Helena, Arkansas' King Biscuit Blues Festival is a mass-produced event, where detailed schedules outline musical performances and regulate most aspects of the festival experience, yet many blues fans perceive their festival attendance as a homecoming. Such a perception is largely thanks to festival ...

In modern leisure spaces, nothing typifies dark leisure as a normative rule better than the supposed alternative, counter-cultural space of pop-rock-metal music. In the first half of this paper, I explore dark leisure theory: first, through an analysis of Rojek's framework for abnormal leisure;...

This is an online content analysis using Discourse Tracing to make sense of how rugby league fans talk about changes in the game since the 1980s. Specifically, we are interested in how fans discuss Tina Turner singing '(Simply) the Best' and another song in a famous marketing campaign for...

This paper builds on our earlier work which looked at folk musicians exercising agency in careers that can develop from casual leisure through serious leisure to work. In looking specifically at songwriting, it synthesises theories on the underlying motivations reflecting the view of Born who...

The paper examines two 'turns' in English national sporting culture, 'Beckhamisation' and 'Southgatism', and their contribution to an 'imagined community' through processes of 'banal nationalism'. It examines the critiques of various academic and media commentators to demonstrate the link between...

This special issue explores some critical links between music and tourism, in addition to addressing ongoing debates about place and heritage. Topics addressed by the five papers include: the marketing of music heritage; the commodification of a musical landscape; the 'psychogeography' of music...

From counterculture to subculture to the ubiquity of every black-clad wannabe vampire hanging around the centre of Western cities, Goth has transcended a musical style to become a part of everyday leisure and popular culture. The music's cultural terrain has been extensively mapped in the first...

This paper explores how music contributes to actualizing meaning potentials in a case of televised football. From the perspective of textual analysis - informed by multimodal discourse analysis and semiotics of music - the paper specifically focusses on the title music and demonstrates how the ...

Football, as other cultural products, has become a major part of the political field, since there has been an ongoing cultural battle between the President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his dissidents. The country is divided into two, not only between social and cultural capital owners; two sets of...

The papers in this special issue started life as presentations to a Fields of Vision conference held in 2019 on the relationships between music and sport. From team songs sung after a match to Arthur Honegger's 1928 Rugby symphonic movement, from terrace chants to Neil Hannon's concept album,...