Peter Romijn, Giles Scott-Smith, Joes Segal (eds.): Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West (2012)

“While the divide between capitalism and communism, embodied in the image of the Iron Curtain, seemed to be as wide and definitive as any cultural rift, Giles Scott-Smith, Joes Segal, and Peter Romijn have compiled a selection of essays on how culture contributed to the blurring of ideological boundaries between the East and the West. This important and diverse volume presents fascinating insights into the tensions, rivalries, and occasional cooperation between the two blocs, with essays that represent the cutting edge of Cold War Studies and analyze aesthetic preferences and cultural phenomena as various as interior design in East and West Germany; the Soviet stance on genetics; US cultural diplomacy during and after the Cold War; and the role of popular music as the universal cultural ambassador. An illuminating and wide-ranging survey of interrelated collective dreams from both sides of the Iron Curtain, Divided Dreamworlds? has a place on the bookshelf of any modern historian.”

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2012
Studies of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation series, 5
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License
ISBN 9089644369, 9789089644367
248 pages

Publisher
OAPEN

PDF

David Byrne: How Music Works (2012)

“How Music Works is David Byrne’s buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about.

Equal parts historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, Byrne draws on his own work over the years with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and his myriad collaborators – along with journeys to Wagnerian opera houses, African villages, and anywhere music exists – to show that music-making is not just the act of a solitary composer in a studio, but rather a logical, populist, and beautiful result of cultural circumstance.

A brainy, irresistible adventure, How Music Works is an impassioned argument about music’s liberating, life-affirming power.”

Publisher Canongate Books, 2012
ISBN 0857862510, 9780857862518
348 pages

review (Mark Ellen, The Guardian)
review (Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing)
review (Geeta Dayal, Wired)
review (John Rockwell, The New York Times)
interview with the author (Vice)

publisher

EPUB

Arno van der Hoeven: The Popular Music Heritage of the Dutch Pirates (2012)

“This article explores how cultural identities are negotiated in relation to the heritage of illegal radio in the Netherlands. The term ‘pirate radio’ commonly refers to the offshore radio stations that were broadcasting during the 1960s. These stations introduced commercial radio and popular music genres like beat music, which were not played by public broadcasters at the time. In their wake, land-based pirates began broadcasting for local audiences. This study examines the identities that are constituted by the narrative of pirate radio. Drawing on in-depth interviews with archivists, fans and broadcasters, this article explores the connection between pirate radio, popular music heritage and cultural identity. Moreover, it considers how new technologies such as internet radio provide platforms to engage with this heritage and thus to maintain these local identities. To examine how the memories of pirate radio live on in the present a narrative approach to identity will be used.” (Abstract)

Published in Media, Culture & Society journal, 34(8), pp 927-943
14 pages

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