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; Bibliography; Discography; Index

'This wide-ranging book will be welcomed by any who are interested in the social context and social roles of music. With contributions ranging from the neo-folklore movement in Latvia to heavy metal in Nepal to Celtic music in Ireland and Fascist music in Soviet Ukraine. This intelligent volume is brimming with insights.' Sabrina P. Ramet, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway 'At the heart of this volume is the collective conviction of its contributors that popular music does critical cultural work at the frontline of struggles for human rights throughout the world. When we listen to the musicians whose voices and struggles are gathered in the chapters of the book, we experience narratives of the past that persist into the present, we enter the borderlands where resistance finds no resolution. As popular music works for and with human rights - in the reformulations of tradition from Asia to Australia, in the political folksongs in the Balkans and the Baltic states, through rock music from Africa to the Middle East, at Europe's margins collapsing in upon its centers, and in the anthems of singer-songwriters in South America and the Mediterranean - popular music transcends even its traditional role as the voice of the people: It empowers the people - and us - to engage with the struggle for human rights.' Philip V. Bohlman, The University of Chicago, USA