Rockin’ the Borders: Rock Music and Social, Cultural and Political Change

Björn Horgby · Fredrik Nilsson

Apr 2010 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

Rock music challenges hegemonic orders based on class, gender, nation, ethnicity/race or generation. This volume investigates how rock has played an integral part in the formation of identities and life-styles since the 1950’s. Rock music is used as a wide concept, including different genres, e.g. rock ‘n’ roll, pop, punk, hip hop and blues.

Unlike most other books on rock music, this volume focuses on how rock music becomes a part of everyday life and the formation of identities in a variety of European states such as England, Finland, Sweden and Wales, the USA, and also states that used to be on the other side of the Iron Curtain—such as GDR and Czechoslovakia. Thus, it includes a comparative perspective based on temporal as well as spatial aspects that further deepen the understanding of how rock music and society are intertwined.

Rockin’ the Borders is an interdisciplinary volume; the authors represent a variety of backgrounds: History, Ethnology, Folklore, Sociology and Sociology of Music, thus presenting us with an interesting mix of theoretical perspectives and methods.

About the author

Björn Horgby is Professor at the School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences at Örebro University, Sweden. Professor Horgby recently published Rock och uppror. Amerikansk, brittisk och svensk rockkultur 1955–69 (Rock and Rebellion: American, British and Swedish Rock Culture 1955–69) (2007). He has also published extensively on the formation and transformation of the Swedish working class and labour movement. His main research interest lies in the conditions of democracy and modern social and cultural history.

Fredrik Nilsson is Associate Professor of Ethnology at the Department of Historical Studies, Malmö University, Sweden. His main research interests concern identity formation in the intersections of global flows and local practices. In 2003, Professor Nilsson published Aktiesparandets förlovade land (In the Promised Land of Sharesaving) in which he analyzed how people’s daily lives were influenced by the stock market and how new competences and communities developed in the intersection of local practices and global flows of information and capital. Currently he is working on a project that focuses on how young women with a working class background negotiated identities as they enrolled in the Salvation Army in the late 19th century.