Thinking Popular Culture

Tara Brabazon is Professor of Education and Head of the School of Teacher Education, Charles Sturt University, Australia

The Times Higher Education's Book of the Week 'Tara Brabazon has ushered cultural studies out of the drawing room and prodded it back onto the streets, where it matters more than ever.' Justin O'Connor, Queensland University of Technology, Australia 'Brabazon is a "war writer", grappling not with the culture wars but with war itself, including the wars within. She offers a cultural studies approach to the period between 9/11 and the present. Her elegiac essays range widely. Brilliant Brabazon is an antidote to the Bush "war presidency" and its dispiriting denouement. She makes cultural studies matter again.' Ben Agger, University of Texas at Arlington, USA 'Tara Brabazon has written a beautiful, passionate, and political book about popular culture in which the learning of pleasure is matched by the pleasure of learning, critique, and civic engagement. One cannot think about politics without engaging popular culture as a powerful educational force, and Thinking Popular Culture is one of the best books available to confront this crucial question with great insight, enormous courage, and sense of social responsibility.' Henry Giroux, McMaster University, Canada 'There is no one else with Brabazon's combination of raucousness and subtlety, offensive pugnacity and dazzling charm, terrific garrulity and razor incisiveness...Indeed, this packed and fizzing book is in many of its sections a celebration sung over the great achievements and works of art wrung from this epoch by both television and the great frescoes of popular culture, especially rock music, which provides its staple...Thinking Popular Culture reads like a pasted-together but perfectly coherent series of shortish newspaper articles. I don't know whether or not this is the case, but the point is really that this swift, darting movement of the author's mind from topic to subject permits her to spin a long, ravelling and gossamer thread of continuity and connectedness along the multitudinous quiddity of popular and televised cultural life.' The Times Higher Education 'The span of the issues discussed is overwhelming and yet Brabazon manages to address all of them with expertise, profound knowledge and passion, regardless of whether she is talking about guitar chords, reality television, internet search engines or cultural theories about the work-place and masculinity... Every essay can stand alone and yet 'the chapters [...] chatter amongst themselves' and, through the analysis of a wide range of cultural artifacts, work together in outlining a complex network of both dominant and resistant discourses... Some books matter. Some books are relevant. Some books have the power to take the written word and use it to change the world. Thinking Popular Culture has the capacity, the intelligence and the breadth of ideas to incite resistance and inspire such change, one thought at a time.' Cultural Sociology

• Contents: Introduction: interventions in/denial; Think: Google is white bread for the mind; Stop crying - start thinking. Putting the punch back into pop; Coalition of the guilty; The 8th deadly sin; When Paris became a celebrity, not a city; Free wiki (but what is the cost?); It's only food, dude; Crazy frog capitalism; What are the young people wearing?; You've been Jaded. Design: The last punk; Mad about the boy (London); Handbag nation; A game you play with your brain: philosophy football; Punking yoga; Kindle surprise. Sonic: 2 bars; As cool as the crickets; It's not easy being Johnny Cash; Play 'great leap forward', you bastard; Singing a city; Downloading democracy; I know I won't be leaving here with the Archduke; I'm with stupid. Vision: What have you ever done on the telly?; Pree-sen-na kul-cha; You’ve got to have a good haircut: Live Forever and an end of spin; I don't believe you. You're a liar; Bad wolf; 28.06.42.12; Life, death and disco; Winds of change; Conclusion: cut Elvis; Selected Bibliography; Notes; Index.