This article explores the current state of the regional vernacular popular music industry in North India, assessing the changes that have occurred since around 2000 with the advent of digital technologies, including DVD format, and especially the Internet, cellphones and ‘pen-drives’. It provides a cursory overview of the regional music scene as a whole, and then focuses, as a case study, on a particular genre, namely the languriya songs of the Braj region, south of Delhi. It discusses how commercial music production is adapting, or failing to adapt, to recent technological developments, and it notes the vigorous and persistent flowering of regional music scenes such as that in the Braj region.

The practice of curation in popular music may be seen as a form of historical enquiry that works in a similar way to the critical projects of the ‘new museology’. Self-curation can be employed by musicians to re-present their work as a historiographical project of popular music and as an intervention in dominant critical accounts of the musicians' creative practices. The challenge to conventional historiography can be understood as a project of archaeology in the Foucauldian sense, where discourses surrounding objects and their histories may be contested and reinvigorated through a process of recollecting/re-collecting that also recalls Walter Benjamin's challenge to historicism. Using the work of Robert Fripp and King Crimson as an example of musician-curated recordings, I argue that legal and economic control may become a basis for aesthetic control, through which histories of creativity may be rewritten. The act of recollection/re-collection becomes a route through which musicians are able to engage with critical contexts and genre formations, and to contribute actively to the material culture of their own history.

Indie-rock band Modest Mouse's earliest music connects aphoristic fragments into uniquely disjointed narratives that resist standard formal categorisation. The band's homespun narratives make us process dramatic interactions between drastically opposed musical paradigms as we search for new formal schema by which to classify them. This, I argue, is one answer to the ‘negative dialectic’ that Adorno thought was missing in popular music. In this paper I analyse three songs in particular depth, extending a methodology borrowed from the ‘classical tradition’ that extends Edward T. Cone's ‘stratification’ analyses of Igor Stravinsky. In Modest Mouse's later work, which seemingly signals a return to simpler strophic song forms, this dialectic is spread across entire albums such as Good News for People Who Love Bad News; but even in individual songs, despite a simplistic façade, my ‘stratification graphs’ reveal deep dialectical negativities.

The desire to construct and define a sense of national identity has often been regarded as something of an ‘obsession’ in Cuban political and cultural discourse. Throughout the Revolution, rock music has consistently played some part in the making of a Cuban soundscape. Yet rock has often been seen as something of a threat to an ‘autochthonous’ construction of Cuban culture, and has often been denied legitimacy as part of the Cuban soundworld. Despite the rather liminal position it occupied throughout the revolutionary period, rock music in contemporary Cuba is as ‘obsessed’ with constructing, defining and reflecting a sense of Cubanness as more ‘recognisably Cuban’ musical forms. In this paper I explore some of the negotiations and conflicts in the music of the controversial rock band, Porno Para Ricardo: negotiations between traditional musics, the state and rock music in the perennial quest to define Cubanía.

Using Norwegian hip hop as an example, this article argues that public sphere theory offers a fruitful theoretical framework in which to understand the political significance of music. Based on a musical and lyrical analysis of Lars Vaular's ‘Kem Skjøt Siv Jensen’ (Who Shot Siv Jensen) – a song that recently became the subject of extensive public political discourse in Norway – this article first highlights how the aesthetic language specific to hip hop music constitutes a form of political discourse that may be particularly effective in addressing and engaging publics. Further, the analysis brings attention to how hip hop music is characterised by phatic, rhetoric, affective and dramatic modes of communication that may be of value to democratic public discourse. Lastly, this article examines the expressive output of ‘Kem Skjøt Siv Jensen’ in light of Habermas' concept of communicative rationality. In conclusion, the article contends that the dichotomy between (‘rational’) verbal argument and (‘irrational’) musical expressivity constructed within public sphere theory is contrived and, moreover, that hip hop expressivity under certain conditions does conform to the standards of communicative rationality.

This paper considers the ways in which the biguine (or ‘beguine’) circulated as a French West Indian musical genre and as a signifier for colonial and island exoticism in non-biguine musical genres during the early to mid-20th century. I begin by suggesting the ways in which the colonial and transnational conditions of its performance have left a history of ideological tensions within popular and academic discussions about the biguine. I then suggest some of the specific ways in which the biguine's circulation functioned in the context of the interwar years and resonated with the discourse and dynamics of ‘Jazz Age Paris’, negrophilia and le tumulte noir. Finally, I offer a close reading of the ways in which French comedian-singer Dranem's ‘La Biguine’ and Cole Porter's ‘Begin the Beguine’ playfully represent the genre in French chanson coloniale and popular song. Rather than viewing the biguine's conditions of performance, or the re-appropriation of the biguine in name only, as the equivalent of the complete musical colonisation and erasure of the genre, I propose that we extend biguine discussion beyond its empirical musicological elements, and lay claim on the echoes of biguine discourse as they resonate through other genres.

This paper on Soviet Estonian jazz explores the dynamics of the processes which temporarily extinguished jazz from the public arena during late-Stalinism. This microhistory inflected study draws on the conception of ‘rupture’ through a close reading of the way jazz was constructed in the official narratives of the Estonian cultural newspaper Sirp ja Vasar. Jazz in Estonia experienced no rupture during the first postwar years, but then the three successive Stalinist campaigns, each with gradually decreasing tolerance towards jazz, led finally to the temporary public disappearance of the music in 1950. The strategies enforced in the late 1940s, such as anti-jazz orchestra reform, dance reforms that banned the foxtrot and the other modern dances, and the eradication of the word jazz from public discourse, all served to silence the ‘formalistic’ musical form by framing it with negative connotations and by shaping the taste of the masses according to Soviet ideological paradigms.