This book is about understanding culture and society through contemporary world popular music. It brings together new and diverse analytic issues and themes, offering detailed coverage of othering representations in late-modern culture that occur in and through world popular music. It proposes fresh conceptualizations about popular music seen within the context of historic, economic, technologic, social, and cultural globalization, while addressing contemporary, interdisciplinary, and international issues. Specific focus is placed on notions of identity, power, and inequality as these are reflected, represented, and challenged in in popular music across continents and musical styles. Simone Kruger provides a clear introduction to modern popular music studies, covering empirical research from all parts of the world in addition to well-established and newer theories and concepts from popular music studies, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, sociology, and other fields. The book thereby accounts for the global processes and dynamics surrounding popular music, and subverts processes of canonization of certain popular music styles and approaches for their study over others. Popular Music in World Perspective provides a powerful contemporary framework for popular music analysis with a distinctive global and interdisciplinary awareness.
