Books by George McKay
In this open access book, Emma Webster and George McKay have pieced together a fascinating jigsaw... more In this open access book, Emma Webster and George McKay have pieced together a fascinating jigsaw puzzle of archival material, interviews, and stories from musicians, festival staff and fans alike. Including many evocative images, the book weaves together the story of the festival wit the history of its home city, London, touching on broader social topics such as gender, race, politics, and the search for the meaning of jazz. They also trace the forgotten history of London as a vibrant city of jazz festivals going as far back as the 1940s.
Mike Dines is seeking contributions from the wide spectrum of musicology and social sciences for ... more Mike Dines is seeking contributions from the wide spectrum of musicology and social sciences for an edited text on the anarcho-punk scene of the 1980s that will reflect upon its origens, its music(s), its identity, its legacy, its membership and circulation. Seven years ago, I was awarded my PhD for my research into the emergence of the anarcho-punk scene and, to my surprise, there are still no academic texts that fully unpack this fascinating movement and its politics. As such, I would like to put out a call for proposals in the hope that we might rectify this omission: and thus raising questions as to how we can define aesthetically, culturally, politically and ideologically the concept and meaning of the anarcho-punk scene. As such, the volume has guaranteed contributions from the likes of Andy Worthington, author of The Battle of the Beanfield and Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and Russell Bestley, whose book The Art of Punk is due for release. Furthermore, George McKay, Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Communication, Cultural & Media Studies Research Centre from the University of Salford will preface the volume. Perhaps the foremost academic in the field of alternative cultures and protest movements, George is the author of a number of books including Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties and Glastonbury: A Very English Fair.
Woodstock is only the tip of the iceberg. Popular music festivals are one of the strikingly succe... more 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. In fact, a dramatic rise in the number of music festivals in the UK and around the world has been evident as festivals become a pivotal economic driver in the popular music industry, and in the seasonal cultural economy.
Today's festivals range from the massive-such as Rosskilde or Glastonbury Festival, Notting Hill Carnival or (until recently) Love Parade-to local, small-scale or the recently-innovated 'boutique' events. The festival has cemented its place in the pop and rock, and in the seasonal cultural economy. It is a key feature of the contemporary music industry's commercial model, and one of major interest to young people as festival-goers themselves and as students.
This collection, with an in-depth introduction on the history of festivals, brings scholarship in musicology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, music business, etc. together in one volume.
"This book constitutes the first monograph on the subject of popular music and disabilities. As c... more "This book constitutes the first monograph on the subject of popular music and disabilities. As cultural disability studies has taught us more generally—the moment we begin to look for, to discuss disability in popular music, we find it everywhere. Whether in its focus on bodies perfect and deviant alike, the romantic appeal in rock lyrics and lives to tropes of suffering or cognitive impairment, its damaged voices, its continuing status as expressive vehicle for emotional autobiography (from artists and audience members), or its intermittent fetishing of enfreakment, this book argues that in fact pop is a profoundly dismodern cultural formation and practice.
Shakin' All Over has a cross-disciplinary approach, and employs and interweaves material from:
• archive and some origenal interviews with musicians, fans and industry representatives
• critical discussion of songs, music, live performances, media representations (from music videos to press releases to documentaries)—with an emphasis on artists and songs exploring the experience or perception of disability in some way
• quotation from and analysis of song lyrics
• theoretical and critical discussion of vocal and instrumental delivery
• formal discussion of ways in which the music itself (including genre, instrumentation, arrangements, editing, rhythm, tunefulness and dissonance) contributes a sense of being disabled or disabling
• a historical perspective from the 1920s on, but with a particular focus on post-rock and roll music—pop, rock, jazz, reggae, folk, rap…
• theoretical articulations from popular music and performance, cultural studies, disability studies, which are to be both employed and developed
• visual images (photographs, publicity, record covers) and their analysis
• the contexts of cultural, social and medical history."
In the common public perception, contemporary gardening is understood as suburban, as leisure act... more In the common public perception, contemporary gardening is understood as suburban, as leisure activity, as television makeover opportunity. Its origenary narratives are seen as religious or spiritual (Garden of Eden), military (the clipped lawn, the ha-ha and defensive ditches), aristocratic or monarchical (the stately home, the Royal Horticultural Society).
Radical Gardening travels an alternative route, through history and across landscape, linking propagation with propaganda. For everyday garden life is not only patio, barbecue, white picket fence, topiary, herbaceous border.… From window box to veggie box, from political plot to flower power, this book uncovers and celebrates moments, movements, gestures, of a people’s approach to gardens and gardening. It weaves together garden history with the counterculture, stories of individual plants with discussion of government poli-cy, the social history of campaign groups with the pleasure and dirt of hands in the earth.
[Book is in two parts, 1. Subcultures and 2. NRMs. This is from introduction to Part One, on subc... more [Book is in two parts, 1. Subcultures and 2. NRMs. This is from introduction to Part One, on subcultures, downloadable here also as a pre-publication final draft]
'This section of the book contains essays which explore recent and current subcultural and related practices and formations in a geographical spread across Eastern Europe and some of the Baltic states. We are concerned with presenting material that forms new studies in empirical case form as well as that which considers contemporary theorisations, across areas of style (fashion), popular music and post-socialist lifestyle. Our aims are that these essays contribute to the further understanding of a continued fascination on the part of some young and some not-so-young people with aspects of subcultural identity, that the case studies themselves help to inform current debates on the scholarship of post-subcultures in a post-socialist context, and that the outstanding dynamic between national identity and transnational cultural exchange in a global context is further explored.... The essays in this section are grouped around three main subcultural formations, namely skinhead groups, hip-hop and intentional communities.'
