Bücher der Reihe For the Record: Lexington Studies in Rock and Popular Music

Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 explores how rock and roll is a Romantic phenomenon that sheds light, retrospectively, on what literary Romanticism was at its different points of origin and on what it has become in the present.

The Rock Music Imagination explores creativity in classic rock, its roots in the blues, and its wide cultural impact. The romantic strains of rock imagination are examined in the songs of popular rock bands, the sixties counterculture, science fiction, the rock music novel, and rock's attention to human rights in the global community.

Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 explores how rock and roll is a Romantic phenomenon that sheds light, retrospectively, on what literary Romanticism was at its different points of origin and on what it has become in the present.

Using Billy Joel's music as a lens on history and culture, this volume introduces a variety of musicological approaches to one of the most popular entertainers of the past fifty years.

As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the most momentous year in the life of the Beatles, the contributors to The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love perform wide-ranging analyses of the group's enduring sociocultural influence and achievements.

Kim combines historical contextualization with political economy of the media and critical textual analysis to investigate the socio-ideological effects of K-Pop in the existing networks of power and domination in gender relations. He examines K-Pop female idols' individualism and identity formation through the lens of Korea's cultural politics.

Using Billy Joel's music as a lens on history and culture, this volume introduces a variety of musicological approaches to one of the most popular entertainers of the past fifty years.

This book presents an analysis of 100 rock concert performances and attempts to answer the question What makes a truly great rock performance? Author Peter Smith, an experienced concert goer, delves into his own recollections of experiencing rock performances over the last 50+ years and, with the support of his daughter, Laura Smith, analyzes 100 selected performances covering the themes of icons, persona, energy, fandom, venues, communities, politics, art-rock, authenticity and maturity. The approach taken is based upon qualitative analysis, reflection, and autoethnography. The selected performances cover a range of diverse acts such as the Rolling Stones, ABBA, Sex Pistols, Barbara Streisand, David Bowie, and the like.

In this work, Ken Bielen explains how album cover art authenticates recording artists in a particular genre. He considers albums issued from the 1950s to the 1980s, the golden era of record album cover art. The whole album package is studied, including the front and back covers, the inside cover, the inner sleeve, and the liner notes. Performers in rock and roll, folk and folk rock, soul and disco, psychedelic, Americana nostalgia, and singer-songwriter genres are included in this study of hundreds of record album covers.

This book explores the relationships between rock and roll, social protest, and authenticity to consider how rock and roll could function as social protest music. The author begins by discussing the nature and origins of rock and roll and the nature of social protest and social protest music within the wider context of the evolution of the commercial music industry and the social and technological infrastructure developed for the mass dissemination of popular music. This discussion is followed by an examination of the causes of the public disapproval originally expressed toward rock and roll, and how they illuminate its social protest and subversive quality. By further investigating the nature of authenticity and its relationship to social protest and to commercialization, the author considers how social protest and commercialization are antithetical. This conclusion, if correct, has broad implications for human culture in advanced industrial society.

The music, performances, and cultural impact of some of the most enduring figures in popular music are explored in Rock Music Icons: Musical and Cultural Impacts. This collection investigates authenticity, identity, and the power of the voices and images of widely circulated and shared artists that have become the soundtrack of our lives.