New book
Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity
Edited by Andy Bennett and Paul Hodkinson

What happens to punks, clubbers, goths, riot grrls, soulies, break-dancers and queer scene participants as they become older?

For decades, research on spectacular ‘youth cultures’ has understood such groups as adolescent phenomena and assumed that involvement ceases with the onset of adulthood. In an age of increasingly complex life trajectories, Ageing and Youth Cultures is the first anthology to challenge such thinking by examining the lives of those who continue to participate into adulthood and middle-age. Showcasing a range of original research case studies from across the globe, the chapters explore how participants reconcile their continuing involvement with ageing bodies, older identities and adult responsibilities. Breaking new ground and establishing a new field of study, the book will be essential reading for students and scholars researching or studying questions of youth, fashion, popular music and identity across a wide range of disciplines.

New journal issue
‘Erotic Screen & Sound’
A special edition of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 26(4)
Edited by Jodie Taylor and David Baker

Sexual desire and the intent to arouse—the erotic—is ubiquitous. Erotic impulses preoccupy our psyches, shape our identities, inscribe our bodies and mediate our relationships with others and objects. Proliferating into the banal everydayness of contemporary life, we find inscriptions of the erotic in the back corner of our local news agency, online, on stage, screens, airwaves, billboards, supermarket shelves, and on gallery walls. A public, private and often highly politicised concern, few subjects are as simultaneously commonplace and controversial as the erotic. Whatever its form—sacred, profane, ordinary, perverse, vanilla or kinky—the erotic has persisted in its ability to delight, entertain, panic and outrage us throughout history and across cultures. Continue reading →

New book
Redefining Mainstream Popular Music
Edited by Sarah Baker, Andy Bennett and Jodie Taylor

Redefining Mainstream Popular Music is a collection of seventeen essays that critically examines the idea of the “mainstream” in and across a variety of popular music styles and contexts. Notions of what is popular vary across generations and cultures – what may have been considered alternative to one group may be perceived as mainstream to another. Incorporating a wide range of popular music texts, genres, scenes, practices and technologies from the United Kingdom, North America, Australia and New Zealand, the authors theoretically challenge and augment our understanding of how the mainstream is understood and functions in the overlapping worlds of popular music production, consumption and scholarship. Spanning the local and the global, the historic and contemporary, the iconic and the everyday, the book covers a broad range of genres, from punk to grunge to hip-hop, while also considering popular music through other mediums, including mash-ups and the music of everyday work life. Redefining Mainstream Popular Music provides readers with an innovative and nuanced perspective of what it means to be mainstream.

New book
Music, Style, and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully?
Andy Bennett

The image of the aging rock-and-roller is not just Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger on stage in their sixties. In his timely book, Music, Style, and Aging, cultural sociologist Andy Bennett explains how people move on from youth and effectively grow older with popular music. For many aging followers of rock, punk, and other contemporary popular music genres, music is ingrained in their identities. Its meaning is highly personal and intertwined with the individual’s biographical development. Bennett studies these fans and how they have changed over time – through fashions, hairstyles, body modification, career paths, political orientations, and perceptions of and by the next generation. The significance of popular music for these fans is no longer tied exclusively to their youth. Bennett illustrates how the music that ‘mattered’ most to people in their youth continues to play an important role in their adult lives – a role that goes well beyond nostalgia.

New book
Music, Politics, and Violence
Edited by Susan Fast and Kip Pegley

Music and violence have been linked since antiquity in ritual, myth, and art. Considered together they raise fundamental questions about creativity, discourse, and music’s role in society. The essays in this collection investigate a wealth of issues surrounding music and violence – issues that cross political boundaries, time periods, and media – and provide cross-cultural case studies of musical practices ranging from large-scale events to regionally specific histories. Following the editors’ substantive introduction, which lays the groundwork for conceptualizing new ways of thinking about music as it relates to violence, three broad themes are followed: the first set of essays examines how music participates in both overt and covert forms of violence; the second section explores violence and reconciliation; and the third addresses healing, post-memorials, and memory. Music, Politics, and Violence affords space to look at music as an active agent rather than as a passive art, and to explore how music and violence are closely – and often uncomfortably – entwined.