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Tony Mitchell. Popular Music and Local Identity: Rock, Pop and Rap in Europe and Oceania. London and New York: Cassell, 1996. 286 pp. ISBN 0-718-500-164. $15.99
Tony Mitchell's Popular Music and Local Identity provides eclectic, well-researched, and interesting case studies of the global flows of contemporary pop, rock, and rap music. It also provides inclusive, wellintegrated, and accessible theoretical frameworks to understand better how local identity is expressed through and situated within globally disseminated popular musics.
Mitchell displays an admirable appreciation for both the practice and theorization of popular music. He provides useful insights on its complexity as process and product, especially when globalized popular musics evolve unpredictably and innovatively within local and national contexts and call into question simplistic notions of Western cultural imperialism.
Mitchell's examples and analyses are especially welcome because there has been a tendency for popular music researchers to fixate...