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.

Houston Baker locates the blues at the crossroads of lack and desire, at the place where the hurts of history encounter determined resistance from people who know they are entitled to something better (Baker 1984, pp. 7, 150). Like the blues singers from whom he learned so much, Hank Williams (1923 to 1953) spent a lot of time at that particular intersection. There he met others whose own struggles informed and shaped his music. Williams's voice expressed the contradictions of his historical moment – post Second World War America – a time when diverse currents of resistance to class, race and gender oppressions flowed together to form a contradictory, but nonetheless real, unity of opposites. Standing at a crossroads in history, at a fundamental turning point for relationships between men and women, whites and blacks, capital and labour, Williams's songs about heartbreak and failed personal relations indentified the body and the psyche as crucial terrains of political struggle in the post-war era.

This article examines the practice and recent rise in the use of various aspects of Japanese popular culture in hip hop, particularly as manifest in the work of RZA, Kanye West and Nicki Minaj. Often these references highlight the high-tech, futuristic aesthetic of much Japanese popular culture and thus resonate with concepts and practices surrounding Afro-futurism. Drawing on various theories of hybridity, this article analyses how Japanese popular culture has informed constructions of African American identity. In contrast to the often sensational media coverage of racial tensions between African American and Asian communities, the nexus of Japanese popular culture and African American hip hop evinces a sympathetic connection based on shared notions of Afro-Asian liberation and empowerment achieved, in part, through a common aesthetic of technological mastery and appropriation. The synthesis of Asian popular culture and African American hip hop represents a globally hybridised experience of identity and racial formation in the 21st century.

There is good evidence that for over ninety-nine per cent of human history, and for ninety-seven per cent of the time since the emergence of our own species (homo sapiens sapiens) approximately 70,000 years ago, all music was popular, in so far as it was shared and enjoyed by all members of a society. If there were distinctions of style within a society's music, they were accepted as sings of functional or social differentiation rather than as barriers to mutual communication. Distinctions between sacred and secular music, between music for young and old or men and women, were generally drawn within the style of each music culture, and, at least in principle, a member of one group could perform and appreciate the music of another group in the same society.

In this article, I discuss aspects of national identity in the performance style of the German rock band Rammstein from the perspectives of imagery, vocal style and the textual content of their songs. Investigation into Rammstein’s music reveals transformations of signifiers from earlier German performance styles and earlier textual themes that the band use as a means of relocating notions of German identity into their own performances. The adoption of national German signifiers enables Rammstein to establish connections between the band and the growth of national awareness among German youth who follow them. In this way, marketing and promotion of notions of a new national German identity to generations unaware of the origins of neo-romantic, national German signifiers in Rammstein’s music supports a successful commercial enterprise that, I argue, runs close to boundaries existing between national and nationalist.

In his Moeurs et Coutumes des Tziganes (1936), the French ethnologist Martin Block notices that

when a Hungarian or Romanian feels sad, or when, on the contrary, he wants to celebrate, he needs Gypsy music to exteriorize the state of his soul. (Block 1936, p. 136)

Block's conclusion that Gypsy musicians are in the business of articulating other people's ‘soul’ confronts us with an intriguing conundrum. Given the fact that in eastern Europe, group boundaries between Gypsies and non-Gypsies are strictly defined and zealously kept up, one wonders how Gypsies would be able to articulate musically an intimate knowledge about their non-Gypsy customers. And why would Hungarians, Romanians – and, as I will argue in this paper, Serbs as well – need Gypsy musicians to ‘exteriorize their state of soul’?

By offering a historical reconstruction of the process of contextualisation of hip hop culture in Italy over the last fifteen years, the article assesses the current status of canzone d’autore and its changing configuration under the impact of rap music. From a theoretical point of view, the conceptual framework combines the sociological definition of ‘field of cultural production’ elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu with the related literature on social and symbolic boundaries. From a methodological point of view, the analysis is based on the data collected by Club Tenco (a cultural organisation which plays an institutional role within the field of canzone d’autore) as well as on a series of qualitative interviews carried out with a number of Italian rappers and cantautori. Special attention is paid to a very few crucial figures that can be considered paradigmatic examples in the dynamic process of boundary-making of the two cultural (sub-)fields of Italian rap and canzone d’autore.

