Music : Popular

From cat food to death, bra size to spirituality, family to goose poop (yes, goose poop), these are the journals of Canadian recording artist Jann Arden. Her writing is wry and insightful, confessional and compassionate. Also included in if i knew, don't you think i'd tell you? are Jann's line drawings and open spaces inviting readers to think out loud, be human, draw, emote, express, participate, live, be a piece of it all — in other words, journal with Jann. more...

Price: $15.95

In one moment, with one tearful, touching performance of "Summertime," Fantasia captured the hearts, and the votes, of millions of American Idol fans. Her powerful voice and independent style made her an overnight national sensation. But life wasn't always sensational for Fantasia. more...

Price: $11.99

Music and Youth Culture offers a groundbreaking account of how music interacts with young people’s everyday lives. Drawing on interviews with and observations of youth groups together with archival research, it explores young people’s enactment of music tastes and performances, and how these are articulated through narratives and literacies. An extensive review of the field reveals an unhealthy emphasis on committed, fanatical, spectacular youth music cultures such as rock or punk. On the contrary, this book argues that ideas about youth subcultures and club cultures no longer apply to today’s young generation. Rather, archival findings show that the music and dance cultures of youth in 1930s and 1940s Britain share more in common with youth today than the countercultures and subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s. By focusing on the relationship between music and social interactions, the book addresses questions that are scarcely considered by studies stuck in the youth cultural worlds of subcultures, club cultures and post-subcultures: more...

Price: $29.99

After years of failing to duplicate its album Dookie's success, punk-rocking Green Day seemed dead in the water. An undercurrent of critical disdain had always held that the band purveyed punk lite and was an aggregation of poseurs compared to legendary punk outfits the Clash and the Ramones. Then the group's eighth album, American Idiot, hit the top of the charts in 2004 and stayed there, catapulting Green Day back into public attention. Spitz, a senior writer for Spin, sympathetically limns the arc of the lads' career from East Bay, California, in informative if unchallenging style. more...

Price: $16.95

Pop Fiction's unique essays individually consider one song within a cinematic context. Unlike previous collected volumes about pop music in film, where a generalised approach has been adopted, this offers instead a close examination of two pervasive and significant mediums in combination. The collection introspects, assembling the pop song into various guises and documenting how individuals dissemble the multiple roles that the pop song plays in cinematic moments. The song as: role-play, memory trigger, narrator, ghost, marketing device, translator, alienator, membership rite etc. All provide fresh insight towards the inter-textual fusion of film and song. Additionally the books form reduces the area of analysis to expose differences and similarities between these contrasting fields of study. Innovative yet accessible, this exciting document would appeal to students, lecturers and researchers offering a diverse set of models with which to investigate the 'ideogram' of image/text/sound - a relationship which sits at the heart of most cultural production. For beginners, the book provides comforting areas of familiarity (pop song and film) while exploring areas of respective discipline and inter-disciplinary practice in an original manner. more...

Price: $29.95