Author Description

Reflecting the growing interest in popular music from the developing world, this unique book is the first to examine all major non-Western urban music styles, from increasingly familiar genres like reggae and salsa, to the lesser-known regional styles of Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, non-Western Europe (Greece, Yugoslavia, Portugal), Asia, and the Near East. Manuel establishes parameters that distinguish popular music from both folk and classical music, defining popular music as music created with the mass media in mind and reproduced on a large scale basis as a salable commodity for wide public consumption. While emphasizing stylistic analysis and historical development, he also treats the diverse popular musics as sites for the negotiation and mediation of the dialectics of nationalism and acculturation, tradition and modernity, urban and rural aesthetics, and grassroots spontaneity and corporate or bureaucratic manipulation. With its encyclopedic syntheses of earlier studies and extensive original research, Manuel's book will be an invaluable source for general readers and students of ethnology, popular music, and contemporary culture.