The Pop Festival

'I'm going to camp out on the land ... try and get my soul free'. So sang Joni Mitchell in 1970 on 'Woodstock'. But Woodstock is only the tip of the iceberg. Popular music festivals are one of the strikingly successful and enduring features of seasonal popular cultural consumption for young people and older generations of enthusiasts. From pop and rock to folk, jazz and techno, under stars and canvas, dancing in the streets and in the mud, the pleasures and politics of the carnival since the 1950s are discussed in this innovative and richly-illustrated collection. The Pop Festival brings scholarship in cultural studies, media studies, musicology, sociology, and history together in one volume to explore the music festival as a key event in the cultural landscape - and one of major interest to young people as festival-goers themselves and as students.

George McKay is a leading writer on alternative cultures and music. He is Professor of Media Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK; his website is georgemckay.org

Acknowledgements
Picture credits
Contributors
Introduction
George McKay
Chapter 1.
'The pose ... is a stance': popular music and the cultural politics of festival in 1950s Britain
George McKay
Chapter 2
Out of sight: the mediation of the music festival
Mark Goodall
Chapter 3
'Let there be rock!' Myth and ideology in the rock festivals of the transatlantic counterculture
Nicholas Gebhardt
Chapter 4
'As real as real can get': race, representation, and rhetoric at Wattstax, 1972
Gina Arnold
Chapter 5
The artist at the music festival: art, performance and hybridity
Rebekka Kill
Chapter 6
Photo-essay: Free festivals, new travellers, and the free party scene in Britain, 1981-1992
Alan Lodge
Chapter 7
Festival bodies: the corporeality of the contemporary music festival scene in Australia
Joanne Cummings and Jacinta Herborn
Chapter 8
The Love Parade: European techno, the EDM festival, and the tragedy in Duisburg
Sean Nye and Ronald Hitzler
Chapter 9
Protestival: global days of action and carnivalised politics at the turn of the millennium
Graham St John
Chapter 10
Alternative playworlds: psytrance festivals, deep play and creative zones of transcendence
Alice O'Grady
Chapter 11
No Spectators! The art of participation, from Burning Man to boutique festivals in Britain
Roxanne Robinson
Chapter 12
Musicking in Motor City: reconfiguring urban space at the Detroit Jazz Festival
Anne Dvinge
Chapter 13
Branding, sponsorship, and the music festival
Chris Anderton
Chapter 14
Everybody talk about pop music: Un-Convention as alternative to festival, from DIY music to social change
Andrew Dubber
Index