Scary Monsters

Rezensionen / Stimmen

Mark Duffett and Jon Hackett have compiled a fascinating collection of analyses that provide new perspectives on popular music figures, popular culture, and the societies and cultures of both the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st. Thanks to their innovative utilization of different theories regarding concepts such as masculinity and monstrosity, their collection is of interest to a wide range of scholars ... Through their close readings of popular culture figures, texts, and discourses, they demonstrate an adeptness at incorporating the less commonly applied monstrosity studies with the more prevalent gender studies to provide new insights into music studies. * Popular Culture Studies Journal * The collection of set pieces in the volume ... is also strangely, perversely entertaining and seems weirdly suited for our viral, pox-ridden times in the era of post-truth. * Popular Music * Seldom has the monster metaphor been used with such depth, diversity and complexity in the field of popular music studies. Applying an overarching approach that covers music artists, managers, fans and associated showbusiness personalities, in Scary Monsters Duffett and Hackett present a compelling and theoretically rigorous account of popular music, monstrosity and masculinity that will serve as an invaluable resource for students and scholars in popular music studies, cultural studies, media and communications, sociology, social history and other fields concerned with the intricate relationship between popular culture and society. * Andy Bennett, Professor, Griffith University, Australia * Scary Monsters brings popular music studies into an innovative and important dialogue with theories of monstrosity. Exploring how culture and industry attribute the monstrous also enables Duffett and Hackett to analyse who is marked as innocent, naive and exploited. Monstrosity is more than attribution alone, however, and this book interrogates pop music's monsters of toxic masculinity, ranging from managers to stars, and from fans to DJs. Pop's shiny glamour may promise what have often been culturally feminised pleasures, but Scary Monsters instead approaches the darker recesses and the dangerously romanticised excesses of popular music's 'monstrous masculine.' * Matt Hills, Professor of Media and Film, University of Huddersfield, UK *