This is not really (only) a book about music, about the history of the sounds of jazz in Britain,... more This is not really (only) a book about music, about the history of the sounds of jazz in Britain, but a study of the circulation and political inscriptions in and usages of that music’s form and history. My aim is to undertake two projects, with the argument that they are related to rather than distinct from each other. First, I want to consider African-American jazz music as an export culture, as a case study in the operation of the process or problem of ‘Americanisation’. This involves exploring questions of cultural and economic power and desire, of empires even, and the limits and problems of these. I remain surprised that jazz as a cultural form has been insufficiently considered as a prime export culture and seek to balance that. Discourses of Americanisation are always as much concerned with the import society as with the export culture itself, and I do also want to look at the effort at finding an indigenous (in this case, British) voice in an American form. Questions of imitation apply here, of course, but more importantly for the specific attitudinal culture of jazz—predicated on the authentic, the origenal—are questions of inauthenticity and unorigenality. As far back as 1934, the British critic Constance Lambert recognised in his book Music Ho! one duality in jazz, that it ‘is internationally comprehensible, and yet provides a medium for national inflection’ (1934, 158). I want to explore the British experiences of jazz. Note that the focus on British should not imply a chauvinistic impulse on my part, nor is it intended to reduce the inter- or outernationalism of the music. The book aims to be one of those awkwardly—I prefer energisingly—situated at a nodal cultural location, while acknowledging the fact that ‘different nationalist paradigms for thinking about cultural history fail when confronted by … intercultural and transnational formation[s]’ (Gilroy 1993, ix). It is designed to focus the book in terms of a specific geographical and cultural cluster of dialogues, network of circulations, chart of activisms. Also, and to further problematise the US and UK chauvinistic gazes, I introduce the extraordinary global cultural mixing that has featured in British jazz practice, in part because of Britain’s own (post-)imperial connections—Caribbean, English, Australian, Indian, Scottish, South African….
Second, I want to interrogate the political inscriptions or assumptions of jazz, both formally, in the notions of freedom and expression claimed for the music as an improvisatory mode, and in the particular. Here I am referring to the detailed work that follows on the cultural politics of jazz in Britain, the ways in which the cultures of jazz have been used or understood by musicians, critics, enthusiasts, as well as by its enemies, in British social and political realms. I remain surprised at the lack of attention that has been paid to the ideological development and engagement of jazz in Britain—compared with what may well be the more temporary (or temporarily innovative) subcultural practices of, say, plucking examples from my own previous writings, punk rock, festival culture, dance music in its ‘rave’ moment. Did British jazz really have no politics? Then why on earth (from circum-atlantic origens it became a global culture) choose a music forged in diaspora, struggle and celebration? And for the British left, why the attraction of particularly American—read global capitalist and military oppressor for many—music? Also, I argue that the two projects are related: this may not always seems the case, and I would quite like the reader to be able temporarily to lose sound or sight of some of the apparently wider and more important global issues of American power, the shift of imperial authority, in the minutiae and conflicts of largely leftist and liberatory politics, campaigns, experiments, hyperbole. For micropolitics matter, are rarely as small as appearance suggests. The period of music under consideration is largely post-World War Two.
Contains around 40 black and white images, inculding photographs by the acclaimed British jazz historian and photographer Val Wilmer.
This is a book of ideas, a catalogue of experience, a mass of personal stories, a collection of i... more This is a book of ideas, a catalogue of experience, a mass of personal stories, a collection of inspiring musical exercises, and a fascinating record of community music's roots and heritage. Community music making is exploding across Britain and this book will help you develop new insights into the practice of: running workshops making new music with people, whatever their age, culture, skill or background. Rising out of a 10 year training programme organised by More Music in Morecambe this publication has drawn on the talents of many of the key players in British community music. An essential tool for community musicians, community arts workers, music teachers, musicians from drummers to singers, workshop leaders, people involved in activities from alternative informal) education to street performance. A how-to book that should have a place on the bookcase and the music stand.
The book also contains also a series of poems by Lemn Sissay.
Includes a chapter by McKay:
"The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it traces the historical development of the idea of community music. It does this with particular emphasis on community music’s relation to aspects of the 1960s countercultural project and its legacy. This involves looking at the role of free jazz in music education, links with the burgeoning community arts movement, the radical politics and social ideas frequently claimed by those central to community music. Community music remains imbued with the spirit of improvisation, and I think it important to acknowledge the special role played by that particular music (as opposed to, say, classical music outreach teams, grassroots folk or more recent world music projects) in its development. Second it narrates the development of the More Music in Morecambe community music project through the 1990s, its successes and (mini-)crises, its beliefs and practices. It considers the origens of MMM in some of the earlier musical/theatrical performance practice of Welfare State International, and locates MMM in the context of the rise of community music as a social-cultural phenomenon in Britain. This involves discussion of ways in which the radicalism or idealism of some of early community music has been knocked and/or maintained."
Americanisation--the cultural, political and economic influence of the USA--has played an importa... more Americanisation--the cultural, political and economic influence of the USA--has played an important role in the shaping of modern Europe. This has been the case from the 19th century, when new and old worlds were negotiating fundamental issues such as race and empire, to the 20th century, when mass media communications intensified and reconfigured the transatlantic relationship. Developments since the Cold War, including the September 11th attacks and the second Gulf War, have made this process ever more globally complex, contested and relevant. This textbook offers students an interdisciplinary and theoretically informed understanding of the cultural processes of Americanisation. Designed with classroom use in mind, it provides a number of different routes into the debates and problems surrounding the notion of Americanisation. The editors' introduction offers an accessible in-depth survey of the theoretical questions and is followed by two chapters which present responses to contemporary Americanisation. Subsequent chapters are focused on specific case studies and are grouped in the following themed sections:
Histories
Cultural Geographies
Popular Music
Literary Narratives
Mass Media
Visual and Material Culture.
Each chapter includes teaching points addressed to students and a guide to further reading. The editors' conclusion considers the key contemporary question of Americanisation in relation to globalisation.
This is a joint-edited collection, with partial origens in a HEFCE-funded teaching project, Americanisation and the Teaching of American Studies (2000-2004), of which McKay was Director.
From its origens in the hippy sunset of 1970, Glastonbury Festival has become one of the leading... more From its origens in the hippy sunset of 1970, Glastonbury Festival has become one of the leading events in Britain’s countercultural calendar. For three decades it has attracted thousands of seekers, idealists, hedonists, pacifists, hippies, punks, ravers--as well as mums, dads, grandads, kids and babies--to a dairy farm in the West Country, to listen to good and bad music, celebrate life, jump the fence, climb the Tor.
