This book examines the diverse facets of popular music in Malta, paying special attention to għana (Malta’s folk song), the wind band tradition, and modern popular music. Ciantar provides intriguing discussions and examples of how popular music on this small Mediterranean island country interacts with other aspects of the island’s life and culture such as language, religion, history, customs, and politics. Through a series of ethnographic vignettes, the book explores the music as it takes place in bars, at festivals, and during village celebrations, and considers how it is talked about...

The key theme of these books is the changing nature of the live music industry in the UK, focussed upon popular music but including all musical genres. The third volume covers the period from Live Aid to Live Nation (1985-2015).

This thought-provoking collection offers a broad introduction to the field of psychedelic music studies, bringing together scholarly work on psychedelic music in genres like rock, folk, electronic dance music and pop. 

In this expanded, all-new edition, this book argues for the tangible relationship between Jackson and blackface minstrelsy. It reveals the dialogue at minstrelsy’s core and, in its broader sense, tracks a centuries-long pattern of racial oppression and its resistance and how that has been played out in popular theatre.

Level Up: Live Performance and Creative Process in Grime Music offers the first long-form ethnographic study of grime practice; it questions how and why artists do what they do; and it asks what this can tell us about creative process and improvisation more widely.

The Stooges have come to be considered one of the most important rock bands. By emphasizing their influence on later developments, however, critics tend to overlook the significance of the band in their own context and era. The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967-71 addresses such oversights.