I have attempted to contribute to debates about the body and music through a discussion of how the performance of salsa constructs a particular sense of Latin identity through the bodies of musicians. The embodiment of salsa is proposed as a way of theorising about how body and music are articulated to communicate a particular Latin cultural identity. In considering the relationship between body and music, I have stressed the cultural construction of bodies in the sense in which bodies are not neutral biological essences.

Salsa clubs in London have provided a focus for studying the construction of Latin identities as embodied and communicated by performing salsa musicians and how this is informed by specific codes of gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Throughout this essay I have argued that the embodiment of salsa develops through specific practices whereby instruments, performance techniques, vocal sounds, bodily movements and ways of dressing are encoded and experienced as part of a particular Latin identity.

I also explained how the existence of essentialist beliefs about a natural Latin body and musical abilities, although a constraint, were challenged by musicians who are making ‘Latin’ music. First, by the involvement of non-Latin musicians in playing salsa, whose practices challenged assumptions about a ‘natural’ relationship between bodies, places and music. Second, through the participation of Latin American musicians and the new styles developing from the interaction between musicians and from having to adapt to different local circumstances. Finally, I mentioned how technological devices, sometimes used to solve practical economic problems, were contributing to the re-making of a Latin music performance and identity in London. I also indicated how the use of both Spanish and English language and the involvement of women in salsa music making were also contributing to a type of salsa and Latin performance.

However, whilst musicians have been challenging the idea of essential links between ethnicity, bodies and instruments, the practices through which salsa is embodied have continued to present limitations and expectations for women according to their sexed bodies. Particular expectations about the practices of gender and sexuality became an issue for women in relation to body movements, the use of the voice and instrumental performance. In this paper, focusing on the performance and participation of musicians in the micro setting of a club, I have suggested that women's place in salsa clubs has to be negotiated in relation to what is expected from sexed bodies. This leads me to conclude that unequal relations of power are directly experienced and embodied through gender relations and practices of sexuality and in turn operate as a micro politics of the body.

This essay argues that the widespread but not widely recognised adaptation of Frankenstein in contemporary dance music problematises the ‘technological’ constitution of modern copyright law as an instrument wielded by corporations to exert increasing control over cultural production. The argument first surveys recent accounts of intellectual property law’s responses to sound recording technologies, then historicises the modern discourse of technology, which subtends such responses, as a fetish of industrial capitalism conditioned by Frankenstein. The increasing ubiquity of cinematic Frankenstein adaptations in the latter two decades of the twentieth century outlines the popular cultural milieu in which Detroit techno developed its futuristic aesthetic, and which provided subsequent dance music producers with samples that contributed to techno’s popularisation. These cultural and economic contexts intersect in an exemplary case study: the copyright infringement dispute in 1999 and 2000 between Detroit’s Underground Resistance (UR) techno label and the transnational majors Sony and BMG.

This article discusses the findings of an Arts and Humanities Research Council project researching how music festival communities in Scotland can address issues of environmental sustainability and climate change. It investigates how music festival communities are constructed with a focus on what role, if any, they might play in responding to the global challenge of environmental sustainability. Using music festivals in Scotland as a case study, we employed a variety of research methods to interrogate different constituents in music festival communities about their views and behaviours regarding climate change and environmental sustainability. These included festival audiences via onsite questionnaires; festival organisers and promoters via interviews and focus groups; and musicians via creative practice-led research. We conclude that rather than necessarily being a site for progressive or utopian socio-cultural experimentation (as they are occasionally portrayed in festival literature), music festival communities engage in complex and often contradictory behaviours when it comes to responding to – and making sense of – their own complicity in social challenges such as climate change.

One of the formations which helps to shape the meaning of modern pop music is the charts. In theory, the charts define the most popular of popular musics, the goal, the pinnacle of success. Both professionals and audience dedicate large amounts of time and money to producing and consuming this series of comparative market histories produced at rapid and regular intervals. Technology is bent to the service of the research in order that the figures be produced more quickly and with the appearance of accuracy. But why should we be interested in the Top 40 itself rather than its music? Writers on pop have provided us with some detailed descriptions of the charts (Frith 1978; Harker 1980; Wallis and Malm 1984; Street 1986), but few have noted that this level of consumer obsession with sales figures is almost unique to the record industry. Consumers of other commodities do not usually consult a specialist book or magazine in order to discover the past sales history of their favourite brand, nor do they listen to particular radio stations in order to ascertain the best selling product of the week. Why then should the sales results of EMI, Polygram, WEA and others be of interest to their consumers when the same data about multi-national corporations in other market sectors are primarily of interest to market insiders and analysts? An important caveat needs to be added in that popular music is now not the only type of cultural production that foregrounds sales figures. More recently popular literature (the ‘Bestsellers List’), video and films have all begun to use this format but in none of these cases is the chart as central as it is with pop music.

