Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive

Good news on the database front, Penn Libraries has just signed on to the Entertainment IndustryMagazine Archive. It sits in the Proquest suite of databases that you are already familiar with if you search key social science databases (Sociological Abstracts, IBSS, etc.), Digital Dissertations, or any of the historical newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, etc. so it will be easy to get find as well as combine with broader searching.

EIMA covers core US and UK trade magazines in film, music, broadcasting and theater. Magazines have been scanned cover-to-cover in high-resolution color, with granular indexing of all articles, covers, ads and reviews. I guess the biggest omission in this collection is Rolling Stone. That being said:

This database includes several trade magazines which have effectively provided the main historical record for their subject areas throughout the 20th century, such as Variety (1905-2000), Billboard (1894-2000), Broadcasting (1931-2000) and The Stage (1880-2000). Although these titles focus primarily on film, music, TV/radio and theatre respectively, they have between them covered the full range of popular entertainments throughout their history, from music halls, circuses and fairs to jukeboxes, gambling machines and computer games.

For students of popular music, the UK music press titles New Musical Express (1946-2000) and Melody Maker (1926-2000) are equally invaluable sources: from their origins as trade papers for working musicians, they grew into mass-circulation weeklies in the 1960s, and pioneered serious rock journalism in the late 1960s and 70s. A selection of more specialist magazines give in-depth coverage of musical genres and eras, such as 'British Invasion' pop (Rave, 1964-70), reggae, African and Caribbean music (The Beat, 1982-2000), or the rave scene (Mixmag, 1983-2000).

Bringing these titles together in a single database gives researchers the opportunity to find comprehensive information on specific films, plays, theaters, actors, directors, TV series, film studios, musicians, genres, record labels, subcultures and youth movements. The inclusion of consumer and fan magazines such as Picturegoer (1911-1960), American Film (1975-1992) and Musician (1976-1999) means that a single search can bring back industry news items, features on technological breakthroughs and in-depth interviews with major artists, together with photographs and illustrations, gossip columns, listings, reviews, charts and statistics. Items such as advertisements, covers and short reviews of films, music singles or other works have been treated as separate documents with accurately-captured titles in order to help researchers find all the relevant material for their search topic.  --Proquest description

March CommQuote

A lyric from Mark Knopfler off his latest "album" Get Lucky is our feature for this month's quote. The song expresses a simple longing for life as lived before the car and before television. Both are indirectly impugned by the speaker's nostalgia for other forms of leisure.

Before Gas And TV

Before gas and TV
Before people had cars
We'd sit round the fires
Pass around a guitar
Remembering songs
When my daddy was home
He'd play along
On the spoons and a comb

We'd go with the flow
When the weather was fine
Sometimes we'd go
Collecting scrap iron
Then we'd sit round the fires
Pass a bottle of wine
And the tales of the road
Since time out of mind

If heaven's like this
Well, that's okay with me
Where the living is fine
And living is free
If heaven's like this
Well, then here's where I'll be
On the edge of the field
On the edge of the world
Before gas and TV.

--Mark Knopfler (2009, Get Lucky)

September CommQuote

This month's quote comes from Nick Hornby's debut novel High Fidelity (1995), a hilarious riff on the interplay between pop culture (especially pop music) and real life inextricably tangled in the mind of the novel's central character who has, in this passage, his own take on media effects.

"Some of my favorite songs: "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," by Neil Young; "Last Night I Dreamed That Somebody Loved Me" by the Smiths; "Call Me" by Aretha Franklin; "I Don't Want to Talk About It" by anybody. And then there's "Love Hurts" and "When Love Breaks Down" and "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" and "The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness" and "She's Gone" and "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself" and . . . some of these songs I have listened to around once a week, on average (three hundred times in the first month, every now and again thereafter), since I was sixteen or nineteen or twenty-one. How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can that not turn you into the sort of person to break into little bits when your first love goes all wrong? What came first--the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands--literally thousands--of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives."
--Nick Hornby, High Fidelity, (Riverhead Essential Editions, 1995, pp. 24-25)