Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This is a critical introduction to the key theoretical issues which arise in the study of contemporary popular music. The book is organized in a way that shows how popular music is created across a series of relationships that link together industry and audiences, producers and consumers.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Audiences
• Industry
• Mediations
• Identities
• Histories
• Geographies
• Politics

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Negus (Univ. of Leicester, UK) has written an introduction to the broad spectrum of popular music scholarship, focusing on the more recent, often theoretical studies. The seven chapters discuss audiences, industry, meditations, identities, histories, geographies, and politics--broad categories with a definite critical edge. The author starts with a summary of the work of Marxist critic Theodor Adorno, then proceeds to explore a procession of studies with increasingly complex views of the connections between popular music and a fragmented international audience. In each case Negus identifies no simple cause and effect, no clear manipulative music industry and helpless mass audience, but instead a subtle mediation heightened by racial, ethnic, gender, geographic, and other factors. Though he focuses on the West, the author does not neglect other areas--for example, he discusses salsa music. The bibliography is a good introduction to recent published accounts, with an emphasis on British scholars. A helpful introduction to the subject, the book is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students in media and cultural studies; a suitable companion to Reebee Garofalo's Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the USA (1997) and to the growing list of studies of world music. R. D. Cohen; Indiana University Northwest