Popular Music, Work, Crisis

THIS IS A RESCHEDULED EVENT. IT WILL NOW TAKE PLACE ON NOVEMBER 14 2024.

Join us to celebrate the publication of two recent books from CAMRI researchers, taking different perspectives on transformations in popular music and work amid the unfolding digital and economic crises of the late 2000s and 2010s. Room UG04, Regent Street campus.

Paul Rekret’s (Goldsmiths/MIT Press 2024) examines expressions of economic crisis and transformation in popular music, in the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crash. From online streaming and the extension of the working day to gentrification, unemployment and the emergence of trap rap, from ecological crisis and field recording to automation and trends in dance music: Take This Hammer shows how song-form has both reflected developments in contemporary capitalism while also intimating a horizon beyond it.

Toby Bennett’s (Bloomsbury 2024) is an ethnographic study of organisational transformation inside the music industry’s largest global firms, as they regained stability after a turbulent period of ‘digital disruption’. Centring not on artists and the most powerful decision-makers but on everyday experiences of work and back-office corporate employees, the book tells a different story of contemporary digital music – one more sensitive to the complex intersections that texture the conduct of work and organizational life.

With introduction and commentary from Aasiya Lodhi and Sally Anne Gross.

Dr Toby Bennett is Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture & Organisation at University of Westminster. Following a career in London's music industry, he has held postdoctoral research posts at Solent University (on Music City strategies) and City, University of London (on cross-border creative value chains and on Cultural Diversity policy and management initiatives). He leads the MA Global Media Business and is also a production editor at the Journal of Cultural Economy.

Dr Paul Rekret is the author of three books and editor of two volumes at the intersections of philosophy, cultural theory and political economy, most recentlyTake This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis. He has published in journals and magazines including South Atlantic Quarterly, Theory, Culture and Society, Critical Quarterly, Frieze, The Wire and The New Inquiry. He is a member of Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective, a convenor of the Marxism in Culture seminar series and a Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster.

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