Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Popular Music on Screen examines the relationship between popular music and the screen, from the origins of the Hollywood musical to contemporary developments in music television and video. Through detailed examination of films, television programs and popular music, together with analysis of the economic, technological and cultural determinants of their production and consumption, the book argues that popular music has been increasingly influenced by its visual economy. Though engaging with the debates that surround postmodernism, the book suggests that what most characterizes the relationship between popular music and the screen is a strong sense of continuity, expressed through institutional structures, representational strategies and the ideology of "entertainment."

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements (p. ix)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• 1 Overtones and undertones (p. 11)
• 2 The emergence of popular music and sound cinema 1890-1927 (p. 32)
• 3 The popular music tradition and the classical Hollywood musical 1926-1955 (p. 53)
• 4 Hollywood and the challenge of the youth market 1955 (p. 82)
• 5 A very British coda (p. 127)
• 6 Popular music and the small screen (p. 179)
• 7 I want my MTV ... and my movies with music (p. 221)
• Bibliography (p. 248)
• Select filmography (p. 261)
• Index (p. 267)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Mundy contends that sight and sound have coexisted throughout the 20th century, beginning with precinematic illustrated songs and continuing through musical accompaniment to "silent" film, the development of the Hollywood and British musical, and the exploitation of popular music on music video and music television. Moreover, he argues that any understanding of popular music necessitates an understanding of its articulation and mediation through these various visual "economies." This glittering generality permits his discourse to ramble far and wide, from analyses of musicals by Elvis Presley and Jessie Matthews, to the documentation of mergers between film studios and recording companies, to a postscript on the postmodern implications of MTV programming and packaging. Stripped of its verbosity, much of this book is all too obvious: classical movie musicals are conservative promulgations of "the utopia of romantic heterosexual love"; television's interrogation of rock 'n' roll "defined patterns of consumption of popular music in the 1950s and beyond." Windy, tediously repetitive, and fraught with factual and typographical errors, this book offers little of value to music, media, or cultural historians (who have heard all this before) and will bore general and undergraduate readers, who will tire of its plodding pace and unnecessarily dense prose. J. C. Tibbetts; University of Kansas