HUM 210 : Understanding our World Through the Arts

This book explores how songs and singers helped African Americans challenge and overcome slavery, subjugation, and suppression. From the spirituals of southern fields and the ringing chords of black gospel to the protest songs that changed the landscape of labor and the cadences sung before dogs and water cannons in Birmingham, sacred song has stood center stage in the African American drama.

Gioia tells a four-thousand-year history of music as a global source of power, change, and upheaval.

'Counterculture' emerged as a term in the late 1960s and has been re-deployed in more recent decades in relation to other forms of cultural and socio-political phenomena. This volume provides an essential new academic scrutiny of the concept of 'counterculture' and a critical examination of the period and its heritage.

André Millard studies the Beatlemania phenomenon from an original perspective--the relationship among the music business, recording technologies, and teens and young adult culture of the era. Millard argues that, despite the Beatles' indisputable skill, they would not have attained the global recognition and been as influential without the convergence of significant developments in the way music was produced, recorded, sold, and consumed.

Through all the years of strife and triumph, America has been shaped not just by our elected leaders and our formal politics but also by our music--by the lyrics, performers, and instrumentals that have helped to carry us through the dark days and to celebrate the bright ones. From "The Star-Spangled Banner" to "Born in the U.S.A.," Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw take readers on a moving and insightful journey through eras in American history and the songs and performers that inspired us.

Analysis of political advertising tends to give music short shrift--which goes against what we know about the power of music. This book is the first to offer an exploration of the role of music in US presidential campaign advertising, showing that music isn't simply one element in the presentation of an ad's message--it's the dominant factor, more important than images, words, or narration.  

The importance of music in a society is clearly brought to light in the role that it plays in the three basic parameters of the social logics: identity, social order and the need for exchange. If music is so important to us, it is because, apart from its assigned aesthetic values, it fits closely with the dynamics of each of these three different parameters. These parameters, which are consubstantial to the social nature of the human being, constitute the core of the book as they manifest in musical practices.

This book examines the development of jazz outside America, including across diverse historical periods and geographies - shedding light on the effectiveness of jazz as an instrument of state power within a global political context. His research also draws heavily upon a variety of sources which are accessible in these diverse countries: all had their unique and culturally specific domestic jazz scenes, but also interacted with each other in an interesting dimension of early globalization.

Nealon argues that the modes of musical "resistance" need to be completely rethought and that a commitment to musical authenticity or meaning--saying "no" to the mainstream--is no longer primarily where we might look for music to function against the grain. Rather, it is in the technological revolutions that allow biopolitical subjects to deploy music within an everyday set of practices that one might find a kind of ambient or ubiquitous answer to the "attention capitalism" that has come to organize neoliberalism in the American present.