The chapter traces the long, unheralded history of Black women electric guitarists in the United States from the 1940s to the present century. It identifies the unique challenges they face striving to work in an American music landscape that adores Black women as singers but largely overlooks them when they strap an electric guitar onto their bodies. It uses historical research and oral history interviews with intergenerational artists in blues, gospel, and rock to explore how race, gender, and genre conventions manifest and intersect to create barriers and opportunities.

This chapter surveys the interaction between Puccini’s works and various forms of popular culture since the mid-twentieth century. The author examines how Puccini’s music quickly came to be widely absorbed into the popular musical memory through a wide variety of genres. It surveys early recordings of Puccini’s arias and their association with particular recording stars such as Caruso. A discussion of the use of Puccini’s music in films from the 1930s to the present follows, analysing the ways in which it has been employed as a device in films ranging from gentle romances to violent Hollywood blockbusters, sometimes symbolising the essence of Italianness. The author then discusses how excerpts from Puccini’s music have been incorporated into popular songs of a wide range of types and how Puccini arias have made their way into the world of popular television via talent shows, sports programming (notably the use of ‘Nessun dorma’ for the Italia 90 World Cup), chat shows, and advertising.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

This chapter examines the diverging ways that minstrelsy used Haiti as source material. Minstrelsy took direct and mocking aim at the aspirations of African Americans, even as its turn to Haiti implicitly acknowledged the transformative power of racial revolution. In popular transatlantic plays like M. M. Dowling’s Othello Travestie, minstrelsy used Haiti to reimagine the rising hopes and transgressive desires of the Black Atlantic. By the 1850s, minstrelsy used Haiti as an empty signifier, a marker of ludicrous and disruptive Blackness.

In the hundred years that saw the widest effects of industrialisation and immigration to Wales, the popular music of the country embraced an increasingly passionate and secular adherence to traditions derived from choralism and eisteddfod culture on the one hand, and the development of commercial popular music on the other. ‘Popular music’ was defined not by repertoire but by the circumstances of its performance. Major features of this story include the first conspicuous appearances of Welsh choralism outside Wales, the world’s first virtuoso private brass band, Welsh manifestations of music hall and romantic theatre music, the rise of tourist entertainment and the projection of Welshness in the early years of broadcasting. One of the more interesting features of the period is the way Wales digested broader trends in popular music, modified them and projected them in distinctive ways. The chapter paints a picture of Welsh musical life that is seldom seen, in which strong musical traditions steeped in the culture of the Welsh language coalesce with popular modernism and new types of musical commerce and consumerism.

Shifting to an examination of identity formation from below, Chapter 4 observes popular culture through music and opens a discussion on the nature of Iranian identity. Music is not only a cultural expression; in Iran it has also been used as a political tool and as part of resistance movements. Iranians voiced their allegiance with the revolution and their identity as Shiite Muslims through song-like protest chants and musical tracks. Protest chants and group singing heighten the meaning of words and help facilitate a sense of unity. These techniques were employed as an emotive force during the revolution and by later generations to proclaim their identity and as a form of resistance after the controversial election of 2009. The Green Movement is a pertinent example of how popular music is utilized by Iranians as a mode of expression. Consequently, popular music can be used as a tool for investigation in order to facilitate a better understanding of contemporary Iranian identity and society.

This chapter introduces the drum, song and dance tradition gwoka, from Guadeloupe, tracing its evolution and development through an analysis of gwoka’s most celebrated musicians. By presenting gwoka as a model for unravelling Guadeloupe’s complicated colonial past, the chapter indicates the critical contributions intangible cultural objects like gwoka can make alongside written sources as tools for research.

Chapter 1 explains the rationale for the book and the principles underlying its methodology. It introduces the two artists covered, Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and the theorists used to contextualise their work: R. Serge Denisoff, Fredric Jameson, J. Anderson Thomson and Clare Aukofer. It summarises the concepts underlying each chapter – dual biography, protest music, history and spirituality – and explores the connections between these themes.

