Download or read book Popular Music and Narrativity written by Alex Jeffery and published by Bloomsbury Academic. This book was released on 2021-06-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular music is rich in imaginative storytelling, from the songs of music hall, and street narratives of hip-hop to the 1970s heyday of the concept album. As an even broader audiovisual practice, including music video, sleeve art and star-texts of performers themselves, the possibilities for unique ways of telling stories multiply - capturing the public imagination more recently are examples like Beyoncé's recent visual album Lemonade and experiments in popular music transmedia like Gorillaz. While music's role as soundtrack for other narrative media has been extensively theorised, relatively little attention has been paid to how narrativity works within popular music itself. By building on writing around narrativity from popular music scholars, applying concepts from the storyworlds literature to music and vice versa, this book connects these two disciplines. It provides fresh takes on well-known case studies from David Bowie and The Beatles to Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of War of the Worlds, while introducing the reader to lesser known examples from global popular music culture. Providing a long overdue overview of narrativity in popular music culture, this book connects the dots between innovative and exciting examples across its history.