The resisting muse: popular music and social protest

Popular music has traditionally served as a rallying point for voices of opposition, across a huge variety of genres.

This volume examines the various ways popular music has been deployed as anti-establishment and how such opposition both influences and responds to the music produced.

Implicit in the notion of resistance is a broad adversarial hegemony against which opposition is measured.

But it would be wrong to regard the music of popular protest as a kind of dialogue in league against 'the establishment'.

Convenient though they are, such 'us and them' arguments bespeak a rather shop-worn stance redolent of youthful rebellion.

It is much more fruitful to perceive the relationship as a complex dialectic where musical protest is as fluid as the audiences to which it appeals and the hegemonic structures it opposes.