The Pop Festival: History, Music, Media, Culture

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Im going to camp out on the land try and get my soul free. So sang Joni Mitchell in 1970 on Woodstock. But Woodstock is only the tip of the iceberg. Popular music festivals are one of the strikingly successful and enduring features of seasonal popular cultural consumption for young people and older generations of enthusiasts. From pop and rock to folk, jazz and techno, under stars and canvas, dancing in the streets and in the mud, the pleasures and politics of the carnival since the 1950s are discussed in this innovative and richly-illustrated collection. The Pop Festival brings scholarship in cultural studies, media studies, musicology, sociology, and history together in one volume to explore the music festival as a key event in the cultural landscape and one of major interest to young people as festival-goers themselves and as students.

Reviews

In addition to its stellar 33 1/3 series, Bloomsbury publishes some of the best academic writing about music that one will read. In The Pop Festival, the music festival is put under the scholarly microscope in 14 separate essays, all punctiliously annotated and referenced the book provides valuable insight into the counter-culture beast that has been and is the music festival. Reading might not be as free and easy as a day at Woodstock, but through careful reading one will find reward. -- Frank Valish * Under the Rader *
For any student of the social, political, and cultural impact of the festivals [this is] a five-star treasure trove of ideas, joining-up disparate elements of society and contextualising the festivals within that background ... An important study. * Record Collector *
The Pop Festival is the most comprehensive collection explaining the underlying nature of music festivals. From humble beginnings of community folk festivals to political movements and to the evolution of the EDM festivals of our time, there is something that will intrigue everyone in here. The essays are each fairly short with their own distinct tone and voice, so each story and era feels self-contained. Yet, they weave together a vivid story of where weve been, with eyes on where we are now. * SLUG Mag *
The festival has long been an essential facet of the popular music experience. In this wonderful book, McKay assembles a series of masterful essays that take us on a thought provoking journey through the history, politics and aesthetic qualities of the pop festival. * Andy Bennett, Professor of Cultural Sociology, School of Humanities, Griffith University, Australia *
George McKay has brought together a lively, challenging, accessible and eclectic collection of essays spanning diverse aspects of the pop music festival: its history, politics, and cultural meaning; its muddy, sweaty, dancing bodies, its mythology and racial tensions, the euphoric (and sometimes tragic) crush of the crowd. I warmly recommend The Pop Festival to anyone interested in the politics of festivals across music and media studies, cultural history and event management. * Chris Gibson, Professor of Human Geography, University of Wollongong, Australia, author of Music Festivals and Regional Development in Australia *
Ranging widely in time and space, from early 1950s British cultural festivals through Love Parade and Burning Man, this original and compelling book examines the music festival from a rich variety of perspectives. The Pop Festival is particularly good at tracing the political, racial and musical contexts which have made festivals such important moments in cultural life around the world. Woodstock is here, and analyzed with great skill, but so are a wide range of other festivals whose importance has been forgotten. This is nothing less than an alternate history of popular music since the Second World War. * William Straw, Professor, Department of Art History & Communication Studies, McGill University, Canada *

Author Bio

George McKay is a leading writer on alternative cultures and music. He is Professor of Media Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK; his website is georgemckay.org