How to Make Music in an Epidemic

Matthew Jones provides the first full-length perspective on Western musical responses to the AIDS epidemic and explores how English-language popular music was used, composed, and performed in the context of the North American crisis.

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This volume examines responses to the epidemic of HIV/AIDS in Anglophone popular musicians and music video during the AIDS crisis (1981–1996).

Through close reading of song lyrics, musical texts, and music videos, this book demonstrates how music played an integral part in the artistic-activist response to the AIDS epidemic, demonstrating music as a way to raise money for HIV/AIDS services, to articulate affective responses to the epidemic, to disseminate public health messages, to talk back to power, and to bear witness to the losses of AIDS.

Drawing methodologies from musicology, queer theory, critical race studies, public health, and critical theory, the book will be of interest to a wide readership, including artists, activists, musicians, historians, and other scholars across the humanities as well as to people who lived through the AIDS crisis.