Popular Musics of the Non-Western World An Introductory Survey [Paperback]

Reflecting the growing interest in popular music from the developing world, this unique book is the first to examine all major non-Western urban music styles, from increasingly familiar genres like reggae and salsa, to the lesser-known regional styles of Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, non-Western Europe (Greece, Yugoslavia, Portugal), Asia, and the Near East. Manuel establishes parameters that distinguish popular music from both folk and classical music, defining popular music as music created with the mass media in mind and reproduced on a large scale basis as a salable commodity for wide public consumption. While emphasizing stylistic analysis and historical development, he also treats the diverse popular musics as sites for the negotiation and mediation of the dialectics of nationalism and acculturation, tradition and modernity, urban and rural aesthetics, and grassroots spontaneity and corporate or bureaucratic manipulation. With its encyclopedic syntheses of earlier studies and extensive original research, Manuel's book will be an invaluable source for general readers and students of ethnology, popular music, and contemporary culture.

An excellent supplementary text for courses dealing with non-Western music. Manuel provides a good balance of social and cultural background with specific musical examples. This book will be recommended reading for all of my survey courses in ethnomusicology. --Michael Largey,Michigan StateUniversity

Comes a lot closer than any reasonable person could have hoped to getting the scoop on an enormous, fragmented, and recondite subject....What you already know he gets right; what you don't know amazes you....Because he's gathered his facts so intelligently and presented them so clearly, he's always readable and often fascinating. You don't have to kid yourself into enjoying all these alien genres to love their stories....Anybody with a yen to expound on the dehumanizingl*