This book, written by three artists from diverse backgrounds, broaches the topic of the influence of the Islamic State beyond its territorial ambitions. The authors describe the project as investigating the mythological structures of the Islamic State through examining images, narratives and sounds. As such, this book adds to the corpus of works that have been published recently, such as Media Persuasion in the Islamic State (Aggarwal Reference Aggarwal2019), Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate (Atwan Reference Atwan2015), and Islamic State's Online Propaganda: A Comparative Analysis (Lakomy Reference Lakomy2021), that have examined the digitisation of violence and mediatised influence of the social movement.

Chapter 1 is an abridged and revised version of a Master's thesis by Hasan Özgür Top when he was studying at the Dutch Art Institute. It traces the history of the Islamic State and explores the strategies of Islamic State propaganda material, one of which is making the masses and the consumers the subject of scrutiny. Presenting evidence from IS-produced videos and their online magazine, Dabiq, Top enters into a discourse analysis of the symbolisms of the ‘golden age’, the ‘call to action’ and the idea of being ‘reborn’. The author aptly links similar themes from the representation of the heroic figure to the choice of fonts used by the Islamic State to Hollywood films like Troy and The Last Samurai that similarly depict a battle between good and evil. Top's chapter also reveals the heavily gendered aspect of these messages. Out of the 1,114 videos that were archived, adult women only appeared in four of them.

The second chapter by Mandus Ridefelt is of the most interest to me, and I suspect, to most readers of Popular Music. It deals with the music produced by the Islamic State, a topic that the author admits has been extensively covered. Termed as jihadist nasheed by Ridefelt, he argues that almost all contemporary jihadi groups incorporate some measure of anashid (plural of nasheed), quoting a jihadist guidebook that ‘a good nasheed can spread so widely it can reach to an audience that you could not reach through a lecture or a book’ (p. 105). This is not unlike the Nation of Islam's leader, Louis Farrakhan's description of the influence of the rap outfit Public Enemy, and the influence of popular music, which he alleged has overtaken the reach of sermons conducted by the religious elites. In my own work, Representing Islam: Hip-Hop of the September 11 Generation (2020), I observed how rap has both been harnessed to proclaim a form of G-had by some groups, but overwhelmingly, the potency of hip-hop music, with some level of nasheed infused, has been utilised by young Muslims as a vehicle for social activism and as a tool to fight Islamophobia (Kamaludeen Reference Kamaludeen2020). Not unlike the idea of the G-had, as promoted by the likes of British group Sheikh Terra and the Soul Salah Crew in their track ‘Dirty Kuffar’, Ridefelt contends that the anashid of the Islamic State not only depicted combat in their lyrics but also infused combat sounds. The author alleges that it is difficult to differentiate between fact and fiction in the music videos, and this distinction is not the purpose of the videos. Rather, their aim is the ‘aspiration towards reality’ (p. 115).

The last chapter, which is the briefest of the three, is authored by Assem Hendawi. Here, Hendawi discusses the cosmic apocalypticism and transgressive violence which form the aesthetic backdrop of the messages of the Islamic State. These messages have spawned memes that are often appropriated by the masses in a desensitised manner, even to the extent of finding humour in all the violence. Especially in the age of social media, Islamic State materials find new life when appropriated by the masses, often by taking them out of context. This gives rise to a moral conundrum. This creative mimicry, which is a pivotal aspect of the memetic practice, leads to an ambivalence as to whether their producers are mocking or revering the original content.

Read collectively, it is evident that the variegated profiles of the authors afford them an edge in terms of the different lens each of them brings into the project. This is seen in the distinct entry points that they examine given an overarchingly similar subject matter. One particular strength of the book, although this can be more consistent across the three chapters, is that it engages with social theories extensively. The works of Deleuze, Adorno, Steigler, Althusser, Fanon and Freud, among others, provide heuristic tools for the authors to illuminate different facets of their analyses. The book also goes beyond merely looking at the Islamic State and, where relevant, draws parallels to similar campaigns and rhetoric, for example those coming from the White House past and present, to Erdoğan's neo-Ottomanism to the Marxist revolutionary, Che Guevara.

Caliphate Pop does not read like a standard monograph, however, instead reading more like a loosely tied together volume. The narrative of the book is rather segmented with each of the three authors writing the three chapters of the book separately. The downside of this is that the chapters seem rather stand-alone, and the reader must work hard to connect the common themes and overlapping analyses that penetrate the three chapters. Hence, the book would have benefitted from a more extensive introduction and possibly a conclusion to bind the work together. As a result of the rather fragmented approach, the chapters are also written each in their own individual style without a uniform format. For instance, the last chapter does not have an introduction, unlike the first two, and the first chapter is the only one with a conclusion. The chapters also get considerably shorter as they go along. The methodology of the book could also have been made more explicit. A more sustained discourse analysis of the material presented would have illuminated the points made by the authors better. Finally, the book could also be laden with less jargon to avail itself to a wider readership.

All in all, Caliphate Pop is a welcome contribution to the field. It lies in the intersections of several academic fields and should be of interest to, albeit not restricted to, those in the fields of digital culture, security studies and popular culture. It is a very relevant study and will continue to be significant beyond this day and age, as scholars play catch-up to the rapid developments in what the authors refer to as the ‘volatile governmentalities of contemporary techno-politics’ that unfold within the chaos of the internet.