For female pop stars, whose star bodies and star performances are undisputedly the objects of a sexualized external gaze, the process of ageing in public poses particular challenges. Taking a broadly feminist perspective, 'Rock On': women, ageing and popular music shifts popular music studies in a new direction. Focussing on British, American and Latina women performers and ageing, the collection investigates the cultural work performed by artists such as Shirley Bassey, Petula Clark, Madonna, Celia Cruz, Grace Jones and Courtney Love. The study crosses generations of performers and audiences enabling an examination of changing socio-historical contexts and an exploration of the relationships at play between performance strategies, star persona and the popular music press. For instance, the strategies employed by Madonna and Grace Jones to engage with the processes and issues related to public ageing are not the same as those employed by Courtney Love or Celia Cruz. The essays in this insightful collection reflect on the ways that artists and fans destabilise both the linear trajectories and the compelling weight of expectations regarding ageing by employing different modalities of resistance through persona re-invention, nostalgia, postmodern intertextuality and even early death as the ultimate denial of age.

For female pop stars, whose star bodies and star performances are undisputedly the objects of a sexualized external gaze, the process of ageing in public poses particular challenges. Taking a broadly feminist perspective, 'Rock On': women, ageing and popular music shifts popular music studies in a new direction. Focussing on British, American and Latina women performers and ageing, the collection investigates the cultural work performed by artists such as Shirley Bassey, Petula Clark, Madonna, Celia Cruz, Grace Jones and Courtney Love. The study crosses generations of performers and audiences enabling an examination of changing socio-historical contexts and an exploration of the relationships at play between performance strategies, star persona and the popular music press. For instance, the strategies employed by Madonna and Grace Jones to engage with the processes and issues related to public ageing are not the same as those employed by Courtney Love or Celia Cruz. The essays in this insightful collection reflect on the ways that artists and fans destabilise both the linear trajectories and the compelling weight of expectations regarding ageing by employing different modalities of resistance through persona re-invention, nostalgia, postmodern intertextuality and even early death as the ultimate denial of age.

Later years are changing under the impact of demographic, social and cultural shifts. No longer confined to the sphere of social welfare, they are now studied within a wider cultural framework that encompasses new experiences and new modes of being. Drawing on influences from the arts and humanities, and deploying diverse methodologies – visual, literary, spatial – and theoretical perspectives Cultural Gerontology has brought new aspects of later life into view. This major new publication draws together these currents including: Theory and Methods; Embodiment; Identities and Social Relationships; Consumption and Leisure; and Time and Space. Based on specially commissioned chapters by leading international authors, the Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology will provide concise authoritative reviews of the key debates and themes shaping this exciting new field.

Opening up the dialogue between popular music studies and aging studies, this book offers a major exploration of age and popular music across Europe. Using a variety of methods to illustrate how age within popular music is contingent and compelling, the volume explores how it provokes curation and devotion across a variety of sites and artists who record in several European languages, and genres including waltz music, electronica, pop, folk, rap, and the French ‘chanson.’ Visiting the many ways in which age is problematized, revered, and performed within Europe in relation to popular music, case studies analyze: French touring shows of popular music stars from the 1960s; André Rieu’s annual Vrijthof concerts in the Netherlands; Kraftwerk and Björk’s appearances at renowned art museums as curated objects; queer approaches to popular music space and time; British folk music inheritances; pan-European strategies of stardom and career longevity; and inheritance and post-colonial hauntings of race and identity. The book works with the notion of travelling, across borders, genres, sexualities, and media, highlighting the visibility of the aging body across a variety of European sites in order to establish popular music through the lens of age as a positive methodology with which to approach popular music cultures, and to offer a counter-narrative to age as decline. This book will appeal to scholars of popular music, popular culture, media studies, cultural studies, aging studies, and cultural gerontology.

This book studies the relationship between women, ageing and celebrity. Focusing on an array of case studies and star/celebrity images, it aims to examine the powerful, contradictory and sometimes celebratory ways in which celebrity culture offers a crucial site for the contemporary and historical construction of discourses on ageing femininities.

This book provides an interdisciplinary focus on music, memory, and ageing by examining how they intersect outside of a formal therapeutic context or framework and by offering a counter-narrative to age as decline. It contributes to the development of qualitative research methodologies by utilizing and reflecting on methods for studying music, memory, and ageing across diverse and interconnected contexts. Using the notion of inheritance to trouble its core themes of music, memory, ageing, and methodology, it examines different ways in which the concept of inheritance is understood but also how it commonly refers to the practice of passing on, and the connections this establishes across time and space. It confronts the ageist discourses that associate popular music predominantly with youth and that focus narrowly, and almost exclusively, on music's therapeutic function for older adults. By presenting research which examines various intersections of music and ageing outside of a therapeutic context or framework, the book brings a much-needed intervention.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture provides a comprehensive and fully up-to-date overview of key themes and debates relating to the academic study of popular music and youth culture. While this is a highly popular and rapidly expanding field of research, there currently exists no single-source reference book for those interested in this topic. The handbook is comprised of 32 original chapters written by leading authors in the field of popular music and youth culture and covers a range of topics including: theory; method; historical perspectives; genre; audience; media; globalization; ageing and generation.