Music Grooves : Essays and Dialogues

This volume explores two themes: the "groove" of firsthand experience and participation in music and the "groove" of musical mediation and commodification through recordings.

A number of the authors' most important essays, all revised and updated, are introduced and framed by dialogues that supply additional context, introduce retrospective concerns and reveal connections.

This format signals the authors' desire for a more reflexive, experimental discourse on music and society and invites readers to join their conversations. "Music Grooves" ranges from jazz, blues, polka, soul, rock, world beat, rap, karaoke and other familiar genres to major scholarly debates in music theory, ethnomusicology and popular culture studies.

The authors develop and create links between the fields of ethnomusicology and popular culture studies and relate the contents of musics from America, Greece, Cuba, Africa and Papua New Guinea to artists as diverse as James Brown, Aretha Franklin, L'il Wally Jagiello, Bo Diddley, Walt Solek, Madonna, Paul Simon, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Billie Holiday. Keil and Feld offer a view of the shaping of central ideas and terms in ethnomusicology such as "engendered feeling," "interpretive moves," "participatory discrepancies," "iconicity of style," "people's music," "schizophonia" and "lift-up-over sounding." From Keil's critique of Leonard Meyer's musicological approach to Feld's recent work on world beat, this volume covers an array of vital issues in media studies, musicology and ethnomusicology, popular culture, anthropology and sociology.

It should interest anyone concerned with the nature and meaning of music in the modern world.