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'I doubt I'll ever read a better account of the history and sociology of popular music than this one.' Brian Eno 'Profound.and beyond.' Robert Plant Legendary producer and record label boss Joe Boyd has spent a lifetime travelling the globe and immersing himself in music. He has witnessed first-hand the growing popularity of music from Africa, India, Latin America, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe since the 1960s and was one of the protagonists of the 'world music' movement of the 1980s. In this sweeping history, Boyd sets out to explore the fascinating backstories to these sounds and documents a decade of encounters with the most extraordinary musicians and producers who have altered the co...
Rhetoric about media technology tends to fall into two extreme categories: unequivocal celebration or blanket condemnation. This is particularly true in debate over the clash of values when first world media infiltrate third world audiences. Bringing together the best new work on contemporary media practices, technologies, and policies, the essayists in Global Currents argue that neither of these extreme views accurately represents the role of media technology today. New ways of thinking about film, television, music, and the internet demonstrate that it is not only media technologies that affect the cultures into which they are introduced—it is just as likely that the receiving culture wi...
In the mid-20th century, African musicians took up Cuban music as their own and claimed it as a marker of black Atlantic connections and of cosmopolitanism untethered from European colonial relations. Today, Cuban/African bands popular in Africa in the 1960s and '70s have moved into the world music scene in Europe and North America, and world music producers and musicians have created new West African-Latin American collaborations expressly for this market niche. World Music and the Black Atlantic follows two of these bands, Orchestra Baobab and AfroCubism, and the industry and audiences that surround them-from musicians' homes in West Africa, to performances in Europe and North America, to ...
"World music" is an awkward phrase. Used to describe the hugely multifaceted nature of a range of typically non-English-language popular music from the world over, it's a tag that throws up as many problems as it does solutions. Louise Gray's The No-Nonsense Guide to World Music attempts to go behind the phrase to explore the reasons for the contemporary interest in world music, who listens to it, and why. Through chapters that focus on specific areas of music, such as rembetika, fado, trance music, and new folk, Gray explores the genres that have emerged from marginalized communities, music in conflict zones, and music as escapism. In this unique guide, which combines the seduction of sound with politics and social issues, the author makes the case for music as a powerful tool able to bring individuals together. Louise Gray is a writer and editor whose work on music and performing arts has appeared in the New Internationalist, The Wire, The Independent on Sunday, the Guardian, and Art Review. She co-edited Sound and the City (British Council, 2007), a book exploring the changing soundworld of China.
The Golden Isles of Georgia comprise a group of four barrier islands and the mainland port city of Brunswick on the 100-mile-long coast of the U.S. state of Georgia on the Atlantic Ocean. They include St. Simons Island, Sea Island, Jekyll Island, Little St. Simons Island, and Historic Brunswick. Mild winters, together with natural beaches, vast stretches of marshland, maritime forests, historical sites, and abundant wildlife on both land and sea made the Golden Isles popular amongst wealthy southern planters, who built their homes on these islands. Charles Spalding Wylly of Darien, Georgia, spent the last years of his long life in Brunswick. Sharing the fate of the old, he found it almost im...
This book covers the history of the music of Latin America. Individual chapters focus on the sounds of the Caribbean, Brazil, South America, and Mexico. Author Stuart A. Kallen includes informative sidebars and numerous quotations from authoritative sources. Students will enjoy this volume for leisure reading and it's an excellent research tool for reports.
Salsa and Its Transnational Moves presents a brilliant critical analysis of salsa dancing in a major North American city. Drawing from a vast number of disciplines, author Sheenagh Pietrobruno focuses on the tension between the status of dance as a bodily expression of identity and its function as a cultural commodity within the economic life of modern day cities. This engaging work investigates the transnational movements of salsa by exploring the circulation of salsa within the Montreal dance scene, nourished by the continuous flow of a people, and examining the commodification of the Latino culture. Pietrobruno's analysis is singular in highlighting how the migration of a people and a dance represent displacements that are not always homologous. At the core of this work, Pietrobruno offers an extensive and intricate ethnography of the institutions and individuals involved in shaping the Montreal salsa scene that will appeal to academics and general audiences alike, who are interested in the study of anthropology, popular music, dance, gender, ethnicity, and culture.
The growth of African immigration to France at the end of the Twentieth Century wrought cultural change in this epicentre of the avant-garde in European art and music. James Winders presents the story of African immigrants to France as a unique chapter in the long history of the reception accorded expatriate artists in Paris.
The Concise Garland Encyclopedia of World Music comprises two volumes, and can only be purchased as the two-volume set.To purchase the set please go to:http://www.routledge.com/9780415972932.
Fado, often described as 'urban folk music', emerged from the streets of Lisbon in the mid-nineteenth century and went on to become Portugal's 'national' music during the twentieth. It is known for its strong emphasis on loss, memory and nostalgia within its song texts, which often refer to absent people and places. One of the main lyrical themes of fado is the city itself. Fado music has played a significant role in the interlacing of mythology, history, memory and regionalism in Portugal in the second half of the twentieth century. Richard Elliott considers the ways in which fado songs bear witness to the city of Lisbon, in relation to the construction and maintenance of the local. Elliott explores the ways in which fado acts as a cultural product reaffirming local identity via recourse to social memory and an imagined community, while also providing a distinctive cultural export for the dissemination of a 'remembered Portugal' on the global stage.