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Britney Spears barely survived 2007. She divorced her husband, lost custody of her kids, went to rehab, shaved her head and assaulted a paparazzo. In the midst of her public breakdown, she managed to record an album, Blackout. Critics thought it spelled the end for Britney Spears’ career.

But Blackout turned out to be one of the most influential albums of the aughts. It not only brought glitchy digital noise and dubstep into the Top 40, but also transformed Britney into a new kind of pop star, one who shrugged off mainstream ubiquity for the devotion of smaller groups of fans who worshipped her idiosyncratic sound.

This book returns to the grimy clubs and paparazzi hangouts of LA in the 2000s as well as the blogs and forums of the early internet to show how Blackout was a crucial hinge between twentieth and twenty-first-century pop.

Chico Buarque comprises a critical appreciation of the self-titled album (1978), which is one of the Brazilian artist’s most representative. This vibrant collection displays the singer-songwriter’s singular talents as a composer/poet of song with both popular appeal and keen analytical skills. The eleven tracks include both up-beat sambas and lyrical compositions: witty tunes, dramatic laments, international items, and, especially, epochal protest songs with fascinating histories. The album embodies Chico Buarque's affective sensibilities and sociopolitical engagement, and this book situates the album in inter-related contexts: the artist's own career; the evolution of the current he represents MPB (Brazilian Popular Music); and, especially, historical conjuncture—the period of military dictatorship in Brazil, 1964-85.

Edition description: Steeped in foreboding mythology, the dark underbelly of heavy metal ignites debate to this day. Guitars playing abrasive, discordant riffs, the thunderous double-kick of the drums acting like an accelerated heartbeat, and porcine, guttural vocals pummeling twisted lyrics. Courting controversy from inception to its modern day iteration, death metal presents a number of contradictions: Driven and adventurous musicians compete to make uncomfortable noises; it is crude and far beyond parody and yet consistently popular; and the music is pig-headedly uncommercial despite making a few labels, albeit briefly, reasonably wealthy.

This book explores the history and methodology of the genre, charting its aims and intentions, its crossovers to the mainstream, successes and failures, and tracks how it developed from the bedrooms of Birmingham and Florida to the near-mainstream, to the murky cult status it enjoys today.

What does it mean, in a polarized political climate, that feminism is popular in mainstream pop? Engaging with feminist theory and previous research about gender and music, this book investigates the meaning of current trends relating to gender, feminism and woman-identified artists in mediated popular music. The examples discussed throughout the book include Beyoncé’s concert documentary Homecoming, the Swedish music industry #MeToo petition signed by 2,192 artists, the television show Star and the functions of a music streaming service. The volume discusses the media specificity of the different examples; introduces and explains feminist theories and concepts; and analyses the position of women, gender equality and feminism in mainstream pop music today.

Breaking the global record for streams in a single day, nearly 10 million people around the world tuned in to hear Kendrick Lamar’s sophomore album in the hours after its release. To Pimp a Butterfly was widely hailed as an instant classic, garnering plauditory albums reviews, many awards, and even a canonized place in Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois archive. Why did this strangely compelling and masterful record stimulate the emotions and imaginations of listeners?

This book takes a deep dive into the sounds, images, and lyrics of To Pimp a Butterfly to suggest that Kendrick appeals to the psyche of a nation in crisis and embraces the development of a radical political conscience. Kendrick breathes fresh life into the black musical protest tradition and cultivates a platform for loving resistance. Combining funk, jazz, and spoken word, To Pimp a Butterfly’s expansive sonic and lyrical geography brings a level of innovation to a field dominated by the predictability of trap music. More importantly, Kendrick’s introspective and philosophical songs compel us to believe in a future where we gon’ be alright!

Just as soon as it had got rolling, rock music had a problem: it wanted to be art. A mere four years separate the Beatles as mere kiddy culture from the artful geniuses of Sergeant Pepper’s, meaning the very same band who represents the mass-consumed, "mindless" music of adolescents simultaneously enjoys status as among the best that Western culture has to offer. The story of rock music, it turns out, is less that of a contagious popular form situated in opposition to high art, but, rather, a story of high and low in dialogue--messy and contentious, to be sure, but also mutually obligated to account for, if not appropriate, one another. The chapters in this book track the uses of literature, specifically, within this relation, helping to showcase collectively its fundamental role in the emergence of the "pop omnivore.

"Trip-hop" was a label cast upon music that, in the early 1990s, sounded from the boundaries of dub, hip-hop, electronic, jazz, soul, psychedelia. Acoustically arresting albums like Massive Attack’s Blue Lines and Protection; Portishead’s Dummy; Tricky’s Maxinquaye; DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… — these, and scores of records on labels like Mo’ Wax and Ninja Tune, seemed to speak to a sense of collective alienation and disenchantment, with the end of the century in sight. But the ‘trip-hop’ label was loathed by most of the musicians and producers; and by the early 2000s, receding into a bland ignominy of soundtracks and commercial imitation, the scene seemed to have exhausted itself.

The music went on, just like it had come before. This short book seeks to dislocate "trip-hop" and instead understand this music within wider and more interesting aesthetic traditions. Traditions in which qualities of beauty, intimacy, and nostalgia sit alongside complexity, virtuosity, and furious experimentation. It places this strange, spacious, avant garde sound alongside musics of exile, loss, and the Black diaspora. Like the music, this book will both offer solace and challenge. It will ask questions about who gets to define genres, and what — and who — do such genres exclude. And it will ask, as a listener, how do you untrain your ears and escape complicity from the commercial imperatives of labels and algorithms?

It is not an exaggeration that Matsutoya Yumi—better known by her stage name Yuming—is one of the most influential figures in Japanese popular music history. A singer-songwriter recognized globally for her songs used in Miyazaki Hayao’s beloved animations, Yuming has captured the hearts of listeners of different generations since her debut in the early 1970s. Her fourth album, The 14th Moon, released in 1976, was a milestone in establishing her signature style: the posh, “city” sound that later paved the way to the 1980s City Pop and 1990s J-pop. In addition to examining the album’s astonishing stylistic versatility, this book explores how Yuming revolutionized the position of women in Japanese popular music and how her work can help us understand social changes in Japan of the 1970s