New Books In Popular Culture

In Music and Sound in the Films of Dennis Hopper (Routledge,2024), Stephen Lee Naish explores how as a director Dennis Hopper used music and sound to propel the narrative of his work and to signpost the era in which the films were made and the characters' place within American culture. Naish examines five of Hopper's films to show how this deep engagement with music to build character and setting continued throughout his career, as Hopper used folk, punk, hip-hop, and jazz to shape the worlds of his films in ways that influenced other filmmakers and foreshadowed the advent of the music video format. As Naish demonstrates, throughout his career Hopper relied on music to propel his films and tell his stories.  In Easy Rider, Hopper was one of the first filmmakers to include popular rock, pop, and folk music on a soundtrack. In his sophomore film The Last Movie, Hopper blended diegetic performances of folk and traditional Peruvian indigenous music to create a textured piece of sound art. In Out of the Blue, Hopp