Popular Music and Human Rights

Ian Peddie has taught at Florida Gulf Coast University, the University of Sydney, and West Texas A&M 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, and these sentiments inform his book The Hunted Revolutionaries: Narrating Class in Twentieth Century American Literature (VDM Verlag, 2009). 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 influence his approach to popular music, where he has written on Led Zeppelin, Goldie, and Billy Bragg.

• Foreword; General Editor ’s Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction 1 More Relevance than Spotlight and Applause: Billy Bragg in the British Folk Tradition 2 “Know Your Rights”: Punk Rock, Globalization, and Human Rights 3 Unlocking the Silence: Tori Amos, Sexual Violence, and Affect 4 Pantomime Paranoia in London, or, “Lookout, He’s behind You!” 5 The Blues, Trauma, and Public Memory: Willie King and the Liberators 6 The Aesthetic Dimension: Cultural Politics, Human Rights, and Hedwig 7 The Evolution of the Political Benefit Rock Album Which Music for Which Catastrophe? The Functions of Popular Music Twenty-first Century Benefit Concerts 9 From Midnight Music to Civil Rights, from Bluesology to Human Rights: Gil Scott-Heron, American Griot 10 Plight of the Redman: XIT, Red Power, and the Refashioning of American Indian Ethnicity 11 “The Country We Carry in Our Hearts is Waiting”: Bruce Springsteen, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the Search for Human Rights in America 12 The Vision of Possibility: Popular Music, Women, and Human Rights; 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