In Off Key, Kay Dickinson offers a compelling study of how certain alliances of music and film are judged aesthetic failures. Based on a fascinating and wide-ranging body of film-music mismatches, and using contemporary reviews and histories of the turn to post-industrialization, the book expands the ways in which the union of the film and music businesses can be understood.

Moving beyond the typical understanding of film music that privileges the score, Off Key also incorporates analyses of rock 'n' roll movies, composer biopics, and pop singers crossing over into acting. By doing this, it provides a fuller picture of how two successful entertainment sectors have sought out synergistic strategies, ones whose alleged "failures" have much to tell about the labor practices of the creative industries, as well as our own relationship to them and to work itself. A provocative and politically-conscious look at music-image relations, Off Key will appeal to students and scholars of film music, cinema studies, media studies, cultural studies, and labor history.

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"Off Key stands as an inspiring contribution to the debate on the meaningful difference between film music with a rare sense of political urgency and great intellectual depth."--Music & Letters

"Written in a lively and engaging style, Off Key casts a spotlight on several dark corners of popular culture: Elvis Presley musicals, composer biopics, Italian horror films, Madonna's acting career. Sifting through the various meanings of "work," Kay Dickinson argues that these misbegotten "synergies" between the film and music business expose the larger fissures that extrude in the relation between capital and labor in the culture industry. Dickinson's dialectical diagnoses are consistent with a truism in the entertainment business; you learn much more from your crashing failures than you do from your soaring successes."--Jeff Smith, Author of The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music

"Elvis meets Eisenstein in Kay Dickinson's boldly original study of the ways in which song and cinema often DON'T blend seamlessly. Once neglected but having become a bit too familiar, the topic of film's relationship to popular music is made new again through Dickinson's wonderfully unexpected and suggestive explorations of the frequent mis-matches in American and British cinema."-- Corey K. Creekmur, Associate Professor of Film Studies, University of Iowa

"While film music gone awry is Off Key's central issue, Dickinson never leaves the labors of musicians and the cultural industries' wish to organize and negotiate them from the discussion. And this is where Off Key is both most important and intellectually challenging. By providing one of the most surprising, illuminating and off-kilter reads that either film or popular music scholars have recently produced, Off Key not only explains why these pieces of detritus have washed up onto our media landscape but gives us important insights into their cultural significance. As a result, after encountering Off Key you will never be able to watch or listen to an Elvis or Madonna movie the same way again."--Tim J. Anderson, author of Making Easy Listening

About the Author

Kay Dickinson is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies within the Media and Communications Department of Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is editor of Movie Music: The Film Reader (2002) and co-editor of Teen TV: Genre, Consumption and Identity (2004).