The 2011 IASPM Book Prize Co-ordinated by Antti-Ville Kärjä Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand The 2011 IASPM prize for a book written in English is awarded to Protest Music in France by Barbara Lebrun. The 2011 IASPM Book Prize for a book written in a language other than English is awarded to Creating the Myth of [...]

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Simona Frasca Birds of passage. I musicisti napoletani a New York (1895-1940) (Lucca: LIM 2010; language: Italian) Review by Giovanni Vacca There is no doubt that Neapolitan Song has been a central genre in the development of what we now call ‘Popular Music’: probably no other urban song has achieved such a world-wide notoriety and [...]

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Bethany Klein As Heard on TV: Popular Music in Advertising (Aldershot: Ashgate 2009) Review by Francesco D’Amato The complex whole of ties between music and TV ads has been recently pushed to the foreground by the changes in the music production/commercialization system and correlated shifts from B2C to B2B business models. However it represents a [...]

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Stan Hawkins The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate 2009) Review by Nathan Wiseman-Trowse In 1999 the British pop band The Divine Comedy released one of their most successful singles ‘National Express’. Secreted away as a B-side on the second CD single was a wonderfully wry and affectionate Noël Coward pastiche [...]

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Gerd Bayer Heavy Metal Music in Britain (Surrey: Ashgate 2009) Review by Michelle Phillipov Heavy metal is one of popular music’s most enduring and commercially successful genres. Emerging in the late 1960s, metal has since undergone numerous transformations, from massive arena spectacles to obscure underground subgenres. Despite its longevity and sustained popularity over the past [...]

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Sean Stroud The Defence of Tradition in Brazilian Popular Music (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008) Review by Alvaro Neder Stroud’s study “examines how notions of what constitutes Brazilian popular music have been constructed over a period of forty years or so since the mid 1960s” (p. 1). Under the “distinct impression” that “the influence of an essentially [...]

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Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence (Adlershot: Ashgate 2008) Review by Carlo Nardi In his book The ragas of North India, Walter Kaufmann reports a conversation he had in 1934 with an eminent classical musician in then Bombay. On the basis that a rāga performed at a [...]

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Michael W. Morse Twenty Years After: A Review Essay of Musicological Identities (1) Steven Baur, Raymond Knapp, and Jacqueline C. Warwick (eds) Musicological Identities: Essays in Honor of Susan McClary (Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009) (2) i It has been nearly twenty years since the publication of Susan McClary’s provocative Feminine Endings. The appearance [...]

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Carys Wyn Jones The Rock Canon: Canonical Values in the Reception of Rock Albums (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) Review by Maria Hanáček The ongoing debate over the concept of a Western canon keeps various disciplines occupied and popular music studies certainly are no exemption. This academic debate is not the main frame of reference of this [...]

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Olivier Julien (ed.) Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It Was Forty Years Ago Today (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008) ISBN: 978-0-7546-6708-7 (Paperback) ISBN: 978-0-7546-6249-5 (Hardback) Review by Alison Notkin The Beatles are a popular band. During their reign as the “Fab Four” in the 1960s they were a popular band, and thirty-eight years after their [...]

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