1st Edition
Coastal Environments in Popular Song Lost Horizons
This book examines how popular music is able to approach subjects of bio-politics, climate change, solastalgia, and anthropomorphisation, alongside its more common diet of songs about love, dancing, and break-ups – all while satisfying its primary remit of being entertaining and listenable.
Nearly a thousand books have been published on bioethics since Van Rensselaer Potter’s Bioethics Bridge to the Future (1971), with a marked increase in the past 20 years. However, not one of these books has focused itself on popular music, something Christopher Partridge describes as ‘central to the construction of [our] identities, central to [our] sense of self, central to [our] well-being and, therefore, central to [our] social relations’. This edited collection examines popular music through a range of topics, from romance to climate change.
Coastal Environments in Popular Song is perfect for students, scholars, and researchers alike interested in bioethics, social history, and the history of music.
Part 1: Campaigns, protests, and warnings
1. Confucius and the Ethical Edge: Shake it baby now, twist and shout
Paul D. Sladky
2. "Nobody Can Stop the Waves": Constructing the Coast in Dutch Pop Music,
Coco d'Hont
3. Frost or Fire? Popular music responses to Climate Change, 1960-1979
Chris Mounsey
Part 2: Sensuality, romance, and hedonism
4. The sensual coast: eroticism, perception, encounter
Jonathan Day
5. Seaside Ports, Coastal Cities and Tropical Islands Songs of Sex Work and Inequality by the Sea
Natasha Mulvihill
Part 3: Politics, isolation, and nostalgia
6. From Endless Summer to Endless Bummer: The Californian ‘beach song’ from 1962–2020
Glenn Fosbraey
7. Island Logic: Roots Reggae, Rasta, and Post-Colonial Critique
Justin Patch
8. Flotsam and Jetsam: British coastal songs of jettison, discovery, and retrieval (1984-2021)
Kevan Manwaring
9. The Sonically Evoked Spaces of Post Rock in an Era of Climate Reality
Gareth Schott
Biography
Glenn Fosbraey is the Head of English, Creative Writing, and American Studies at The University of Winchester. He has published various books, chapters, and journal articles about the academic study of song lyrics including Writing Song Lyrics (2019), and Misogyny, Toxic Masculinity, and Heteronormativity in Post-2000 Popular Music (2021).
