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Rock and Roll, Desegregation Movements, and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era: An “Integrated Effort” Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2024-04-22 Richard D. Driver
Published in Popular Music and Society (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Re-Membering Music Worlds: Exhibiting the Rebel Women of Manchester’s Suffragette City Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2024-04-04 Susan O’Shea, Alison Surtees
This paper addresses a lack of scholarly focus on intersections of memory, gender, and the popular music archive. To challenge the underrepresentation of women, reparative actions must be collabora...
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R. Serge Denisoff Award Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2024-04-03
Published in Popular Music and Society (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Beatlemania in America: Fan Culture from Below Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2024-04-02 Martin Cloonan
Published in Popular Music and Society (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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“I Felt Like a Normal Human Being”: Professional DJs’ Experiences of the COVID-19 Lockdowns Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2024-04-02 Lee Marshall, Martha Whitfield
The social restrictions prompted by COVID-19 disproportionately impacted creative industries that rely upon live performance as a main source of revenue, including the (electronic) music industry, ...
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“I’ll Also With My Poverty, Buy All Your Sadness”: Tataloo and the Tatality Fanbase in Iran Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2024-03-25 Behrang Nikaeen
This article explores the emergence of Tataloo and his fans, the Tatality subculture. I ask how the strong and incontestable relationship was constructed between them through social media, particul...
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Introduction: Gender and Popular Music Knowledge Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Mimi Haddon, Bethany Klein
This special issue of Popular Music and Society on gender and popular music knowledge considers feminized ways of listening to and knowing about popular music that have occupied the margins of medi...
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Small Venues: Precarity, Vibrancy and Live Music Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Christine Rose Cooling
Published in Popular Music and Society (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Make It Funky for Me: Black British Women’s Explorations of Britishness, Womanhood, and Artistry Through 2000s Music Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Monique Charles
2000s Britain was an interesting and expansive time musically for Black Britain (Bradley 2013), as underground music gained traction in mainstream spaces. This article examines the context in which...
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Segue-me à Capela: Inclusion and Resilience Strategies in Traditional Portuguese Music Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Luísa Fernanda Ochoa Márquez
Although traditional polyphonic singing has been practiced assiduously by many groups of women in Portugal, the cultural policies implemented during the New State (1933–1974) did not give it visibi...
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Out on the Floor: Exploring the London Lesbian Club Scene of the 1980s and 1990s Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Katherine Griffiths
This article sets out to counter dominant depictions of DJs and clubbing that privilege white male DJs and their scenes, and that erase nightclubbing’s Black queer origins. Using queer oral history...
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Sad Girls on TikTok: Musical and Multimodal Participatory Practices as Affective Negotiations of Ordinary Feelings and Knowledges in Online Music Cultures Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Veronika Muchitsch
This article examines musical participatory practices on TikTok as mediations of ordinary feelings and knowledges. It conducts a multimodal analysis of user-generated videos that recirculated the s...
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Screaming, Crying, Writing Up: Literary Music Journalism Books as a Legitimization of Contemporary Fangirl Practices Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Jenessa Williams
In light of the increased commercial awareness of fangirl culture in the last decade, this article critically analyses three books written by prominent woman music and culture journalists: Fangirls...
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Rap Music and the Youth in Malawi: Reppin’ the Flames Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Murendehle M. Juwayeyi
Published in Popular Music and Society (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Scott Walker and the Song of the One-All-Alone Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2024-01-31 John Littlejohn
Published in Popular Music and Society (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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The Force of Environmental Lyrics in Pop Songs: The Case of Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-12-27 Håvard Haugland Bamle
This article examines how compositional and performative strategies impact the potency of environmental song lyrics on Gorillaz’s album Plastic Beach. The quality of songfulness is implicated as a ...
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Stage, Street, Garden, or Parlour: The Ubiquitous Popular Songs of Late Georgian England Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Georgina Bartlett
This article explores the ubiquity of popular songs across print traditions, performance venues, and social classes in England during the late Georgian era. It examines the formatting and presentat...
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Pop Music Diegesis and the 360º Video Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Zack Bresler
One approach to studying music videos is through the framework of diegesis, which considers the relation of sounds to narrative structure in film. Unlike most visual media, music videos flip the di...
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Subverting the Restorative Nostalgia of Black Metal: Reading Swiss Band Zeal & Ardor Through an Afropessimistic Lens Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Mathijs Peters
This article analyzes the ways in which Swiss experimental metal band Zeal & Ardor imagine an allohistory, according to which slaves in the American South embraced Satanism to resist white supremac...
