front cover of Music Scenes
Music Scenes
Local, Translocal, and Virtual
Andy Bennett
Vanderbilt University Press, 2004
These fourteen original essays examine the fascinating world of music scenes, those largely inconspicuous sites where clusters of musicians, producers, and fans explore their common musical tastes and distinctive lifestyle choices. Although most music scenes come and go with hardly a trace, they nevertheless give immense satisfaction to their participants, and a few--New York bop jazz, Merseybeat, Memphis rockabilly, London punk, Bronx hip-hop--achieve fame and spur musical innovations. To date, serious study of the scenes phenomenon has focused mainly on specific music scenes while paying less attention to recurrent dynamics of scene life, such as how individuals construct and negotiate scenes to the various activities. This volume remedies that neglect.
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front cover of Music, Style, and Aging
Music, Style, and Aging
Growing Old Disgracefully?
Andy Bennett
Temple University Press, 2013
 The image of the aging rock-and-roller is not just Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger on stage in their sixties.  In his timely book Music, Style, and Aging, cultural sociologist Andy Bennett explains how people move on from youth and effectively grow older with popular music.

For many aging followers of rock, punk, and other contemporary popular genres, music is ingrained in their identities.  Its meaning is highly personal and intertwined with the individual's biographical development.  Bennett studies these fans and how they have changed over time--through fashions, hairstyles, body modification, career paths, political orientations, and perceptions of and by the next generation.

The significance of popular music for these fans is no longer tied exclusively to their youth.  Bennett illustrates how the music? that "mattered" to most people in their youth continues to play an important role in their adult lives--a role that goes well beyond nostalgia.
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