Books
Driving Identities: At the Intersection of Popular Music and Automotive Culture (Routledge: 2020).
We Are the Champions: The Politics of Sports and Popular Music (Ashgate: 2011; 2nd ed. 2017).
Select Book Chapters and Articles
“Outer Space, Futurism, and the Quest for Disco Utopia,” in Disco Heterotopias and Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s, eds. Flora Pitrolo and Marko Zubak, Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music (Palgrave: 2022).
“Designing Identities: Sound and Music in Automotive and Appliance Branding,” in Oxford Handbook on Advertising Music, eds. James Deaville et al. (Oxford: 2020).
“Vaporwave: Politics, Protest, and Identity,” Journal of Popular Music Studies vol. 4, no. 4 (2018): 123–142.
“Living in the Immaterial World: Holograms and Spirituality in Recent Popular Music,” Popular Music and Society vol. 39, no. 5 (2016): 501–515.
“Hip Hop Holograms: Tupac Shakur, Time Travel and Technological Immortality,” in Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, eds. Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones (Lexington, 2015).
“Afro-Samurai: Techno-Orientalism in Recent Hip Hop,” Popular Music vol. 32, no. 2 (2013): 261–277.
“Visual Kei: Hybridity and Gender in Japanese Popular Culture,” Young: Nordic Journal of Youth Research vol. 21, no. 4 (2013): 309–325.
“Ideology and Racial Myth in Henry Purcell’s King Arthur and Thomas Arne’s Alfred,” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 vol. 34, nos. 1–2 (2010): 82–102.
“Constructions of African American Masculinity in Music and Sports,” American Music vol. 27, no. 2 (2009): 204–226.
“Sounds of the Future: Music and Science Fiction,” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, eds. M. Bold, A. Butler, A. Roberts and S. Vint (New York: Routledge, 2009), 392–403.
“A Fifth of Beethoven: Disco, Classical Music and the Politics of Inclusion,” American Music vol. 24, no. 3 (2006): 348–363.
“Venus: Politics and Masculine Anxiety on the Restoration Stage,” Seventeenth-Century Music vol. 11, no. 1 (2006), http://www.sscm-jscm.org/jscm.
“Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Rock Music,” Popular Music vol. 23, no. 2 (2003): 315–333.
“Bohemian Rhapsodies: Operatic Influence and Crossover in Rock Music,” Popular Music vol. 20, no. 2 (2001): 189–203.
Ken McLeod passed away peacefully on March 17, 2022, in Ottawa. Please read Dean Hisama's message to the Faculty of Music community.
Ken McLeod was a Full Professor of Musicology whose research and publishing activities addressed identity politics and popular music. His most recent book, Driving Identities: At the Intersection of Popular Music and Automotive Culture (2020), explored the historical and contemporary connections between popular music and automobiles and how the two have combined to construct, contest, reinforce, and re-envision gender, racial, sexual, and locational identities. He was researching issues of colonization, racism, and spirituality in the nexus of popular music, science fiction, and the space industry. He was also investigating issues surrounding technology and identity politics in hip hop and Japanese popular music, and the influence of automotive culture and machine sounds on popular music. He regularly delivered papers at national and international conferences and received numerous grants, fellowships, and awards from The Handel Society, The Japan Foundation, Popular Music and Society, The Jackman Humanities Institute, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). His work was supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant.