Popular Cultures: Rock Music, Sport and the Politics of Pleasure

Focusing on two major forms of popular culture - rock music and sport - David Rowe outlines the key issues involved in the understanding the diverse aspects of popular culture.

Rock music and sport encapsulate the contradictory elements of popular culture: the tensions between the commercial manufacture and marketing of popular products on the one hand, and their potential for articulating a resistive independence on the other.

David Rowe demonstrates that popular culture cannot be adequately understood without a clear grasp of the ways in which economics, ideology and culture interrelate. This relationship is explored through examples such as an examination of punk rock music in terms of its presentation as a product, its practical consciousness and its symbolic expression.