This is a brief meditation on ethnicity as a source of all powerful musical styles, as a kind of curse in the contemporary world of nation states, and as an ever more complex puzzle for every student of popular music to solve.

The Raincoats were one of a handful of British, all-female punk bands successful enough to release records and tour internationally. Since the late 1970s, critics intrigued by the idea that music can enact gender, have heard their music as somehow embodying femininity. I explore the discursive origins of the Raincoats music as ‘feminine music’ before analysing their music to determine the specific nature of their work as female punk musicians. The Raincoats took advantage of punk's ideology of amateurism to shatter traditional (read: masculine) subjectivity in rock music. Analysing their music reveals the ways in which their music triggers listening that encourages an understanding of their music as feminine.

This is the story of a rock venue in an English city. Hardly, it might be supposed, the stuff of great drama; there are, after all, rock venues throughout England. Most towns and cities of any size have at least one. But this venue, the Waterfront in Norwich, is distinctive, if not unique, in at least two respects.It was purpose-built and, more importantly, it was largely financed, not by private enterprise, but by the city's Labour council. Norwich's local politicians risked both financial and political capital so that their city could host performers like Nitzer Ebb, Dumpy's Rusty Nuts, Labi Siffre and Orzic Tentacles (all of whom appeared at the Waterfront in the space of a week in November 1991). The £1 million project opened in late 1990, amid much publicity and intense criticism from the opposition parties and local residents: these complaints continued into the venue's second year, when it received a further subsidy of £30,000 from the council. Why did the council take these risks? What were the political interests and values which led to this novel policy development?

One afternoon in September 1982, at Tirrenia, in the province of Pisa, hundreds of Communist party-workers prepared for the opening concert of an Italian tour by the rock band Genesis. The work took place under the red flags of the National Festival of the Communist Party – L'Unità – and to the sound of traditional songs of political struggle coming from the loudspeakers placed all round the area. These were unpaid workers, highly organised, and they had come from all over Italy.

Radio and the recording business have, since the beginning of the last century, had a profound impact upon existing musical life whenever and wherever they have decisively and irreversibly established themselves. Their arrival restructures and redefines the social relations of music in many aspects of its production, performance and reception. Radio and recording technologies have had a significant impact on the livelihoods of all those who one way or another try to make a living from music (composers, performers and - in Europe - publishers, for instance). Performance itself is transformed as new norms are set in place which call for new levels of technique and interpretation. Finally the conditions of musical reception are reconfigured and new `taste publics' emerge, potentially in conflict with each other, as musical life is totalised into a new and complex unity.

This article examines the cultural biases embedded in critiques of Mandopop (Mandarin Chinese pop music). Contemporary commercialised Mandopop is generally recognised as beginning around 1980, drawing on musical traditions from the early twentieth century. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Taiwan’s popular music swept across China and many in the PRC government reacted to the values embedded in Taiwan’s lyrics with mistrust and disdain, expressing a fear that Taiwan and Hong Kong’s cultural incursion would result in the PRC’s loss of national identity. On the other side of the strait, people in Taiwan complained of Mandopop’s fast pace and changing nature and linked this to similar trends in Taiwan’s society. More recently, several of Taiwan’s scholars have critiqued Mandopop for promoting patriarchal gender roles, and English language publications complain of a lack of individualism in that songs are produced in teams of composers, lyricists and performers. I examine the cultural contexts of these critiques in order to come to a better understanding of the most popular Chinese language music in the world.

Interest in the processes of change involved in the transformation of rural African recreational music into popular music under urban conditions has grown substantially over the past decade (see Nettl 1978; Mukuna 1980). This interest has largely focused on two complementary problem areas: what such change can tell us about the principles and dynamics of musical development, and what processes of musical change may reveal about human behaviour (see Rycroft 1977, pp. 216–17) and the role of musical expression in social reorganisation. If the study of the urban music of modern Africa is to advance our knowledge in these areas, we must formulate ‘a conceptual framework in which changes and retentions of musical style and context can be understood within a synthesis of social and cultural change’ (Szwed 1970, p. 220). The results of my research into the past three centuries of urban musical change among black South Africans have suggested some tentative steps toward constructing such a framework (see Coplan 1980A).

