Synth-Pop and Its Repercussions

(Hardback)

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This collection explores synth-pops sounds and its hooks, new technologies and production techniques, its media and imagery, its ideologies and discourses about art and culture, society and politics.

Synth-pop is a loose rubric that includes DIY electronic music, post-punk and sounds shot through with the tropes of futurism and dystopia during the Cold War and early neoliberalism that Mark Fisher has called "the eerie. Synth-pop also refers to melodic hits and chart toppers such as those by a-ha, Bronski Beat, The Buggles, Eurythmics, New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Tears for Fears, Ultravox, Visage and Yazoo. This book covers synth-pop broadly defined, considering everything between its most rough-hewn and naive forms to its glossier, sophisticated incarnations.

This collection follows synth-pops international circuits, not only in the UK and the US, but in Poland, Spain, Czech Republic, Italy, Japan, Germany, Australia, India, and through migrations and diasporas; and it opens up local, national and transnational developments and influences with critical and interdisciplinary approaches from musicology, media studies and cultural studies, among others. The volume brings together contributions that critically examine synth-pop in relation to the histories of music genres, gender, sexuality, race, class, the human, technology and politics.

Author Bio

Geoff Stahl is Senior Lecturer in Media & Communication at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. His publications include: Poor, But Sexy: Reflections on Berlin Scenes (2014), Made in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand (2018), Nocturnes: Popular Music and the Night (2019), Mixing Pop & Politics: Political Dimensions of Popular Music in the 21st Century (2022), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music, Space and Place (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Nabeel Zuberi is Associate Professor in Media and Screen Studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau /University of Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Nabeel's publications include Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music (2001), Media Studies in Aotearoa/New Zealand 1 & 2 (2004, 2010), and Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945 (2014).

Holly Kruse is Professor of Communications at Rogers State University, USA. She is author of Site and Sound: Understanding Independent Music Scenes (2003) and Off-Track and Online: The Networked Spaces of Horse Racing (2016).