Download or read book Death and the Rock Star written by Dr Catherine Strong and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-10-28 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection explores the reception of dead rock stars, ‘rock’ being taken in the widest sense. When music artists die, their fellow musicians, producers, fans and the media react differently, and this book brings together their intertwining modalities of reception. The commercial impact of death on record sales, copyrights, and print media is considered, and the different justifications by living artists for being involved with the dead, through covers, sampling and tributes. The cultural representation of dead singers is investigated through obituaries, biographies and biopics. The book discusses the gendering of death and posthumous prestige, and the enduring appeal of the notion of ‘tragedy’ in popular music culture.
Download or read book Rockstar Games and American History written by Esther Wright and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-08-22 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For two decades, Rockstar Games have been making games that interrogate and represent the idea of America, past and present. Commercially successful, fan-beloved, and a frequent source of media attention, Rockstar’s franchises are positioned as not only game-changing, ground-breaking interventions in the games industry, but also as critical, cultural histories on America and its excesses. But what does Rockstar’s version of American history look like, and how is it communicated through critically acclaimed titles like Red Dead Redemption (2010) and L.A. Noire (2011)? By combining analysis of Rockstar’s games and a range of official communications and promotional materials, this book offers critical discussion of Rockstar as a company, their video games, and ultimately, their attempts at creating new narratives about U.S. history and culture. It explores the ways in which Rockstar’s brand identity and their titles coalesce to create a new kind of video game history, how promotional materials work to claim the "authenticity" of these products, and assert the authority of game developers to perform the role of historian. By working at the intersection of historical game studies, U.S. history, and film and media studies, this book explores what happens when contemporary demands for historical authenticity are brought to bear on the way we envisage the past –– and whose past it is deemed to be. Ultimately, this book implores those who research historical video games to consider the oft-forgotten sources at the margins of these games as importance spaces where historical meaning is made and negotiated.
Download or read book Tribute to Another Dead Rock Star written by Randy Powell and published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (BYR). This book was released on 1999-04-20 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a tribute to his mother, a dead rock star, fifteen-year-old Grady returns to Seattle, where he faces his mixed feelings for his retarded younger half-brother Louie while pondering his own future.
Download or read book Uncommon People written by David Hepworth and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the best music books of 2017 by The Wall Street Journal An elegy to the age of the Rock Star, featuring Chuck Berry, Elvis, Madonna, Bowie, Prince, and more, uncommon people whose lives were transformed by rock and who, in turn, shaped our culture Recklessness, thy name is rock. The age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed. Like the cowboy, the idea of the rock star lives on in our imaginations. What did we see in them? Swagger. Recklessness. Sexual charisma. Damn-the-torpedoes self-belief. A certain way of carrying themselves. Good hair. Interesting shoes. Talent we wished we had. What did we want of them? To be larger than life but also like us. To live out their songs. To stay young forever. No wonder many didn’t stay the course. In Uncommon People, David Hepworth zeroes in on defining moments and turning points in the lives of forty rock stars from 1955 to 1995, taking us on a journey to burst a hundred myths and create a hundred more. As this tribe of uniquely motivated nobodies went about turning themselves into the ultimate somebodies, they also shaped us, our real lives and our fantasies. Uncommon People isn’t just their story. It’s ours as well.
Download or read book Dead Rockstar written by Lillah Lawson and published by . This book was released on 2024-05-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rock Star written by David R. Shumway and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Filled with memorable photographs, Rock Star will appeal to anyone interested in modern American popular culture or music history.