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White Stripes, White Rock: The Uncontested Blues Appropriations of the White Stripes Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Charlotte Markowitsch, Sebastian Diaz-Gasca
Despite the prevalence of the cultural appropriation debate in popular music discourse, white, popular rock band, the White Stripes, appropriated African-American Delta blues culture, particularly ...
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Sensing Vinyl: Ritual, Memory, Materiality Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Josh Greenberg
Once relegated to the dustbins of media history, the vinyl LP has had a revival since the late aughts, becoming popular among all segments of music consumers, from those for whom it was the dominan...
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The Lo-Fi Lens: Interpretations of Memphis Rap Tape Rips in the Online Mediascape Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-12-07 Joseph Coughlan-Allen
This article interrogates the association between 1990s Memphis rap and the concept of lo-fi in journalistic discourse between 2012 and 2022. It employs Appadurai’s concept of mediascape in demonst...
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Stories and Data: Australian Musicians Navigating the Spotify for Artists Platform Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-11-30 Sophie Freeman, Martin Gibbs, Bjørn Nansen
Spotify offers users powerful algorithmic recommendations and hybrid “algo-torial” curation at scale. In this paper we argue that juxtaposed within this data-driven platform, is the power of human ...
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K-Pop and the Creative Participatory Engagement of Thai Fans: When Cultural Hybridity Becomes Cultural Authenticity Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-11-29 Matthew Robert Ferguson, Thanyavee Thanyodom
K-pop products generally avoid cultural particularity, but they speak to specific neoliberal aspirations of middle-class urban audiences in Asia, even if such dreams are a distant reality in workin...
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Musicians as Workers and the Gig Economy Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-11-26 Martin Cloonan, John Williamson
Recent years have seen notions of the “gig economy” become widespread. Hitherto most analyses of this phenomenon have centered on first defining the phenomenon, then tracing its extent and effects ...
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“Both Sides Now”: Folk-Rock Authorship, Interpretation, and the Cover Version Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-11-26 Matthew Bannister
Many 1960s folk-rock hits were not original, but neither were they referred to as cover versions. Cover versions were “inauthentic,” but folk-rock repertoire was defined by songs by Bob Dylan and J...
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Local Digital: Staging Geographies and Sonic Identities Through Auto-Tune Effects and Streaming Sites in North Indian Popular Music Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-11-26 Andrew Alter, Adrian Renzo
This paper interprets the use of the Auto-Tune effect (ATE) in popular music from northern India. The paper sets out to demonstrate the value of using YouTube channels to identify regionally calibr...
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Crooner: Singing from the Heart from Sinatra to Nas Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-11-26 James Dyer
Published in Popular Music and Society (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Correction Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-10-13
Published in Popular Music and Society (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-09-11 John Littlejohn
Published in Popular Music and Society (Vol. 46, No. 5, 2023)
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Ornette Coleman: The Territory and the Adventure Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Allen Michie
Published in Popular Music and Society (Vol. 46, No. 4, 2023)
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R. Serge Denisoff Award Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-06-27
Published in Popular Music and Society (Vol. 46, No. 3, 2023)
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DIY House Shows and Music Venues in the US: Ethnographic Explorations of Place and Community Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Aram Bajakian
Published in Popular Music and Society (Vol. 46, No. 4, 2023)
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Rock and Roll, Desegregation Movements, and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era: An “Integrated Effort,” Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-06-12 Grant Wong
Published in Popular Music and Society (Vol. 46, No. 4, 2023)
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Judith Durham (1943-2022) Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-06-06 Bruce Johnson
Published in Popular Music and Society (Vol. 46, No. 3, 2023)
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Ramsey Lewis (1935-2022) Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-06-04 Garth Alper
Published in Popular Music and Society (Vol. 46, No. 3, 2023)
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Pharoah Sanders (1940-2022) Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-05-31 Garth Alper
Published in Popular Music and Society (Vol. 46, No. 4, 2023)
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Digital Man or Jocko Homo: Rush, Devo, and competing visions of the technofuture Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-05-29 Jack David Eller
ABSTRACT This article explores the lyrics of Rush and Devo – and in the case of Devo, their embodied performance – during their key overlapping creative periods from the late-1970s to the mid-1980s. Both imagined technology becoming a greater force – and threat – for humanity, although Rush championed constant opposition to and despair at the alienation of humanity while Devo reveled in an ambiguous
