The Routledge Handbook of Pink Floyd

Description

The Routledge Handbook of Pink Floyd is intended for scholars and researchers of popular music, as well as music industry professionals and fans of the band. It brings together international researchers to assess, evaluate and reformulate approaches to the critical study and interpretation of one of the world’s most important and successful bands. For the first time, this Handbook will ‘tear down the wall,’ examining the band’s collective artistic creations and the influence of social, technological, commercial and political environments over several decades on their work. Divided into five parts, the book provides a thoroughly contextualised overview of the musical works of Pink Floyd, including coverage of performance and sound; media, reception and fandom; genre; periods of Pink Floyd’s work; and aesthetics and subjectivity. Drawing on art, design, performance, culture and counterculture, emergent theoretical resources and analytical frames are evaluated and discussed from across the social sciences, humanities and creative arts. The Handbook is intended for scholars and researchers of popular music, as well as music industry professionals. It will appeal across a range of related subjects from music production to cultural studies and media/communication studies. Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Table of Contents List of tables and figures List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: ‘What happened to the post-war dream?’ The story of Pink Floyd Companions to the albums of Pink Floyd and sources on Pink Floyd PART I Performance and sound 1 A cartographical companion to listening to and understanding the songs of Pink Floyd 2 A saucerful of secrets: Pink Floyd, free improvisation and collective composition 3 David Gilmour: defining the ‘melodic’ guitarist 4 Planet Floyd: the evolution of Pink Floyd’s live performances 5 Back to the UFO: Pink Floyd, The Division Bell tour (1994) and the retrofied aesthetics of psychedelia PART II Media, reception and fandom 6 Original soundtracks: Pink Floyd in the movies 7 ‘Us and them’: Pink Floyd and the British music media 8 Visual coverscapes: why Pink Floyd album covers don’t have types 9 Pink Floyd memories and memorability: ‘a personal essay on fandom and collecting' PART III Genre 10 In search of space (rock): Pink Floyd and genre formation in popular music 11 ‘On the Run’: the birth of electronic dance music? 12 More punk than Pink: Pink Floyd’s relationship with 1970s UK punk 13 Pink Floyd: the musical elements PART IV Periods of Pink Floyd’s work 14 The psychedelic self at play: re-reading whimsy in the early music of Pink Floyd 15 Legacy recre/ation: mining the elements in the archive of The Early Years box set 16 ‘Cruising for a bruising’: how The Dark Side of the Moon made Pink Floyd successful beyond their wildest dreams and instigated their downfall 17 Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ and the stage theory of grief 18 ‘A certain unease in the air’: transitional aspects of Pink Floyd’s Animals 19 Behind The Wall: a tool for condemning totalitarianism 20 Hey you! subjectivity and the ideological repressive state apparatuses in Pink Floyd’s The Wall 21 Truth and manipulation in Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut PART V Aesthetics and Subjectivity 22 Meadows, relics, and Victorian dolls’ houses: places, ephemera, and the unreal realities of Pink Floyd 23 The Pink Floyd Intensity: humanity, aesthetics and the breathless fan 24 The cultural legacy of Syd Barrett’s English pastoral 25 Temporal structuration in Pink Floyd’s The Wall 26 A temporal journey through Pink Floyd’s music Pink Floyd: Selective Chronology of Relevant Events Index