Popular Music and Human Rights

Ian Peddie teaches English and Cultural Studies at Florida Gulf Coast University. His edited collection, The Resisting Muse: Popular Music and Social Protest (Ashgate), a finalist in the Association for Recorded Sound Collections book of the year, was published in 2006. He is an avowed humanist, and one of the harmonizing themes in his work is the way in which human interaction is governed by a cohesive inequality. He has published numerous essays on authors such as Irvine Welsh, Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot, and Thomas McGrath, as well as on topics such as class, poverty, and radicalism. These topics inform his approach to popular music, where he has written on Led Zeppelin, Goldie, and Billy Bragg.

• List of Illustrations; List of Contributors; Foreword; General Editor’s Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1 Long Played Revolutions: Utopic Narratives, Canzoni d’autore; 2 Treaty Now: Popular Music and the Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Contemporary Australia; 3 Intense Emotions and Human Rights in Nepal’s Heavy Metal Scene; 4 Songs of the In-Between: Remembering in the Land that Memory Forgot; 5 How a Music about Death Affirms Life: Middle Eastern Metal and the Return of Music’s Aura; 6 The “Dangerous” Folksongs: The Neo-folklore Movement of Occupied Latvia in the 1980s; 7 Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Encounters with Popular Music and Human Rights; 8 Víctor Jara: The Artist and His Legacy; 9 No Country for Young Women: Celtic Music, Dissent, and the Irish Female Body; 10 Long Live the Revolution? The Changing Spirit of Chinese Rock; 11 Fascist Music from the West: Anti-Rock Campaigns, Problems of National Identity, and Human Rights in the “Closed City” of Soviet Ukraine, 1975-84 147; Bibliography; Discography; Index

'Anyone interested in the topic of popular music and human rights can begin here. The volume gives an empirically grounded introduction to a variety of perspectives on the topic. It shows how human rights issues in popular music are embedded in everyday identity politics and media consumption. Moreover, the volume illustrates the complexity of music as a medium of expression in creating pleasure and discontent, coherence and unrest, individualism and collectivity.' Fabian Holt, Roskilde University, Denmark