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Ton Steine Scherben: A Unique Hybrid of Psychedelic Rock and Battle Song Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-05-27 David Robb
ABSTRACT This article will examine the relationship of the anarchist rock group Ton Steine Scherben to the tradition of the German battle song. After setting the group in the context of the countercultural scene of West Berlin of the 1970s, the article will identify a key battle song trait in the group's militant lyrics that, combined with the music, are geared towards inspiring direct political action
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Holographic ABBA: Examining Fan Responses to ABBA’s Virtual “Live” Concert Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-05-09 Justin Matthews, Angelique Nairn
ABSTRACT In 2021, ABBA reunited, released a new album, Voyage, and announced holographic concerts featuring their digital avatars or “ABBAtars.” Using visual effects and motion capture technology, these performances create a realistic illusion without physical presence. This study analyzed reactions to these virtual musicians, highlighting concerns of ageism, undermining live music, and profit-driven
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Patches of Survival in the Anthropocene: Melancholy and Ecstasy within Go_A’s 2021 Eurovision Song Contest Performance of “SHUM” (ШУМ) Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-03-16 Manuel Reyes, Kristin McGee
ABSTRACT This article examines the Ukrainian electro-folk band Go_A and their multimedial performances of “SHUM” created for the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest. We highlight how Go_A’s performances feature an aesthetics of ecstasy and melancholia despite ongoing damage within Anthropogenic late capitalism. We compare two versions of the song, exposing critical contexts for the group’s local, transmedial
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One More Turn after the Algorithmic Turn? Spotify’s Colonization of the Online Audio Space Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-03-10 Håvard Kiberg, Hendrik Spilker
ABSTRACT In the last decade, development of algorithmic recommendation systems has constituted the main competitive factor between music streaming services. In this article, we identify how a new turn, labelled ‘the auxiliary services phase’, is rising to prominence. We analyze Spotify’s move from being a mere music distributor, to becoming a general provider of audiovisual content – involving investments
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American Punk and the Rhetoric of “Political Correctness” Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-03-07 Michael S. Begnal
ABSTRACT In the Trump era, conservative and alt-right commentators have framed punk rock subculture as a right-wing phenomenon, emphasizing punk’s individualism and “politically incorrect” rebellion as its defining characteristics. Taking a cultural studies approach, this article examines the rhetoric of so-called “political correctness” in contemporary American discourses surrounding the intersection
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“Town’s Dead”: Contemporary Irish Popular Music and Dublin City Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-03-06 Orlaith Darling
ABSTRACT The increasing “common sense” hegemony of neoliberalism in the west and to the emergence of the internet as a dominant cultural influence have been linked to a “cultural slowdown.” For Mark Fisher and others, contemporary popular culture has lost track of the unfolding conditions of contemporary capitalism and the ability to produce anything new. Instead, it recycles old tropes and forms and
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Searching for “Australia’s Woodstock”: The Forgotten Australian Rock Festivals of 1970 – 1975 Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-03-01 Catherine Strong, Andy Bennett, Ben Green, Ian Rogers
ABSTRACT Between 1970 and 1975, at least 18 rock festivals took place in Australia, often near regional towns. These have gone largely undocumented. By focusing on these “forgotten” festivals, this article contributes to our understanding of the festival’s role in Australian music culture, mapping the Australian context over the international rock music trends of the time. These festivals highlight
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Singing a New Technology of Car Riding: Jitney-Bus Songs, 1915-1917 Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-02-27 C. Matthew Balensuela
ABSTRACT Using personal cars for private taxi services gave rise to the jitney bus a century before Uber and Lyft. Songs with titles such as “Take Me Out in a Jitney Bus (and Pose as a Millionaire)” (Ruddy and Garrahan) provide a body of sheet music on a cultural issue of the early twentieth century that has striking similarities to issues in the early twenty-first century. In this way, they provide
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Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-02-17 Dean Biron
Published in Popular Music and Society (Vol. 46, No. 3, 2023)
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How Music Empowers: Listening to Modern Rap and Metal Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-01-25 Stefano Barone
Published in Popular Music and Society (Vol. 46, No. 2, 2023)
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The Performance of Authenticity: The Making of Jazz and the Self in Autobiography Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-01-22 Thomas M. Kitts
Published in Popular Music and Society (Vol. 46, No. 2, 2023)
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Mobile Safe Spaces and Preset Emotions: Making Music with Apps as a Digital Technology of the Self Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-01-15 Linus Eusterbrock
