Jonathyne Briggs Sounds French: Globalisation, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958–1980 (Book review)

Abstract

Music is not only significant to existing communities, such as those based on nationality or region, but also generates new communities. This is a central contention of Sounds French by historian Jonathyne Briggs, which investigates the production, mediation, and consumption of popular music in France during the increased globalization of culture between the 1950s and 1970s. The book argues that when social and cultural upheavals after the Second World War necessitated new modes of expression, the shifting styles of popular music permitted new possibilities of social interaction and provided cultural material for creating communities in more fluid and plastic ways.