Associate Professor Charles Fairchild
Associate Professor of Popular Music
Charles Fairchild's work is primarily concerned with the cultural and material mediation of music. His books and articles examine how institutions and organisations shape the ways people consume and make meaning from music. His recent work includes a book examining music museums and another examining the production and reception of The Grey Album by Danger Mouse and several articles about popular music museums. He has also completed a mongraph examining how music presenters at community radio stations in Australia use music to construct distinct kinds of social relationships. Fairchild has also examined how the circulation of music through film, television, radio and digital music cultures creates varied and constantly evolving contexts through which the experience and meaning of music is formed.
Fairchild teaches units in popular music, music and media, and the globalisation of popular culture. His primary pedagogical interests are the changing nature of the music industry, music and copyright, the manufacturing of musical celebrities, and how the institutions and media through which people consume music change over time.
He has published six books, as well as articles in journals such as American Music, International Journal of Heritage Studies, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Popular Music and Society, Media, Culture, Museum and Society, Popular Music and New Media and Television.
Fairchild holds a BA in Liberal Arts from the University of Illinois, a MA in Ethnomusicology from York University in Toronto, and a PhD in American Studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he was a student of the noted musicologist Charles Keil.
His publications include: Musician in the Museum, 2021; Sounds, Screens and Soeakers, 2019; Danger Mouse's The Grey Album. Bloomsbury, 2014; Music, Radio and the Public Sphere: The Aesthetics of Democracy. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave, 2012, Pop Idols and Pirates: Mechanisms of Consumption and the Global Circulation of Popular Music. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. 2008. ‘Understanding the Exhibitionary Characteristics of Popular Music Museums.’ Museum and Society, ‘Crowds, Clouds, and Idols: New Dynamics and Old Agendas in the Music Industry, 1982-2012.’ American Music, ‘Revealing What We Can Never Know: The Problem of Real Life in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days.’ Popular Music and Society, ‘Alan Freed Casts a Long Shadow: The Persistence of Payola and the Ambiguous Value of Music.’ Media, Culture and Society. 34(3), pp. 328–42, 2012, ‘Flow Amid Flux: The Evolving Uses of Music in Evening Television Drama,’ Television and New Media.
The Capitalist Imaginaries of Popular Music
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The Avalanches 'Since I Left You.'
Selected publications
(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021)
(Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
(Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
(Hampton Press, Inc., 2001)
Publications
Selected Grants
2007
- Popular music and cultural politics: disability, activism, (post)subculture, Fairchild C, McKay G, McKay G, University of Sydney/International Visiting Research Fellowship (IVRF)
2006
- The public culture of popular music at community radio stations in Sydney and Canberra, Fairchild C, University of Sydney/Career Interruption
In the media
The Grammys: music’s grim battle for industrial supremacy
https://theconversation.com/the-grammys-musics-grim-battle-for-industrial-supremacy-21919
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Why the Grey Album still matters – in black and white
https://theconversation.com/why-the-grey-album-still-matters-in-black-and-white-31473
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Nightlife (ABC Radio National)
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/booze-music/101446326