ABSTRACT Apps for making music on smartphones and tablets are widely used by professional and amateur musicians alike. Based on a qualitative study, this article describes how making music with apps affects users’ sense of self and emotion regulation in everyday life. It demonstrates that music apps are used in “technologies of the self,” that they shape musicians’ self-constitution and allow a complex
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Music-making Beyond the Pub: The Importance of Community Music and DIY Enterprise in Maintaining Regional Music Scenes (Gippsland Case Study) Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-01-05 Cristian Stromblad, Andrea Baker
ABSTRACT Regional music scenes in Australia face unique challenges tied to distance, deflated economies and youth flight to urban areas. Drawn from seven interviews with music workers from Gippsland during 2020, the article examines these challenges and the cultural practices that glue musicians to this south-eastern region of Victoria. Findings highlight that Gippsland’s music scene is sustained at
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Musicking Assemblages and the Material Contingency of Sound: Mostly Other People Do the Killing’s Re-enactment of Kind of Blue Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-01-05 Artur Szarecki
ABSTRACT This paper provides an in-depth cultural analysis of the album Blue, by Mostly Other People Do the Killing – a detailed, note-for-note recreation of Miles Davis’s jazz classic, Kind of Blue. While the group’s undertaking has been widely regarded as a postmodern deconstruction of genre and history, this paper adopts a new materialist framework to demonstrate how the re-enactment makes perceptible
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The Genesis and Structure of the Hungarian Jazz Diaspora Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2023-01-03 Anna Szemere
Published in Popular Music and Society (Vol. 46, No. 2, 2023)
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The Return to Craft: Taylor Swift, Nostalgia, and Covid-19 Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2022-12-17 John McGrath
ABSTRACT What I term “the return to craft” is a distillation of a pervasive phenomenon – the nostalgic, folk esthetic of contemporary Western society that has arisen partly in response to the Covid-19 pandemic but also to neoliberalism and climate change. It arises as a reaction to turmoil, offering the comfort of an imagined past, a tangible tactility, and a reconnection with the “old ways,” with
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Peter Gabriel: Global Citizen Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2022-11-15 John Littlejohn
Published in Popular Music and Society (Vol. 46, No. 2, 2023)
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Critiquing the “What Is Jazz” Puzzle in a Diasporic Setting: “Jazz-Related” Performance and Patronage in Australia before “Jazz” Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2022-10-29 John Whiteoak
ABSTRACT This article proposes that the framing of jazz diaspora in relation to Australia must embrace significant antecedents of jazz-related performance and culture in Australia, including blackface and African-American minstrel show music, improvisatory popular and art music practices and various subgenres of ragtime. It argues that the spirit of “jazz” as a vehicle for extroverted self-expression
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Black Fatherhood, Hip Hop, and Inner Life: Reading Rapsody’s “The Man” and Mama Sol and the N.U.T.S.’s “Manhood” Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2022-10-06 Kellie D. Hay, Rebekah Farrugia
ABSTRACT This article theorizes affect, aesthetics, and black inner life through an analysis of two hip hop music videos: Rapsody’s “The Man” and Mama Sol and The N.U.T.S.’s “Manhood.” The authors deploy Quashie’s notion of “the quiet interior” and Rose’s concept of “(inter)personal justice” to examine the aesthetics through which hip hop fatherhood is forged. Scrutinizing the dynamics of inner life
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Presenting the Studio on Record Covers: Changing the Understanding of Swedish Jazz Records Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2022-09-30 Mischa van Kan
ABSTRACT This article analyzes early Swedish jazz record covers to understand how producers and users comprehended the jazz record as a medium. It employs Jonathan Sterne’s definition of a medium as a social agreement about use. The article shows how, following the transition from shellac to vinyl records in Sweden in the 1950s, record covers reinterpreted the understanding of the jazz record. From
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“Everyday Fidelity”: Analyzing Sound Quality in Ubiquitous Listening Practices Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2022-09-28 Pat O’Grady
ABSTRACT Studies have suggested that consumers of recorded music favor portability over high fidelity. In recent years, wireless technologies – such as Bluetooth headphones and speakers – have become a popular way to listen to music. The technology can be contextualized within “ubiquitous listening,” which describes how music is, for many listeners, not a standalone activity. This article examines
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An Exploration of the East Indian and African Music Traditions in Trinidad and Tobago: The Case of Mungal Patasar and Pantar Popular Music and Society Pub Date : 2022-09-28 Jill-Ann Walters-Morris, Clarence Morris, Rachel-Ann Charles-Hatt
ABSTRACT In this article, we present a case study of Mungal Patasar and his band, Pantar to explore syncretism between jazz and local music traditions in Trinidad and Tobago. We discuss the nuances emerging from the interactions between East Indian and African music traditions as we delineate the ways jazz diaspora is performed within this context. The overall findings of this study demonstrate that