The Residents: Visionaries, Satirists, and Mythmakers

A themed issue of the journal Rock Music Studies.

The Residents are one of the most important bands in avant-garde / alternative music. With their first albums in the 1970s, they quickly established themselves as fierce critics of popular culture and as visionaries of new technologies and multimedia aesthetics. Since the 1970s, they have been committed to deconstructing the canon of popular music (with Meet the Residents, The Third Reich’n’Roll, Not Available, The Warner Bros. Album) and reconstructing American popular music (The King and Eye, God in Three Persons, Stars and Hank Forever). Reinventing the music of the avant-garde (Eskimo, Fingerprince, The Commercial Album) over the decades of their artistic career, the Residents also redefined the idea of the concept album (Mark of the Mole, Demons Dance Alone, The Voice of Midnight, The Ghost of Hope) and the genre of music videos (Freak Show, Gingerbread Man, One Minute Movies, Bad Day on the Midway). During their career they have also deconstructed the mythologies of popular culture, reinterpreting the music of the Beatles, Elvis, George Gershwin, James Brown, Hank Williams, Iron Butterfly, and the Rolling Stones–to name only a few. Consequently, by the turn of the twenty-first century, the Residents had extended the concept of the avant-garde and alternative music.

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Call for Participation: APME @ Edinburgh Napier University

July 26-29, 2020
Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland
Deadline for Applications/proposals: 15th of November 2019

The Association for Popular Music Education is pleased to announce a call for participation in its first-ever European conference, Breaking Down Barriers, which will be held at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland. This conference will take place the week before the International Society for Music Education’s (ISME) biennial conference in Helsinki, Finland. Edinburgh is a great stopping point on the way to Helsinki, and this conference provides the opportunity for Popular Music Education researchers to come together in a specialised environment.

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SOUND-IMAGE 2019: Exploring sonic and audio-visual practice

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
9-10 November 2019, University of Greenwich

This colloquium explores the relationship between sounds and images, and the images which sounds can construct by themselves.

Through a series of complementary strands – talks, screenings, loudspeaker orchestra concerts – we bring together artists and experts to investigate sound and sound-image phenomena.

We are delighted to present the following call for works, seeking submissions that explore the diverse areas of sound / image practice.

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Oxford Handbook of Global Popular Music

Invitation for expressions of interest
Edited by Simone Krüger Bridge.  

The Handbook offers an authoritative and state-of-the-art survey of current thinking and research in studies of global popular musics from different parts of the world. The chapters will be written by leading international figures from ethnomusicology, popular music studies, and anthropology to give critical examinations of the progress and direction of debates surrounding global popular music. The Handbook captures the vibrant, dynamic, and diverse approaches that characterize popular music across the world. The volume features a diversity of topics and approaches, structured into five conceptual parts: GLOBAL CAPITALISM, GLOBAL GENRES, MIGRATION, IDENTITY, TECHNOLOGY. The purpose of the organization is to give a comprehensive review of achievements by leading scholars in the field of global popular music to date, and to contribute to an understanding of what global popular music might become in future, charting new areas that are likely to define studies of global popular music in the coming decades.

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