Download or read book How to Kill a Rock Star written by Tiffanie DeBartolo and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2005-09-01 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Funny, tender, edgy. I wanted the love story to go on forever."—Joan Johnston, bestselling author of No Longer a Stranger Written in the wonderfully honest, edgy, and hilarious voice she perfected in God-Shaped Hole, Tiffanie DeBartolo shines in a passionate new story of music, love, and sacrifice. Eliza Caelum, a young music journalist, is finally getting her footing in New York when she meets Paul Hudson, a talented songwriter and lead singer of the band Bananafish. They soon realize they share more than a reverence for rock music and plunge headlong into love. When Bananafish is signed by a big corporate label, and Paul is on his way to becoming a major rock star, Eliza's past forces her to make a heartbreaking decision that might be the key to Paul's sudden disappearance. A layered and emotional look into the world of music, this raw summer read will resonate with readers who loved Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Praise for Tiffanie DeBartolo's God-Shaped Hole: "From highs to heartbreak, DeBartolo conjures an affair to remember."—People "Honest, raw, and engaging."—Booklist "This generation's Love Story."—Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Death and the Rock Star written by Catherine Strong and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untimely deaths of Amy Winehouse (2011) and Whitney Houston (2012), and the ’resurrection’ of Tupac Shakur for a performance at the Coachella music festival in April 2012, have focused the media spotlight on the relationship between popular music, fame and death. If the phrase ’sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’ ever qualified a lifestyle, it has left many casualties in its wake, and with the ranks of dead musicians growing over time, so the types of death involved and the reactions to them have diversified. Conversely, as many artists who fronted the rock’n’roll revolution of the 1950s and 1960s continue to age, the idea of dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse (which gave rise, for instance, to the myth of the ’27 Club’) no longer carries the same resonance that it once might have done. This edited collection explores the reception of dead rock stars, ’rock’ being taken in the widest sense as the artists discussed belong to the genres of rock’n’roll (Elvis Presley), disco (Donna Summer), pop and pop-rock (Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse), punk and post-punk (GG Allin, Ian Curtis), rap (Tupac Shakur), folk (the Dutchman André Hazes) and ’world’ music (Fela Kuti). When music artists die, their fellow musicians, producers, fans and the media react differently, and this book brings together their intertwining modalities of reception. The commercial impact of death on record sales, copyrights, and print media is considered, and the different justifications by living artists for being involved with the dead, through covers, sampling and tributes. The cultural representation of dead singers is investigated through obituaries, biographies and biopics, observing that posthumous fame provides coping mechanisms for fans, and consumers of popular culture more generally, to deal with the knowledge of their own mortality. Examining the contrasting ways in which male and female dead singers are portrayed in the media, the book
Download or read book Not In the Game written by Regina Seiwald and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-08-21 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do games represent history, and how do we make sense of the history of games? The industry regularly uses history to sell products, while processes of creation and of promotion leave behind markers of a game’s history. The access to this history is often granted by so-called paratexts, which are accompanying elements orbiting texts. Exploring this fully, case studies in this work move the focus of debate from the games themselves to wider, ancillary materials and ask how history is used in, and how we can use history to study games.
Download or read book Rock Star written by David R. Shumway and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nature and meaning of rock stardom—celebrities who embody the most important social and cultural conflicts of their era. "All stars are celebrities, but not all celebrities are stars," states David Shumway in the introduction to Rock Star, an informal history of rock stardom. This deceptively simple statement belies the complex definition and meaning of stardom and more specifically of rock icons. Shumway looks at the careers and cultural legacies of seven rock stars in the context of popular music and culture—Elvis Presley, James Brown, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen. Granted, there are many more names that fall into the rock icon category and that might rightfully appear on this list. Partly, that is the point: "rock star" is a familiar and desired category but also a contested one. Shumway investigates the rock star as a particular kind of cultural construction, different from mere celebrity. After the golden age of moviemaking, media exposure allowed rock stars more political sway than Hollywood's studio stars, and rock stars gradually replaced movie stars as key cultural heroes. Because of changes in American society and the media industries, rock stars have become much more explicitly political figures than were the stars of Hollywood’s studio era. Rock stars, moreover, are icons of change, though not always progressive, whose public personas read like texts produced collaboratively by the performers themselves, their managers, and record companies. These stars thrive in a variety of media, including recorded music, concert performance, dress, staging, cover art, films, television, video, print, and others. Filled with memorable photographs, Rock Star will appeal to anyone interested in modern American popular culture or music history.