The term ‘protest song’, which became so familiar in the context of the anti-war movement in the United States during the 1960s, has been widely applied to the songs of socio-political commitment which have developed out of traditional folksong in most of the countries of Latin America over the past twenty years (see Pring-Mill 1983 and forthcoming). Yet it is misleading insofar as it might seem to imply that all such songs are ‘anti’ something: denouncing some negative abuse rather than promoting something positive to put in its place. A more helpful designation is that of ‘songs of hope and struggle’, enshrined in the titles of two Spanish American anthologies (C. W. 1967 and Gac Artigas 1973), which nicely stresses both their ‘combative’ and their ‘constructive’ aspects, while one of the best of their singers – the Uruguayan Daniel Viglietti – describes his own songs as being ‘in some measure both de protesta and de propuesta’ (i.e. as much ‘proposing’ as they are ‘protesting’). The document with which this article is chiefly concerned uses the term ‘revolutionary song’, which clearly covers both those aspects, but such songs may be seen to perform a far more complex range of tasks than any of those labels might suggest, as soon as their functions are examined ‘on the ground’ within the immediate context of the predominantly oral cultures of Latin America to which they are addressed: cultures in which traditional folksong has retained its power and currency largely undiminished by the changes of the twentieth century, and in which the oral nature of song (with the message of its lyrics reinforced by music) helps it to gain a wider popular diffusion than the more ‘literary’ but unsung texts which make up the greater part of the genre of so-called ‘committed poetry’ (‘poesía de compromiso’) to which the lyrics of such songs clearly belong (see Pring-Mill 1978, 1979).

Punk is usually thought of as a radical reaction to local circumstances. This article argues that, while this may be the case, punk's celebration of nihilism should also be understood as an expression of the acknowledgement of the cultural trauma that was, in the late 1970s, becoming known as the Holocaust. This article identifies the disproportionate number of Jews who helped in the development of the American punk phenomenon through the late 1960s and 1970s. However, the effects of the impact of the cultural trauma of the Holocaust were not confined to Jews. The shock that apparently civilised Europeans could engage in genocidal acts against groups of people wholly or partially thought of by most Europeans as European undermined the certainties of post-Enlightenment modernity and contributed fundamentally to the sense of unsettlement of morals and ethics which characterises the experience of postmodernity. Punk marks a critical cultural moment in that transformation. In this article the focus is on punk in the United States.

As Matthew Bannister has recently suggested in these pages (see Popular Music, 25/1), The Smiths stand at the head of a 1980s Indie canon based on its rejection of a commodification associated with contemporary black US musics. This article argues that this racial understanding has also bled into the band’s critical reception, encouraging many to assume that Morrissey and Marr drew on exclusively white influences. Specifically, I argue that the white camp icons from the 1950s and 1960s who famously adorn the band’s record sleeves together form a kind of smokescreen, or ‘beard’, which stokes interest in Morrissey’s sexual predilections and orients it away from his and Marr’s Black Atlantic sources. The pre-immigrant Britain summoned up by these icons, I argue, helps prevent fans and critics alike from grasping that Morrissey’s lyrical attempts to find humour and succour by remembering pain is profoundly inspired by the African-American form of the Blues.

MCs (rappers) such as Cardi B, Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Big Sean and Young Thug use triplet rhythms in their rapping, a practice that is known as triplet flow. This paper argues that the prevalence of triplet flow is one of the most aurally salient features of contemporary hip hop, and exemplifies the popularity and influence of the Atlanta-centred genre of trap music through its sparse, slow beats. Three types of triplet flow are defined – mixed, phrasal and total – and are used to explore how various songs and artists active in the late 1980s and early 1990s provided the stylistic blueprint for triplet flow's recent explosion in popularity. With the aid of a 50 song mini-corpus, the paper concludes with a general survey of stylistic characteristics common in many songs featuring triplet flow, and further analysis of two of these songs in order to illuminate the creative, rhetorical and virtuosic potential that underpins this ostensibly simple style of rapping.

