This edited volume concentrates on the period from the 1940s to the present, exploring how popular music forms such as blues, disco, reggae, hip hop, grime, metal and punk evolved and transformed as they traversed time and space. Within this framework, the collection traces how music and subcultures travel through, to and from democracies, autocracies and anocracies.
The chosen approach is multidisciplinary and deliberately diverse. Using both archival sources and oral testimony from a wide variety of musicians, promoters, critics and members of the audience, contributors from a range of academic disciplines explore music and subcultural forms in countries across Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America and Africa. They investigate how far the meaning of music and associated subcultures change as they move from one context to another and consider whether they transcend or blur parameters of class, race, gender and sexuality.
List of contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Migrating Musical and Subcultural Forms Elke Weesjes and Matthew Worley PART I 1 Jamaican Music in the United States: The Story of Percussionist Larry McDonald Elke Weesjes 2 Reggae and the First-generation Skinhead Subculture 1968–1972 Christopher Spinks 3 On the Land, in the Underground: The Rise and Fall of the ‘Crusties’ Kate Firks 4 Out of My Brain on the Bullet Train: Japan, Mod and the Migratory Flows of a Subculture Peter Hughes Jachimiak 5 ‘You’re as Taz as Tazzy can be’: Transgressing Racial and Class Boundaries in Australian Grime Alex De Lacey 6 Straightwashed or Hiding in Plain Sight?: The Secret History of Italo Disco Stephen Hill 7 The New Pop Formula: How to Write a Global US Hit Song in the Twenty-first Century Lars Münzer PART II 8 The Spanish Blues Scene: Travelling Music and Subcultural Identities Josep Pedro and Begoña Gutiérrez-Martínez 9 Solidarity, Rebellion or Exoticisation? The Transferral of Ska and Reggae Cultures to Czech and Slovak Fans Miroslav Michela and Ondřej Daniel 10 From Blackened Valhalla to Hyperborean Dacia: The Romanian Black Metal Scene as a Case Study of Cultural Migration Claudiu Oancea 11 Subversive South Africa: Race, Class and Gender in South African Punk, 1976–1985 Amber Beeson 12 ‘For the Betterment of Our Homeland’: Interpretations and Adaptations of Global Black Music in an Ethiopian Border Town Sarah Bishop 13 ‘Straight Outta Kathmandu’: Hip-Hop and Youth Culture in Post-War Nepal Kritika Chettri Index
Elke Weesjes is an adjunct Associate Professor of Modern History at the City University of New York in Brooklyn, USA. Matthew Worley is a Professor of Modern History at the University of Reading, UK.
