and discourses of statehood, this book offers a gateway into scholarly explanation of a key region in Eastern Europe. An introduction provides an overview and background on popular music in Yugoslavia, followed by chapters in four thematic sections: Zabavna-Pop; Rock, Punk, and New Wave; Narodna (Folk) and Neofolk Music; and the Politics of Popular Music Under Socialism.

Divided Dreamworlds?
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 498

Divided Dreamworlds?

With its unique focus on how culture contributed to the blurring of ideological boundaries between the East and the West, this important volume offers fascinating insights into the tensions, rivalries and occasional cooperation between the two blocs. Encompassing developments in both the arts and sciences, the authors analyze focal points, aesthetic preferences and cultural phenomena through topics as wide-ranging as the East- and West German interior design; the Soviet stance on genetics; US cultural diplomacy during and after the Cold War; and the role of popular music as a universal cultural ambassador. Well positioned at the cutting edge of Cold War studies, this important work illuminates some of the striking paradoxes involved in the production and reception of culture in East and West.

Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 251

Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956

This book uses the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), as an analytical entry point to understand and illuminate post-War Europe and the drive to create an identity that can legitimise the European project in its broadest sense. The ESC presents an idealised vision of Europe, and this has long existed in a strained relationship with reality. While the trajectory of post-war European integration is a high-profile topic, we believe that the ESC offers a unique and innovative way to think about the role of culture in the history of post-War European integration and tensions between the ideal and reality of European unity. Through the series of case studies that make up the chapters in this book, analysis brings these interlinked tensions to light, exploring the roles of culture and identity, alongside and a productive conversation with the political and economic projects of post-war European integration.

Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 320

Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc

Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc explores the rise of youth as consumers of popular culture and the globalization of popular music in Russia and Eastern Europe. This collection of essays challenges assumptions that Communist leaders and Western-influenced youth cultures were inimically hostile to one another. While initially banning Western cultural trends like jazz and rock-and-roll, Communist leaders accommodated elements of rock and pop music to develop their own socialist popular music. They promoted organized forms of leisure to turn young people away from excesses of style perceived to be Western. Popular song and officially sponsored rock and pop bands formed a socialist beat that yo...

The Eurovision Song Contest as a Cultural Phenomenon
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 207

The Eurovision Song Contest as a Cultural Phenomenon

Drawing from the wealth of academic literature about the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) written over the last two decades, this book consolidates and recognizes the ESC's relevance in academia by analysing its contribution to different fields of study. The book brings together leading ESC scholars from across disciplines and from across the globe to reflect on the intersection between their academic fields of study and the ESC by answering the question: what has the ESC contributed to academia? The book also draws from fields rarely associated with the ESC, such as Law, Business and Research Methodologies, to demonstrate the contest's broad utility in research, pedagogy and in practice. Given its interdisciplinary approach, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students working in cultural, media, and music studies, as well as those interested in the intersections between these areas and politics, law, education, pedagogy, and history.

Post-communist Nostalgia
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 310

Post-communist Nostalgia

Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social and especially economic changes did not always result in the hoped-for improvements in people's lives. This led to widespread disillusionment that can be observed today all across Eastern Europe. Not simply a longing for security, stability, and prosperity, this nostalgia is also a sense of loss regarding a specific form of sociability. Even some of those who opposed communism express a desire to invest their new lives with renewed meaning and dignity. Among the younger generation, it surfaces as a tentative yet growing curiosity about the recent past. In this volume scho...

Women Comedians in the Digital Age
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 232

Women Comedians in the Digital Age

This book offers a thorough examination of digital work by women comedians in the US, exploring their use of digital media to perform jokes, engage with fans, remake their reputations, and become political activists. This book argues that despite its many adverse effects, digital work is changing comedy, empowering women to create new comic forms and negotiate the contentious political climate incited by former President Donald. J. Trump. Chapters are focused on video podcasting, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and the streaming platform Netflix – each containing informative case studies on significant women comedians who use them, including Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, Leslie Jones,...