Download or read book Collateral Damage written by Taylor Simonds and published by The Parliament House. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featured in Writer's Digest, Kirkus Reviews, Hypable, and MuggleNet. "A spunky and jubilant love letter to superhero fans." -Kirkus Reviews Power. Courage. Invincibility. The marks of a true hero. Meg Sawyer has none of these things. Meg has never stopped a moving bus with her bare hands, been bitten by a radioactive insect, or done anything moderately resembling saving the world. She doesn't have to. She's a background citizen, a nobody, one of the swarms of faceless civilians of Lunar City--where genetically enhanced superhumans straight out of the comics have thwarted evil for years. For as long as the Supers have existed, Meg has had one goal: to not become a casualty in their near-daily battles for justice. And for the last seventeen years, she's managed to do just that. Sure, her minimum-wage job at the local coffee shop isn't great, she can't even leave her apartment without loading herself up with protective gear, and her car was just hijacked to throw at a supervillain (again), but she's not dead yet. But when Meg accidentally finds one of the city's perfect, invincible protectors murdered under extremely suspicious circumstances, her whole "innocent bystander" strategy falls apart. After being coerced by his determined girlfriend into a mission to help prevent the deaths of the remaining Supers, Meg finds herself forced into the foreground of a story she never wanted to be part of-one that challenges everything she thought she knew about both her city and herself. "Simonds writes smart and sassy characters but takes the time to give them emotional depth..." -MuggleNet
Download or read book Playing at War written by Patrick A. Lewis and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2024-09-19 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Playing at War offers an innovative focus on Civil War video games as significant sites of memory creation, distortion, and evolution in popular culture. With fifteen essays by historians, the collection analyzes the emergence and popularity of video games that topically engage the period surrounding the American Civil War, from the earliest console games developed in the 1980s through the web-based games of the twenty-first century, including popular titles such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and War of Rights. Alongside discussions of technological capabilities and advances, as well as their impact on gameplay and content, the essays consider how these games engage with historical scholarship on the Civil War era, the degree to which video games reflect and contribute to popular understandings of the period, and how those dynamics reveal shifting conceptions of martial identity and historical memory within U.S. popular culture. Video games offer productive sites for extending the analysis of Civil War memory into the post–Confederates in the Attic era, including the political and cultural moments of Obama and Trump, where overt expressions of Lost Cause memory were challenged and removed from schools and public spaces, then embraced by new manifestations of white supremacist organizations. Edited by Patrick A. Lewis and James Hill Welborn III, Playing at War traces the drift of Civil War memory into digital spaces and gaming cultures, encouraging historians to engage more extensively with video games as important cultural media for examining how contemporary Americans interact with the nation’s past.
Download or read book The Rock And Roll Book Of The Dead written by David Comfort and published by Kensington Publishing Corp.. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once you're dead, you're made for life. --Jimi Hendrix Hendrix. Janis. Morrison. Elvis. Lennon. Cobain. Garcia. Their reckless brilliance held the key to their self-destruction. Their deaths had much in common--and, surprisingly, so did their lives. From lonely childhoods marred by loss to groundbreaking music and turbulent careers that ended tragically and suspiciously, David Comfort explodes the myths as he probes: • The sinister roles of Hendrix's manager and girlfriend in his death and subsequent cover-up • The bizarre odyssey of Jim Morrison's corpse • Why Kurt Cobain was worth more dead than alive to Courtney Love • The twisted motives that caused John Lennon to sail through the Devil's Triangle to Bermuda--nearly going down in a storm--shortly before he was fatally shot • The crippling disease and "miracle" drug that drove Elvis to suicide Charismatic and gifted, but also isolated and conflicted, these are not the rock icons you thought you knew. Here are their larger-than-life stories of turmoil and excess that led to their early deaths and ultimate immortality. It's a wild ride to the other side of fame. "Fame is the soul eater." --Jerry Garcia "Everybody loves you when you're six foot in the ground." --John Lennon Includes Rare Photos David Comfort is the author of three bestselling nonfiction books. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, including Eclectic Literary Forum, Pacific Review, Coe Review, and Belletrist Review. He has been the recipient of several literary prizes and a finalist for such prestigious awards as the Nelson Algren Award and America's Best. A former rock musician, he has spent over 30 years studying rock music, particularly the revolutionary and fatalistic pioneers of the 1960s. He lives in Santa Rosa, California.
