This book discusses the political content of music over the past 200 years, from the classical to the hip-hop genres and everything in between. Beginning with Beethoven, Courtney Brown describes how Beethoven's music has been used to support a wide variety of political views across the entire ideological spectrum, both during Beethoven's life and long after. Then a provocative comparison of Bob Marley's music and Richard Wagner's "Ring" operas identifies striking similarities between the political ideas of these two composers relating to the idea of revolution. Nationalist music is then described and elaborated through examples, drawing from a wide range of national identities. Brown then turns to labor music by focusing on the legend of Joe Hill. Movement and non-movement related political music is then explored and compared, including the music associated with the Vietnam War. Finally, the political content of hip-hop is examined. Never before has a book covered such a broad spectrum of political music. This is a timely publication given the exponential growth of contemporary political music.
Courtney Brown is a mathematician and social scientist who teaches in the Department of Political Science at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He received his Ph.D. degree from Washington University (St. Louis) in 1982 in political science with an emphasis on mathematical modeling. He began his teaching career as a college calculus instructor in Africa before moving on to teach nonlinear differential and difference equation modeling in the social sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, Emory University, and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research Summer Program at the University of Michigan. He has published numerous books on applied nonlinear mathematical modeling in the social sciences, including two new volumes, one on applied differential equation systems (2007) and another on graph algebra (2008), a new graphical language used for modeling systems. He also has an interest in political music, and has recently published a book on the subject. Independent of his work as a college professor, he is the Director and founder of The Farsight Institute (www.farsight.org), a nonprofit research and educational organization dedicated to the study of a phenomenon of nonlocal consciousness known as "remote viewing." He recently published a book titled "Remote Viewing: The Science and Theory of Nonphysical Perception." In this book he analyzes data and develops a new theory that explains the remote-viewing phenomenon as a consequence of superposition formation on the quantum level.
