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Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown
Christopher J. McDonald
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Description for Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown
Paperback. Canadian progressive rock band Rush was the voice of the suburban middle class. This book assesses the band's impact on popular music and its legacy for legions of fans. It explores the ways in which Rush's critique of suburban life - and its strategies for escape - reflected middle-class aspirations and anxieties. Series: Profiles in Popular Music. Num Pages: 272 pages, black & white illustrations. BIC Classification: 1KBC; AVGP; AVH; JFSC. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 217 x 142 x 17. Weight in Grams: 384.
Canadian progressive rock band Rush was the voice of the suburban middle class. In this book, Chris McDonald assesses the band’s impact on popular music and its legacy for legions of fans. McDonald explores the ways in which Rush’s critique of suburban life—and its strategies for escape—reflected middle-class aspirations and anxieties, while its performances manifested the dialectic in prog rock between discipline and austerity, and the desire for spectacle and excess. The band’s reception reflected the internal struggles of the middle class over cultural status. Critics cavalierly dismissed, or apologetically praised, Rush’s music for its middlebrow leanings. McDonald's wide-ranging musical ... Read moreand cultural analysis sheds light on one of the most successful and enduring rock bands of the 1970s and 1980s.
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Product Details
Publisher
Indiana University Press United States
Series
Profiles in Popular Music
Place of Publication
Bloomington, IN, United States
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
About Christopher J. McDonald
Chris McDonald is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in popular music studies. He teaches at Cape Breton University.
Reviews for Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown
"As Chris McDonald correctly points out in Dreaming in Middletown, writing on rock music traditionally has tended to privilege the working class as the ultimate site of authentic expression. It is refreshing to encounter a scholarly book that finally takes up the challenge of interpreting popular music’s meanings in relation to its substantial, yet often neglected, middle class fan base. ... Read moreDeftly interweaving in-depth musical analyses with the insights of sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, and the voices of Rush fans themselves, McDonald has produced a smart, probing, and illuminating scholarly work that deserves a place alongside Susan Fast’s In the Houses of the Holy as one of the best musicological studies of a single rock band." —Theo Cateforis, Syracuse University, editor of The Rock History Reader "McDonald has a lot of interesting points to make about the music, the band, and what was going on in the world surrounding them at the time. Rush fans who are interested in something more in-depth than the normal run of band biographies should at least take a look at this volume." —Goldmine, February 12, 2010 "A well-researched, provocative glimpse into one of the most popular, yet oft-overlooked bands in the history of rock." —Theo Cateforis, editor of The Rock History Reader "McDonald makes an important contribution to our understanding of the middle class as a force in North American rock culture, and at the same time offers a pioneering look at one of the most idiosyncratic and influential bands of the past four decades. This book should be welcomed not only by those with an interest in hard and progressive rock, but also by anyone who wishes to understand the role of social class in recent popular culture." —William Echard, Carleton University, author of Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy "If you are the sort who is a Rush freak, a musician, and a fan of academic writing, you'll enjoy this book." —PopMatters Show Less