Changing the Record

This book studies the relation between English national culture and popular music in the first decades of the 21st century. In a dialogue of literary and popular music studies, it makes a case for paying renewed attention to the song lyric as a genre of cultural self-reflection and criticism.

Drawing on recent perspectives from cultural studies and postcolonial studies, the book contributes to the critical study of Englishness. It focuses on the pop-cultural significance of the Brexit debate and argues that the years leading up to the vote registered a shift in the ‘English pop’ paradigm. Schuhmaier includes close readings of PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake (2011), Kae Tempest’s Let Them Eat Chaos (2016), and Kano’s Made in the Manor (2016), which illustrate a tendency of British popular music in the early 21st century to be critical, rather than celebratory, of national identity. The book’s discussions focus on the pastoral imagination of Englishness, imperial nostalgia, and Black British reconfigurations of Englishness, as well as on socioeconomic conditions in the United Kingdom and its capital and the state of the nation according to British popular music.

The book speaks to students and scholars in literary and popular music studies as well to a wider audience with an interest in popular music and discourses of Englishness.