For reasons which would themselves be worthy of an article, the musical theatre has been almost entirely ignored by popular music scholarship. This has often puzzled me, since such factors as the musical theatre's ambiguous position in the high/low culture debate, its close relationship with film (film musicals were for a time a favoured subject – with film theorists), its persistent playing with the links between song and drama, the sociality of its performance conventions, the durability of the amateur performance tradition, to name but a few, together suggest a promising vein of study. Musical theatre songs have been the subject of intermittent scholarly investigation, mostly from a perspective derived from classical musicology. Wilfrid Mellers, characteristically, sought meaning through musicology (he speaks of Cole Porter's chromatics as telling us ‘regretfully, that we are kidding ourselves’ (in love) and of the ‘queasy honesty’ of ‘Anything Goes’), but found too many musicals tend to ‘create an illusion that we can live on the surface of our emotions’ and never get beyond that point. (Mellers 1964, pp. 384, 385).

The blues genre is commonly (and not incorrectly) regarded as a key marker of African-American identity and one with ‘deep’ (folk, or ‘down home’) roots. But this status is inadequately understood unless it is placed in a context of inter-racial exchange, in which ‘roots’ are a product of a complex transaction between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’. This territory is explored in terms of a thematics of loss, nostalgia and trauma, evident both in blues content and in the historical structure of revival to which the genre has been continually subject. A useful background is the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a nostalgic celebration of nostalgia with a blues/bluegrass inter-racial dimension, and a productive theoretical framework is provided by Lacan's approach to fantasy, loss and nostalgia.

Traditional genres, modern popular music, ‘classical’ concert music and other styles of music-making in Japan can be viewed as diverse elements framed within a musical culture. Bourdieu's concept of habitus, and Williams' of dominant, residual and emergent traditions, are helpful in formulating an inclusive approach, in contrast to the prevailing demarcation between traditional and popular music research. Koizumi Fumio first challenged the disciplinary separation of research on historical ‘Japanese music’ and modern hybrid music around 1980, and the influence of his work is reflected in a small number of subsequent writings. In Japanese popular music, evidence for musical habitus and residual traits of past practice can be sought not only in characteristics typical of musicological analysis; modal, harmonic and rhythmic structures; but also in aspects of the music's organisation, presentation, conceptualisation and reception. Among these are vocal tone and production techniques, technical and evaluative discourse, and contextual features such as staging, performer-audience interaction, the agency of individual musicians, the structure of corporate music-production, and the use of songs as vehicles for subjectivity. Such an inclusive approach to new and old musical practices in Japan enables demonstration of ways in which popular music is both part of Japanese musical culture and an authentic vehicle for contemporary Japanese identity.

Going for the One was a good rebirth of Yes at that time, to find its feet and really know what it wanted to do. And we made ‘Awaken’ . . . (Morse 1996, p. 58).

Since the release of their third recording, The Yes Album, in March 1971, the music of the English band Yes has been associated with the rock music substyle called ‘progressive rock’. The first two Yes albums showcase a very capable, inventive group of musicians who drew freely from the multitude of sounds around them, emulating aspects of the various musical styles they found engaging. However, it was not until they composed the works appearing on The Yes Album that the band coupled this eclecticism with a quest for originality to develop a voice highly idiosyncratic when judged against prevailing popular music styles. Subsequent albums reveal a predeliction for experimentation and expansion, and successful record sales in both the UK and US encouraged further development in the same direction. Although not members of the ‘first wave’ of progressive rock bands, Yes became ‘codifiers’ and for many, especially later detractors, the flagship of the ‘progressive' fleet. Before I go on to describe and illustrate, through the analysis of a particular song, aspects of Yes's musical language, I will briefly describe the environment in which it appeared and flourished.