Since Thailand's Copyright Act became law in 1979 an indigenous music industry has emerged. In the past, the small recording business was concentrated on two aspects: the sale of imported records and the manufacture of popular, mainly Lukkroong music, and classical records. However, the organisation of the Association of Music Traders – an immediate reaction to the enforcement of the Copyright law – coupled with the advent of cassette technology, has transformed the faltering gramophone trade. Today, middle-class youngsters appreciate Thai popular music in contrast to the previous generation who grew up with western pop and rock. Young people in the countryside have begun to acquire a taste for the same music as well as enjoy a wider range of Pleng Luktoong, the country music with which they identify. How did this change which has resulted in the creation of a new pleasure industry come about? And what are some of the consequences of this transformation.

As a woman who performs rock music in an unabashedly ‘masculine’ fashion, Suzi Quatro is often criticised for trying to be ‘one of the boys’. Through close examinations of Quatro's performance strategies, including her repertoire, physical performance and vocal presence, I hope to show that Quatro's performances of gender and sexual identity on sound recordings and video belie such an uncomplicated characterisation. Focusing particularly on Quatro's ability to construct multiple subject positions that are ambiguous or mutually contradictory with respect to gender and sexuality, I shall argue that the role of female cock-rocker, as she performs it, is a paradoxical one that destabilises the gender codings from which it is constructed and celebrates the polymorphousness and performativity of identity.

Theodor Adorno's writings on jazz remain at best a puzzle, and to many an acute embarrassment. To jazz historians they merely contain ‘some of the stupidest pages ever written about jazz’ (Hobsbawm 1993, p. 300) and are generally dismissed without further comment. Adorno scholars, on the other hand, are unlikely to see in them anything more than preliminary steps to his later and more substantial studies in the sociology of music, or – in the words of Martin Jay (1984, p. 132) – a ‘gloss on The Authoritarian Personality’. Nor are matters helped by Adorno's own attitude. In the preface to volume 17 of his Gesammelte Schriften he clearly distances himself from his early jazz writings, referring to his ignorance of the specifically American features of jazz, his dependence on the German-Hungarian pedagogue Mátyás Seiber in matters of jazz technique, and his willingness to draw hasty psycho-sociological conclusions without clear knowledge of the institutions of the commercial music industry. If these essays are belittled by their own author, why should we bother to study them at all?

This article explores the case of a musician performing pro-Zapatista revolutionary songs in a restaurant in a city in southern Mexico which has undergone rapid gentrification since the turn of the century. It highlights the particular set of constraints on, and possibilities for, musical creativity that emerged in an urban setting in which space was increasingly ordered around the accumulation of rents. Exploring relationships between commercial strategy and musical detail, it examines tensions arising around the performance of a revolutionary body of song in such a setting. To conclude, and drawing on the recent work of Anna Tsing, it introduces the notion of musical ‘salvage’ to make sense of the relationship between protest and commerce. Recognizing the incompleteness of revolutionary songs’ translation into the rapidly gentrifying context of San Cristóbal, it is argued here, may help to underline performer agency and creativity.

Music has rarely exerted such positively hypnotic fascination on such masses of listeners as it has since the meteoric rise of the English group, the Beatles, at the begining of the 1960s. Under this influence the leisure behaviour of young people began to undergo lasting change, focusing around music to an extent that no one — despite the periodically recurring waves of enthusiasm for specific vogues within dance music — would have thought possible. Young people in their thousands took up music making as a leisure activity once again, to say nothing of the masses that a single rock concert was capable of mobilising. At the same time, music has become a sociopolitical problem on a scale never seen before, concerning teachers, sociologists and psychologists equally — and it has become so in both capitalist and socialist societies, even though with quite different emphases. Evidently, then, for a whole age group with a lower age limit of about twelve (and steadily falling) and an upper limit of between twenty and twenty-five (when family responsibilities intrude — see Dollase, Riisenberg and Stollenwerk 1978), the process of attainment of selfhood within society is being realised, essentially, with reference to the assimilation of this kind of music.

In 1963, Amiri Imamu Baraka, a.k.a. LeRoi Jones, launched an Afrocentrist attack on the American white establishment that has been sustained, with variations, for forty years. He made a powerful case that the white commodity industry had systematically exploited and then debased authentic African-American music. In the meantime, a new kind of Afrocentrism has appeared, associated with the meteoric rise of Wynton Marsalis at New York's Lincoln Center. With the help of rhetoric similar to Baraka's, Marsalis has showcased and expanded the kind of black jazz he regards as authentic. However, the two men represent overlapping but also divergent points of view on the cultural politics of African-American music. This study compares these perspectives in detail, suggesting that behind the revealing differences between the two, both suffer from a formally similar outmoded essentialism.

