Redefining Mainstream Popular Music [Paperback]

Redefining Mainstream Popular Music is a collection of seventeen essays that critically examines the idea of the mainstream in and across a variety of popular music styles and contexts. Notions of what is popular vary across generations and cultures  what may have been considered alternative to one group may be perceived as mainstream to another. Incorporating a wide range of popular music texts, genres, scenes, practices and technologies from the United Kingdom, North America, Australia and New Zealand, the authors theoretically challenge and augment our understanding of how the mainstream is understood and functions in the overlapping worlds of popular music production, consumption and scholarship. Spanning the local and the global, the historic and contemporary, the iconic and the everyday, the book covers a broad range of genres, from punk to grunge to hip-hop, while also considering popular music through other mediums, including mash-ups and the music of everyday work life. Redefining Mainstream Popular Music provides readers with an innovative and nuanced perspective of what it means to be mainstream.

Part 1: Re-Appraising the Mainstream 1. Making Sense of the Mainstream 2. Queer Dissonances, Lesbian Music Cultures and Multiple Mainstreams Part 2: Perceptions of the Mainstream 3. The Commercial Success of Grunge and the Contradictions of the Mainstream 4. Negotiating the Mainstream from Within: Young Girls Understandings of Pop Music Part 3: Historicising the Mainstream 5. Elvis goes Hollywood: Authenticity, Resistance, Commodification and the Mainstream 6. It Aint Necessarily So: Gender, the Popular Music Mainstream and England in the 1960s 7. Historicizing the Mainstream of the Late 1960s: Don Kirshner, The Monkees, and the Archies Part 4: Production, Aesthetics and the Mainstream 8. Sounds Like anlÃ