“'A Messianic aspiration to the Sermon on the Mount with visions of totalitarian uniformity': the editors characterize what was once mass entertainment, but is now mass-produced entertainment. Intricately and insightfully interlacing analysis, commentary, evaluations and interviews, the editors offer the definitive text on perhaps the most spectacular and (literally) awesome form of musical entertainment ever conceived. They take us from ... Read moreto Shea Stadium, New York in the 1960s to the O2 Arena Dublin today; we are with Coldplay one chapter, Iron Maiden the next; Dylan in Manchester, England, Beyoncé in Rosemont, Illinois. My ears are still ringing. A stunning text.
Ellis Cashmore, author of Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption and Beyond Black: Celebrity and Race in Obama’s America
This is a striking new book addressing the recent radical reconfiguration of popular music around the arena concert as charged and monumental event. It illustrates vividly how far the large-scale musical event has pulled together and redefined music, celebrity, audience, consumerism, technology, and, as the book also shrewdly notes, retaining a degree of religious aura as part of the bargain. The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment is a remarkable intervention, defining the field with a varied and highly engaging collection of essays, aware of earlier ideas but striving for a new and sophisticated understanding of this crucial and dominant facet of current musical culture.
K.J. Donnelly, Reader in Film, University of Southampton, UK
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