Why Pamper Life's Complexities?: Essays on the Smiths (Music and Society) - Softcover

Sean Campbell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0719078415 ISBN 13: 9780719078415

Publisher: Manchester University Press, 2010

Synopsis

For five short years in the 1980s, a four-piece Manchester band released a collection of records that had undeniably profound effects on the landscape of popular music and beyond. Today, public and critical appreciation of The Smiths is at its height, yet the most important British band after The Beatles have rarely been subject to sustained academic scrutiny. Why pamper life's complexities?: Essays on The Smiths seeks to remedy this by bringing together diverse research disciplines to place the band in a series of enlightening social, cultural and political contexts as never before. Topics covered by the essays range from class, sexuality, Catholicism, Thatcherism, regional and national identities, to cinema, musical poetics, suicide and fandom. Lyrics, interviews, the city of Manchester, cultural iconography and the cult of Morrissey are all considered anew. The essays breach the standard confines of music history, rock biography and pop culture studies to give a sustained critical analysis of the band that is timely and illuminating. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of sociology, literature, geography, cultural and media studies. It is also intended for a wider audience of those interested in the enduring appeal of one of the most complex and controversial bands. Accessible and original, these essays will help to contextualise the lasting cultural legacy of The Smiths.

About this title

Review:

"This book as a whole conveys how the band drew from canonized literature as credibly as they did from what popular culture's own bourgeoisie have more recently called 'guilty' pleasures. Each chapter differently suggests how to listen to The Smiths is to listen to a sublimely subjective history of culture itself, in which supposed distinctions between 'high' and 'popular' are unostentatiously rejected. The essays thus work superbly as a collection, displaying how, via The Smiths, Sandie Shaw meets Oscar Wilde, Guy Fawkes joins T. Rex, Andy Warhol enters Coronation Street and George Formby harmonises with Kazem Al Saher."

About the Author:

Sean Campbell is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge Colin Coulter is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth

About this edition

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0719078415
• ISBN 13: 9780719078415
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Sean Campbell, Colin Coulter