New book series: Pop Music, Culture and Identity

I’m co-editing a book series with Steve Clark and Jason Whittaker (my co-editors on Blake 2.0, in which we all wrote about music!). It’s called Pop Music, Culture and Identity, and it’s with Palgrave Macmillan. The first few books are in the works now — we have a few more in the pipeline — and we’re eager to see what other proposals come up once word on the series gets out. Here’s the little blurb describing how we envision the series:

Pop music lasts. A form all too often assumed to be transient, commercial and mass-cultural has proved itself durable, tenacious and continually evolving. As such, it has become a crucial component in defining various forms of identity (individual and collective) as influenced by nation, class, gender and historical period.

Pop Music, Culture and Identity investigates how this enhanced status shapes the iconography of celebrity, provides an ever-expanding archive for generational memory and accelerates the impact of new technologies on performing, packaging and global marketing. The series gives particular emphasis to interdisciplinary approaches that go beyond musicology and seeks to validate the informed testimony of the fan alongside academic methodologies.

Herpetological Proportions

A colleague of mine, Margaret Clark at Wilfrid Laurier University, recently wrote me a few eloquently flattering lines on my Blake and Jim Morrison essay in Blake 2.0. I’m so tickled with them that I have to share them:

Though the topic alone boggled the mind at first glance, and I initially chuckled at Huxley’s assertion that Blake was of the ‘mental species’ that is ‘visionaries all the time’ (I think Huxley may have underplayed the possible influence of all those production chemicals on Blake’s poor head!), that section quickly took a dark turn with many deft transitions between Blake, Morrison, and Milton‘s verse. By the end, though you never explicitly used the term ‘ouroboros’, I was given to imagine a centuries-long self-consuming circle-jerk of decidedly herpetological proportions.

Out now! Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture

Blake 2.0 has just been published by Palgrave, edited by Steve Clark, Jason Whittaker, and myself. It’s a collection of essays on the reception of Blake beyond the traditionally literary.

It has my essay on Blake and Jim Morrison in it (to accompany the posts on the subject on Jason’s Zoamorphosis blog), along with many other choice pieces: particularly in the realm of Blake and pop music, there are essays on Blake and Bob Dylan; Nick Cave, Julian Cope, the Libertines and Billy Bragg; as well as Blake set to music, and ‘covers’ of  ‘Jerusalem’ (aka ‘And did those feet…).

Blake said of his designs, ‘Tho’ I call them Mine I know they are not Mine’. Then who owns Blake? Where does his work begin and end? There is something about reading and viewing Blake’s multimedia which spurs creation in response. His reception goes far beyond academic criticism because he is more than just a literary figure: artist, printmaker, philosopher, revolutionary, visionary, Blake has always been more than words on a page. This volume follows some of his digital and analog regenerations in the fields of comics, cultural criticism, copyright; sculpture, surrealism, art history, art therapy; film, folk, rock, pop, and the afterlife of Blake’s own music and lyrics. A variety of virtual selves has been created for Blake, his works, and his audience by the twentieth-century dissemination across a wide variety of media, and the more recent interactive possibilities raised by Web 2.0 as technology and as concept.

‘A ground-breaking series of essays on the widely-spread and dynamic influence of Blake’s composite art on the artistic practices of the twentieth century, right up to the emerging digital age.’ – Professor Edward Larrissy, Queen’s University Belfast, UK

Blake and Jim Morrison

I’ve been working on an essay on Blake and Jim Morrison for the collection Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture (forthcoming from Palgrave), which I have the privilege and pleasure of co-editing with Jason Whittaker and Steve Clark. (In fact, it is also a privilege and pleasure to write about Mr. Mojo Risin — it’s like a teenage dream come true, combining scholarly and musical obsessions, on the subject of one of my favourite intellectual rock gods…)

I threw myself into it and, inevitably, the essay was bursting at the seams about as much as Jim himself (and several Blake characters too, as I argue…) so I’m using some of the material for postings on the Zoamorphosis blog. One on Blake, Morrison, and prophecy, and another on tracing what the Lizard King might have read by the Mental Prince. (But, for the bulging analysis, you’ll have to wait for the book…)

Update, March 2012: the book is out!