Happy Easter

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Highway to Hebdige: Why We All Should Read Dan Nelson's All Known Metal Bands (2008)

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Many thanks to Dr. Chris Kennett for this guest post:

The idea of subcultures as homogeneous, internally consistent and spectacularly defined signifying practices has taken a knock over the last fifteen years or so. When Dick Hebdige and his Birmingham chums first mapped the socio-anthropological and ethnographic terrain of the spectacular subculture in Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), a whole new area of research emerged at the junction-points of several disciplines (social psychology, semiotics, human geography, politics and ethnomusicology among them); and in those days, subcultures were defined by two opposite tropes: similarity of world-view within each subculture and defiant distance from hegemonic models of living in the wider world: you knew you were in a subculture because everyone outside the group was suspicious of you, and everyone inside realised that you and they were on the same wavelength, not least because of your similar taste patterns in clothes, private language, dance, political attitude and so on. However, by the time Sarah Thornton’s Club Cultures book hit the common-rooms in 1995, the simple us/them dialectic was being challenged by something altogether more complex, more fluid and less overtly political in its habitus. Since then, the tendency in the literature is to assume that subcultures nowadays are far more self-aware, far more post-modern, far more problematic, all round. Andy Bennett’s ‘neo-tribes’ concept, dating from an article published in 1999, takes this fluidity further: no subculture is as certain of its spectacular distance and internal homogeneity as they were in the days of Hebdige’s Mods, Punk and Skins, surely?

Carry on reading ...... click on the book review tab

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Monitoring - Alan Parsons' Art & Science of Sound Recording

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Alan Parson's Art and Science of Sound Recording

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Colm O'Rourke has asked the library to buy a copy of the Alan Parsons Art and Science of Recording 3 DVD box set, as he thought it would be especially useful for MA Audio Production students and anyone interested in sound recording (I'm always happy to accept suggestions for purchase and because Colm raved about it, I've bought two sets).

In the meantime while waiting for the DVDs to come into the library (keep checking for them on library search) and having become bored of the short clips available on YouTube, check out the acompanying website.Here you can freeely create a user name and password to have access to a free view of the intro, and a 25-minute interview that Alan conducted recently at Guitar Center in San Francisco, receive news and interact with Alan and "all manner of other cool things".

If you are interested in the history of sound recording you may like to look at and listen to Archival sound recordings from the British Library, (go in via Library search and once in log-in via the "your home institution" link. FIn here there is access to an oral history of recorded sound, early record catalogues and information on playback and recording equipment.

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Desert Island Discs - What would you choose?

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The BBC has released episodes of Desert Island Discs on it's archive.Listen to the choices of Neil Tennant, Vic Reeves, Yoko Ono, Randy Newman, George Michael and many more - which 8 tracks would you choose to listen to on the island?

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Fame is the answer (Financial analysis made easy)

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A question from an MA Music Business Management student

and my reply which may help with your assignment.

Q. What other business e-resources do we subscribe to other than Business Insight, Mintel, Factiva and Business Source Complete? I wonder does our library have an e-resource that is good for finding analysts' reports of listed companies? I am looking for strategic and financial analysis.

A.For Financial information about a particular company we subscribe to FAME (financial analysis made easy) available through Library search. The Business librarians have been featuring it on their blog and providing a step-by-step guide to using it, which you might find useful including a peer analysis.

Be aware it’s UK and Ireland based and it may help with searching if you are aware of the holding company. The British library subscribe to ORBIS which is a “fuller” product by the same company as it contains International listed and unlisted companies.

You could also do a company search in Factiva - click on the companies/markets tab and then click on the company tab that appears underneath

Factiva also provides other contextual information – e.g. Searching for EMI brings me a company report, datamonitor reports, and further down the page tabs that lead to further news and business reports that relate to the company.

You could also consider companies house where you can buy a report (about £1 a download).

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radio recordings for music

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Image: J Fry / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

We've recently added some music-related recordings of BBC radio broadcasts to the library collection that may be of interest. These include:



Why do we sing ( Radio 4 2/11/08)

Leadbelly: a secret history of rock and roll (Radio 2 7/12/09)

The definitive historuy of UK dance music. Underground, overground 1994 to the present day (Radio 2 5/7/08)

Radio 2 live: Bon Jovi (Radio 2 14/2/08)

Joe Strummer's last recorded concert (Radio 2 18/10/08)

Please give generously (Radio 4 20/2/10)



Use Library search to check for them and for other recordings; you can then find them on the second floor of the Harrow Library shelved after the DVD collection.

I've also added an RSS feed to the blog for music related DVDs that you might find interesting

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