Product Description: The field of American studies has a long tradition of scholarship and research into the social and cultural worlds of sound. The essays in this volume highlight the key role of sound in the formation of central themes and areas of inquiry within contemporary American studies...read more

Product Description: Birds of Fire brings overdue critical attention to fusion, the musical idiom that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, as musicians blended elements of jazz, rock, and funk. Fusion never coalesced into a distinct genre; many artists and critics disparaged the music as amorphous and hard to define...read more

Product Description: In Buena Vista in the Club, Geoffrey Baker traces the trajectory of the Havana hip hop scene from the late 1980s to the present and analyzes its partial eclipse by reggaetón. While Cuban officials initially rejected rap as “the music of the enemy,” leading figures in the hip hop scene soon convinced certain cultural institutions to accept and then promote rap as part of Cuba’s national culture...read more

Product Description: What started out as a mutual affinity for kitschy Jewish album covers–think Neil Diamond baring his chest hair on the cover of Hot August Night or Barbra Streisand in hot pants on the cover of Streisand Superman–soon became a quest for identity, history, and culture between the grooves of LPs...read more

Product Description: Ranging from Los Angeles to Havana to the Bronx to the U.S.-Mexico border and from klezmer to hip hop to Latin rock, this groundbreaking book injects popular music into contemporary debates over American identity. Josh Kun insists that America is not a single chorus of many voices folded into one, but rather various republics of sound that represent multiple stories of racial and ethnic difference...read more

Product Description: Mickey Katz (1909 - 1985), a Jewish comedian and musician, is best known for his parodies -- "Theme from Moulin Rouge (Where is My Heart)" became "Where is My Pants?", "(How Much is that) Doggie in the Window" became "Pickle in the Window" -- incorporating Yiddish words and accents...read more