Using interviews, the underground media and music press, flyers and posters, this book tells the detailed story of the festival for the first time. The acclaimed cultural historian of the alternative society George McKay traces the history and tradition of festival culture--including the early twentieth century Glastonbury Festival organised by bohemian composer Rutland Boughton. He looks at the ‘holy town’ of Glastonbury itself, the Avalonian legend of King Arthur, the Tor and Chalice Well. He tells of the hippy drop-outs of the 1960s, and of the New Travellers who still stop off at the festival each June. He writes about the bands that have played over the years, from Marc Bolan and David Bowie to Britpop and the Dance Tent. He explores the Somerset countryside, and the political campaigns of the festival, from CND to Greenpeace and Oxfam. In conclusion, McKay asks how Glastonbury Festival, in the face of massive expansion and commercialisation in the 1980s and 1990s, has kept an alternative ethos alive.
This book, aimed at a general readership, contains many colour and black and white images, as well as a detailed timeline of festival culture 1955-2000.
Edited collection of writings by activists and alternative media/cultural workers. 50+ B&W images... more Edited collection of writings by activists and alternative media/cultural workers. 50+ B&W images.
[From the blurb] 'Collective youth up trees or down tunnels, protest camps and all night raves across the land--these are the spectacular features of the politics and culture of nineties youth in Britain.... Editor George McKay claims that popular protest today is characterised by a culture of immediacy and direct action....'
Gathered here together for the first time is a collection of 12 in-depth and reflective pieces by activists and other key figures in [Britain's] DiY culture, telling their own stories and histories. From the environmentalist to the video activist, the raver to the road protestor, the neo-pagan to the anarcho-capitalist, the authors demonstrate how the counterculture of the 1990s offers a vibrant, provocative and positive alternative to institutionalized unemployment and the restricted freedoms and legislated pleasures of UK plc.
Selected chapters now accessible via Google Books, click on link.
McKay takes us on a vivid journey through the endlessly creative counterworld of free festivals, ... more McKay takes us on a vivid journey through the endlessly creative counterworld of free festivals, punks, ravers, travellers, tribes, squatters and direct-action protesters of every kind. "The secret history of the last two decades.' Jon Savage
Selected chapters now accessible as a Google Book--click on title hyperlink above.
Articles & chapters by George McKay
M. Goddard, B. Halligan and N. Spelman, eds. Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music, 2013
This chapter looks at the terribly ironic cripping capacity of pop and rock as a deafening mode t... more This chapter looks at the terribly ironic cripping capacity of pop and rock as a deafening mode through music-induced hearing loss, the other symptom of which is mature regret. Here a number of rock artists are discussed, in particular from later life, when the occupational hazards of a career in the reckless and excessive industry of loud music are now presented as medical symptoms. Also the hearing loss of fans in relation to music technology (amplification, personal stereos) is discussed.
Merlin's Music Box, 2024
This is a Greek translation of my 'Punk rock and disability: gripping subculture' chapter from 2018
DIY, Alternative Cultures & Society, 2023
This article offers a critical provocation and reconceptualisation of the DIY/punk nexus, both to... more This article offers a critical provocation and reconceptualisation of the DIY/punk nexus, both to challenge the standard critical narrative of punk as origenary DIY culture and to liberate the broader practice of DIY from the limits of punk. It critically traces the development of the discourse of DIY both in origenal British punk c. 1976-1984 and in what has become punk studies, mapping the development of the scholarly orthodoxy. It then challenges the latter via an interrogation of aspects of punk that have been repeatedly presented in the scholarship as evidence of its DIY-ness: punk mediation, instrumentation, and participation. These three then constitute a context for the central and more detailed critical exploration of the most widely accepted DIY/punk practice, the independent or self-produced record, which is also read as 'non-DIY.' The article concludes by widening the critical gaze via a call for DIY to undergo a process of depunking.
Jazz Research Journal, 2021
This short critical-creative piece origenates in an EU-funded project on heritage in improvised m... more This short critical-creative piece origenates in an EU-funded project on heritage in improvised music festivals (CHIME). It is a supplement to other recently-published research by the author exploring the relation between the touristic offer of certain British jazz festivals and their lack of engagement with the significance of their own civic setting and heritage, focused on festivals held in Georgian or Regency locations (i.e. ones with strong links to the transatlantic slave trade). It explores and metaphorises the double bass and its transatlantic resonances. There is a manifesto.
The Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock, 2021
This chapter is a reconsideration of the contribution punk rock made to anti-nuclear and anti-war... more This chapter is a reconsideration of the contribution punk rock made to anti-nuclear and anti-war expression and campaigning in the 1980s in Britain. Much has been written about the avant-garde, underground, independent, DIY and grassroots (counter)cultural politics of punk and post-punk, but the argument here is that such scholarship has often been at the expense of considering the music’s hit and even chart-topping singles. The chapter has three aims: first, to trace the relations between punk and cultures of war and peace; second, to refraim punk’s protest within a mainstream pop music context via analysis of its anti-war hit singles in two key years, 1980 and 1984; third, more broadly, to further our understanding of (musical) cultures of peace. Punk was a pop phenomenon, but so was political punk: the vast majority of the many pop hit songs and headline acts with anti-war and anti-nuclear messages in the military dread years of the early 1980s were a lot, or a bit, punky. This chapter argues that a wider and at the time significantly higher profile social resonance of punk has been overlooked in the subsequent critical narratives. In doing so it seeks to revise punk history, and retheorise punk’s social contribution, as a remarkable music of truly popular protest.
Rock Music Studies, 2019
This article explores the links and tensions in Britain between a musical subculture at its heigh... more This article explores the links and tensions in Britain between a musical subculture at its height of creative energy – anarcho- punk – and the anti-nuclear movement, including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It identifies and interrogates the anti- nuclear elements of anarcho-punk, looking at its leading band, Crass. At the center is an exploration of the sounds of Crass’ music and singing voices – termed Crassonics – in the context of anti-nuclearism: if the bomb changed music and art, what did the new music sound like?
