In South Africa, the prospects for social integration were auspicious after the first democratic elections in 1994. As the popular music of the time shows, it was not only blacks who exulted in the new ‘rainbow’ euphoria: many whites did so too. But for millions of black and white citizens, this moment was short lived. The government's adoption of neo-liberal policies had severe social consequences – which it and the new elite sought to conceal behind populist calls to ‘race’ solidarity, a new racial typecasting and slurs aimed at whites in general. ‘White’ popular music has responded to these reversals in a variety of ways – including direct criticism, sharp satire, humour and the expression of ‘fugitive’ identities. Perhaps more remarkably, white musicians have stressed the need for self-reinvention in music that is ironic, unpredictable, transgressive. These songs play with malleable identities; tokens of a disdain for fixed or essential identities, they are hopeful signposts towards a more integrated future.

This essay aims to expand on existing narratives of medieval music performance by exploring recent interpretations of the troubadours. Recent advances in the field of ethnomusicology, popular music and medieval music reception suggest the need to view medieval music performance in ways other than the conventional narrative of early music performance. This article focuses on the troubadours, originally song-makers in the late medieval Midi, or South of France. Based on my interviews with recent ‘living troubadours’ in the United States and France, I present evidence for multifarious musical interpretations of the art de trobar, or medieval troubadour art. Living troubadours under consideration here include Eco-Troubadour Stan Slaughter from Missouri and Occitan rap group Massilia Sound System from Marseille. The latter claim a special distinction as living descendants of the original troubadours; the former views himself as more remotely related to medieval music. And while all the different musicians considered here offer widely contrasting interpretations of the medieval art de trobar, they do have in common certain recent musical influences, along with a view of folk music as an open-ended, and musically flexible category. All of these artists are also united in their belief that the essence of folk song is an urgent message which, though it may range from recycling to anti-centralist politics, consistently controls the musical medium. What the groups considered here have in common with traditional early music groups is their creative use of contemporary influences to evoke for their audience the Middle Ages.

Historically, the field of ethnomusicology has tended to neglect the lives and work of individual musicians in favour of a view of music as culture, a disciplinary perspective that has assumed the homogeneity of the world's cultures. Contesting this erasure of the musical subject, biographical micro-histories situate the individual at the centre of music studies. Accordingly, the subject of this article is a self-identified ‘local’ jazz musician, whose narrative elucidates the exigencies of his musical and social life. One of the music's ‘lesser lives’, ‘LC’ is typical of those players who negotiate the contested terrain of jazz scenes peripheral to the jazz world's centre, New York City. The explication of his musical aesthetic and its influence upon his self-image as a jazz musician is directed toward a more representative view of jazz than that of institutionalised histories, which promulgate a ‘Great Man’ narrative. Incorporating contemporary discourse and critical race theories as alternatives to traditional modes of aesthetic inquiry, this study unpacks issues related to musical and social dialogism and signification, ‘voice’ and identity, and race and masculinity as a means of illuminating those criteria deemed crucial by a particular musician in his search for existential meaning and a jazz truth.

For Australian men, the very act of appearing on stage has for much of the twentieth century aroused suspicion about their gender status and their sexuality. To aspire to the stage often implied homosexuality culturally in Australia. This has been evident in the evolving aesthetic of white Australian masculinity in pop music from the 1970s onwards. For most of that period, Anglo-Australian males who presented themselves in a rigid, almost asexual way dominated the aesthetic. The reality of urban Australia was ignored in their images, which were essentially confined to outback or coastal Australian settings. This paper examines that development as part of a continuum of twentieth century Australian male music performance that has variously been informed by the bush legend; a mythologised late nineteenth-century Australian masculine image, popularised in The Bulletin under the editorship of Archibald, that saw the urban as the feminine and the rural as the masculine. The paper considers how the combination of sexual anxiety surrounding male gender identity in Australian performance, and this rigid bush aesthetic, have encouraged the development of unstable male gender representations in Australian music that for the most part have come across as either caricatured male, sexless or anti-pop. The exception is the late Michael Hutchence whose performances were a clear departure from this in that on stage and in music videos he conveyed a star persona that was sexually charged and often ambiguous about its sexuality. It is for that reason alone that Michael Hutchence has been referred to as Australia's only international rock star (Carney 1997).

IASPM conferences are always enjoyable. There is plenty of enthusiasm for music, as well as much skilful delineation of its form and cultural context. IASPM conferences also have a pretty flat structure and, although there is never enough, a relatively high degree of interaction between people from different countries, ethnicities, disciplines, sexualities. Certainly, the academic star system is in evidence, but its worst manifestations are suppressed because most people want their conference to be democratic, to represent an alternative kind of academic culture.