The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music

Andy Bennett, Steve Waksman

SAGE Publications, Mar 14, 2015 - Social Science - 664 pages

"The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music is a comprehensive, smartly-conceived volume that can take its place as the new standard reference in popular music. The editors have shown great care in covering classic debates while moving the field into new, exciting areas of scholarship. International in its focus and pleasantly wide-ranging across historical periods, the Handbook is accessible to students but full of material of interest to those teaching and researching in the field."
- Will Straw, McGill University

"Celebrating the maturation of popular music studies and recognizing the immense changes that have recently taken place in the conditions of popular music production, The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music features contributions from many of the leading scholars in the field. Every chapter is well defined and to the point, with bibliographies that capture the history of the field. Authoritative, expertly organized and absolutely up-to-date, this collection will instantly become the backbone of teaching and research across the Anglophone world and is certain to be cited for years to come."
- Barry Shank, author of 'The Political Force of Musical Beauty' (2014)

The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music provides a highly comprehensive and accessible summary of the key aspects of popular music studies. The text is divided into 9 sections:

• Theory and Method
• The Business of Popular Music
• Popular Music History
• The Global and the Local
• The Star System
• Body and Identity
• Media
• Technology
• Digital Economies

Each section has been chosen to reflect both established aspects of popular music studies as well as more recently emerging sub-fields. The handbook constitutes a timely and important contribution to popular music studies during a significant period of theoretical and empirical growth and innovation in the field.

This is a benchmark work which will be essential reading for educators and students in popular music studies, musicology, cultural studies, media studies and cultural sociology.

About the author

Andy Bennett is Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. He has authored and edited numerous books including Popular Music and Youth Culture (Palgrave Macmillian, 2000), Cultures of Popular Music (Open University Press, 2001), Remembering Woodstock (Ashgate, 2004), Music Scenes (Vanderbilt University Press, 2004) with Richard A. Peterson and Music, Style and Aging (Berg, 2012) with Paul Hodgkinson. Bennett was lead Chief Investigator on a three-year, five-country project funded by the Australian Research Council entitled Popular Music and Cultural Memory (DP1092910). He is also a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University.

Steve Waksman is Professor of Music and American Studies at Smith College, Massachusetts, USA. His works include the books Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Harvard University Press, 1999), and This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press, 2009), the latter of which was awarded the 2010 Woody Guthrie Award for best scholarly book on popular music by the US chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. With Reebee Garofalo he co-authored the sixth edition of Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (Pearson, 2013). His essays have appeared in Guitar Cultures, The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar, Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop, and Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music Around the World. Currently he is researching a book on the cultural history of live music and performance in the US, tentatively titled Live Music in America: A History, 1850–2000.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music
• Editors: Andy Bennett, Steve Waksman
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: SAGE Publications, 2015
• ISBN: 1446210855, 9781446210857
• Length: 664 pages
• Subjects: Social Science / Media Studies