Oh boy!

Stretching from the blues of Muddy Waters to the pop of Justin Timberlake, this collection examines how masculinity has been shaped and contested in popular music. The essays look at the male personas singers have taken on, from the blues performer who dominates his partner to the tender singer-songwriter, and at how those personas change as artists age, as attitudes shift, or as the pop scene demands something new. Some performers slip into roles they can later outgrow, while others find their persona hardening into a mask they struggle to remove.

The book presents itself as the first sustained scholarly study of how masculinity is negotiated, built, depicted and addressed across a range of popular music texts and practices. Its contributors are popular music scholars, among them Sheila Whiteley, Richard Middleton and Judith Halberstam. Together they consider masculinity in both the performance and the appearance of artists, and show that male and female performers alike have worked with ideas of masculinity in their music.