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Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series


About the Series

Popular musicology embraces the field of musicological study that engages with popular forms of music, especially music associated with commerce, entertainment and leisure activities. The Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series aims to present the best research in this field. Authors are concerned with criticism and analysis of the music itself, as well as locating musical practices, values and meanings in cultural context. The focus of the series is on popular music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a remit to encompass the entirety of the world’s popular music.

Critical and analytical tools employed in the study of popular music are being continually developed and refined in the twenty-first century. Perspectives on the transcultural and intercultural uses of popular music have enriched understanding of social context, reception and subject position. Popular genres as distinct as reggae, township, bhangra, and flamenco are features of a shrinking, transnational world. The series recognizes and addresses the emergence of mixed genres and new global fusions, and utilizes a wide range of theoretical models drawn from anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, media studies, semiotics, postcolonial studies, feminism, gender studies and queer studies.

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Black British Music in America, 1967–2000 Atlantic Crossover

Black British Music in America, 1967–2000: Atlantic Crossover

1st Edition

Forthcoming

By Mike Alleyne
March 11, 2025

Black British Music in America 1967–2000: Atlantic Crossover historically examines musical and cultural relationships through popular music recordings, exploring the transatlantic journeys via academic, critical, and commercial reception of the music. It addresses an overlooked area of Black ...

Popular Music in Spanish Cinema

Popular Music in Spanish Cinema

1st Edition

Edited By Lidia López Gómez
January 30, 2025

Popular Music in Spanish Cinema analyses the aesthetics and stylistic development of soundtracks from national productions, considering how political instability and cultural diversity in Spain determined the ways of making art and managing culture. As a pioneering study in this field, the ...

Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask

Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask

2nd Edition

By Harriet J. Manning
December 18, 2024

Michael Jackson challenged the power structure of the American music industry and struck at the heart of blackface minstrelsy, America’s first form of mass entertainment. The response was a derisive caricature that over time Jackson subverted through his art. In this expanded, all-new edition, ...

Musical Psychedelia Research at the Intersection of Music and Psychedelic Experience

Musical Psychedelia: Research at the Intersection of Music and Psychedelic Experience

1st Edition

Edited By Gemma L. Farrell
December 18, 2024

Psychedelic music is a fascinating yet under-researched field of study. This thought-provoking collection offers a broad introduction to the field of psychedelic music studies, bringing together scholarly work on psychedelic music in genres like rock, folk, electronic dance music and pop. Through ...

The Evolution of Chinese Popular Music Modernization and Globalization, 1927 to the Present

The Evolution of Chinese Popular Music: Modernization and Globalization, 1927 to the Present

1st Edition

By Ya-Hui Cheng
December 18, 2024

Ya-Hui Cheng examines the emergence of popular music genres – jazz, rock, and hip-hop – in Chinese society, covering the social underpinnings that shaped the development of popular music in China and Taiwan, from imperialism to westernization and from modernization to globalization. The political ...

Level Up: Live Performance and Creative Process in Grime Music

Level Up: Live Performance and Creative Process in Grime Music

1st Edition

By Alex de Lacey
November 28, 2024

Grime music has been central to British youth culture since the beginning of the 21st century. Performed by MCs and DJs, it is an Afrodiasporic form that developed on street corners, on pirate radio and at raves. Level Up: Live Performance and Creative Process in Grime Music offers the first ...

Bee Gees, Process and Latent Elements in Music Production

Bee Gees, Process and Latent Elements in Music Production

1st Edition

By Pat O’Grady
November 26, 2024

This book examines the creative process of the Bee Gees and the latent elements that shaped their sound. From their formative Australian work to the highs of their disco years and the scores of songs they wrote and produced for other artists, the Bee Gees’ catalogue is vast and varied. It is also ...

Electro Swing Resurrection, Recontextualisation, and Remix

Electro Swing: Resurrection, Recontextualisation, and Remix

1st Edition

By Chris Inglis
October 08, 2024

Electro swing is a relatively recent musical style and scene which combines the music of the swing era with that of the age of electronic dance music. Chris Inglis considers key questions about electro swing’s place in contemporary society, including what it may mean for a contemporary genre to be ...

How to Make Music in an Epidemic Popular Music Making During the AIDS Crisis, 1981-1996

How to Make Music in an Epidemic: Popular Music Making During the AIDS Crisis, 1981-1996

1st Edition

By Matthew Jones
June 07, 2024

This volume examines responses to the epidemic of HIV/AIDS in Anglophone popular musicians and music video during the AIDS crisis (1981–1996). Through close reading of song lyrics, musical texts, and music videos, this book demonstrates how music played an integral part in the artistic-activist ...

Interrogating Popular Music and the City

Interrogating Popular Music and the City

1st Edition

Edited By Shane Homan, Catherine Strong, Seamus O'Hanlon, John Tebbutt
June 03, 2024

How does popular music influence the culture and reputation of a city, and what does a city do to popular music? Interrogating Popular Music and the City examines the ways in which urban environments and music cultures intersect in various locales around the globe. Music and cities have been ...

Community-based Traditional Music in Scotland A Pedagogy of Participation

Community-based Traditional Music in Scotland: A Pedagogy of Participation

1st Edition

By Josephine L. Miller
May 27, 2024

This book examines the community-based learning and teaching of ‘traditional’ music in contemporary Scotland, with implications for transnational theoretical issues. The book draws on a broad range of scholarship and a local case study of a large organisation. A historical perspective provides an ...

One-Track Mind Capitalism, Technology, and the Art of the Pop Song

One-Track Mind: Capitalism, Technology, and the Art of the Pop Song

1st Edition

Edited By Asif Siddiqi
May 27, 2024

The song remains the most basic unit of modern pop music. Shaped into being by historical forces—cultural, aesthetic, and technical—the song provides both performer and audience with a world marked off by a short, discrete, and temporally demarcated experience. One-Track Mind: Capitalism, ...

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