Full Description
The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment is the first sustained engagement with what might said to be - in its melding of concert and gathering, in its evolving relationship with digital and social media, in its delivery of event, experience, technology and star - the art form of the 21st century.
This volume offers interviews with key designers, discussions of the practicalities of mounting arena concerts, mixing and performing live to a mass audience, recollections of the giants of late twentieth century music in performance, and critiques of latter-day pretenders to the throne. The authors track the evolution of the arena concert, consider design and architecture, celebrity and fashion, and turn to feminism, ethnographic research, and ideas of humour, liveness and authenticity, in order to explore and frame the arena concert.
The arena concert becomes the "real time" centre of a global digital network, and the gig-goer pays not only for an immersion in (and, indeed, role in) its spectacular nature, but also for a close encounter with the performers, in this contained and exalted space. The spectacular nature of the arena concert raises challenges that have yet to be fully technologically overcome, and has given rise to a reinvention of what live music actually means.
Love it or loathe it, the arena concert is a major presence in the cultural landscape of the 21st century. This volume finds out why.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction: "A Stately Pleasure-Dome"?
Robert Edgar, Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs, Benjamin Halligan and Nicola Spelman
Part One: Prehistories
1: From Mach Schau to Mock Show: The Beatles, Shea Stadium, and Rock Spectacle
Jeffrey Roessner
2. Beyond Beatlemania: The Shea Stadium Concert as Discursive Construct
Mark Duffett
3: Through a Lens Darkly: The Changing Performer-Audience Dynamic as Documented by Four Progressive Rock Concert Films
Kevin Holm-Hudson
4: Evolutions of The Wall: 1979 - 2013
Kimi Kärki
Part Two: Arena Concerts Now
5: From Shed to Venue: the Arena Concert Event Space
Robert Kronenburg
6: Constructing the Cosmopolitan Arena Concert
Lukasz Swiatek
7: "Roll Up and Shine": A Case Study of Stereophonics at Glasgow's SECC Arena
Emma Webster
8: Being There: Encounters with Space and the Affective Dimension of Arena Spectacle
Alice O'Grady
Part Three: Perspectives - Personal and Professional
9: "Hello Cleveland..!": The View from the Stage
Jon Stewart
10: Illuminating Arenas: Towards the "Ultimate Multimedia Experience"
Jon Stewart and Benjamin Halligan
11: A Personal History of UK Arena Concerts: Reflections on Gigs over the Past Forty Years
Peter Smith
12: Rocking Around Watford: Trying to Find What I Was Looking For
Robert Edgar, with Julia and Evan Shelton
Part Four: Arena Media
13: The Aesthetics of the Arena: Live and Recorded
Robert Edgar
14: We Made This Together: How Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That! Foresaw Changes in the Live Concert Experience Brought about by Digital Technology and Social Media
Neil Fox
15: Framing Experience: Filming and the Excesses of Aesthetics
Erich Hertz
Part Five: The Arena Experience
16: "Sing it with me now": Audience Participation in Arena Concerts
Nicola Spelman
17: Performing Kylie: Looks Divine
Sunil Manghani
18: Intimacy in Public
Jos Mulder
19: Beyoncé's Celebrity Feminism and Performances of Female Empowerment in the Arena Concert
Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs
20: Intimate Live Girls
Benjamin Halligan
Bibliography
Index
