ABSTRACT
Redefining Mainstream Popular Music is a collection of seventeen essays that critically examines the idea of the "mainstream" in and across a variety of popular music styles and contexts. Notions of what is popular vary across generations and cultures – what may have been considered alternative to one group may be perceived as mainstream to another. Incorporating a wide range of popular music texts, genres, scenes, practices and technologies from the United Kingdom, North America, Australia and New Zealand, the authors theoretically challenge and augment our understanding of how the mainstream is understood and functions in the overlapping worlds of popular music production, consumption and scholarship. Spanning the local and the global, the historic and contemporary, the iconic and the everyday, the book covers a broad range of genres, from punk to grunge to hip-hop, while also considering popular music through other mediums, including mash-ups and the music of everyday work life. Redefining Mainstream Popular Music provides readers with an innovative and nuanced perspective of what it means to be mainstream.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|35 pages
Reappraising the Mainstream
part 2|49 pages
Perceptions of the Mainstream
chapter 4|11 pages
Lesbian Musicalities, Queer Strains and Celesbian Pop
chapter 6|14 pages
Kill the Static
chapter 7|11 pages
The Contradictions of the Mainstream
part 3|50 pages
Historicizing the Mainstream
chapter 8|13 pages
Elvis Goes to Hollywood
chapter 10|11 pages
‘Following In MotheR's Silent Footsteps'
chapter 11|12 pages
Music from Abroad
part 4|37 pages
Production Aesthetics and the Mainstream
chapter 13|12 pages
Chasing An Aesthetic Tail
chapter 14|12 pages
The Hobbyist Majority and the Mainstream Fringe
part 5|39 pages
The Mainstream and Vernacular Culture