What are female fans of popular music seeking and hearing when they listen to music and attend concerts? In an innovative and fascinating study entitled Sing Us a Song, Piano Woman: Female Fans and the Music of Tori Amos (The Scarecrow Press,

On November 29, 1957, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holliday, Zoot Sims, Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins, and a multi-talented young R&B player who played jazz that night, Ray Charles, and others played a benefit concert for the Morningside Recreation Center at Ca...

Since the 1990s, the music industry has been going through a massive transformation. After World War II, the primary way audiences participated in the music business in the period between 1945 and 1990 was by purchasing records and attending concerts.

During his lifetime, Michael Jackson became a global icon. Michael Jackson was beloved by millions; his journey began as he became a boy star with The Jackson Five and it culminated with his being crowned the King of Pop,

What is the value of music and why does it matter? These are the core questions in David Hesmondhalgh‘s new book Why Music Matters (Wiley Blackwell, 2014). The book attempts a critical defence of music in the face of both uncritical populist post-moder...

In 2004, the traditionally Polish-Catholic community of Hamtramck Michigan became the site of a debate over the Muslim call to prayer. Members of the Hamtramck community engaged in a contest about the appropriateness of sound and its intrusion into pub...

The New York-based rock band Living Colour exploded into national consciousness in 1988 after their video for the thunderous “Cult of Personality” went into heavy rotation on MTV. Their album, Vivid, broke into the Billboard Top Ten and sold more than ...

In Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea (University of California Press, 2013), Nicholas Harkness explores the human voice as an instrument, and object, and an emblem in a rich ethnography of songak in Christian ...

It is a challenge for all musicians to find success in the modern music industry, but women face unique challenges. Cultural narratives shape how female artists get sold to the public and those narratives, in turn,

How did jazz take shape? Why does jazz have so many styles? Why do jazz songs get longer as the twentieth century proceeds? Marc Myers, in his fascinating book Why Jazz Happened (University of California Press,

In Vince Guaraldi at the Piano (McFarland Press, 2012),Derrick Bang chronicles San Francisco jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi’s sojourns into the world of jazz from the late 1940s to his untimely death in 1976. Guaraldi,

Today Detroit is down for the count, but as Steve Miller reveals inDetroit Rock City: The Uncensored History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in America’s Loudest City (Da Capo Press, 2013), his comprehensive oral history of the city’s rock scene,

Who is Eminem? Is he a violent misogynist, another “white” performer imitating African American musical styles, or is he something else entirely? In her provocative bookEminem: The Real Slim Shady(Praeger, 2013),

“…when people were hearing us, they were hearing the avant-garde on the one hand, and they were hearing the history of jazz that led up to it on the other hand – because Miles was that history.” -Herbie Hancock,

Videography is a powerful tool for recording and representing aspects of human society and culture, and anthropologists have long used – and debated the use of – video as a tool to study indigenous and traditional peoples.

Conventional wisdom holds that the birth of the rock star came in 1956 with the ascendance of Elvis Presley. Not so, says author Michael Walker, who argues in his page-turning What You Want is in the Limo (Spiegel and Grau,

2013 has been an annus horribilis for thrash metal legends Slayer. In February, Slayer parted ways with longtime drummer Dave Lombardo for the third and likely final time. In May, guitarist Jeff Hanneman died of alcohol-related cirrhosis,

Thinking about “Noise” in the history and practice of music means thinking in opposites. Noise is both a musical genre, and is not. It both produces a global circulation and emerges from it. It has depended on the live-ness of embodied performance whil...

Before the twentieth century, opera was a kind of cultural glue: it was both a medium of mass-communication, and a powerful shaper and reflector of the popular imagination in the way TV and film are today. In Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture...

Thomas Bey William Bailey is the author of Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society (Belsona Books, 2012). He is a psycho-acoustic sound artist and writer on saturation culture.

What is noise? In his new book Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Greg Hainge, Reader in French at University of Queensland, Australia, explores this question. The book is written within the tradition of critical t...

MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press, 2012) is a fascinating study of the MP3 as a historical, cultural, conceptual, and social phenomenon. In the course of an account of the MP3 that has surprising connections to telephony and the econo...

New Jersey. Home to Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Yo La Tango. . .and the Misfits, a hardcore metal horror rock band from Lodi. In This Music Leaves Stains: The Complete Story of the Misfits (Scarecrow Press, 2013), James Greene Jr.

Between 1969 and 1973, the Who hit their commercial and creative peak. The legendary English quartet produced three Billboard Top Ten albums, including two double LP “rock operas,” Tommy (1969) and Quadrophenia (1973).

After the huge success of Elvis Presley there was a moment when it looked as if rock ‘n’ roll might, indeed, be nothing more than a fad. Its successor in the world of popular music would be folk music, and its undisputed leader was the Kingston Trio.