Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity

Pop music and rock music are often treated as separate genres but the distinction has always been blurred. Motti Regev argues that pop-rock is best understood as a single musical form defined by the use of electric and electronic instruments, amplification and related techniques. The history of pop-rock extends from the emergence of rocknroll in the 1950s to a variety of contemporary fashions and trends -- rock, punk, soul, funk, techno, hip hop, indie, metal, pop and many more. This book offers a highly original account of the emergence of pop-rock music as a global phenomenon in which Anglo-American and many other national and ethnic variants interact in complex ways. Pop-rock is analysed as a prime instance of aesthetic cosmopolitanism -- that is, the gradual formation, in late modernity, of world culture as a single interconnected entity in which different social groupings around the world increasingly share common ground in their aesthetic perceptions, expressive forms and cultural practices.