In recent times there has been an encouraging increase in the musicological study of Western popular music by members of the academy. Both Richard Middleton and Alan Moore have published important books that are emphatic about the need for such study (Middleton 1990; Moore 1993). Also there have been a number of articles in a variety of journals over the past several years that have either addressed the need for, suggested various approaches to, or actually taken a musicological approach to one or another aspect of popular music (Foret 1991; Brackett 1992; Hawkins 1992; Moore 1992; Taylor 1992; Walser 1992; Middleton 1993). Despite this flurry of activity, as far as this author is aware, there has been no academic musicological work, other than Robert Walser's recent study of heavy metal (Walser 1993), that has attempted to ferret out the component parts of a given genre through an analysis of a sizable body of repertoire. There is an acute need for such work if popular music scholars are going to begin to understand in concrete terms what is meant by terms such as rock, soul, funk, Merseybeat and so on. This essay is an attempt to begin such a study for the genre of southern soul music as it was manifested by Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee.

It is hard to be tasteless.

It is not so hard to have bad taste, I grant, but that is another matter. To have bad taste, one simply must consistently make choices which offend those with good taste — an ability which is relatively commonplace. For some, bad taste seems to appear naturally, as a birthright; others must learn to cultivate it. But no matter how acquired, or how skilfully employed, bad taste is not tastelessness.

This paper explores some forms of rock/rap hybridity and a historically related shift toward a greater eclecticism in consumption practices in popular music in the United States in the late 1990s, a period marked by the decline of rock as the dominant mode of popular music. This decline has repercussions not simply for a musical style, but additionally for the privileged subjects who are both the producers and consumers of that music: predominantly white, middle-class males. A number of different strategies have emerged which attempt to develop new positions for these white suburbanites to occupy in the contemporary music-cultural terrain in order to re-assert their hegemony as both producers and consumers. On the producers' side, the most common strategy has been to develop hybrid forms which combine rock with styles of its musical competitors – most notably, of hip hop music and culture. On the consumer side, the response has been the emergence of a ‘neo-eclectic’ form of listening where a number of formerly disparate or even hostile musical forms are consumed by a single (white suburban) individual.

Musically, it (Lovesexy) is probably the most complex and unconventional body of work he (Prince) has ever produced. The dense undergrowth of twists and disjunctures to which even the most structured songs are subjected brings to mind once again the extended jam rehearsal technique Prince has always favoured. (Hill 1989, p. 210)

With the dramatically improving fidelity of electric sound recording in the 1920s, aural spatiality – traces of room ambience and reverberation – became a factor in record production. Drawing on prior radio broadcast practice, a split occurred whereby ‘fine’ orchestral musics were recorded with relatively high levels of ambient or atmospheric sound while dance music, popular songs, humorous recitations and other ‘low’ forms were generally recorded with little or no reverberation. Through the 1930s and 1940s, popular recording occasionally, though increasingly, made use of mechanically fabricated echo and reverb to present a kind of sonic pictorialism, especially on singing cowboy and popular ‘Hawaiian’ recordings. Hollywood film sound practice in this period employed similar sonic space-making devices to denote states of terror, mystical revelation and supernatural transformations. The coming of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, with its characteristic big echo and reverb production sounds, may be seen as the radical recombining of these contradictory antecedents, effected in such a way as to allow (and promote) disordered, non-pictorial sound spatialities.

What is the cost of music in the so-called Anthropocene? We approach this question by focusing on the case of sound-recording formats. We consider the cost of recorded music through two overlapping lenses: economic cost, on the one hand, and environmental cost, on the other. The article begins by discussing how the price of records has changed from the late 19th to the 21st century and across the seven most economically significant playback formats: phonograph cylinder, gramophone disc, vinyl LP, cassette tape, compact disc, digital audio files on hard drive, and streaming from the cloud. Our case study territory is the United States, and we chart the gradual decline in the price of recorded music up to the present. We then examine the environmental and human costs of music by looking at what recordings are made out of, where those materials come from, and what happens to them when they are disposed of. Despite what rhetorics of digital dematerialisation tell us, we show that the labour conditions in the digital electronics and IT industries are as inhumane as ever, while the amount of greenhouse gases released by the US recording industry could actually be higher today than at the height of any previous format. We conclude by asking the obvious (but by no means straightforward) question: what are musicians and fans to do?

Music video has become an increasingly integral component of the music recording business over the past three decades. Major US record companies with international divisions have made music clips since the 1970s to promote their acts in the UK and continental Europe where television shows were a more important form of promotion for recording artists. However, record labels did not make a full commitment to music clips until after the premiere of MTV in August 1981 as a 24-hour US cable programme service presenting an endless stream of music videos. As MTV's popularity blossomed in the early 1980s, music video revitalised a troubled record industry suffering a prolonged recession by prompting renewed consumer interest in pop music and successfully developing several new recording acts like Madonna, Cyndi Lauper and Boy George with provocative visual images.

