Crime and Music

This unique volume explores the relationship between music and crime in its various forms and expressions, bringing together two areas rarely discussed in the same contexts and combining them through the tools offered by cultural criminology. Contributors discuss a range of topics, from how songs and artists draw on criminality as inspiration to how musical expression fulfills unexpected functions such as building deviant subcultures, encouraging social movements, or carrying messages of protest.

Spanning a range of cultures and time periods, Crime and Music will be of interest to researchers in critical and cultural criminology, the history of music, anthropology, ethnology, and sociology.

1 Stories of Crime and Music.- Part 1 The criminalization of music.- 2 Entartete Musik – perpetrators and victims.- 3 Marginalizing the Muslim Ustad: Hindu Nationalism and Music in Modern North India.- Part 2 Music and Violence.- 4 Castrati: child abuse and the search for musical perfection.- 5 Crime at the Opera House.- 6 “Blood-Thirsty Blues”: The Sonic Politics of American Murder Ballads.- Part 3 Organised crime and music.- 7 Praise the Drug Lord: Narcocorridos in Mexico.- 8 Jazz and the Mob: A story of unexpected patronage.- 9 Crimen et Circenses: Serbian Turbo Folk Music and Organised Crime.- Part 4 Music and Genocide and Crimes against humanity.- 10 Todestango. Music in Nazi death camps.- 11 The Music act of ‘Kosovo’ and its semantic resonances in international criminal trials: an oral epic poetry case study towards a cognitive approach to analysis investigations and prosecutions.- 12 Jihadi Anashid, Islamic State Warfare and the Agency of Sound.- Part 5 Music as resistance.- 13 The malleable and inevitable path of demonizing (sub)culture: The case of Greek rebetiko.- 14 “Keeping it (hyper)real”: a musical history of rap’s quest beyond authenticity.

Frank Bovenkerk is Em. Professor of criminology, University of Utrecht. He received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He has published on organized crime, multi-cultural societies, prostitution, terrorism and cultural criminology. Among publications in the field of cultural criminology are: (with Y. Yücelgöz), Crime, Ethnicity and the Multicultural Administration of Justice (Glasshouse, 2004), (with M. van San) Loverboys in the Amsterdam red light district: a realist approach to the study of a moral panic (2011), (with T. Fokkema) Crime among young Moroccan men in the Netherlands: Does their regional origin matter? (2016)

Dina Siegel is a Professor of Criminology at the Willem Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology at the VU University Amsterdam. She has published on migration, crimes of mobility, human trafficking and smuggling, transnational organized crime, crime in the diamond industry, Russian Mafia and cultural criminology. Her publications include: Wagner in Israel. The Mixture of Politics and Music (2013), special issue Music and Crime (with Decorte, T., 2013), Maffia, diamanten en Mozart. Etnografie in criminologisch onderzoek (2010).