Sounds English by Nabeel Zuberi
Popular music culture serves as an arena for debates on English and British national identity in this lively discussion of English popular music of the 1980s and 1990s. Against the background of his own upbringing as a Pakistani Brit, Nabeel Zuberi deftly combines a detailed account of the development of this music with a sophisticated assessment of its relation to the politics of cultural identity in Britain. Zuberi looks at how the sounds, images, and lyrics of English popular music generate and critique ideas of national belonging, recasting the social and even the physical landscapes of cities like Manchester and London. The Smiths and Morrissey play on romanticized notions of the (white) English working class, while the pet shop boys map a queer urban Britain in the AIDS era. The techno-culture of raves and dance clubs incorporates both an anti-institutional do-it-yourself politics and emergent leisure practices, while the potent mix of technology and creativity in British black music includes local conditions as well as a sense of global diaspora. traditions, seek a sense of place in Britain as commercial interests try to pin down an image of them to market. Sounds English shows how popular music complicates cherished notions of Englishness as it activates cultural outsiders and taps into a sense of not belonging. Alert and readable, Zuberi's wide-ranging discussion includes the performers Oasis, Blur, Tricky, Massive Attack, Goldie, A Guy Called Gerald, Roni Size, Bally Sagoo, Fundamental, Echobelly, Cornershop, Talvin Singh, and others.
"The twenty-first century in Britain has begun with an endlessly debated "crisis" of national identityNabeel Zuberi's Sounds English shows lucidly and with passion that popular music is now the most important site on which the meaning of Englishness in all its liberating and oppressive confusion is being worked out." -- Simon Frith "A richly multi-layered perspective entirely lacking from most other treatments of the subject." -- Tony Mitchell, European Journal of Communication
Jon Stratton is Professor of Cultural Studies at Curtin University, Australia. Jon has published widely in Cultural Studies, Popular Music Studies, Jewish Studies, Australian Studies and on race and multiculturalism. His most recent books are Jews, Race and Popular Music (Ashgate, 2009), Britpop and the English Music Tradition, co-edited with Andy Bennett (Ashgate, 2010), Uncertain Lives: Culture, Race and Neoliberalism in Australia (2011) and When Music Migrates: Crossing British and European Racial Faultlines 1945-2010 (Ashgate, 2014). Nabeel Zuberi is Senior Lecturer in Media, Film and Television at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is the author of Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music (2001), and co-editor (with Luke Goode) of Media Studies in Aotearoa / New Zealand 1 & 2 (2004 & 2010). His articles and book chapters have dealt mainly with the intersections of music and media technologies, race, ethnicity and diaspora. He is currently working on the Muslim in recent British and American music. He is editor-in-chief of Popular Communication: International Journal of Media and Culture.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780252026201 |
| ISBN 10 | 0252026209 |
| Title | Sounds English |
| Author | Nabeel Zuberi |
| Series | Transnational Cultural Studies |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | University of Illinois Press |
| Year published | 2001-02-19 |
| Number of pages | 288 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |