ABSTRACT

This edited volume concentrates on the period from the 1940s to the present, exploring how popular music forms such as blues, disco, reggae, hip hop, grime, metal and punk evolved and transformed as they traversed time and space. Within this framework, the collection traces how music and subcultures travel through, to and from democracies, autocracies and anocracies.

The chosen approach is multidisciplinary and deliberately diverse. Using both archival sources and oral testimony from a wide variety of musicians, promoters, critics and members of the audience, contributors from a range of academic disciplines explore music and subcultural forms in countries across Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America and Africa. They investigate how far the meaning of music and associated subcultures change as they move from one context to another and consider whether they transcend or blur parameters of class, race, gender and sexuality.

part |114 pages

Part I

chapter 1|18 pages

Jamaican Music in the United States

The Story of Percussionist Larry McDonald

chapter 3|17 pages

On the Land, in the Underground

The Rise and Fall of the ‘Crusties'

chapter 4|16 pages

Out of My Brain on the Bullet Train

Japan, Mod and the Migratory Flows of a Subculture

chapter 5|14 pages

‘You're as Taz as Tazzy Can Be'

Transgressing Racial and Class Boundaries in Australian Grime

chapter 6|14 pages

Straightwashed or Hiding in Plain Sight?

The Secret History of Italo Disco

chapter 7|16 pages

Making Music Memorable

The New Pop Formula, or How to Write a Global US Hit Song in the Twenty-first Century

part |92 pages

Part II

chapter 8|16 pages

The Spanish Blues Scene

Travelling Music and Subcultural Identities

chapter 9|12 pages

Solidarity, Rebellion or Exoticisation?

The Transferral of Ska and Reggae Cultures to Czech and Slovak Fans

chapter 10|15 pages

From Blackened Valhalla to Hyperborean Dacia

The Romanian Black Metal Scene as a Case Study of Cultural Migration

chapter 11|16 pages

Subversive South Africa

Race, Class and Gender in South African Punk, 1976–1985

chapter 12|17 pages

‘For the Betterment of Our Homeland'

Interpretations and Adaptations of Global Black Music in an Ethiopian Border Town

chapter 13|14 pages

‘Straight outta Kathmandu' 1

Hip-hop and Youth Culture in Post-war Nepal