Popular music is rich in imaginative storytelling, from the songs of
music hall, and street narratives of hip-hop to the 1970s heyday of the
concept album. As an even broader audiovisual practice, including music
video, sleeve art and star-texts of performers themselves, the
possibilities for unique ways of telling stories multiply - capturing
the public imagination more recently are examples like Beyoncé's recent
visual album Lemonade and experiments in popular music transmedia like
Gorillaz.
While music's role as soundtrack for other narrative media has been
extensively theorised, relatively little attention has been paid to how
narrativity works within popular music itself. By building on writing
around narrativity from popular music scholars, applying concepts from
the storyworlds literature to music and vice versa, this book connects
these two disciplines. It provides fresh takes on well-known case
studies from David Bowie and The Beatles to Jeff Wayne's Musical
Version of War of the Worlds, while introducing the reader to lesser
known examples from global popular music culture. Providing a long
overdue overview of narrativity in popular music culture, this book
connects the dots between innovative and exciting examples across its
history.
