In this essay, I explore the use of rap and hip-hop conventions as they have developed within the self-consciously contemporary American Jewish ‘hipster’ scene between c. 1986 and 2006, framed particularly around the way these genres have addressed the discourses of masculinity within Jewish culture. By exploring the works and actions of such artists as Matisyahu and the Hip Hop Hoodíos within the context of both American Jewish masculinity discussions and the historical relationship of Jews with commercial hip-hop performance, I attempt to explore how a population’s attempts at musical ‘change’ act as a crucial part of the religious and ethnic transmission and preservation process. Although outwardly seen as based on mimesis and even novelty, ‘Jewish’ hip hop, I suggest, instils a deep sense of identity into a population often characterised as iconoclastic, dynamic, politically inclusive and culturally mutable. Masculinity therefore serves largely as a vessel for young Jews to fashion a sense of self into a conversation from which they had previously been largely absent: one of several strategies used both to unmoor and to redefine what it means to be a ‘new’ Jew.

This article closely analyses the rhythmic components in John Lee Hooker’s boogie. We show how Hooker recasts a signature riff from a ternary to a binary beat subdivision, paving the way for the triple-to-duple shift that characterised mid-century American popular music. Further, we attribute the boogie’s ‘hypnotic’ feel to two psychoacoustic phenomena: stream segregation and temporal order misjudgement. Stream segregation occurs when the musical surface is divided by the listener into two or more auditory entities (streams), usually as a result of timbral and registral contrasts. In Hooker’s case, these contrasts occur between the guitar groove’s downbeats and upbeats, whose extreme proximity also blurs their temporal order. These expressive effects are complemented by global and gradual accelerandos that envelop Hooker’s early performances.

At the level of micro-intonation, singing provides an object for intimate corporeal identification for the listener. In fact, the listener can, by way of vocal identification, achieve a direct corporeal relationship with the vocal performance. Similarly, the researcher can use his/her own purposeful identification and imitation as a means of observation. ‘Once in a century’ is a description often attached to the legendary singer Olavi Virta (1915–1972), who had a significant impact on Finnish popular music during the 1950s and is considered a cultural icon by many Finns. In this article, the vocal performance on the novelty recording ‘Luonasi jos oisin (‘If I were there with you’)/Isn’t it Romantic?’ is studied in order to map out its gestural content. Olavi Virta was in possession of a rich arsenal of vocal gestures. The gestures shared a relationship with the semantic content of the lyrics – not always mimetic but often contrapuntal, polarising, or estranging.

‘Alternative’ publications challenge the conventional discourses of rock journalism. In particular, the dominant discourses of authenticity, masculinity and mythology might be countered by publications that emphasise historical and (sub)cultural framing, and that present radicalised ‘spaces of listening’. Using Bourdieu’s field theory to identify autonomous and semi-autonomous sites for rock criticism, the paper compares how a fanzine (the Sound Projector) and what Frith has termed an ideological magazine (the Wire) construct their reviews. The findings suggest that, whilst there is no evidence for an absolute break with the dominant conventions of reviewing, there is a remarkable polyglottism in alternative music reviewing. The paper emphasises differing cultural and social practices in the multiple ways the publications write about music, and argues for the value of such polyglottism.

This article examines the cultural biases embedded in critiques of Mandopop (Mandarin Chinese pop music). Contemporary commercialised Mandopop is generally recognised as beginning around 1980, drawing on musical traditions from the early twentieth century. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Taiwan’s popular music swept across China and many in the PRC government reacted to the values embedded in Taiwan’s lyrics with mistrust and disdain, expressing a fear that Taiwan and Hong Kong’s cultural incursion would result in the PRC’s loss of national identity. On the other side of the strait, people in Taiwan complained of Mandopop’s fast pace and changing nature and linked this to similar trends in Taiwan’s society. More recently, several of Taiwan’s scholars have critiqued Mandopop for promoting patriarchal gender roles, and English language publications complain of a lack of individualism in that songs are produced in teams of composers, lyricists and performers. I examine the cultural contexts of these critiques in order to come to a better understanding of the most popular Chinese language music in the world.

This paper focuses on the musical discourse of nostalgia evidenced in the songs of Dana International, an Israeli transsexual singer who took First Prize in the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest. It is organised around several songs featuring various compositional strategies, beginning with remakes of older songs and leading into new ones. Through quotation of music and/or lyrics, and the alteration and departure from the original, Dana premiers, transforms and renews songs in a way unique to her: she forces the audience to rethink what is natural and what is historically constructed, blurs distinctions between the sexes, past and present, the national and international, and draws on nostalgia as a powerful device to unsettle and question received truths. Her songs often mock and parody the masculinist, nationalist myths of mainstream Israeli culture, exposing the ideology of its artefacts. By promoting various types of blending, Dana challenges the notion of fixed borders. Despite the musical surface of popular song, which sounds international and without specific identity, the deep structures of these songs are in fact very much about complex questions of identity.

Hosted by The University of Glasgow’s Music Department, the biennial IASPM UK & Ireland Conference, entitled ‘Problems, Disputes, Questions’, took place on 12–14 September 2008. The aim was to explore issues that have in recent years concerned and provoked discussion among IASPM members, with the three main themes of the conference being Music and National Identity, Popular Music Theory, and The Musical Experience.

Those of us who found we were sitting on or next to an empty cinema type numbered seat with black gaffer tape covering its number gathered at the front of the room and then, after a ten-minute break, entered into a windowless studio where two rows of seats were arranged in a semi-circle. In front of the seats were three high microphones, a keyboard, and a table with an Apple Mac laptop on it (the iconic corporate apple sign was the only thing that glowed in the dark while we sang). After an introduction from Drummond, he played a note and its octaves above and below and we hummed along to get in pitch to a count of ten. His recording man checked all was entering the Mac hard disc and then Drummond counted 1,2,3,4 and we began singing the note for five minutes, stopping only as we wished for breath. The lights were turned off so that we would not feel embarrassed. One was aware of the people each side and voices coming from behind and around while simultaneously being aware of one’s own thoughts – at least I was. I loved the idea of just breathing whenever, as opposed to singing for a phrase, and after a time decided that as five minutes was a long time I would use it as a meditation and walk along a beach, North Berwick beach. By the time we had done the first five-minute note I was only half-way along the beach.