This paper explores the social origins and development of music relayed through loudspeakers in British factories during World War Two, focusing on the BBC programme Music While You Work, which provided a national soundtrack for factory work, and the contemporary institutions of Industrial Psychology, which promoted music as a highly ‘valuable’ accompaniment to work and formulated scientific principles governing its broadcast. Combining archival evidence from these organisations, the paper first outlines the historical circumstances of development, detailing the form of broadcasts and of the music itself. Subsequently, the causes of music's introduction to the factory are analysed. The central argument advanced is that the music resulted centrally from top-down initiatives from a ‘human relations school’ coalition of institutions and individuals, in which the aims of increased productivity and the humanisation of the workplace intermingled, but in which the aim of increased productivity dominated. Concluding remarks assess the argument and relate it to the growing literature on contemporary practices of the sound-tracking of social life.

The ‘temp track’, a temporary mock-up of a film's soundtrack, is assembled from pre-existing music prior to the real, commissioned score being composed. An integral element of the post-production process of American feature films, it survives only in its role for audience previews. Constructed by a music editor, in most cases, it is a blueprint of a film's soundtrack – a musical topography of score, songs, culture and codes in which a balance must obtain between the director's vision, the music's function, underlying requirements of genre, and the spectator's perception. This article demonstrates that the temp track informs compositional practices and the final score, and makes the argument that textual analysis would benefit from the recognition of the role of production practices. Drawing on published sources and interviews with practitioners, this article provides historical context and musical detail, and shows how productive analysis can be when it draws on practitioners' insights as well as textual analysis. Film score analysis must not begin and end with the finished film score but must utilise a more eclectic methodology which takes into account the production process. Film score analysis should reflect the constitutive nature of film and film music.

Kind of Blue has been misrepresented by its promoters. The roots in the blues of the best-selling jazz album have repeatedly been obscured in favour of modal features whose associations are less problematic for those coping with the realities of racial injustice. The case that the blues underpins the modal language of the album is made through reconsideration of the claims made for compositional features of individual tracks. Recognition of the transformed blues language that lies at the heart of the album places questions of its significance on a new footing, opening up the mix of musical languages on the album to interpretation within the context of integrationist ideals of the late 1950s. A critical reading of the album against this backdrop leads to the suggestion that the ongoing commercial success of the album can be partly attributed to a retention of integrationist ideals that masks the reality of persistent inequalities in race relations.

By applying Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's systems model of creativity, evidence can be presented to claim that despite ‘Yesterday’s promotion as a Romantic piece of creative activity, perpetuating the myth of the mystically inspired freely expressive artist, the creation of ‘Yesterday’ can be seen as a more considered and rational process than otherwise mythologised. The definition of creativity assumes an activity whereby products, processes and ideas are generated from antecedent conditions by the agency of someone, whose knowledge to do so comes from somewhere and the resultant novel variation is seen as a valued addition to the store of human knowledge. As an example of a system at work, the song's creation satisfies more closely the characteristics ascribed to the rationalist approach to creativity. From the evidence, it can be argued that creativity is a dynamic system that works on a larger scale than that of the sole individual posited by the Romantic conception and concomitant understandings. It, instead, incorporates the actions of the person, in this case Paul McCartney, within the systemic relationships of the field and domain. These three components, person, domain and field, comprise a system with circular causality where the individual, the social organisation they create within, and the symbol system they use are all equally important and interdependent in producing creative products. ‘Yesterday’ is but one creative product of this system at work.

This article explores the relationship between musicians and the music press from the musicians' point of view, based on a collection of recent interviews with musicians working in the pop and jazz fields. It will expose some of the concrete effects of the music press using examples from the everyday experiences of musicians, which include the influence of the press in record retail, genre labelling, and creating industry buzz. But while musicians may have a pragmatic understanding of the role of music criticism, their perspectives are emotionally heated in direct proportion to the influence the press holds over their own livelihoods. The interests of the working music critic often conflict with the interests of the working musician, and this article will conclude with a discussion of how the practical conflict of interests between musicians and critics is reflected in ideological differences between the two groups.

