Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory - Softcover

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Thomas Swiss is Humanities Endowment Professor of English and Associate Chair at Drake University. He is a published poet and literary critic with works appearing in The New York Times Book Review, Iowa Review and the American Scholar.
Andrew Herman is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Drake University. He specializes in the study of popular culture and society.
John M. Sloop is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Vanderbilt University. His interests include cultural representation in the media, music and cyberspace.

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One of the most vibrant and exciting new areas of academia inquiry falls under the cross disciplinary category of cultural studies. Within this field, popular music has been commonly analyzed to understand our world through the social dynamics, cultural production and consumption of popular music.

Recent works on popular music studies examine the institutional and economic limitations that define popular music. Other works have addressed the textual aspects; representations and symbolic meaning in popular music as reflected in contemporary society. Other books look solely at the phenomenon of fandom and music subcultures.

This collection cuts across all these ways of analyzing culture and is done through looking at spaces of noise and places of music. Included in this volume are some of the best cultural theorists and their reflections on modern life through music and representation.