The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment - Softcover

"'A Messianic aspiration to the Sermon on the Mount with visions of totalitarian uniformity': the editors characterize what was once mass entertainment, but is now mass-produced entertainment. Intricately and insightfully interlacing analysis, commentary, evaluations and interviews, the editors offer the definitive text on perhaps the most spectacular and (literally) awesome form of musical entertainment ever conceived. They take us from to Shea Stadium, New York in the 1960s to the O2 Arena Dublin today; we are with Coldplay one chapter, Iron Maiden the next; Dylan in Manchester, England, Beyonce in Rosemont, Illinois. My ears are still ringing. A stunning text. * Ellis Cashmore, author of Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption and Beyond Black: Celebrity and Race in Obama's America * This is a striking new book addressing the recent radical reconfiguration of popular music around the arena concert as charged and monumental event. It illustrates vividly how far the large-scale musical event has pulled together and redefined music, celebrity, audience, consumerism, technology, and, as the book also shrewdly notes, retaining a degree of religious aura as part of the bargain. The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment is a remarkable intervention, defining the field with a varied and highly engaging collection of essays, aware of earlier ideas but striving for a new and sophisticated understanding of this crucial and dominant facet of current musical culture. * K.J. Donnelly, Reader in Film, University of Southampton, UK *

The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment is the first sustained engagement with what might said to be - in its melding of concert and gathering, in its evolving relationship with digital and social media, in its delivery of event, experience, technology and star - the art form of the 21st century. This volume offers interviews with key designers, discussions of the practicalities of mounting arena concerts, mixing and performing live to a mass audience, recollections of the giants of late twentieth century music in performance, and critiques of latter-day pretenders to the throne. The authors track the evolution of the arena concert, consider design and architecture, celebrity and fashion, and turn to feminism, ethnographic research, and ideas of humour, liveness and authenticity, in order to explore and frame the arena concert. The arena concert becomes the "real time" centre of a global digital network, and the gig-goer pays not only for an immersion in (and, indeed, role in) its spectacular nature, but also for a close encounter with the performers, in this contained and exalted space. The spectacular nature of the arena concert raises challenges that have yet to be fully technologically overcome, and has given rise to a reinvention of what live music actually means. Love it or loathe it, the arena concert is a major presence in the cultural landscape of the 21st century. This volume finds out why.