Musician in the Museum

Rezensionen / Stimmen

Charles Fairchild's comprehensive and thought-provoking Musician in the Museum inscribes popular music back into the realm of neo-liberal politics. The book offers a welcome critical intervention on how we think about the contemporary value of popular music and will certainly have considerable effects on academic, journalistic, and vernacular discourses on the heritagization of popular music. * Raphael Nowak, Cultural Sociologist, Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, France * Musician in the Museum shows how proliferating music museums function to reinforce neoliberal ideologies. Charles Fairchild's book usefully adds to the growing literature on music in today's capitalism. * Timothy D. Taylor, Professor, Department of Ethnomusicology, UCLA, USA * This book contributes to the scarce literature on music and neoliberalism and the criticism of the production and reproduction of social inequalities by exploring popular music museums in cities such as Los Angeles, Liverpool, Seattle and Nashville that have become a crucial part of the Western entertainment industry. In a stimulating way, the book provides important insights into the broader neoliberal restructuring on the social, cultural and economic contexts in which popular culture is situated and shows how popular music museums contribute to the acceleration of these restructuring processes. Thus, the book challenges not only certain established theories for analyzing popular culture but also draws our attention to the well-trodden paths employed by popular music museums to construct white male musicians as "great artists" and audiences as ideal neoliberal subjects. In short, the book guides its readers through a challenging analysis of neoliberalism that goes far beyond popular music museums. * Rosa Reitsamer, Professor of Music Sociology, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria *