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Description
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.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- EPUB 3.0
- Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
- WCAG level AA
- WCAG v2.2 compliant
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
- No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
- Has alternative text descriptions for images
Visual adjustments
Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
- Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
- Purposes of all links are made clear
Rich content
Language tagging provided
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. A Brief History of Popular Music and Narrativity
3. The Building Blocks of Popular Music
4. Extending Form
5. Popular Music Adaptations
6. David Bowie - Performer / Persona / Character / Star
7. Popular Music Transmedia
8. Conclusion
Product details
| Published | 20 Aug 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 288 |
| ISBN | 9781501343261 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 45 bw illus |
| Series | New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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