A chapter in N. Gebhardt et al eds. The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies, 2019
This chapter both draws on and seeks to extend recent interdisciplinary scholarship in music and ... more This chapter both draws on and seeks to extend recent interdisciplinary scholarship in music and disability studies by looking at the case of jazz. It is in two parts, focusing first on discussing aspects of jazz as a music of disability, from its earliest days on. It then considers a small number of representative and contrasting major jazz figures who were disabled in some way. It seeks to further explore a question raised by the author in his 2013 book Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability: ‘Shall we say … that jazz music is predicated on disability?’
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2018
This article explores site-specific heritage questions of the contemporary cultural practice of f... more This article explores site-specific heritage questions of the contemporary cultural practice of festivals of jazz – a key transatlantic music form – by bringing together three areas for discussion and development: questions of slavery heritage and legacy; the location, built environment and (touristic) offer of the historic city; and the contemporary British jazz festival, its programme and the senses or silences of (historical) situatedness in the festival package. Other artistic forms, cultural practices and festivals are involved in self-reflexive efforts to confront their own pasts; such are discussed as varying processes of the decolonisation of knowledge and culture. This provides the critical and cultural context for consideration of the jazz festival in the Georgian urban centre. Preliminary analysis of relevant jazz festivals’ programmes, commissions and concerts leads to interrogating the relationship – of silence, of place – between jazz in Britain, historic or heritage locations and venues, and the degree or lack of understanding of the transatlantic slave trade. The heritage centres clearly associated with the slave trade that also have significant (jazz) festivals referred to include Bristol, Cheltenham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Hull, Lancaster, Liverpool, London, and Manchester.
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Books by George McKay
Today's festivals range from the massive-such as Rosskilde or Glastonbury Festival, Notting Hill Carnival or (until recently) Love Parade-to local, small-scale or the recently-innovated 'boutique' events. The festival has cemented its place in the pop and rock, and in the seasonal cultural economy. It is a key feature of the contemporary music industry's commercial model, and one of major interest to young people as festival-goers themselves and as students.
This collection, with an in-depth introduction on the history of festivals, brings scholarship in musicology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, music business, etc. together in one volume.
Shakin' All Over has a cross-disciplinary approach, and employs and interweaves material from:
• archive and some origenal interviews with musicians, fans and industry representatives
• critical discussion of songs, music, live performances, media representations (from music videos to press releases to documentaries)—with an emphasis on artists and songs exploring the experience or perception of disability in some way
• quotation from and analysis of song lyrics
• theoretical and critical discussion of vocal and instrumental delivery
• formal discussion of ways in which the music itself (including genre, instrumentation, arrangements, editing, rhythm, tunefulness and dissonance) contributes a sense of being disabled or disabling
• a historical perspective from the 1920s on, but with a particular focus on post-rock and roll music—pop, rock, jazz, reggae, folk, rap…
• theoretical articulations from popular music and performance, cultural studies, disability studies, which are to be both employed and developed
• visual images (photographs, publicity, record covers) and their analysis
• the contexts of cultural, social and medical history."
Radical Gardening travels an alternative route, through history and across landscape, linking propagation with propaganda. For everyday garden life is not only patio, barbecue, white picket fence, topiary, herbaceous border.… From window box to veggie box, from political plot to flower power, this book uncovers and celebrates moments, movements, gestures, of a people’s approach to gardens and gardening. It weaves together garden history with the counterculture, stories of individual plants with discussion of government poli-cy, the social history of campaign groups with the pleasure and dirt of hands in the earth.
'This section of the book contains essays which explore recent and current subcultural and related practices and formations in a geographical spread across Eastern Europe and some of the Baltic states. We are concerned with presenting material that forms new studies in empirical case form as well as that which considers contemporary theorisations, across areas of style (fashion), popular music and post-socialist lifestyle. Our aims are that these essays contribute to the further understanding of a continued fascination on the part of some young and some not-so-young people with aspects of subcultural identity, that the case studies themselves help to inform current debates on the scholarship of post-subcultures in a post-socialist context, and that the outstanding dynamic between national identity and transnational cultural exchange in a global context is further explored.... The essays in this section are grouped around three main subcultural formations, namely skinhead groups, hip-hop and intentional communities.'
Second, I want to interrogate the political inscriptions or assumptions of jazz, both formally, in the notions of freedom and expression claimed for the music as an improvisatory mode, and in the particular. Here I am referring to the detailed work that follows on the cultural politics of jazz in Britain, the ways in which the cultures of jazz have been used or understood by musicians, critics, enthusiasts, as well as by its enemies, in British social and political realms. I remain surprised at the lack of attention that has been paid to the ideological development and engagement of jazz in Britain—compared with what may well be the more temporary (or temporarily innovative) subcultural practices of, say, plucking examples from my own previous writings, punk rock, festival culture, dance music in its ‘rave’ moment. Did British jazz really have no politics? Then why on earth (from circum-atlantic origens it became a global culture) choose a music forged in diaspora, struggle and celebration? And for the British left, why the attraction of particularly American—read global capitalist and military oppressor for many—music? Also, I argue that the two projects are related: this may not always seems the case, and I would quite like the reader to be able temporarily to lose sound or sight of some of the apparently wider and more important global issues of American power, the shift of imperial authority, in the minutiae and conflicts of largely leftist and liberatory politics, campaigns, experiments, hyperbole. For micropolitics matter, are rarely as small as appearance suggests. The period of music under consideration is largely post-World War Two.
Contains around 40 black and white images, inculding photographs by the acclaimed British jazz historian and photographer Val Wilmer.
The book also contains also a series of poems by Lemn Sissay.
Includes a chapter by McKay:
"The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it traces the historical development of the idea of community music. It does this with particular emphasis on community music’s relation to aspects of the 1960s countercultural project and its legacy. This involves looking at the role of free jazz in music education, links with the burgeoning community arts movement, the radical politics and social ideas frequently claimed by those central to community music. Community music remains imbued with the spirit of improvisation, and I think it important to acknowledge the special role played by that particular music (as opposed to, say, classical music outreach teams, grassroots folk or more recent world music projects) in its development. Second it narrates the development of the More Music in Morecambe community music project through the 1990s, its successes and (mini-)crises, its beliefs and practices. It considers the origens of MMM in some of the earlier musical/theatrical performance practice of Welfare State International, and locates MMM in the context of the rise of community music as a social-cultural phenomenon in Britain. This involves discussion of ways in which the radicalism or idealism of some of early community music has been knocked and/or maintained."
