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In 1996, Emma Baulch went to live in Bali to do research on youth culture. Her chats with young people led her to an enormously popular regular outdoor show dominated by local reggae, punk, and death metal bands. In this rich ethnography, she takes readers inside each scene: hanging out in the death metal scene among unemployed university graduates clad in black T-shirts and ragged jeans; in the punk scene among young men sporting mohawks, leather jackets, and hefty jackboots; and among the remnants of the local reggae scene in Kuta Beach, the island’s most renowned tourist area. Baulch tracks how each music scene arrived and grew in Bali, looking at such influences as the global extreme metal underground, MTV Asia, and the internationalization of Indonesia’s music industry.

Making Scenes is an exploration of the subtle politics of identity that took place within and among these scenes throughout the course of the 1990s. Participants in the different scenes often explained their interest in death metal, punk, or reggae in relation to broader ideas about what it meant to be Balinese, which reflected views about Bali’s tourism industry and the cultural dominance of Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital and largest city. Through dance, dress, claims to public spaces, and onstage performances, participants and enthusiasts reworked “Balinese-ness” by synthesizing global media, ideas of national belonging, and local identity politics. Making Scenes chronicles the creation of subcultures at a historical moment when media globalization and the gradual demise of the authoritarian Suharto regime coincided with revitalized, essentialist formulations of the Balinese self.

Bob Marley's recordings, some twenty years after his death, still enjoy enormous international popularity. For popular music fans in most of the world, reggae looms so large as to be Jamaica's only music and Marley its consummate musician. In this book, Jamaicans Kevin Chang  and Wayne Chen offer a history of reggae, accounting for its rise and devolution.

Jamaican music can be roughly divided into four eras, each with a distinctive beat - ska, rocksteady, reggae, and dancehall. Ska dates from about 1960 to mid-1966 and rocksteady from 1966 to 1968, while from 1969 to 1983 reggae was the  popular beat. The reggae era had two phases, "early reggae" up to 1974 and "roots reggae" up to 1983. Since 1983 dancehall has been the prevalent the prevalent sound.

The authors describe each stage in the development of the music, identifying the most popular songs and artists, highlighting the significant social, political, and economic issues as they affected the music scene. While they write from a Jamaican perspective, the intended audience is "any person, local or foreign, interested in an intelligent discussion of reggae music and Jamaica." Featuring some four hundred illustrations that range from album covers to rare photos, Reggae Routes profiles the innumerable artists, producers, and recordings that secured an international audience for Jamaican music.

Artists discussed: Toots and the Maytals, the Wailers, Gaylads, Desmond Dekker, Delroy Wilson, Alton Ellis, Burning Spear, Itals, Wailing Souls, Skatalites, Heptones, and hundreds more.