This article explores the current state of the regional vernacular popular music industry in North India, assessing the changes that have occurred since around 2000 with the advent of digital technologies, including DVD format, and especially the Internet, cellphones and ‘pen-drives’. It provides a cursory overview of the regional music scene as a whole, and then focuses, as a case study, on a particular genre, namely the languriya songs of the Braj region, south of Delhi. It discusses how commercial music production is adapting, or failing to adapt, to recent technological developments, and it notes the vigorous and persistent flowering of regional music scenes such as that in the Braj region.

Popular music occupies a dominant position in the musical landscape of contemporary Africa, yet academic study of popular music is still in its infancy in most parts of Africa. This may be due in part to the absence of theoretical frameworks that stimulate popular music discourses from the African perspective. This paper is an attempt to fill this lacuna. Based on a critical and qualitative analysis of data gathered from field situations, participant observation, interviews and published literary materials on the subject matter, the paper theorises that the creation of African popular music is characterised by two significant processes: indigenisation and syncretisation. The paper further states that African popular music is a socially responsive phenomenon, sustained through the interplay of cross-cultural and trans-national social dynamics. The paper therefore proposes ‘social reconstructionism’ as a new theoretical paradigm for the analysis of African popular music. The paper also suggests that the term ‘African pop’ should be adopted as a generic name for all popular music forms in Africa.

In 1989 the Western media left its consumers with the romantic impression that it was merely the students who were demonstrating for ‘democracy’, as if emulating the student demonstrations of twenty years before in Europe and America. But there were workers involved too, who had illegally organised unofficial labour unions, and beyond concerns about democratic rights, there was the impetus of a socio-economic crisis. Most of those killed by the tanks in Tiananmen were workers, not students. People from all walks of life had marched and demonstrated throughout China from Canton ti Lhasa. Nine months before the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989, reversals in official economic policy put a halt to investment and constructions, and the problem of unemployment of rural migrants who had come to the towns was exacerbated. This migration was illegal but had been tolerated since labour was needed for construction. In 1989 anywhere between 60 to 100 million unemployed and homeless people were moving around the country en masse. At one time 250,000 were camped at Canton railway station.

forgotten recordings – such as ‘have a little talk with jesus’, the 1952 sister rosetta tharpe–red foley duet documented in this essay – may reveal a more complex account of popular music history than that which can be compiled from recordings that are remembered and passed on. released as the b-side of a red foley and the sunshine boys 45, ‘have a little talk’ is the product of a then-unprecedented collaboration in nashville of a black woman and a white man, people who couldn't have broken bread in a restaurant in that city at the time. yet ‘have a little talk’ is neither a transcendent record nor the record of a transcendent moment. rather, it attests to the multifaceted story-beneath-the-story of the links between country and gospel artists at a time when the former was consolidating its racial identity as ‘white’ and when major labels like decca faced increasing threats from independents putting out rhythm-and-blues. this essay attests to the challenges of writing the ‘b-side of history’ in the absence of a traditional (i.e. written or published) archive. through self-conscious storytelling based largely on oral histories, it attempts to reconstruct the foley-tharpe collaboration as a ‘magical moment’ in us popular music.

How does one tell the history of an art form? Looking at classic examples like Gombrich's The Story of Art (London, Phaidon Press, 1950) or Read's A Concise History of Modern Painting (London, Thames and Hudson, 1959), it seems that, at their core, such projects conventionally consist of annotated lists: extended commentaries on a long line of works and artists, in other words a canon. These works are typically presented as peaks of the aesthetic power of the art form in question, as ultimate manifestations of aesthetic perfection, complexity of form and depth of expression which humans are capable of reaching through this art form. Such presentations hide an implicit promise that, with proper knowledge, encounters with these works will result in extraordinary experiences.

The significance of the mass media in everyday musical life can scarcely be exaggerated. Music is nowadays, to a large degree, heard in technologically communicated form, i.e. as ‘transmitted music’ (Übertragungsmusik), not live (see especially Silbermann 1954, Eberhard 1962, Jungk 1971, Goslich 1971, Bornoff 1972, Blaukopf, Goslich and Scheib 1973, Schmidt 1975, Rösing 1978a, Brinkmann 1980, Hosokawa 1981). It can be assumed that young people and adults in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) consume, on average, a good three hours' worth of music a day, on radio, cassette recorder, television or records. The fact that music, by means of the technological transmission-chain, is available at all times and can be replayed at will, independent of the here-and-now of live performance, has far-reaching consequences for the listening behaviour, listening expectations, musical preferences and musical understanding of every individual. Two of these aspects, listening behaviour and musical preferences, will be examined in detail in what follows.