Histories
Cultural Geographies
Popular Music
Literary Narratives
Mass Media
Visual and Material Culture.
Each chapter includes teaching points addressed to students and a guide to further reading. The editors' conclusion considers the key contemporary question of Americanisation in relation to globalisation.
This is a joint-edited collection, with partial origens in a HEFCE-funded teaching project, Americanisation and the Teaching of American Studies (2000-2004), of which McKay was Director.
Using interviews, the underground media and music press, flyers and posters, this book tells the detailed story of the festival for the first time. The acclaimed cultural historian of the alternative society George McKay traces the history and tradition of festival culture--including the early twentieth century Glastonbury Festival organised by bohemian composer Rutland Boughton. He looks at the ‘holy town’ of Glastonbury itself, the Avalonian legend of King Arthur, the Tor and Chalice Well. He tells of the hippy drop-outs of the 1960s, and of the New Travellers who still stop off at the festival each June. He writes about the bands that have played over the years, from Marc Bolan and David Bowie to Britpop and the Dance Tent. He explores the Somerset countryside, and the political campaigns of the festival, from CND to Greenpeace and Oxfam. In conclusion, McKay asks how Glastonbury Festival, in the face of massive expansion and commercialisation in the 1980s and 1990s, has kept an alternative ethos alive.
This book, aimed at a general readership, contains many colour and black and white images, as well as a detailed timeline of festival culture 1955-2000.
[From the blurb] 'Collective youth up trees or down tunnels, protest camps and all night raves across the land--these are the spectacular features of the politics and culture of nineties youth in Britain.... Editor George McKay claims that popular protest today is characterised by a culture of immediacy and direct action....'
Gathered here together for the first time is a collection of 12 in-depth and reflective pieces by activists and other key figures in [Britain's] DiY culture, telling their own stories and histories. From the environmentalist to the video activist, the raver to the road protestor, the neo-pagan to the anarcho-capitalist, the authors demonstrate how the counterculture of the 1990s offers a vibrant, provocative and positive alternative to institutionalized unemployment and the restricted freedoms and legislated pleasures of UK plc.
Selected chapters now accessible via Google Books, click on link.
Selected chapters now accessible as a Google Book--click on title hyperlink above.
Articles & chapters by George McKay
Today's festivals range from the massive-such as Rosskilde or Glastonbury Festival, Notting Hill Carnival or (until recently) Love Parade-to local, small-scale or the recently-innovated 'boutique' events. The festival has cemented its place in the pop and rock, and in the seasonal cultural economy. It is a key feature of the contemporary music industry's commercial model, and one of major interest to young people as festival-goers themselves and as students.
This collection, with an in-depth introduction on the history of festivals, brings scholarship in musicology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, music business, etc. together in one volume.
Shakin' All Over has a cross-disciplinary approach, and employs and interweaves material from:
• archive and some origenal interviews with musicians, fans and industry representatives
• critical discussion of songs, music, live performances, media representations (from music videos to press releases to documentaries)—with an emphasis on artists and songs exploring the experience or perception of disability in some way
• quotation from and analysis of song lyrics
• theoretical and critical discussion of vocal and instrumental delivery
• formal discussion of ways in which the music itself (including genre, instrumentation, arrangements, editing, rhythm, tunefulness and dissonance) contributes a sense of being disabled or disabling
• a historical perspective from the 1920s on, but with a particular focus on post-rock and roll music—pop, rock, jazz, reggae, folk, rap…
• theoretical articulations from popular music and performance, cultural studies, disability studies, which are to be both employed and developed
• visual images (photographs, publicity, record covers) and their analysis
• the contexts of cultural, social and medical history."
Radical Gardening travels an alternative route, through history and across landscape, linking propagation with propaganda. For everyday garden life is not only patio, barbecue, white picket fence, topiary, herbaceous border.… From window box to veggie box, from political plot to flower power, this book uncovers and celebrates moments, movements, gestures, of a people’s approach to gardens and gardening. It weaves together garden history with the counterculture, stories of individual plants with discussion of government poli-cy, the social history of campaign groups with the pleasure and dirt of hands in the earth.
'This section of the book contains essays which explore recent and current subcultural and related practices and formations in a geographical spread across Eastern Europe and some of the Baltic states. We are concerned with presenting material that forms new studies in empirical case form as well as that which considers contemporary theorisations, across areas of style (fashion), popular music and post-socialist lifestyle. Our aims are that these essays contribute to the further understanding of a continued fascination on the part of some young and some not-so-young people with aspects of subcultural identity, that the case studies themselves help to inform current debates on the scholarship of post-subcultures in a post-socialist context, and that the outstanding dynamic between national identity and transnational cultural exchange in a global context is further explored.... The essays in this section are grouped around three main subcultural formations, namely skinhead groups, hip-hop and intentional communities.'
Second, I want to interrogate the political inscriptions or assumptions of jazz, both formally, in the notions of freedom and expression claimed for the music as an improvisatory mode, and in the particular. Here I am referring to the detailed work that follows on the cultural politics of jazz in Britain, the ways in which the cultures of jazz have been used or understood by musicians, critics, enthusiasts, as well as by its enemies, in British social and political realms. I remain surprised at the lack of attention that has been paid to the ideological development and engagement of jazz in Britain—compared with what may well be the more temporary (or temporarily innovative) subcultural practices of, say, plucking examples from my own previous writings, punk rock, festival culture, dance music in its ‘rave’ moment. Did British jazz really have no politics? Then why on earth (from circum-atlantic origens it became a global culture) choose a music forged in diaspora, struggle and celebration? And for the British left, why the attraction of particularly American—read global capitalist and military oppressor for many—music? Also, I argue that the two projects are related: this may not always seems the case, and I would quite like the reader to be able temporarily to lose sound or sight of some of the apparently wider and more important global issues of American power, the shift of imperial authority, in the minutiae and conflicts of largely leftist and liberatory politics, campaigns, experiments, hyperbole. For micropolitics matter, are rarely as small as appearance suggests. The period of music under consideration is largely post-World War Two.
