Bringing together 51 essays, each devoted to a single American film, Screening American Film offers a wide-ranging exploration of the histories, practices, politics, styles, and meanings that have shaped American film since the 1930s. While this volume proceeds decade by decade from the 1930s onward, contributors reach further back and forward to illuminate the breadth and complexity of the American screen.Complemented by the volumes on Screening American Independent C...

This cross-disciplinary collection provides the first comprehensive study of library music practices in the 1960s and 1970s.Library music was inexpensive, off-the-shelf music available to license for a small fee. It was widely used in television and film as a cheaper alternative to commissioned soundtracks. The book pays attention to the different individuals, groups, organisations and institutions involved in making library music, as well as to its transnational s...

This book examines The Commitments (Parker, 1991) for the first time as a film, rather than an adaptation of Roddy Doyle’s bestselling novel, and as a significant cultural event in 1990s Ireland.A major hit in Ireland and around the world, the film depicts the short-lived attempts of an ensemble of young working-class Dubliners to achieve success as a soul covers band, playing the hits of Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and others, on a mission to ‘bring soul back to Dublin...

This extensively revised and expanded fifth edition of Understanding Popular Music Culture provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the production, distribution, consumption and meaning of popular music, and the debates that surround popular culture and popular music.Reflecting the continued proliferation of popular music studies, the new music industry in a digital age, and the emergence of new stars, this new edition has been reorganized and extensively u...

Known for his outspoken and often controversial views on class, ethnicity and sexuality, Morrissey has remained an anti-establishment figure who continues to provoke argument, debate and devotion amongst critics and his many fans. Focusing exclusively on Morrissey’s solo career, the collected essays in this important book make for a rich reading of Morrissey and his highly influential creative output. Working across a range of academic disciplines and approaches (including musicology; ethn...

Don and Betty Draper live in a picture-perfect world. He is a hard-living advertising executive - a 'mad man' - on the fast track. She's a Bryn Mawr graduate and former fashion model, now a suburban princess, mother of three children. If they've everything, why are they so unhappy? Why is their dream come true not enough? This book explores, analyses, celebrates the world of "Mad Men" in all its aspects, and includes an interview with it's Executive Producer and an episode guide. Every few...

1964: Mods clash with Rockers in Brighton, creating a moral panic. 1973: ex-Mod band The Who release Quadrophenia, a concept album following young Mod Jimmy Cooper to the Brighton riots and beyond. 1979: Franc Roddam directs Quadrophenia, a film based on Pete Townshend's album narrative; its cult status is immediate. 2013: almost fifty years on from Brighton, this first academic study explores the lasting appeal of 'England's Rebel Without a Cause'. Investigating...

Sexing the Groove discusses these issues and many more, bringing together leading music and cultural theorists to explore the relationships between popular music, gender and sexuality. The contributors, who include Mavis Beayton, Stella Bruzzi, Sara Cohen, Sean Cubitt, Keith Negus and Will Straw, debate how popular music performers, subcultures, fans and texts construct and deconstruct `masculine' and `feminine' identities. Using a wide range of case studies, from Mick Jag...

That rare thing, an academic study of music that seeks to tie together the strands of the musical text, the industry that produces it, and the audience that gives it meaning... A vital read for anyone interested in the changing nature of popular music production and consumption"- Dr Nathan Wiseman-Trowse, The University of NorthamptonPopular music entertains, inspires and even empowers, but where did it come from, how is it made, what does it mean, ...

Although Film Studies has successfully (re)turned attention to matters of style and interpretation, its sibling discipline has left the territory uncharted - until now. The question of how television operates on a stylistic level has been critically underexplored, despite being fundamental to our viewing experience. This significant new work redresses a vital gap in Television Studies by engaging with the stylistic dynamics of TV; exploring the aesthetic properties and values of both the m...

Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik take as their starting point the remarkable diversity of comedy's forms and modes - feature-length narratives, sketches and shorts, sit-com and variety, slapstick and romance. Relating this diversity to the variety of comedy's basic conventions - from happy endings to the presence of gags and the involvement of humour and laughter - they seek both to explain the nature of these forms and conventions and to relate them to their institutional contexts. They prop...

This book examines the birth of punk in the UK and its transformation, within a short period of time, into post-punk. Deploying innovative concepts of ‘critical mass’, ‘social networks’ and ‘music worlds’, and using sophisticated techniques of ‘social network analysis’, it teases out the events and mechanisms involved in punk’s ‘micro-mobilisation’, its diffusion across the UK and its transformation in certain city-based strongholds into a variety of interlocking post-punk forms. Nick Cros...