Kirjahaku

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.

Contradicting assumptions that disco albums are shallow and packed with filler, Donna Summer’s double album Once Upon A Time stands out as a piece that delivers on its promise of an immaculately crafted journey from start to finish. A new interpretation of the Cinderella story, it is set in the then contemporary world of New York disco and takes the listener on a journey from urban isolation and deep despair to joy and vindication, all filtered through the mind of its naïve and fantasy-prone protagonist.As well as charting the production of the album within the legendary Munich Machine in Germany, this book digs deep into the album’s rich themes and subtexts. Approaching the book from inventive angles, the four essays within the book act as a prism connecting the reader to the classical aspirations of Eurodisco, the history of the black fairy tale and a queer knowledge that reads Summer’s Cinderella tale in some surprising ways.