Download or read book Video Games Violence and the Ethics of Fantasy written by Christopher Bartel and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it ever morally wrong to enjoy fantasizing about immoral things? Many video games allow players to commit numerous violent and immoral acts. But, should players worry about the morality of their virtual actions? A common argument is that games offer merely the virtual representation of violence. No one is actually harmed by committing a violent act in a game. So, it cannot be morally wrong to perform such acts. While this is an intuitive argument, it does not resolve the issue. Focusing on why individual players are motivated to entertain immoral and violent fantasies, Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy advances debates about the ethical criticism of art, not only by shining light on the interesting and under-examined case of virtual fantasies, but also by its novel application of a virtue ethical account. Video games are works of fiction that enable players to entertain a fantasy. So, a full understanding of the ethical criticism of video games must focus attention on why individual players are motivated to entertain immoral and violent fantasies. Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy engages with debates and critical discussions of games in both the popular media and recent work in philosophy, psychology, media studies, and game studies.
Download or read book Crime Punishment and Video Games written by Kristine Levan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving beyond discussions of potential linkages between violence and video games, Crime, Punishment, and Video Games examines a broad range of issues related to the representation of crime and deviance within video games and the video game subculture. The context of justice is discussed with respect to traditional criminal justice agencies, but also expanded throughout to include issues related to social justice. The text also presents the potential cultural, social, and economic impact of video games. Considering the significant number of video game players, from casual to competitive players, these issues have become even more salient in recent years. Regardless of whether someone considers themselves a gamer, video games are undoubtedly relevant to modern society, and this text discusses how the shift in gaming has impacted our perceptions of deviance, crime, and justice. The authors explore past, present and future manifestations of these connections, considering how the game industry, policy makers, and researchers can work toward a better understanding of how and why video games are an important area of study for criminologists and sociologists, and how games will present new promises and challenges in the years to come.
Download or read book Playing American written by Sören Schoppmeier and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-06-10 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Game Culture Reader written by Jason Thompson and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-07-18 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Game Culture Reader, editors Jason C. Thompson and Marc A. Ouellette propose that Game Studies—that peculiar multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary field wherein international researchers from such diverse areas as rhetoric, computer science, literary studies, culture studies, psychology, media studies and so on come together to study the production, distribution, and consumption of games—has reached an unproductive stasis. Its scholarship remains either divided (as in the narratologists versus ludologists debate) or indecisive (as in its frequently apolitical stances on play and fandom). Thompson and Ouellette firmly hold that scholarship should be distinguished from the repetitively reductive commonplaces of violence, sexism, and addiction. In other words, beyond the headline-friendly modern topoi that now dominate the discourse of Game Studies, what issues, approaches, and insights are being, if not erased, then displaced? This volume gathers together a host of scholars from different countries, institutions, disciplines, departments, and ranks, in order to present original and evocative scholarship on digital game culture. Collectively, the contributors reject the commonplaces that have come to define digital games as apolitical or as somehow outside of the imbricated processes of cultural production that govern the medium itself. As an alternative, they offer essays that explore video game theory, ludic spaces and temporalities, and video game rhetorics. Importantly, the authors emphasize throughout that digital games should be understood on their own terms: literally, this assertion necessitates the serious reconsideration of terms borrowed from other academic disciplines; figuratively, the claim embeds the embrace of game play in the continuing investigation of digital games as cultural forms. Put another way, by questioning the received wisdom that would consign digital games to irrelevant spheres of harmless child’s play or of invidious mass entertainment, the authors productively engage with ludic ambiguities.
