Paul du Gay

Stuart Hall

Hugh Mackay

Keith Negus

Linda Janes

Anders Koed Madsen

What does the Walkman have to do with the 21st century? The long-awaited second edition of this classic textbook takes students on a journey to the past and back again, giving them to skills do to cultural analysis along the way. Through the 'circuit of culture', this book teaches students to critically examine what culture means, and how and why it is enmeshed with the media texts and objects in their lives. Students will: • gain practical experience with the historical comparative method • learn to think about some of the cultural conundrums of the present • unpack the key concepts of contemporary culture, such as mobility and materiality • look with fresh eyes at the media world and their practice within it • practice their critical skills with up-to-date exercises and activities. This book remains the perfect 'how to' for cultural studies. It is an essential classic, reworked for today's students in cultural studies, media studies and sociology.

The Story of the Sony Walkman

Doing Cultural Studies

David Hesmondhalgh

The study of popular music has reached an exciting and important moment in its development. Popular Music Studies introduces students to the most significant debates in the field, offering fresh perspectives and suggesting new directions. Genuinely interdisciplinary on scope, the book outlines the history and development of popular music studies while offering and unprecedentedly international perspective on popular music, featuring writers from North and South America, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Combining insights from media and cultural studies, sociology, music analysis, ethnomusicology, and performance studies, the essays cover textual analysis, place and space, production, consumption, and everyday life.

Popular Music Studies

Michael J Pickering

Negus and Pickering provide a clear and logical way of understanding what we describe as creative, and how this term has become central to attaching cultural value.

Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value

In this concise profile Keith Negus presents Bob Dylan primarily as musician, focusing on the qualities of his songs that have received little attention, such as melody, rhythm, instrumental texture, and his performing voice.

Bob Dylan

Producing Pop provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes analysis of one of the world's major entertainment industries. Focusing on the contribution of recording industry personnel, it challenges the simplistic assumption that pop music is merely determined by corporate financial interests, and argues against writers who portray the music business as a cultural assembly line.

Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry

Producing Pop

Keith Negus addresses both the novice Dylan fan and the longtime listener in his new book, Bob Dylan. Negus first approaches the man as a mythical cultural figure before situating the music within the larger folk and blues tradition. He then examines the beginning of Dylan's career as a protest singer, his role as a performer, and his impact on popular music, concluding with an overall assessment of Dylan as an artist. Chapters titled "Surroundings," "Chronologies," "Traditions," "Lyrics," and "Music" take up the various aspects of Dylan's career, making for a smooth exploration of its overall yet unfinished trajectory. Negus also includes a complete discography as of 2007.

Music Genres and Corporate Cultures explores the seemingly haphazard workings of the music industry, tracing the uneasy relationship between economics and culture; `entertainment corporations' and the artists they sign. Keith Negus examines the contrasting strategies of major labels like Sony and Polygram in managing different genres, artists and staff. How do takeovers affect the treatment of artists? Why has Polygram been perceived as too European to attract US artists? And how did Warner's wooden floors help them sign Green Day? Through in-depth case studies of three major genres; rap, country, and salsa, Negus explores the way in which the music industry recognises and rewards certain sounds, and how this influences both the creativity of musicians, and their audiences. He examines the tension between raps public image as the spontaneous `music of the streets' and the practicalities of the market, and asks why country labels and radio stations promote top-selling acts like Garth Brooks over hard-to-classify artists like Mary Chapin-Carpenter, and how the lack of soundscan systems in Puerto Rican record shops affects salsa music's position on the US Billboard chart. Drawing on over seventy interviews with music industry personnel in Britain and the United States, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures shows how the creation, circulation and consumption of popular music is shaped by record companies and corporate business styles while stressing that music production takes within a broader culture, not totally within the control of large corporations.

Keith Negus

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