The globalisation of reggae continues to engender a wide range of highly poignant re-inscriptions and re-interpretations of reggae's sound and of Rastafarian thought. One of the most compelling of these has been the negotiation of Rastafarian and Christian ideologies within the context of Protestant reggae bands and artists. The application of Rastafarian thought, dress and language to the evangelical concerns of Protestants – at times paradoxical, at others ingenious – signals an important moment of inter-religious contact that opens a window onto the complexities and multiple meanings that attach to music and to religious systems as they travel between the local and the global. This essay considers music by Christafari (United States), Sherwin Gardner (Trinidad and Tobago), and Stitchie (Jamaica), and considers questions related to the parallel globalisation of reggae and Rastafari. It does this by interrogating the extent to which authenticity, positionality, and religious context inform the use of and interpretation of Rastafari symbols within gospel reggae. In so doing, I introduce a concept that I call the negotiation of proximity, and offer some reflections on the ways that the Rastafari elements within gospel reggae might be understood in new, global (and newly localised) contexts.

In this article I shall attempt to demonstrate the application of an ideology-critical framework designed to give a comprehensive and differentiated account of textual ‘contradictions’ and ‘tensions’ in symbolic forms. Based on Johann Visagie's figurative semiotics of ideological discourse, this theoretical schema is demonstrated via an extensive analysis of the gospel rap video wrapped up by the African-American group Dawkins & Dawkins. As a metaphorically mediated enactment of contemporary-religious meaning, this instance of gospel rap is analysed as a forthright yet complex example of structural ambiguity. Allowing for a detailed reading of the semiotic layering surrounding and infiltrating all dimensions of this text, my interpretation problematises its reading as an uncomplicated, commercialised excursion into the pleasures of an embodied, danced religion. In both ‘highlighting’ and ‘hiding’ the layers of cultural meaning built into the metaphor of danced religion, wrapped up celebrates black religious identity without distancing it from underlying ideological formations associated with collective suffering and social injustice.

This article looks at audiocassette tapes that are produced and circulated within the Bay Area underground hip hop scene as subcultural artefacts through which an understanding of the key activities, ideologies and sensibilities that mark subcultural identity can be grasped. Using du Gay's circuit of culture (1997) as a template for organising ethnographic data, the article demonstrates the ways in which subcultural meanings are encoded into the activities surrounding the commodification of underground hip hop cassettes. Ultimately, it argues for a reading of audiocassette tapes as unique technologies that simultaneously embrace the progressive politics of subcultural inclusion while defending subcultural boundaries against mainstream co-optation.

If Brazilian and international audiences now have a far broader view of the range of the musical tradition in Brazil, and particularly the heterogeneous richness of the regional tradition of popular music in that country, it is largely due to the pioneering work of Marcus Pereira. Following the example of Cecil Sharp and Alan Lomax, the Brazilian collector of popular music and culture set out in the mid 1970s to independently produce a series of recordings of regional popular music entitled Música Popular do Brasil. This huge project is important for three main reasons. First, in a climate of uncompromising political and artistic censorship, Pereira attempted to bring to the fore elements of a cultural and political debate that had polarised Brazil in the early 1960s: a debate that was abruptly terminated by the military dictatorship that seized power in 1964. Second, Música Popular do Brasil demonstrates the beginning of an awareness of a new, more complex relationship between traditional, largely rural popular culture and the increasingly urbanised Brazilian society of the mid-1970s. Finally, at a time when popular music in Brazil was increasingly orientated towards influences emanating from abroad, Marcus Pereira dramatically bucked the trend and re-introduced the Brazilian public to aspects of the regional, rural tradition of popular music and culture that would have a huge influence in Brazilian popular music over the last three decades of the twentieth century.

I first met Gerard in 1975 in Örebro (Sweden) at the Nordic Piano Teachers' annual conference and workshops. Both of us were like fish out of water in discussions about the best fingering techniques to use in Beethoven sonatas. I had been asked to talk about popular music education and Gerard was on the lookout for fresh ideas for his art college in Lelystad. ‘I didn’t have a clue what you were actually saying' (in Swedish), he told me, ‘but it seemed to make sense’. What Gerard said he was trying to achieve in his college made perfect sense to me. He was determined to democratise music (and media) education: he wanted to right the wrong that consisted of excluding the music of the popular majority from officially sanctioned institutions of education and research. I had found a good friend and powerful ally. We kept contact from that time until very recently.

For the readers of Popular Music, the name of Toru Mitsui is associated with the ‘Booklist’, a column he was in charge of from 1989 to 2002. For many members of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the meeting he organised in Kanazawa in 1997 is unforgettable. For scholars and students interested in Japanese popular music, his numerous articles in English are the first references to be read. Last March (2005) Professor Mitsui retired from Kanazawa University, where he had taught since 1969. To commemorate his retirement, a Festschrift entitled Popular Music and Academia (2005b) was published in coordination with a symposium held at the University of Tokyo in May 2004. This is a good opportunity to look back over his prolific career in popular music studies.