A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest

One of the first English-language academic studies of the Eurovision Song Contest, this collection of essays provides analyses of the televised pop music competition in Finland, Germany, Holland, Israel, Lithuania, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey, and the former Yugoslavia, as well as comparative studies with Arab and Japanese song competitions. The collection includes musicological, linguistic and psychoanalytic studies as well as studies that focus on race and sexuality in the competition. This book urges its readers to take seriously a pop phenomenon that has too often been dismissed as, at best, pure entertainment.

with Ivan Raykoff, A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.

Reviews: Terra 120.2 [2008], 129-130; Popular Music and Society 31.5 [December 2008], 700-703; Popular Music 27 [2008], 498-501; Choice 44.11 [July 2007]; Lied und populäre Kultur 54 [2009], 439-441; H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews [January 2010] ; International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 41.1 [2010], 141-46.