This Is the Sound of Irony
Subtitle: Music Politics and Popular Culture
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 274
ISBN-13: 9781472442598
Subjects: Popular music, history and criticism
Description: The use of irony in music is just beginning to be defined and critiqued, irony in popular music being especially worthy of study because it is pervasive, even fundamental to the music, the business of making music and the politics of messaging. Contributors to this collection address a variety of musical ironies found in the 'notes themselves,' in the text or subtext, and through performance, reception and criticism. The chapters explore the linkages between irony and the comic, the tragic, the remembered, the forgotten, the co-opted, and the resistant. From the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, through America, Europe and Asia, this provocative range of ironies course through issues of race, religion, class, the political left and right, country, punk, hip hop, folk, rock, easy listening, opera and the technologies that make possible our pop music experience. This interdisciplinary volume creates new methodologies and applies existing theories of irony to musical works that have made a cultural or political impact through the use of this most multifaceted of devices.