In recent years, popular music museums have been established in high profile locations in many of the presumed musical capitals of the world, such as Los Angeles, Liverpool, Seattle, Memphis, and Nashville. Most of these are defined by expansive experiential infrastructures centered around spectacular, high-tech displays of varying sizes and types. Through over-the-top acts of display, these museums influence and reflect the values and priorities in the public life of popular music.
This book examines the phenomenon of the popular music museum outside the typical and familiar frames of heritage and tourism. Instead, it looks at these institutions as markers of the broader entertainment industry in the era of its rise to global dominance. It highlights the multiple manifestations of power as read across a range of institutions and material forms and discusses how this contributes to shaping the experience of popular culture.
Charles Fairchildis Associate Professor of Popular Music at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the author of
Sound, Screens, Speakers(Bloomsbury, 2019),
Danger Mouse's The Grey Album(Bloomsbury, 2014),
Music, Radio and the Public Sphere(Palgrave, 2012) and
Pop Idols and Pirates(Ashgate, 2008).
Charles Fairchild's comprehensive and thought-provokingMusician in the Museuminscribes popular music back into the realm of neo-liberal politics. The book offers a welcome critical intervention on how we think about the contemporary value of popular music and will certainly have considerable effects on academic, journalistic, and vernacular discourses on the heritagization of popular music. Rapha?l Nowak, Cultural Sociologist, Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, France
Musician in the Museumshows how proliferating music museums function to reinforce neoliberal ideologies. Charles Fairchild's book usefully adds to the growing literature on music in today's capitalism. TimothylÃ/
![Musician in the Museum: Display and Power in Neoliberal Popular Culture [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/9/9/8/2_7181599.jpg "Musician in the Museum: Display and Power in Neoliberal Popular Culture [Paperback]")