Overview

In this book, Alison Stone argues that popular music since rock-‘n’-roll is a unified form of music which has positive value. That value is that popular music affirms the importance of materiality and the body, challenging the long-standing Western elevation of the intellect above all things corporeal. Stone also argues that popular music’s stress on materiality gives it aesthetic value, drawing on ideas from the post-Kantian tradition in aesthetics by Hegel, Adorno, and others. She shows that popular music gives importance to materiality in its typical structure: in how music of this type handles the relations between matter and form, the relations between sounds and words, and in how it deals with rhythm, meaning, and emotional expression. Extensive use is made of musical examples from a wide range of popular music genres. This book is distinctive in that it defends popular music on philosophical grounds, particularly informed by the continental tradition in philosophy.

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9783319835396

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Reviews

“Alison Stone has written an engaging and well-informed book about the artistic value of contemporary popular music. It is a thoughtful and useful addition to the small handful of philosophical monographs about that topic. … Stone’s book is an admirable engagement with the topic of popular music.” (Theodore Gracyk, The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 59 (4), October, 2019) “This book outlines a persuasive esthetic of popular music rooted in the post-Kantian tradition, re-tools Adorno in order to allow his critique of popular music to be understood in relation to his wider authorship, and, most importantly, from the point of view of popular music scholarship, grounds that esthetic in an understanding of popular music … .” (Stan Erraught, Popular Music and Society, Vol. 42 (4), 2019) “This book stands as a powerful, and articulate, rejoinder to any lingering suspicion among philosophers that popular music lacks sophistication, beauty, or expressive power.” (Michael Gallope, Popular Music, Vol. 38 (3) October, 2019)

Winner of the Outstanding Publication Award from the Popular Music Interest Group of the Society for Music Theory, 2017.

Author Information

Alison Stone is Professor of European Philosophy at Lancaster University, UK. She is the author of books on Hegel’s philosophy of nature, Luce Irigaray, feminist philosophy, and motherhood, and numerous articles on topics in continental philosophy. She edited the Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth Century Philosophy and is co-editing the Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy.

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