Publication: Bruce Johnson: Popular Music and Australian Culture: Across the Grain

Bruce Johnson: Popular Music and Australian Culture: Across the Grain
published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

It consists of a commissioned collection of essays that are gathered from various sources such as reprints from journals, keynote presentations, guest lectures that have never appeared in print. Generally they are revised/updated  to varying degrees, ranging from minor to very extensive. 
A quick summary: the essays in the first part run from an examination of Australia’s response to the Great War of 1914 to 1918; the socio-political origins of the world’s oldest annual jazz festival, the Australian Jazz Convention inaugurated in 1946; early Australian rock; the Australian tour of The Beatles; music and the Pauline Hansen phenomenon; the cultural context of Australian jazz history. The second part is less tightly focussed on Australian cases, and on popular culture more broadly: a phenomenological attempt to come to grips with the actual experience of playing music; our own complex and often ambiguous role as popular music scholars; the role of ethnography in popular music studies; and finally a lament for the deterioration of academic culture in a consumerist society.
You can access the cover, list of contents, and samples here.
More information here.