Popular music has become increasingly embedded in complex and often contradictory discourses of wellbeing. For instance, some new genres and sub-cultures of popular music are associated with violence, drug-use, and the angst of living, yet simultaneously define the hopes and dreams of millions of young people. At a service level, popular music is increasingly used as a therapeutic modality in holistic medicine, as well as in conventional health care and public health practice. By conceptually and empirically foregrounding place, this book demonstrates how music - whether from particular places, about particular places, or played in particular places " is a crucial component of health and wellbeing.

Gavin J. Andrews, McMaster University, Canada, Paul Kingsbury, Simon Fraser University, Canada and Robin Kearns, The University of Auckland, New Zealand.

1: Introduction; I: Circulation; 2: Norah Jones's 'Don't Know Why': Flexible Grounding and Contemporary Cities; 3: Look Beyond Appearances: Place, Disability, and Wellbeing in the Music of Staff Benda Bilili; 4: 'Gonna Live Forever': Noel Gallagher's Spaces of Wellbeing; 5: 'Still ill': Morrissey, The Smiths, and the Geography of Miserabilism; 6: Jewish Spiritual Healing, Mi Shebeirach, and the Legacy of Debbie Friedman; II: Transformations; 7: Listen! It's Alive; 8: Sounds, Surrounds, and Wellbeing on Planet WOMAD; 9: Pasifika Festival Representations and Realities for the Wellbeing of Pacific Peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand; 10: Dying Healthy: Music in Places of Palliative Care; 11: A Soundtrack to the Everyday: Street Music and the Production of Convivial 'Healthy' Public Places; 12: Painting Therapeutic Landscapes with Sound: On Land by Brian Eno; III: Gathering; 13: Mapping the Geography of Health Inequity through Participatory Hip Hop; 14: Fast and Frightening: Boundaries to Wellbeing for Women in the Punk Community; 15: Mary, Maria, and the Intensity of Redemption: Everyday Spiritual Healing in the Lyrics of Bruce Springsteen; 16: No-Go Zones and Comfortable Places: Musical Challenges to the Displacements of HIV and AIDS in South Africa; 17: Music and the Wellbeing of a Nation: Developing Identity, Constructing Community in Singapore; 18: Bono, Band Aid, and Before: Celebrity Humanitarianism, Music, and the Objects of its Action; Coda Please Please Me: The Potency of Music