The global significance of Latin American popular music is well documented in contemporary research. Less is known about Latin American music and musicians in Australia and New Zealand (collectively termed ‘Australasia’): nations that have historically hosted waves of migrants from the Americas, and which are also strongly influenced by globalised US popular music culture. This article presents an overview of Latin American music in Australasia, drawing on ethnographic research, with the aim of providing a historical framework for the understanding of this music in the Australasian context. It begins with an explanation of the early 20th-century conceptualisation of ‘Latin’ in Australasia, and an investigation into how this abstract cultural construction affected performance opportunities for Latino/a migrants who began to arrive en masse from the 1970s onwards. It then discusses the performance practices that were most successfully recreated by Latin American musicians in Australia and New Zealand, especially ‘Andean’ folkloric music, and ‘tropical’ dance music. With reference to prominent individuals and ensembles, this article demonstrates how Andean and tropical performance practices have developed over the course of the last 30 years, and articulates the enduring importance of Latin American music and musicians within Australasian popular music culture.

This paper is a study of prestige and boundaries in Quebec French-language popular music. Based on interviews with artists, producers and critics conducted in the early 1990s, I argue that popular music in Quebec at that time remained divided along a symbolic boundary established in the 1960s between a highly prestigious group of songwriters/rock artists, who wrote and sang their own material, and a less prestigious group of interpreters/artistes populaires, who sang light pop songs or songs written by others. As predicted by Bourdieu, I show that artists in the most prestigious category were associated with privileged social groups and gained material and symbolic advantages from their prestige. They are more likely to receive honorific awards, to be invited to perform at special cultural events, to see their work recognised as ‘important’, and to persist over time. In opposition to Bourdieu, however, I argue that in the context of emerging nationalism, their songs were also perceived as providing collective benefits over and beyond class and gender divisions.

In recent years, pop/rock has ceased being an exclusive Anglo-American phenomenon. Local styles of rock might be found today in many countries, styles which merge local traditions with the rock aesthetic. Some products of these styles are distributed successfully in the USA and Britain under the large title of ‘ethnic pop’ (sometimes ‘world music’). The work on the emergence of these local styles tends to stress their ‘authenticity’ in one way or another: in the way they reflect political resistance, in the way they express cultural change (Szemere 1983; Fiori 1984; Vila 1987; Duran 1989; Siriyuvasak 1990; Bright 1986; Manuel 1988; Frith 1989). In addition, much of the work tends to be descriptive – there are hardly any attempts to theorise the emergence of pop/rock and its becoming ‘local authentic’ music. One salient exception is the work of Wallis and Malm (1984). They describe a two-way flow of musical elements, in which local or national music cultures both contribute to and pick up from an emerging body of music which they call transcultural. Anglo-American pop/rock is the nucleus of transcultural music. The simultaneous convergence of its influence, of access to music industry technologies, of local music culture and of the will to create something different explains, according to Wallis and Malm, the first stage of transculturation in the countries they studied.

records often include accidents. i suggest this tells us something about the flexibility of musical practices and the limits of theories. musical ‘hooks’ provide useful test-cases because the hook is normally considered the least accidental part of a song. we imagine it emerging fully formed in a moment of inspiration – the catchy phrase that comes into a songwriter's head – or at least of calculation: ‘i’ll see your vibraphone and raise you a mellotron'. but hooks sometimes incorporate accidents or happen accidentally. if hooks are less than completely determinate, then every aspect of the popular record must be subject to contingency. i argue for theories – and views of musical practices – which begin with the recognition that accidents happen.

‘Alternative’ publications challenge the conventional discourses of rock journalism. In particular, the dominant discourses of authenticity, masculinity and mythology might be countered by publications that emphasise historical and (sub)cultural framing, and that present radicalised ‘spaces of listening’. Using Bourdieu’s field theory to identify autonomous and semi-autonomous sites for rock criticism, the paper compares how a fanzine (the Sound Projector) and what Frith has termed an ideological magazine (the Wire) construct their reviews. The findings suggest that, whilst there is no evidence for an absolute break with the dominant conventions of reviewing, there is a remarkable polyglottism in alternative music reviewing. The paper emphasises differing cultural and social practices in the multiple ways the publications write about music, and argues for the value of such polyglottism.

In rock historiography, Abbey Road Studios is depicted as the rock canon's ultimate recording house; home to the Beatles, Pink Floyd and a generation of classic rock album production. In recent years, the studio has struggled to maintain itself as an operational recording house, yet effectively exploits its past to secure its future. This article considers issues of heritage, pilgrimage and tourism before elucidating brand ‘Abbey Road’ as a conflation of geographical location, zebra crossing, graffiti wall, recording house and aura. In separating the tangible aspects of Abbey Road's heritage – the zebra crossing, graffiti wall and the Beatles Abbey Road album – out from its intangibles – its ‘magic’, legacy and studio ‘vibe’ – Abbey Road's studio aura is exposed as a commodity in its own right.