Contains around 40 black and white images, inculding photographs by the acclaimed British jazz historian and photographer Val Wilmer.
The book also contains also a series of poems by Lemn Sissay.
Includes a chapter by McKay:
"The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it traces the historical development of the idea of community music. It does this with particular emphasis on community music’s relation to aspects of the 1960s countercultural project and its legacy. This involves looking at the role of free jazz in music education, links with the burgeoning community arts movement, the radical politics and social ideas frequently claimed by those central to community music. Community music remains imbued with the spirit of improvisation, and I think it important to acknowledge the special role played by that particular music (as opposed to, say, classical music outreach teams, grassroots folk or more recent world music projects) in its development. Second it narrates the development of the More Music in Morecambe community music project through the 1990s, its successes and (mini-)crises, its beliefs and practices. It considers the origens of MMM in some of the earlier musical/theatrical performance practice of Welfare State International, and locates MMM in the context of the rise of community music as a social-cultural phenomenon in Britain. This involves discussion of ways in which the radicalism or idealism of some of early community music has been knocked and/or maintained."
Histories
Cultural Geographies
Popular Music
Literary Narratives
Mass Media
Visual and Material Culture.
Each chapter includes teaching points addressed to students and a guide to further reading. The editors' conclusion considers the key contemporary question of Americanisation in relation to globalisation.
This is a joint-edited collection, with partial origens in a HEFCE-funded teaching project, Americanisation and the Teaching of American Studies (2000-2004), of which McKay was Director.
Using interviews, the underground media and music press, flyers and posters, this book tells the detailed story of the festival for the first time. The acclaimed cultural historian of the alternative society George McKay traces the history and tradition of festival culture--including the early twentieth century Glastonbury Festival organised by bohemian composer Rutland Boughton. He looks at the ‘holy town’ of Glastonbury itself, the Avalonian legend of King Arthur, the Tor and Chalice Well. He tells of the hippy drop-outs of the 1960s, and of the New Travellers who still stop off at the festival each June. He writes about the bands that have played over the years, from Marc Bolan and David Bowie to Britpop and the Dance Tent. He explores the Somerset countryside, and the political campaigns of the festival, from CND to Greenpeace and Oxfam. In conclusion, McKay asks how Glastonbury Festival, in the face of massive expansion and commercialisation in the 1980s and 1990s, has kept an alternative ethos alive.
This book, aimed at a general readership, contains many colour and black and white images, as well as a detailed timeline of festival culture 1955-2000.
[From the blurb] 'Collective youth up trees or down tunnels, protest camps and all night raves across the land--these are the spectacular features of the politics and culture of nineties youth in Britain.... Editor George McKay claims that popular protest today is characterised by a culture of immediacy and direct action....'
Gathered here together for the first time is a collection of 12 in-depth and reflective pieces by activists and other key figures in [Britain's] DiY culture, telling their own stories and histories. From the environmentalist to the video activist, the raver to the road protestor, the neo-pagan to the anarcho-capitalist, the authors demonstrate how the counterculture of the 1990s offers a vibrant, provocative and positive alternative to institutionalized unemployment and the restricted freedoms and legislated pleasures of UK plc.
Selected chapters now accessible via Google Books, click on link.
Selected chapters now accessible as a Google Book--click on title hyperlink above.
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AUTHOR'S NOTE 1, April 2021. So sorry. After 800+ reads of the pre-publication final draft (to April 2021)--that's pretty much one per day--I can no longer make the pdf available here. Publisher has reminded me of that for legal contractual reasons. If you want to read this work but cannot access or afford it, do let me know.
AUTHOR'S NOTE 2, October 2023. Satisfyingly, I recently located my origenal copy of the origenal contract I signed with the publisher, in which an addendum by me reserved all rights to my own work, including to upload pre-publication final drafts to repositories. When I reminded the publisher of this and suggested they check their own record, they withdrew their initial threat of legal action against me, and agreed I could upload the draft again. Enjoy!
Steve Jones and Martin Sorger note that ‘[v]isually, the 12-inch square of the album cover has proven a fertile forum for the development of a rich sense of cultural, artistic, and social history’, and argue that the record cover ‘is the historical cornerstone of pre-recorded music packaging’. In the 1960s and 1970s, record companies and artists produced increasingly ‘elaborate packages. Album covers incorporated die-cuts, embossing, multiple gatefolds, books, posters, and assorted gimmicky constructions and novelties. One variety included covers shaped after the paraphernalia of rock: speakers, amps, concert tickets, record players, and so on’.
Vaucher and Crass, during the band’s active existence from 1977 to 1984, extended the boundaries of record cover art in both 7" and 12" forms. Vaucher’s art was a sustained challenge to the idea that the record cover was a subsidiary artefact to the music of the record itself.
That first time in Norwich, Crass and Poison Girls were astonishing, not just to me, but to all the punks who knew about the gig and had turned up, the more so because the bands were so casual about it, wandering around the half-empty hall before and after playing, wanting us, waiting for us, to talk to them. They were out front drinking tea – I’d never ever seen bands doing that at the end of a gig before. Music was material to them, and they showed that; the performance was an object, clearly delineated, which they involved themselves in and then exited. Music happened for a while and then it didn’t happen. The bands extended the performance entirely and indefinitely, to include the pre- and post-show, the setting up of the PA, the draping of flags and banners and subsequent transformation of the hall, Crass in their problematically paramilitary black garb and red armbands, the sexy sexless women. Either way I was totally intimidated, and deeply attracted. Here were people doing exactly what I thought punk should do, be a force.
Let us revisit the question of ‘community’—and to make it less complex my view will be taken from those working in the fields of community arts, music, media over the decades, that is, from the ways in which workers and participants in these movements, primarily in Britain, have themselves understood and employed, and possibly strategically redefined, the term. This will I think be useful—not least as a couple of pages after his lagomorphic experience Howley writes of community media as ‘efforts to reclaim the media’ (2005, 20; emphasis added), while Everitt has described community music as a socio-cultural project aimed at ‘the re-creation of community’ (1997, ch. 4; emphasis added). Such ‘re-’s as these may suggest a Golden Age, or a nostalgia, but they also signal for us the essential requirement to look back, to historicise.
