English Rock and Pop Performances

This book addresses the phenomenon of non-American rock and pop singers emulating an Americanized singing style for performance purposes. By taking a novel approach to this pop cultural trend and drawing attention to the audience, British and American students’ perceptions of English rock and pop performances were elicited. Interviews guided by various music clips were conducted and analyzed through a detailed qualitative content analysis. The interviewees' responses provide important insights into social meanings attached to Americanized voices and local British accents in the respective genres and show how British and American attitudes toward these performance accents differ. These perceptions and attitudes are illustrated by developing associative fields which offer a fresh view on the notion of indexicalities.
An engaging folk linguistic investigation of a relatable everyday pop culture phenomenon, this book makes complex sociolinguistic phenomena easily approachable and qualitative research accessible. It is suitable for intermediate students onward and inspires further research projects in the field of language performances.

Weiwei Wu, Hangzhou City University, in Journal of Pragmatics 209 (2023).:
The notion of indexical fields applied in the collection-analysis methodology contributes to the understanding of the ideological processes of language and opens up various possibilities for future research; moreover, it invites a discussion of sociolinguistic concepts in a larger context of globalization, localization, and global localization (e.g., Blommaert 2010:23; Robertson, 1995). Moreover, this book's unique research perspective – the audience perspective – provides a nuanced viewpoint to the studies of sociolinguistics, particularly in the context of performance art, where the opinions of the audience (or users) are key to success as the voice of the audience becomes increasingly essential with the growing structure of online media participation. Members of the audience are actively involved in shaping the cultural values of the language. This study highlights the hermeneutic cycle of production and perception, giving the audience the attention it deserves.