Using the example of Cliff Richard fans, this article investigates to what extent the rites and rituals exercised in fandom can be regarded as representations of a religious form as understood by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Because empirical research has established its significance, the pop concert experience and its echoing effects are used as a starting point to explore the thesis that fans draw and cultivate a distinction between a profane and a sacred domain in their lives. These suggestions are further enriched by Randall Collins' and Gabriele Mordt's analyses of passions. This article adopts their concept of the sacred object as a passion-preserving device. In addition, the argument of popular music scholar Daniel Cavicchi (based on Bruce Springsteen fans) is taken one step further. Finally, I suggest a typology of fan experience that differentiates between primary interaction ritual, secondary interaction ritual, the cult of the individual and special rites.

‘What kind of music?’ This question has been put to me by hundreds of people, always for different reasons: by fellow train passengers who want to know what I do; by hi-fi dealers anxious to advise on the right type of speakers for listening to my record collection; in record shops when I enquire about the latest releases; by theatre managers when I have asked to hire their premises for a concert; by a young spectator while I am tuning up my '63 Stratocaster; by other musicians when I have asked to join a group; by civil servants responding to my application for a state grant; by sound engineers when I have hired a recording studio or amplification system; by the RAI* when I have proposed programmes or when I am engaged as a guitarist and they want to determine how much I should be paid; by policemen and frontier guards throughout Europe when I go through customs with my instruments and identity card on which is written: ‘Profession: Musician’.

The diffusion of rock and popular music from the US and British mass entertainment industries since the 1950s has had a profound impact on the music traditions world-wide. Several generations of youth have been socialised to the musical accompaniment of rock and roll music of the 1950s, the ‘beat music’ of the 1960s, the so-called ‘psychedelic’ or ‘underground’ rock music of the 1970s, disco, punk and new wave music in the 1970s and 1980s. It has resulted in the transplantation of these ‘foreign’ styles into music cultures with small groups of fan communities for rock and roll, country and western, blues, punk, reggae and others which were previously unheard of there before their introduction. In addition, domestic traditions have been profoundly affected by the diffusion of these new music styles and have integrated some of their musical, technical and other components into their own repertoires. The Schlager music in the German-speaking countries has been one of the most prominent in this respect, adapting syncopated rhythm but modifying its harmonic attributes in order to maintain its own prominence and cultural legitimacy in the music culture. Even the volkstümliche or folk-like music, a commercialised genre of traditional folk music, has undergone changes as a result of the diffusion of the newer forms of popular music. A third type of impact upon music tradition is that of ‘transnational’ or ‘transcultural’ styles. When imported musical and cultural innovations are mixed with domestic styles and traditions, these new styles and conventions are ultimately created. These, in turn, form a primary thrust in the cultivation and development of innovations in musical traditions, which eventually evolve into changes in the cultural identity of the particular country.

The New Zealand popular music industry has recently undergone impressive growth, and is poised to make a significant international impact. Two aspects of this newly privileged position are examined. First, broadly sketching twenty years of developments, I argue that Government willingness to get behind the local industry, especially the role of the post-2000 Labour Government, is a crucial determinant of the present success story. Secondly, I consider the debated relationship between local music and New Zealand cultural identity, with particular reference to two prominent musical styles: Kiwi ‘garage’ rock, and Polynesian-dominated local rap, reggae and hip-hop-inflected music. I argue that the local must not be overly valorised, and that it is necessary to distinguish between ‘local music’ as a cultural signifier and locally made music, with both worthy of support.

This article examines the complex racial and national politics that surrounded British post-punk musicians’ incorporation of and identification with dub-reggae in the late 1970s. I analyse this historical moment from sociological, intra-musical and discursive perspectives, reading the musical incorporation of dub-reggae by The Police, Gang of Four and Joy Division against the backdrop of the era's music press discourse. I also unpack discursive representations of Jamaican musicians and ask: what role does subaltern performativity play in contributing to ‘imaginary’ critical conceptions of dub, particularly concerning the Jamaican melodica player Augustus Pablo? I conclude by suggesting that post-punk musicians’ incorporation of dub-reggae represents neither an unencumbered post-colonial socio-musical alliance nor a purely colonial one, but rather exceeds and therefore problematises these two positions.

Current musicology has not developed such a methodical or systematic knowledge of melody as it has of other aspects of music. Music schools have courses and examinations in harmony, counterpoint, musical forms, etc., but not in melody; in the same way, books dealing with melody are rare exceptions.