Nineteen Eighty-Four does not seem to offer the most promising material for singers, rock stars, and opera performers. There is, nevertheless, a vast history of adaptation and appropriation of Orwell’s text, a sub-genre referred to here as ‘rock’n’prole’. This afterlife in music encompasses a wide range of forms and styles, from albums such as David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (1974), Rage Against The Machine’s The Battle Of Los Angeles (1999), and Muse’s The Resistance (2009) to individual songs such as John Lennon’s ‘Only People’ (1973) and Radiohead’s ‘2+2=5’ (2003). There is also the controversial opera 1984 (2005), composed by Lorin Maazel, which demonstrates yet another vector for musical response to Orwellian dystopia. This chapter traces the history of these responses to Nineteen Eighty-Four in order to consider how musical adaptation brings into focus a key tension in dystopia more generally: that between entertainment and instruction. Does the act of taking Orwell’s novel as source material strip it of its critical content, once transmuted into song? Or does the act of adaptation reveal and make possible new kinds of criticism, aided and abetted by the confluence of text and music?

The introduction outlines how the book reassesses the impact of the Beatles on sixties Britain. Existing accounts have variously conceived of the Beatles as trailblazers of change, as exemplars of change or as outliers whose marginality revealed the lack of change in sixties Britain. Here the relationship between the Beatles and sixties Britain is instead conceived as one of creative tension, with the band’s divergence from societal norms provoking a full gamut of contemporary reactions: approbatory, contemptuous, ambivalent, indifferent and reformist. The book also uses different methods to study a familiar topic. It is a historical study of a subject largely studied by non-historians. Its empiricism distinguishes it from work informed by the theoretical approaches favoured by cultural critics and social scientists. It eschews the politicisation of the Beatles by writers engaged in culture wars over the sixties. It is purposely eclectic in its source materials, analytical methods and in its subject matter, which encompasses society, culture and politics. As the first book-length study of the Beatles by an academic British historian, The Beatles and Sixties Britain sets out to explain the significance of the band to twentieth-century British history, and vice versa.

The preface uses contemporary cartoons to introduce the four principal characteristics of the Beatles and their relationship to 1960s Britain, which is explored in the book. It argues that the Beatles should be understood as iconic, divisive, atypical and prefigurative. The band’s iconic status rested on more than their popularity, talent, wealth and fame. It existed because they functioned as ready-made symbols of modernity and controversy. The divisive effect of the Beatles is illustrated by opposition to their threat towards established institutions and identities. The Beatles’ atypicality, signified by their distinctive appearance, later identified them as elitist and eccentric. Once viewed as Everymen, they were associated with some of the most marginal and least popular elements of late sixties society. The prefigurative nature of the Beatles is demonstrated by the familiarity to us of the events depicted in the cartoons and the unfamiliarity of their underlying assumptions about class, gender, ethnicity and popular culture. Much of what seemed absurd to the cartoonists seems unexceptionable now. To understand the Beatles in their time, we need to examine why they often seemed so funny peculiar in 1960s Britain. To understand their legacy, we should consider why we struggle to laugh at these cartoons today.

This chapter examines how the unprecedented popularity and symbolic power of the Beatles forced politicians in Britain to attend to popular music in the 1960s. It begins by showing that parliamentarians were ill-equipped to comprehend not only the Beatles but also the new social forces with which they were associated. They reacted with a mixture of jocularity, partisan point-scoring and earnest debates over art, class, youth and the state. Their general bewilderment testified to how social and cultural change in sixties Britain exceeded the limits of the knowable and actionable in Westminster. The revolutionary left displayed more interest in and understanding of the Beatles than did Westminster politicians owing to the band members' class origins, youth appeal, anti-authoritarianism and support of certain radical causes. More broadly, left-wing writers and publications were instrumental in establishing pop music as a legitimate subject of analysis. Yet irrespective of their affiliations, most Marxists and anarchists adjudged the Beatles to be politically unsound. This was a correct analysis within its own terms, but testified to the difficulties encountered by revolutionary left organisations in accommodating countercultural values and attracting mass support among the young.