During the 2010s a new generation of queer hip hop artists emerged, providing an opportunity to engage with a set of politics defined by art, fashion, lyrics and music. A leading proponent of this movement was Azealia Banks, the controversial rapper, artist and actress from New York. This study instigates a critical investigation of her performance strategies in the track and video, ‘Chasing Time’ (2014), offering up various perspectives that probe into queer agency. It is suggested that techniques of sonic styling necessitate a consideration of subjectivity alongside genre and style. Employing audiovisual methods of analysis, we reflect on the relationship between gendered subjectivity and modalities of queerness as a means for demonstrating how aesthetics are staged and aligned to advanced techniques of production. It is argued that the phenomenon of eroticised agency, through hyperembodied display, is central to understanding body politics. This article opens a space for problematising issues of black female subjectivity in a genre that is traditionally relegated to the male domain.

Using Swedish metal band Ghost as a primary case study, this article examines how anonymous bands mediate their identity through the use of masks. The isolation of the band members’ ‘real’ identities from their musical performance complicates traditional modes of ‘knowing’ the performer, but in turn enables the formation of a multitude of connectivities, as audiences utilise masked bodies as sites upon which to project their desires and fantasies. Such projections are integral to the ways in which masking allows performers to mobilise and sustain their connections to audiences, who themselves become complicit in the maintenance of anonymity. This article thus considers how masks might challenge established notions of popular music performance, celebrity and authenticity, particularly within heavy metal contexts, and investigates how masks, rather than de-identifying a performer, can invite intimate connections among musicians and audiences.

This article discusses the development of a live music network in Larnaca, Cyprus. It is the result of a 9 month field research project centred on a specific music venue and it is based on interviews with members of four local prominent rock bands and the venue manager. These interviews were further informed by several discussions with numerous audience members, the result of the author's participatory involvement in this network. The emphasis of the discussion lies in the experiences of the performers and their views concerning the growth of this live music network, which in itself is an indicator of the dynamic relationship between underground musical tastes and the presence of mainstream currents in the city. The purpose of this research is to highlight that the development and preservation of such live music networks depend on various factors and to argue that the study of transformations of a locality's musical life can lead to sociological readings regarding its music-related past and present.

This article focuses on the role of protest music in the biggest social movement of recent Turkish history. It is the result of three years of fieldwork triangulating musical and cultural analysis with ethnographic methods. Motives of the protest, strategies of the movement, agency of musicians and participatory performances are investigated and contextualised in an analysis of Turkey's cultural changes. The function of music shifted from framing the protest to encouraging political action and fostering a sense of belonging to the collective identity of the Gezi Park movement. Music even became political activism. By underlining different functions played by music in the case of the Gezi Park movement, this article problematises the relevance of music for social movements.

Social mood in Finland shifted from generally positive in the spring of 2006 to generally negative by the spring of 2009. We identify this change in mood via eight indicators, including the onset of a financial and macroeconomic crisis, a decline in measures of sentiment, a rise in radical politics and the demise of an iconic business unit of one of the country's most successful firms. From the standpoint of Prechter's socionomic theory we hypothesise that this change in social mood is also evident in a greater level of pessimism in the songs on the country's pop chart in 2009 relative to 2006. To test this hypothesis, we introduce and validate a tool to measure optimism and pessimism in popular music. We apply this tool to a random sample of songs from the Finnish pop chart from 2006 and a comparable sample from 2009. Indeed, we find that the sample from 2009 in the aggregate is substantially and significantly more pessimistic than the sample from 2006. The study serves to enrich our understanding of what makes pop songs popular and how popular music is linked psychologically to broader popular culture and other domains of social expression through a shared social mood.

Lo-fi music is commonly associated with a recording aesthetic marked by an avoidance of state-of-the-art technologies and an inclusion of technical flaws, such as tape hiss and static. However, I argue that lo-fi music is not defined merely by the presence of such imperfections, but by a discourse which deliberately draws attention to them. Album liner notes play an important role in this discourse, as they can function as curatorial practices, through which lo-fi artists give an appropriate frame of reference to their recordings. By highlighting the ‘honest’ character of the recordings, the intimate recording spaces, the materiality of the equipment and its ambiguous character as machine/instrument/performer, they invite listeners to adopt a genre-adequate mode of listening. Rather than listening past hiss and other recording artefacts as undesirable qualities, listeners are asked to listen for these qualities as an essential element of not just the recordings, but the music itself.

The emergence of punk in Britain (1976–1978) is recalled and documented as a moment of rebellion, one in which youth culture was seen to challenge accepted values and forms of behaviour, and to set in motion a new kind of cultural politics. In this article we do two things. First, we ask how far punk's challenge extended. Did it penetrate those political, cultural and social elites against which it set itself? And second, we reflect on the problem of recovering the history and politics of moments such as punk, and on the value of archives to such exercises in recuperation. In pursuit of both tasks, we make use of a wide range of historical sources, relying on these rather than on retrospective oral or autobiographical accounts. We set our findings against the narratives offered by both subcultural and mainstream histories of punk. We show how punk's impact on elites can be detected in the rhetoric of the popular media, and in aspects of the practice of local government and the police. Its impact on other elites (e.g. central government or the monarchy) is much harder to discern. These insights are important both for enriching our understanding of the political significance of punk and for how we approach the historical record left by popular music.