Rock On : Women, Ageing and Popular Music

Printed on demand

Estimated despatch time 7 - 10 days

Contents: Introduction: women, ageing and popular music, Ros Jennings and Abigail Gardner
Part I 'Renewal, Recycling and Renegotiation': Madonna: like a crone, Lucy O'Brien
It's all just a little bit of history repeating: pop-stars, audiences, performance and ageing - exploring the performance strategies of Shirley Bassey and Petula Clark, Ros Jennings
Long live the Queen!: Celia Cruz's longevity as a counterpoint of tradition and change, Delia Poey
Framing Grace: shock and awe at the ageless black body, Abigail Gardner. Part II 'It's Not Over...': Mom rock? Media representations of 'mothers who rock', Norma Coates
27 for ever: Kristen Pfaff and the coverage of death as the re-presentation of a gendered musical life, Paula Hearsum
'I'd stage-dive, but I'm far too elderly': Courtney Love and expectations of femininity and ageing, Catherine Strong
Rebel without a pause: the continuity of controversy in Madonna's contemporary music videos, Paul Watson and Diane Railton
Bibliography
Index.

About
Reviews
Explore

About

For female pop stars, whose star bodies and star performances are undisputedly the objects of a sexualized external gaze, the process of ageing in public poses particular challenges. Taking a broadly feminist perspective, 'Rock On': women, ageing and popular music shifts popular music studies in a new direction. Focussing on British, American and Latina women performers and ageing, the collection investigates the cultural work performed by artists such as Shirley Bassey, Petula Clark, Madonna, Celia Cruz, Grace Jones and Courtney Love. The study crosses generations of performers and audiences enabling an examination of changing socio-historical contexts and an exploration of the relationships at play between performance strategies, star persona and the popular music press. For instance, the strategies employed by Madonna and Grace Jones to engage with the processes and issues related to public ageing are not the same as those employed by Courtney Love or Celia Cruz. The essays in this insightful collection reflect on the ways that artists and fans destabilise both the linear trajectories and the compelling weight of expectations regarding ageing by employing different modalities of resistance through persona re-invention, nostalgia, postmodern intertextuality and even early death as the ultimate denial of age.

Reviews

Popular Music

Timely and pertinent, the collection successfully opens up a space where the ageing female body traverses musical discourses of identity and subjectivity, always and already marked by gender, sexuality and ethnicity

Book

Contents

Download queue