In a tiny inner city pub

The amps were getting stacked

Leads were getting wound up

It was full of pissed Anzacs

‘Got no more gigs for Tuesday nights’ said the barman to the star,

‘We're putting pokies in the lounge and strippers in the bar’

The star, he raised his fingers and said ‘fuck this fucking hole’

But to his roadie said ‘it's the death of rock and roll’

‘There ain't no single place left to play amplified guitar

Every place is servin' long blacks if they're not already tapas bars

(TISM (This Is Serious Mum), ‘The Last Australian Guitar Hero’, 1998)

Introduction: local music-making

A number of recent studies have focused upon the places and spaces of popular music performance. In particular, analyses of British live music contexts have examined the role of urban landscapes in facilitating production/consumption environments. Building upon Simon Frith's (1983) initial exploration of the synthesis of leisure/work ideologies and popular music, Ruth Finnegan's detailed examination of amateur music practices in Milton Keynes (1989) and Sara Cohen's account of the Liverpool scene (1991) reveal the benefits of engaging in detailed micro-studies of the local. Paul Chevigny's history of the governance of New York City jazz venues (1991) similarly provides a rich insight into performance contexts and the importance of hitherto unnoticed city ordinances in influencing the production of live music.

In thinking about how to locate popular music within music history, I start from two propositions. Firstly, that attempts to isolate and define musical types, functions and effects by purely empirical means are likely to be unhelpful. Understanding ‘popular music’ – for example – in terms of a quantitively measured ‘popularity’ (sales figures) is not only methodologically difficult to do coherently but, more important, it hypostatises what is in reality a result of living, historically changing relationships. Secondly: if, then, musical categories should be grasped as part of social processes, it does not however follow that in this relationship (between musical type, concept or practice on the one hand, social group, factor or formation on the other) the relata are in a one-to-one correspondence. Thus – quoting again examples from commonly assumed positions – the idea that ‘popular music’ is ‘really’ confined to authentic proletarian self-expression is no less misleading than the Adornian notion that it is part of an undifferentiated blanket of leisure-goods imposed on the unresisting masses by a monopoly-capitalist ‘culture industry’.

The album Diamonds and Pearls had recently been released when I started working on this study of Prince's music. It had not, therefore, obtained the many layers of personal history which enveloped the earlier albums by Prince in my collection. In addition, it seemed to me an absolutely contemporary record: an exemplary sign of the times which would be able to say something in general about our time. But my initial question was simply: what characterises Prince's music?

The recorded format is the medium through which popular music is diffused. Since the advent of multi-track recording, the studio has become a compositional tool in which musical ideas are formed into sounding matter. Direct access to the manipulation of sound layers and the possibility of mixing different sources and moving them in the stereo window become not only technical options but musical and compositional properties. In fact, the organization of the recording space reflects more and more the structural organization of the music itself; the sound of the record is a sort of sonicprint (sounding fingerprint) of the music of an artist in a particular period. This paper develops the idea of sonic space, a multi-dimensional representation of the recording space in which spatial, morphological and spectral spaces interact in order to form the structure on which the sounding matter of the piece is developed. Through the analysis of the properties of each space and their relationships, it is possible to point out normative behaviours, well defined associations between more musical aspects like motives, harmony, melodies and their organization in the sounding structure.

With a return to authoritarian rule only a few years after the initially successful 2011 revolution, some Egyptian DIY musicians have made it a point to avoid the political. These musicians consider the ordinary politics of discursive critique and public protest to be ineffective and have opted to continue the revolution by appealing to the ineffable properties of listening as a less ideologically driven way to produce social change. This article explores how and why the sonic ineffable is believed to be a more utopian form of politics. It argues that mobilizing ‘magic’ is a particularly positioned solution to political failure that obscures the relations of power it perpetuates. Building from 30 months of ethnographic research conducted in Egypt among DIY musicians between 2010 and 2017, it avoids a romanticisation of the ineffable, showing instead how utilising the ambiguity between the conscious and subconscious aspects of sonic experience is a political tool not removed from power.

In the 1930s and 1940s, musicians and artists from different cultures and varied backgrounds joined and made the golden age of Shanghai popular songs which suggests the beginnings of Chinese popular music in modern times. The present article gives a historical description of the rise of Shanghai popular songs and examines their generic features according to Franco Fabbri's five groups of genre rules. Through gramophone recordings, radio broadcasts and films these musical products enjoyed great popularity despite severe criticisms from certain sectors of society. The diversity of musical elements, lyrical contents and forms of performance of these popular songs reflects a collective style of the participating artists and institutions and past audience tastes in a metropolis different from other major cities in the world at that time.