The Routledge Handbook to the Popular Music Cover Song
Vivid Versions and Musical Subjectivities
Lori Burns editor Mike Alleyne editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published:19th Jul '26
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
The Routledge Handbook to the Popular Music Cover Song: Vivid Versions and Musica Subjectivities examines histories, contexts, and critical perceptions of cover song practices that manifest in mimetic homages, nuanced reinterpretations, or radical transformations. Aimed at exploring genre variations, gendered and intersectional expressions, political implications, and international dimensions, the analyses collectively interrogate the implicit and explicit meanings of popular music covering and versioning, following a chronological pathway to illuminate evolutionary developments across phonographic history from the 1950s to the present. In 27 chapters, this handbook explores how covers create new “vivid” versions that traverse social and musical boundaries and contexts.
By incorporating cross-cultural insights including postcolonial, indigenous, and sign language readings of recorded music texts, the authors foreground reinterpretive power as a vehicle for expanded awareness of under-examined cover contexts. Their goal is to invite reassessment of cover practices and their popular music presence, often by focusing on lesser known vivid versions and their commercial, technological, and compositional rearticulations. The Routledge Handbook to the Popular Music Cover Song: Vivid Versions and Musical Subjectivities is valuable for second- through final-year students in undergraduate courses devoted to popular music, composition, and production studies, and to postgraduate programs and researchers in a range of fields, including: popular music studies, musicology, creative music performance and composition, songwriting, and music production studies
“This handbook handles a breathtakingly broad bank of musical material—a gauntlet thrown down by any ‘covers’ project but rarely taken up with such commitment to the cause. The essays assembled here address everything from Bob Dylan to Madvillain, from Metallica to Mussorgsky, from Soca to Sign Language, and much more besides. Vivid Versions is a vital volume for anyone interested in the questions coming out of the musical matrices that remade songs represent.”
—Dr Freya Jarman, Reader in Music, University of Liverpool
“There is probably no better way to explore the past seventy years of recorded popular music in all its stylistic, cultural, and sonic diversity than through the lens of the cover song. In The Routledge Handbook to the Popular Music Cover Song: Vivid Versions and Musical Subjectivities, Mike Alleyne and Lori Burns have assembled an impressive collection of essays from among the world’s leading popular music scholars, each of whom offers a close analysis of how a specific cover song transforms the original version in profound and interesting ways, using an array of approaches and methodologies that are as diverse as the cover songs themselves. Brimming with insightful observations in every chapter, this volume will prove essential reading not only for those interested in the phenomenon of the cover song but also the reception history of recorded popular music more broadly.”
—Mark Spicer, Professor and Chair of Music, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
“I’ve found Vivid Versions especially compelling in the way it treats cover versions as a lens on how songs travel through bodies, scenes, industries, and histories. Across the volume, contributors show how re-imaginings can newly animate an original, rescue it, or even boldly attack it—and why those shifts matter socio-culturally as much as they do musically. What I particularly value is how the chapters connect close listening to questions of identity, power, and oppression without sacrificing musical specificity. And rather than leaning on familiar canonical touchstones, the book draws on a wide stylistic range and favors lesser-known cases that, in many instances, have even more to say.”
—Prof. Ralf von Appen, Director of the Department of Popular Music, MDW - University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna
ISBN: 9781032789484
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 1100g
420 pages