ABSTRACT
For many people, music is the backdrop of their everyday life. Although most music is viewed as a social ‘good’, there are also social ‘harms’ that are associated with it, and this collection aims to reflect this juxtaposition by detailing the positive, and at other times problematic, nature of music. Marxist interpretations of popular culture continued with the Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing very much on music as part of spectacular youth cultures – subcultures that, the authors felt, were politically resisting the capitalist ‘parent’ culture. Music is a powerful feature of the collective life of the prison, as it can aid in the identification of shared experiences. In informal contexts, music can provide a range of benefits for prisoners, as music is used to reconstruct and repair one's sense of self which has been suppressed by a custodial identity.
