Special issue of Popular Music 40.4 (2021)

Prosecuting and Policing Rap

Contributions are invited to a special issue of Popular Music on the complex interface between rap music (taken in its broadest sense to include mainstream rap, gangsta rap, activist rap, drill, grime, etc.) and criminal justice systems around the world.

Rap music is an international youth-cultural powerhouse and, while its spread has been celebrated, it has also been attended by mounting criminalisation. This special issue asks researchers to explore the policing and prosecuting of rap and how this has been framed in media reporting. It also considers what might make rap susceptible to such state criminalisation and how rappers, communities, civil liberties groups, defence lawyers, and scholars have come to challenge ‘prosecuting rap’.

This book explores, from a variety of perspectives and methodologies, how record stores became such important locales. As an agora, a community center, and a busy critical forum for taste, culture, and politics, the record store prefigured social media. Once conduits to new music, frequently bypassing the corporate music industry in ways now done more easily via the Internet, independent record stores (in direct opposition to rock radio programmed by corporate interests), championed the most local of economic enterprises, allowing social mobility to well up from them in unexpected ways. In this way, record stores speak volumes about our relationship to shopping, capitalism, and art. The editors of this volume believe that record stores are spaces rife for examination because their cultural history is in some ways the story of the best side of capitalism seen in microcosm. To that end, this book employs three motifs: cultural history, urban geography, and auto-ethnography to find out what individual record stores meant to individual people, but also what they meant to communities, to musical genres, and to society in general. What was their role in shaping social practices, aesthetic tastes, and even, loosely put, ideologies? This book will collect stories and memories, and facts about a variety of local stores that will not only re-center the record store as a marketplace of ideas, but also explore and celebrate a neglected personal history of many lives.

Editors Dr. Brent Keogh and Prof. Phil Hayward

Equinox Publishing

Chapter proposals are invited for a collected edition on the theme of musical responses to plagues and pandemics. This book will chart a historical trajectory of musical responses to plagues and pandemics, providing a critical historical perspective on the lived experiences in the present. By focusing on major plagues, outbreaks, and pandemics, such as the Black Death, the Spanish flu, SARS, and Zika virus, we aim to historically contextualise musical responses to such disasters. In addition to charting historical contexts, this collection will address ways in which musicians have harnessed digital technologies to create forms of patronage, connect with fans, rehearse with band members, and network with peers and industry. The volume will also discuss musical responses in terms of the intersections of class and race, where social distancing is virtually impossible for some classes of people due to their specific living conditions, or where the prevailing Government policy is to “let it rip”, to allow a virus to sweep through the population for reasons of “herd immunity”, economic stability, or an under-resourced medical system. This edition will provide a timely work that not only accounts for the exceptional times we are living in, but sheds light on this time by thinking historically through musical responses to plagues and pandemics and suggesting manners in which future ones may be navigated by cultural producers and audiences.

Proposals due 31 July 2020

Chapter submissions of 4,500-7,000 words due 25 January 2021

Contact: brent.keogh@uts.edu.au, philip.hayward@uts.edu.au

We are pleased to announce the launch of Sound Stage Screen (SSS), a new biannual peer-reviewed journal devoted to historical and theoretical research into the relations between sound, performance, and media. SSS will address a wide range of phenomena, practices, and objects pertaining to sound and music in light of the interconnections between performing traditions and media archaeologies: from opera to musical multimedia, and from cinema to interactive audio-visual platforms.