MUSIC AND SOUND STUDIES
Duran Duran's Rio
Roxy Music's Avalon
Annie Zaleski
Simon Morrison
In the '80s, Duran Duran became closely associated with new wave, an idiosyncratic genre that dominated the decade's music and culture. No album represented this rip-it-upand-start-again movement better than the act's breakthrough 1982 LP, Rio. Via extensive new interviews with band members and other figures who helped Rio succeed, this book explores how and why Rio became a landmark pop-rock album, and examines how the LP was both a musical inspiration and a reflection of a musical, cultural, and technology zeitgeist.
Having designed Roxy Music as an haute couture suit hand-stitched of punk and progressive music, Bryan Ferry redesigned it. He made Roxy Music ever dreamier and mellower—reaching back to sadly beautiful chivalric romances. The production and engineering imposed on Avalon confiscates emotion and replaces it with an acoustic simulacrum of courtliness, polished manners, and codes of etiquette. The seducer sings seductive music about seduction, but decorum is retained, as amour courtois insists. The backbeat cannot beat back nostalgia; it remains part of the architecture of Avalon, an album that creates an allusive sheen.
July 2021 • 184 pages • 121 x 165mm 9781501355189 Bloomsbury Academic • Series: 33 1/3
July 2021 • 160 pages • 122 x 165mm 9781501355349 Bloomsbury Academic • Series: 33 1/3
Donna Summer's Once Upon a Time Alex Jeffery Donna Summer’s double album Once Upon A Time stands out as a piece that delivers on its promise of an immaculately crafted journey from start to finish. As well as charting the production of the album within the legendary Munich Machine in Germany, this book digs deep into the album’s rich themes and subtexts. Approaching the book from inventive angles, the four essays within the book act as a prism connecting the reader to the classical aspirations of Eurodisco, the history of the black fairy tale and a queer knowledge that reads Summer’s Cinderella tale in some surprising ways. July 2021 • 144 pages • 123 x 165mm 9781501355462 Bloomsbury Academic • Series: 33 1/3
Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963
Janelle Monáe’s The ArchAndroid
Maria Callas's Lyric and Coloratura Arias
Colin Fleming
Alyssa Favreau
Ginger Dellenbaugh
Covering Sam Cooke's days with the Soul Stirrers, the gospel unit that was inventing a strand of soul in the 1950s, this book continues on to his string of hit singles as a solo artist that reveal far more about this complex man. As a writer and an agent of social change, the differences between Cooke’s true identity and what various factions of his audience wanted from him, he came to reconcile so many disparate elements on a stage in Miami that extended well into the future, beyond Cooke’s own life, beyond the 1960s, and into a perpetual here-and-now.
In Janelle Monáe’s full-length debut, the science fiction concept album The ArchAndroid, the android Cindi Mayweather is on the run from the authorities for the crime of loving a human. Taking into account the literary merit of Monáe’s astounding multimedia body of work, the political relevance of the science fictional themes and aesthetics she explores, and her role as an Atlanta-based pop cultural juggernaut, this book explores the lavish world building of Cindi’s story, and the many literary, cinematic, and musical influences brought together to create it.
September 2021 • 144 pages • 124 x 165mm 9781501355547 Bloomsbury Academic • Series: 33 1/3
September 2021 • 152 pages • 125 x 165mm 9781501355707 Bloomsbury Academic • Series: 33 1/3
Much has been written about Callas's sensational opera career and fraught private life, from her clashes with other artists, affair with billionaire playboy Aristotle Onassis, to her tragic death in 1977. And yet, the fascination with Callas's biography tends to overshadow her most seemingly superhuman qualities – her astounding voice and masterful technique. Using one of Callas’s first recital recordings from 1954 as a foundation, this book envisions each song, each aria, as a lens to examine phenomena as diverse as the operatic screaming point, feminism and the voice, and music and violence. November 2021 • 152 pages • 126 x 165mm 9781501379024 Bloomsbury Academic • Series: 33 1/3 Rights sold: Greek
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