This book is the first comprehensive account of how Anglo-American popular music transformed Italian cultural life. Drawing on neglected archival materials, the author explores the rise of new musical tastes and social divisions in late twentieth century Italy. The book reconstructs the emergence of pop music magazines in Italy and offers the first in-depth investigation of the role of critics in global music cultures. It explores how class, gender, race and geographical location shaped the production and consumption of music magazines, as well as critics’ struggle over notions of expertise, cultural value and cosmopolitanism. Globalization, Music and Cultures of Distinction provides an innovative framework for studying how globalization transforms cultural institutions and aesthetic hierarchies, thus breaking new ground for sociological and historical research. It will be essential reading for scholars and students interested in cultural sociology, popular music, globalization, media and cultural studies, social theory and contemporary Italy.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research is the first comprehensive academic survey of the field of rock music as it stands today. More than 50 years into its life and we still ask - what is rock music, why is it studied, and how does it work, both as music and as cultural activity? This volume draws together 37 of the leading academics working on rock to provide answers to these questions and many more. The text is divided into four major sections: practice of rock (analysis, performance, and recording); theories; business of rock; and social and culture issues. Each chapter combines two approaches, providing a summary of current knowledge of the area concerned as well as the consequences of that research and suggesting profitable subsequent directions to take. This text investigates and presents the field at a level of depth worthy of something which has had such a pervasive influence on the lives of millions.

Key debates of contemporary cultural sociology – the rise of the ‘cultural omnivore’, the fate of classical ‘highbrow’ culture, the popularization, commercialization and globalization of culture – deal with temporal changes. Yet, systematic research about these processes is scarce due to the lack of suitable longitudinal data. This book explores these questions through the lens of a crucial institution of cultural mediation – the culture sections in quality European newspapers – from 1960 to 2010. Starting from the framework of cultural stratification and employing systematic content analysis both quantitative and qualitative of more than 13,000 newspaper articles, Enter Culture, Exit Arts? presents a synthetic yet empirically rich and detailed account of cultural transformation in Europe over the last five decades. It shows how classifications and hierarchies of culture have changed in course of the process towards increased cultural heterogeneity. Furthermore, it conceptualizes the key trends of rising popular culture and declining highbrow arts as two simultaneous processes: the one of legitimization of popular culture and the other of popularization of traditional legitimate culture, both important for the loosening of the boundary between ‘highbrow’ and ‘popular’. Through careful comparative analysis and illustrative snapshots into the specific socio-historical contexts in which the newspapers and their representations of culture are embedded – in Finland, France, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the UK – the book reveals the key patterns and diversity of European variations in the transformation of cultural hierarchies since the 1960s. The book is a collective endeavour of a large-scale international research project active between 2013 and 2018.

The reference will discuss mass media around the world in their varied forms—newspapers, magazines, radio, television, film, books, music, websites, and social media—and will describe the role of each in both mirroring and shaping society.

Music listeners today can effortlessly flip from K-pop to Ravi Shankar to Amadou & Mariam with a few quick clicks of a mouse. While contemporary globalized musical culture has become ubiquitous and unremarkable, its fascinating origins long predate the internet era. In Music and the New Global Culture, Harry Liebersohn traces the origins of global music to a handful of critical transformations that took place between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century. In Britain, the arts and crafts movement inspired a fascination with non-Western music; Germany fostered a scholarly approach to global musical comparison, creating the field we now call ethnomusicology; and the United States provided the technological foundation for the dissemination of a diverse spectrum of musical cultures by launching the phonograph industry. This is not just a story of Western innovation, however: Liebersohn shows musical responses to globalization in diverse areas that include the major metropolises of India and China and remote settlements in South America and the Arctic. By tracing this long history of world music, Liebersohn shows how global movement has forever changed how we hear music—and indeed, how we feel about the world around us.

This book launches a proposal: to fill some empirical and theoretical gaps that presently exists in populism studies by looking at the potential nexus between populist phenomena and popular culture. It provides a detailed account of the multiple mechanisms linking the production of pop music (as a form of popular culture) to the rise and reproduction of populism. The authors use a case study of Italy to interrogate these mechanisms because of its long-lasting populist phenomena and the contextual importance of pop music. The book’s mixed-methods strategy assesses three different aspects of the potential relationship between pop music and populist politics: the cultural opportunity structure generated and reproduced by the production of music, the strategies political actors use to exploit music for political purposes, and, crucially, the ways fans and ordinary citizens understand the relationship between pop music and politics, and subsequent debates and identities. Moving from the case study, the book in its last chapter offers a more general understanding of the associations between pop music and populism.

The Asian Institute of Research Journal of Social and Political Sciences is a peer-reviewed International Journal of the Asian Institute of Research. The journal covers scholarly articles in the fields of Social and Political Sciences, which include, but not limited to, Humanities, Arts, Psychology, Anthropology, Government Studies, Political Sciences, Sociology, International Relations, Law, Public Administration, History, Philosophy, Arts, and Cultural Studies. The Journal of Social and Political Sciences is an Open Access Journal that can be accessed and downloaded online for free. Thus, ensuring high visibility and increase of citations for all research articles published. The journal aims to facilitate scholarly work on recent theoretical and practical aspects of Social and Political Sciences. Academics, Policymakers, and researchers are open to submit their manuscript at any time.