Music : Popular

After years of failing to duplicate its album Dookie's success, punk-rocking Green Day seemed dead in the water. An undercurrent of critical disdain had always held that the band purveyed punk lite and was an aggregation of poseurs compared to legendary punk outfits the Clash and the Ramones. Then the group's eighth album, American Idiot, hit the top of the charts in 2004 and stayed there, catapulting Green Day back into public attention. Spitz, a senior writer for Spin, sympathetically limns the arc of the lads' career from East Bay, California, in informative if unchallenging style. more...

Price: $16.95

Pop Fiction's unique essays individually consider one song within a cinematic context. Unlike previous collected volumes about pop music in film, where a generalised approach has been adopted, this offers instead a close examination of two pervasive and significant mediums in combination. The collection introspects, assembling the pop song into various guises and documenting how individuals dissemble the multiple roles that the pop song plays in cinematic moments. The song as: role-play, memory trigger, narrator, ghost, marketing device, translator, alienator, membership rite etc. All provide fresh insight towards the inter-textual fusion of film and song. Additionally the books form reduces the area of analysis to expose differences and similarities between these contrasting fields of study. Innovative yet accessible, this exciting document would appeal to students, lecturers and researchers offering a diverse set of models with which to investigate the 'ideogram' of image/text/sound - a relationship which sits at the heart of most cultural production. For beginners, the book provides comforting areas of familiarity (pop song and film) while exploring areas of respective discipline and inter-disciplinary practice in an original manner. more...

Price: $29.95

A unique Israeli national culture--indeed, the very nature of "Israeliness"--remains a matter of debate, a struggle to blend vying memories and backgrounds, ideologies and wills. Identifying popular music as an important site in this wider cultural endeavor, this book focuses on the three major popular music cultures that are proving instrumental in attempts to invent Israeliness: the invented folk song repertoire known as Shirei Eretz Israel; the contemporary, global-cosmopolitan Israeli rock; and the ethnic-oriental musica mizrahit. more...

Price: $15.95

Shakira's crossover success has been predicted for years by those in the know. She landed her first record deal when she was a mere thirteen years old, recorded her second album at fifteen, and starred in a popular soap opera in her native Colombia. She was only nineteen when her third album, Pies descalzos (Barefoot), made her the bestselling female rock star in Latin America. more...

Price: $11.99

Americana music isn't just a musical form. It's a state of mind. This book charts the coordinates of this state of mind with a series of interviews and portraits from the heart of alternative country, often known to its adherents simply as OKOM: Our Kind of Music. more...

Price: $24.95