Popular Music and Narrativity - A Theory and History of Pop Storyworlds

Popular music is rich in imaginative storytelling, from the songs of music hall, and street narratives of hip-hop to the 1970s heyday of the concept album. As an even broader audiovisual practice, including music video, sleeve art and star-texts of performers themselves, the possibilities for unique ways of telling stories multiply - capturing the public imagination more recently are examples like Beyoncé's recent visual album Lemonade and experiments in popular music transmedia like Gorillaz.

While music's role as soundtrack for other narrative media has been extensively theorised, relatively little attention has been paid to how narrativity works within popular music itself. By building on writing around narrativity from popular music scholars, applying concepts from the storyworlds literature to music and vice versa, this book connects these two disciplines. It provides fresh takes on well-known case studies from David Bowie and The Beatles to Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of War of the Worlds, while introducing the reader to lesser known examples from global popular music culture. Providing a long overdue overview of narrativity in popular music culture, this book connects the dots between innovative and exciting examples across its history.

About the author

Alex Jeffery writes and teaches about popular music, and currently lives between London and Berlin. Alex lectures on popular music in several institutions in London, including City, University of London BIMM London and the University of Cambridge. He has also worked as associate editor at the long-running music review site MusicOMH, and runs the YouTube channel DocPopterTV, which posts audiovisual essays on his research and other audiovisual creative work.

Product details

• Authors: Alex Jeffery
• Assisted by: Holly Rogers (Editor), Carol Vernallis (Editor)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 31.12.2021, delayed
• EAN: 9781501343254
• ISBN: 978-1-5013-4325-4
• No. of pages: 288
• Series: New Approaches to Sound, Music; New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Music > Music history; Media Studies, Rock & Pop music, MUSIC / History & Criticism, MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Pop Vocal, MUSIC / Instruction & Study / Songwriting, History of Music, Social and cultural history, Theory of music & musicology, Popular Music, Other graphic or visual art forms