“POPULAR MUSIC AUTOBIOGRAPHIES: REREADING MUSICIANS AND THEIR AUDIENCES”

This broad, interdisciplinary collection to be published by Bloomsbury Academic will consider why popular music autobiography has recently become such a widely-read genre and a significant factor in mediating popular music for its audience.

Vivid Versions: Cover Songs, Contexts, and Subjectivities

Edited by Mike Alleyne and Lori Burns

~Call for Proposals~

The covering of an iconic song has long been a popular music strategy for an artist’s expression of identity and musical subjectivity. Such song adaptations often entail the traversing of borders that articulate significant contexts for social and musical identities. We summarize these potential contexts in the following list, in no particular order of critical importance:

Call for Papers: Handbook of Critical Media Industry Studies

We seek chapter proposals for inclusion in the Handbook of Critical Music Industry Studies. Critical Music Industry Studies (CMIS) is an encompassing and inclusive field that describes research and analytical perspectives on the music industry that move beyond operational concerns or introductions to subsets of the sector. The Handbook marks an important step in the development of CMIS as a legitimate field of study, bringing together industry professionals and academics from a diverse set of disciplinary perspectives. As Music Industry Studies explodes, it is time to revisit the field as an academic mode of inquiry. Too often, music industry programs of study emphasize getting students jobs and hiring faculty with “real world experience.” As such, the field diverges from other scholarly projects (especially with “studies” in their title). These programs tend to resemble trade schools that emphasize working within the system at the expense of re-envisioning the system. By narrowly focusing on getting students jobs, these systems end up reenforcing structures of domination within the music business. We seek to bring together scholars to intervene in the field and provide teachers with a text to teach music industry students the problems, potential, and promises of performing music.

Just Can’t Get Enough: Synth-Pop and Its Legacies

Editors: Geoff Stahl, Nabeel Zuberi & Holly Kruse

If one were to nominate a pivotal moment for synth-pop, 1978 is a strong contender: Kraftwerk switches on Die Mensch-Maschine; Gary Numan’s group Tubeway Army and the Yellow Magic Orchestra release their debut albums; The Human League, Japan, The Normal (AKA Daniel Miller of Mute Records) and Telex release their first singles; two lads from Liverpool eschew their guitars for synths and a tape machine and form Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark; the group Berlin forms in Los Angeles, Duran Duran in Birmingham, and Soft Cell begins to record in Leeds. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the sound of synthesisers, sequencers and drum machines becomes an indelible part of the pop soundscape, manifested in music-making across the globe. 

Call for chapter proposals

Intellect Handbook of Global Music Industries

Edited by Chris Anderton, Martin James, Daniel Nordgård and Sergio Pisfil

Social, technological and political developments and disruptions continue to impact the music industries, fostering new revenue streams and opportunities, and allowing music from around the world to gain a global audience. Audio streaming, video apps and social entertainment services have rapidly become key areas of growth, and there has been a rise in academic work focusing on the global music industries in terms of their issues, challenges, and opportunities. Much of this work describes developments in the global north, and while this book will explore and expand upon this field, it also seeks to explore the industries from a global perspective. We therefore encourage proposals that stress global overviews, tackling issues to do with global capitalism, trans-national companies, geo-politics and so on, but also proposals that focus on significant local/regional contexts that cast light on global differences and what may be learned from them.

With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the crisis following to the increasing number of deaths, forced closures, exclusions and lockdowns, and the social, emotional economic aftermaths; the reemergence of the biopolitical argument is hardly surprising. In his last lecture “Society Must Be Defended,” (1975-1976), French philosopher Michel Foucault refers to biopolitical governmentality, which determines the differential exposure of human beings to health and social risks. According to Faucault’s historicized view of modernity, citizens are not subjects of law, but a biological entity to be controlled by means of epidemiological (biostatistical) surveillance. The emergence of biopolitics paved the way for fragmenting the biological continuum, in order to create hierarchies between different groups and, thus, differences in the way in which the latter were exposed to the risk of death. Racism became the “condition of acceptability” of such a differential exposure of lives in a society in which power is mainly exercised to protect the biological life of the population and enhance its productive capacity.