How to Make Music in an Epidemic: Popular Music Making During the AIDS Crisis, 1981-1996

This volume examines responses to the epidemic of HIV/AIDS in Anglophone popular musicians and music video during the AIDS crisis (1981-1996). Through close reading of song lyrics, musical texts, and music videos, this book demonstrates how music played an integral part in the artistic-activist response to the AIDS epidemic, demonstrating music as a way to raise money for HIV/AIDS services, to articulate affective responses to the epidemic, to disseminate public health messages, to talk back to power, and to bear witness to the losses of AIDS.