This article examines the musical techniques used to create humour in the contemporary Broadway musical The Book of Mormon. Drawing on existing theories of parody, I argue that most songs initially rely on ‘straight’ and accurate imitations of other Broadway composers and pop-rock artists to set up an incongruity with the characters’ words or actions. There is a tendency then for these intertextual references to be layered or exaggerated, giving the joke in question an overblown quality. I adopt the novel label of a ‘musical caricature’ to describe such instances. This analysis thus presents a new methodological tool for studying musical humour; it also offers insights into The Book of Mormon's critical success as well as the writers’ ability to evade censure for the crude and potentially offensive thematic content.

German Schlager's simple and static musical form is considered by many authors as an immutable key factor in the genre's overall success. However, the introduction of break routines and pop drops to the genre seem to refute this point of view. Cultural references and musical clichés are also integral parts of Schlager's staging. This paper presents an integrative content analysis of 548 songs from 2009 to 2019 with the aim of observing trends in musical form and the use of both cultural references and musical clichés in contemporary Schlager. Overall, the corpus shows more variability than expected, featuring a growing number of structural parts. Contrary to strong claims, the genre is undergoing a change in musical structure. However, whether this also applies to the reproduction of certain stereotypes in song lyrics remains to be seen: about a quarter of the songs contain cultural references, outnumbering musical clichés by a factor of three.

‘Bayraktar’, a pop/rap song written by a Ukrainian soldier following Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, went viral, spawning various covers, from electronic dance music to hardcore punk. I analyse this digital archive of 19 ‘Bayraktar’ songs, including five that share only the title with Taras Borovok's paradigmatic song, and contextualise it within the broader historical and decolonial frameworks of Ukrainian resistance music, including the protest music of the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan demonstrations, and the anti-war music produced during the Donbas war and in the first six months of the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war. I apply the method of multimodal critical discourse analysis to highlight the ways that sound, image (videos and stills) and text (lyrics and verbal descriptions on YouTube) forge nationalist and global protest rhetorics, and also function pragmatically to raise awareness, fundraise for the armed forces and humanitarian efforts, and boost morale in Ukraine and abroad.

This article examines emerging practices of popular music revivals that rely on affective commitments other than nostalgia. It uses two Serbian-based singers’ post-war Croatian tours as case studies, analysing musical fluidities in the material and symbolic navigation of post-Yugoslav performance networks and focusing on borderwaters such as the Danube that bridge the region's peoples, centring their interconnected industrial and cultural attachments, yet also physically and politically separating former Yugoslav republics. Reviewing hydrological conceptions of territorial belonging in the late-Yugoslav period and in the 1990s as expressed in their ballads and reception history, it argues that the singers (Đorđe Balašević and Zvonko Bogdan), in attempting to re-establish their interrepublic touring practices with the backing of Serbian tambura bands, engage in an economy of love that, as with revival tours elsewhere in Europe, has proved more efficacious than nostalgia for responding to recent political and socioeconomic changes in the European Union.

This article explores the emergence of musical performance practices whereby electronic music styles, along with the musical and sonic characteristics inherent in their electronic production, are emulated through live musical performance using acoustic instrumentation. The article draws on Brummett's (1999) concept of ‘machine aesthetics’ to explore the emergence of these practices, whereby musicians emulate sonic and musical attributes of music usually produced by machines, without the use of machines. Utilising semi-structured interviews and musical analysis of records by Abstract Orchestra and GoGo Penguin, the article attempts to contextualise these practices within their broader function in popular music production and performance.

One of the more annoying aspects of the life of a popular music academic is that we study music that is primarily made and used by people who seem to have no interest at all in what we have to say. Popular musicians and fans are engaged with what we're talking about but not with how we talk about it. When the first volume of our history of live music came out, covering 1950–67 (Frith et al. 2013), I did some non-academic promotional work for it – presenting our book at a literary festival, library events and pensioners’ clubs (these were the people who had lived through what we were describing). Audiences were, like my non-academic friends, sufficiently interested in live music history to discuss our findings with enthusiasm but, at the same time, found the book unreadable. They couldn't be doing with academic research conventions, with the references constantly interrupting the narrative flow, with the painstaking collection and assessment of evidence, the stolid back and forth between the particular (the facts) and the general (the concepts).