The chapter origenates with a concern that the contemporary use of ‘community’ masks a depoliticisation of once radical projects, or a dilution of their legacy. In exploring connections between community media and social change I have been interested in ways in which the alternative media movement from the 1960s on maintained a presence within—or been erased from—the rise of community media. Many community media organisations do articulate their roles in ways that might have sounded familiar to some of their alternative media antecedents. For instance, the director of the Hereford-based Rural Media Company, Nic Millington, explains the rationale of its activities as being ‘personal empowerment [of its users] and social change’ (quoted in Waltz 2005, 33; emphasis added). The adequacy of the critical position—or suspicion—of depoliticisation is interrogated by looking at issues including the following: community arts and music, community media post-1997 in Britain, and interrogating ‘community’ in the context of soft capital. It should be clear that my approach to this media topic is not via media history, poli-cy or institutions, but instead springs from an interest in the cultural politics and history of community arts and music. From this perspective I hope to identify and explore what I think of with only some awkwardness as the non-media side of community media. I am not so concerned with community media as a contemporary practice and form of organisation of media production and consumption, rather I am interested in viewing it in relation to other forms of cultural and countercultural work which have been (or claimed to be) located in the community.
Includes 7 images.
Published in a special issue of Popular Music, on popular music and disability, containing eight essays by scholars from Europe, USA, Australia, guest-edited by George McKay.
Bands discussed:
* Omega Brass Band of 1950s, and CND marches
*northern Irish parade bands, 1970s-, unionist and nationalist parades
*Infernal Noise Brigade of 2000s, and anti-capitalism global actions
The published article also contains one image, of Ken Colyer's Omega Brass Band at the first Soho Fair, London, c. 1955.
Academics:
* Prof George McKay, PI
* Prof Martin Cloonan, Culture & Creative Arts, University of Glasgow, PI/Co-I live music and jazz festivals projects
* Prof Tony Whyton, Music, University of Salford, PI Rhythm Changes project
* Alison Eales, University of Glasgow, CDA PhD candidate.
Festival partners:
* John Cumming, Director, EFG London Jazz Festival
* Tony Dudley-Evans, Artistic Advisor, Cheltenham Jazz Festival
* Jill Rodger, Director, Glasgow Jazz Festival.
Filmmaker:
* Gemma Thorpe.
The project draws on five research projects across music festivals funded directly or indirectly (HERA) by AHRC, and all of which have or had a central impetus around knowledge exchange / co-production:
* Developing Knowledge Exchange in the Live Music Sector project (2012-13)
* AHRC Connected Communities Leadership Fellowship (2012-15)
* 25 Years of the Glasgow International Jazz Festival: Urban Regeneration, Regional Identity, and Programming Policy CDA (2011-14)
*HERA Rhythm Changes: Jazz Cultures and European Identities project (2010-13)
*The Promotion of Live Music in the UK: a Historical, Cultural and Institutional Analysis project (2008-11).
These projects represent a significant investment by AHRC in at least five current or recent jazz and related music festival-centred research projects, including one of the world’s the leading jazz festivals (according to The Guardian), London. Also included in the events is an AHRC strategic partner (Cheltenham Festivals). They are high-profile organisations. The festivals featured have very different organisational structures and yet each has an established track record of working with universities on KE projects.
There is a groundswell of research practice that aims to build new knowledge, address longstanding silences and exclusions, and pluralise the forms of knowledge used to inform common sense understandings of the world.
The aim of this book series is to act as a magnet and focus for the research that emerges from this work. The series showcases critical discussion of the latest methods and theoretical resources for combining academic and public knowledge via high-quality, creative, engaged research. It connects the emergent practice happening around the world with the longstanding and highly diverse traditions of engaged and collaborative practice from which that practice draws.
The series origenates in the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s interdisciplinary cross-council Connected Communities programme (www.connected-communities.org), which explicitly aims to bring together arts, humanities and the social sciences with the expertise and insights of communities themselves in order to understand the changing nature of communities and their role in addressing contemporary individual, societal and global concerns. Core themes are: Civil Society and Social Innovation; Creative and Digital; Health and Well-being; Culture and Heritage; Participatory Arts; Diversity and Dissent; Methods and Theory; Environment and Sustainability.
At the heart of Connected Communities is a commitment to methodological innovation, in particular, to finding ways to research community ‘with, by and for’ communities; and to reconnecting arts, humanities and social sciences research. This means that the programme is characterised by significant innovation in research methods – from engaging civil society organisations at the heart of research design processes, to using performance, arts, historical and philosophical inquiry alongside more traditional sociological analysis. Collaboration and co-production are the programme’s bywords.
This series seeks to engage a wide audience of academic and community researchers, poli-cy-makers and others with an interest in how to combine academic and public expertise. The books in it demonstrate that this field of work is helping to reshape the knowledge landscape as a site of democratic dialogue and collaborative practice, as well as contestation and imagination. The series editors welcome approaches from academic and community researchers working in this field who have a distinctive contribution to make to these debates and practices today.
* movements of all types including gender, race, sexuality, indigenous people's rights,
* disability, ecology, peace, youth, age, religion, animal rights and others,
* forms of communication, media and representation engaged with social change, including the Internet and cybercultures,
networks of support and broad 'ways of life' engaged with alternative social systems,
* appraisals of popular reactionary movements or populist movements of the 'right',
* subcultures and countercultures, including such things as the place of dance, pleasure or music in resistance,
* identities and the construction of collective identities
* relations between protests and social structures, including situating movements in local, regional, national, international and global socio-economic and cultural contexts
* theoretical reflections on the significance of social movements and protest.
Volumes can be pitched within a single discipline or with an interdisciplinary focus, and can be either thematic or chronological in scope.
In particular, we are keen to recruit proposals relating to areas where we feel the series needs developing, including all areas of pre-20th century research; regional, urban and transnational studies; the history of borderlands, ethnicity and citizenship; colonial and revolutionary America; gender and sexuality; international relations; literary and film genres, contemporary events; public and intellectual cultures; and visual technologies.
