Democracy of Sound


Book Description

Democracy of Sound tells the story of the pirates, radicals, jazzbos, Deadheads, and DJs who challenged the record industry for control of recorded sound throughout the twentieth century. A political and cultural history, it shows how the primacy of "intellectual property" gradually eclipsed an American political tradition that was suspicious of monopolies and favored free competition.




Discordant Democracy: Noise, Affect, Populism, and the Presidential Campaign


Book Description

Discordant Democracy: Noise, Affect, Populism, and the Presidential Campaign paints a portrait of the political experience at a pivotal time in American political and social history. The modern political campaign is aestheticized and assimilated into mass culture, divorced from fact and policy, and nakedly tethered to emotional appeal. Through a multi-modal comparative examination of the sonic and emotional cultures of the 2008 and 2016 campaigns, Justin Patch raises critical queries about our affective relationship to modern politics and the impact of emotional campaigning on democracy. Discordant Democracy asks: how do campaign sounds affect us; what role do we the electorate play in creating and sustaining these sounds and affects; and what actions do they generate? Theories from anthropology, cognitive science, sound studies and philosophy are engaged to grapple with these questions and connect bombastic mass-mediated political events, campaign media and individual sonic experience. The analyses complicate notions of top-down campaigning, political spin, and enthusiastic millennial populism by examining our role in producing and animating political sounds through conversation, applause, laughter, media, and music.




Top 40 Democracy


Book Description

A capacious and stimulating tour de force of the mainstream music industry that reveals the cultural import of even the most deliberately banal performers and songs. Weisbard finds depths in our culture s shallows as he investigates and articulates the cultural construction of such phenomena as Dolly Parton, Elton John, the Isley Brothers, A&M Records, and the rise of radio populism. He further sheds new light on the upheavals in the music industry over the last fifteen years and the implications of them for the audiences the industry has shaped. Each chapter brings us to see afresh precisely that music and those musicians that have become the most familiar and overexposed, by delving into the minutiae of how pop stars and their music were made and framed for repeated consumption in the era dominated by radio."




Finding Democracy in Music


Book Description

For a century and more, the idea of democracy has fuelled musicians’ imaginations. Seeking to go beyond music’s proven capacity to contribute to specific political causes, musicians have explored how aspects of their practice embody democratic principles. This may involve adopting particular approaches to compositional material, performance practice, relationships to audiences, or modes of dissemination and distribution. Finding Democracy in Music is the first study to offer a wide-ranging investigation of ways in which democracy may thus be found in music. A guiding theme of the volume is that this takes place in a plurality of ways, depending upon the perspective taken to music’s manifold relationships, and the idea of democracy being entertained. Contributing authors explore various genres including orchestral composition, jazz, the post-war avant-garde, online performance, and contemporary popular music, as well as employing a wide array of theoretical, archival, and ethnographic methodologies. Particular attention is given to the contested nature of democracy as a category, and the gaps that frequently arise between utopian aspiration and reality. In so doing, the volume interrogates a key way in which music helps to articulate and shape our social lives and our politics.




Music and Politics


Book Description

It is common to hear talk of how music can inspire crowds, move individuals and mobilise movements. We know too of how governments can live in fear of its effects, censor its sounds and imprison its creators. At the same time, there are other governments that use music for propaganda or for torture. All of these examples speak to the idea of music's political importance. But while we may share these assumptions about music's power, we rarely stop to analyse what it is about organised sound - about notes and rhythms - that has the effects attributed to it. This is the first book to examine systematically music's political power. It shows how music has been at the heart of accounts of political order, at how musicians from Bono to Lily Allen have claimed to speak for peoples and political causes. It looks too at the emergence of music as an object of public policy, whether in the classroom or in the copyright courts, whether as focus of national pride or employment opportunities. The book brings together a vast array of ideas about music's political significance (from Aristotle to Rousseau, from Adorno to Deleuze) and new empirical data to tell a story of the extraordinary potency of music across time and space. At the heart of the book lies the argument that music and politics are inseparably linked, and that each animates the other.




Trendy Fascism


Book Description

Popular music plays a major role in mobilizing citizens, especially youth, to fight for political causes. Yet the presence of music in politics receives relatively little attention from scholars, politicians, and citizens. White power music is no exception, despite its role in recent high-profile hate crimes.Trendy Fascism is the first book to explore how contemporary white supremacists use popular music to teach hate and promote violence. Nancy S. Love focuses on how white power music supports "trendy fascism," a neo-fascist aesthetic politics. Unlike classical fascism, trendy fascism involves a hyper-modern cultural politics that exploits social media to create a global white supremacist community. Three case studies examine different facets of the white power music scene: racist skinhead, neo-Nazi folk, and goth/metal. Together these cases illustrate how music has replaced traditional forms of public discourse to become the primary medium for conveying white supremacist ideology today. Written from the interdisciplinary perspective on culture, economics, and politics best described as critical theory, this book is crucial reading for everyone concerned about the future of democracy.




Breaking the Sound Barrier


Book Description

Collection of the author's commentaries from Democracy now!, the daily grassroots global news hour that broadcasts the program via radio, satellite and cable television, and Internet.




Music, Radio and the Public Sphere


Book Description

Radio, the most widely used medium in the world, is a dominant mediator of musical meaning. Through a combination of critical analysis, interdisciplinary theory and ethnographic writing about community radio, this book provides a novel theorization of democratic aesthetics, with important implications for the study of old and new media alike.




Democracy and Music Education


Book Description

Counterpoints: Music and Education--Estelle R. Jorgensen, editor




How Music Dies (or Lives)


Book Description

All recordings document life, arising from a specific time and place, and if that place is artificial, the results will be as well. Culled from a lifetime of learning through failure and designed to provoke thought and inspiration for artists in every medium, How Music Dies (or Lives) is a virtual how-to manual for those on a quest for authenticity in an age of airbrushed and Auto-Tuned so-called “artists.” Author and Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan chronicles his own journeys to find new and ancient sounds, textured voices, and nonmalleable songs, and he presents readers with an intricate look at our technological society. His concise prose covers topics such as: •The damages of colonization in generalizing distinctive variations •The need for imperfection •The gaps between manufacturing and invention •The saturation of music in everyday life This guide serves those who ask themselves, “What’s wrong with our culture?” Along with possible answers are lessons in using the microphone as a telescope, hearing the earth as an echo, and appreciating the value of democratizing voices. Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.