Dear Colleagues,

This is the second call for submissions for the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of SEM Student News. The theme for this new issue, Vol. 18, No.1, is “Music and Pleasure.” The frequent stratification between professional musicianship and making music “for pleasure” often frames the latter category as something less serious or valuable. But for many of us, participating in and experiencing music in informal or communal spaces fills us with powerful sensations of joy. Music is often a part of other activities associated with pleasure such as sex, the alteration of one’s consciousness through drugs or meditation, and physical expressions like dancing. Music is also frequently integral to the pleasure gained from forming connection with a group (e.g., singing songs at sporting events) or passing through different stages of our lives (e.g., music in play settings among children). In this issue, we want to take seriously the interrogation of pleasure as it relates to these and other activities in and around music.

Andy Bennett and Jon Stratton are editing a collection discussing pub rock in the UK and Australia. We are looking for someone to write a chapter on gender, focusing on women, and pub rock in the UK. The completed chapter will be around 6000 words and we will need it around the middle of November. The book is to be published by Routledge. All enquiries should go to either Andy or Jon, or both of us. Andy’s email address is a.bennett@griffith.edu.au, Jon’s email address is jon.stratton@unisa.edu.au.

After All This Time: Legacy Acts, Fandom, and Collective Identity

Guest-edited by Andy Bennett and Devpriya Chakravarty (Griffith University, Australia)

Submissions are invited for a special issue of Rock Music Studies on the topic of Legacy Acts, Fandom, and Collective Identity. Popular music is now increasingly acknowledged as a key aspect of contemporary history and heritage. The marketing of popular music as a form of youth-based leisure and consumption from the mid-1950s onward has had significant implications for its cultural meaning as a collective soundtrack and a means through which successive generations of youth have sought to distinguish themselves from the parent culture. This aspect of the relationship between popular music and youth became more pointed during the 1960s and into the 1970s with a new political sensibility among youth, and was also reflected in much of the popular music of the time, which gave rise to a global counter-cultural movement. This sensibility continued to reverberate in subsequent musical genres such as punk, post-punk and new wave.