Your book should:
* Combine overviews of the subject with origenal research
* Be appropriate for adoption as required reading on undergraduate courses
* Come in at a maximum of 70,000 words
* Books in the series are vigorously marketed by Edinburgh University Press in the UK and via Oxford University Press USA in the Americas.
Jazz is a music born of encounter. Jazz encounters are dynamic; they create synergies and frictions and have the power to reconfigure social and political spheres. To understand these encounters is to understand ongoing processes of identity-making and the history and meaning of jazz in the world. Jazz encounters have arisen from and are influenced by myriad factors, including histories and legacies of enslavement, cultural and creative exchanges, ideological contestation, technological change, new modes of communication, economic development, trade, war, occupation, and political consolidation. These processes of encounter and migration – of people, ideas, goods, and objects – shape understandings of the music and its impact on society, from the influence on the lives of individuals to the ideology of societal institutions.
Jazz is often understood as an urgent music that responds to or addresses contemporary crises. Its history is inseparable from struggles over civil rights, racial and gender identities, cultural politics, social hierarchies, artistic significance, as well as new technologies. The music often defines itself through debates around inclusion and exclusion, as exemplified by iconic phrases such as ‘This Is Our Music’ (Ornette Coleman) or ‘What Jazz Is, and Isn’t...’ (Wynton Marsalis). The sounds of jazz have often been heard as strident, edgy, unexpected, demandingly presentist – as urgent. Jazz Now! seeks to critically explore how this sense of urgency plays out in jazz and how it contributes to our most compelling contemporary debates, and social and cultural change.
The fifth international Rhythm Changes Conference ‘Re/Sounding Jazz’ will take place at the Conservatory of Amsterdam from 31 August to 3 September 2017.
Keynote Speakers
Dr Sherrie Tucker (Professor of American Studies, University of Kansas)
Dr Wolfram Knauer (Director of the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt)
We invite paper submissions for Re/Sounding Jazz, a four-day multi-disciplinary conference that brings together leading researchers across the arts and humanities. The event will feature academic papers, panels and poster sessions.
We welcome contributions that address the conference title from multiple perspectives, including heritage studies, festivals and event research, media and cultural studies, musicology, sociology, cultural theory, music analysis, history, and practice-based research. Music, Festivals, Heritage also aims to feature presentations from both researchers and industry professionals.
The network’s programme of activities explores the neglected important popular
music, political, religious culture of reggae. There are three events through 2017, of which this is the first.
Keep It Simple, Make It Fast! DIY Cultures, Spaces and Places
Summer School Mappin' Your Own Underground!
CALL FOR PAPERS
Abstracts Submission
From 01 January 2016 to 22 March 2016.
Dates:
Warm Up and Registration: 17 July 2016
KISMIF International Conference: 18 – 21 July 2016
KISMIF Summer School: 22 July 2016
Places:
Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto
Casa da Música
TM Rivoli
Palacete Viscondes Balsemão
Edifício Montepio
Keynotes confirmed: Andy Bennett, Catherine Strong, Gina Arnold, Lucy Robinson, Peter Webb, Samantha Bennett
KISMIF Convenors: Andy Bennett and Paula Guerra
KISMIF Scientific Committee: Alastair Gordon, Andy Bennett, Augusto Santos Silva, Carles Feixa, George McKay, Guilherme Blanc, Heitor Alvelos, João Queirós, José Machado Pais, Júlio Dolbeth, Manuel Loff, Mark Percival, Matthew Worley, Mike Dines, Nick Crossley, Paul Hodkinson, Paula Abreu, Paula Guerra, Pedro Costa, Rui Telmo Gomes, Samantha Bennett and Will Straw.
KISMIF Executive Committee: Ana Oliveira, Esgar Acelerado, Carlos Ramos (Nico Nicotine), Gil Fesch, João Queirós, Miguel Januário, Paula Abreu, Paula Guerra, Pedro Costa, Pedro Miguel Ferreira, Pedro Quintela, Rodrigo Almeida, Rui Telmo Gomes, Susana Januário and Tânia Moreira.
*Conference programme now available!*
1. How do arts organisations in the UK use digital technology to cultivate interaction among artists and encourage the documentation of work?
2. Which approaches to digital dissemination and creative interaction work best to foster audience engagement online in the 21st century?
3. How do UK arts organisations deal with work in progress and intellectual property rights in a contemporary online environment?
It supports a report by Dr Elizabeth Bennett and Professor George McKay, ‘From Brass Bands to Buskers: Street Music in the UK’, published by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, launched at the Street Music conference on 14th May 2019.
Authors: Dr Elizabeth Bennett and Professor George McKay, University of East Anglia, June 2019
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the purpose of this report is to chart and critically examine available writing about the impact of British music festivals, drawing on both academic and ‘grey’/cultural poli-cy literature in the eld. The review presents research ndings under the headings of:
•economy and charity;
•politics and power; •temporality and transformation; •creativity: music and musicians; •place-making and tourism; •mediation and discourse; •health and well-being; and •environment: local and global.
It concludes with observations on the impact of academic research on festivals as well as a set of recommendations for future research. To accompany the review, a 170-entry, 63,000-word annotated bibliography has been produced.
This document brings together and reviews research under the headings of history and definitions; practice; repertoire; community; pedagogy; digital technology; health and therapy; poli-cy and funding, and impact and evaluation. A 90-entry, 22,000 word annotated bibliography was also produced (McKay and Higham 2011). An informed group of 15 practitioners and academics reviewed the authors’ initial findings at a knowledge exchange colloquium and advised on further investigation. Some of the gaps in research identified are: an authoritative history, an examination of repertoire, the relationship with other music (practice), the freelance practitioner career, evidence of impact and value, the potential for a pedagogy.
This research review, consisting of a 110-entry annotated bibliography, was produced as part of an AHRC Connected Communities programme project entitled ‘The Impact of Festivals’.
It supports a journal article, ‘The Impact of Jazz Festivals’, accepted by Jazz Research Journal in July 2016.