Yothu Yindi stands as one of Australia's most celebrated popular bands, and in the early 1990s became renowned worldwide for its innovative blend of rock and indigenous performance traditions. The band's lead singer and composer, Mandawuy Yunupiŋu, was one of the first university-trained Yolŋu educators from remote Arnhem Land, and an influential exponent of bicultural education within local indigenous schools. This article draws on my comprehensive interview with Yunupiŋu for an opening keynote address to the Music and Social Justice Conference in Sydney on 28 September 2005. It offers new insights into the traditional values and local history of intercultural relations on the Gove Peninsula that shaped his outlook as a Yolŋu educator, and simultaneously informed his work through Yothu Yindi as an ambassador for indigenous cultural survival in Australia. It also demonstrates how Mandawuy's personal history and his call for a constitutional treaty with indigenous Australians are further grounded in the inter-generational struggle for justice over the mining of their hereditary lands. The article's ultimate goal is to identify traditional Yolŋu meanings in Yothu Yindi's repertoire, and in doing so, generate new understanding of Yunupiŋu's agency as a prominent intermediary of contemporary Yolŋu culture and intercultural politics.

Rock and pop music in the USSR and eastern Europe has become an area of increasing interest to both the western mass media and cultural studies since glasnost, perestroika, the collapse of the Eastern bloc Communist regimes and the constitution of new western-styled democratic governments. This is largely because rock music has represented probably the most widespread vehicle of youth rebellion, resistance and independence behind the Iron Curtain, both in terms of providing an enhanced political context for the often banned sounds of British and American rock, and in the development of home-grown musics built on western foundations but resonating within their own highly charged political contexts. As the East German critic Peter Wicke has claimed,

Because of the intrinsic characteristics of the circumstances within which rock music is produced and consumed, this cultural medium became, in the GDR, the most suitable vehicle for forms of cultural and political resistance that could not be controlled by the state. (Wicke 1991, p. 1)

Music has always been part of street life. Taking it off the streets and bringing it into enclosed spaces is a relatively recent experience but it has profoundly changed the way music is perceived and evaluated. ‘After art music moved indoors, street music has become an object of increasing scorn’ (Schafer 1980, p. 66). However, although discouraged by the new sonorities that appeared with the Industrial Revolution and the new comfort of home-reproducible music, street music has not disappeared: on the contrary, it is tending to reinvade the urban scene, in forms both old and new.

Probably the most famous photograph of the entire anti-rock movement features record burnings held in August 1966. A crowd of elementary school-age children and a clean-cut disc jockey stand before a bonfire; one grinning boy presents a copy of Meet the Beatles to the camera prior to tossing it on the flames. This particular bonfire was organised by radio staion WAYX in Waycross, Georgia, but it was only one of many in response to comments made by John Lennon.

The author argues that the success of the Russian pop duo, t.A.T.u., and in particular their participation in the 2003 Eurovision Song Contest, is revealing of the multiple and contradictory ways in which Russia is currently engaging with concepts of the national and the international. Specifically, the essay considers t.A.T.u.’s performance of faux-lesbian pop eroticism as a productive flashpoint of East-West misreading and failed translation that might account for the pop duo’s very different reception in Russia and the West. The controversies and inconsistencies that have followed t.A.T.u are located in the larger context of ongoing debates over the redefinition of post-Soviet Russian national identity and Russia’s emerging role on the global pop cultural stage. From this perspective, it is argued, the t.A.T.u. phenomenon interfaces with aspects of both post-Soviet and international youth cultures, shifts in Russian attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and identity politics, and the contradictory commodification and transnational circulation of distinctive ‘European’ identities that is Eurovision’s stock and trade. Thus, a secondary question addressed by the author concerns the value of Eurovision itself as a subject suitable for serious scholarly engagement.

There is a shared view among insiders that the release of the recording ‘Od izvora dva putića’ ([There are] ‘Two paths leading from the water spring’) by Serbian female singer Lepa Lukić in 1964, marked the beginning of the ‘market history’ of Yugoslav novokomponovana narodna muzika (newly-composed folk music; henceforth NCFM). The song's lyrics depict a young woman in a rustic village whose love is thwarted when her lover moves to the city. The music evokes a motif typical of the Central-Serbian region of Šumadija: a tuneful melody, steady 2/4 rhythm, and a caressing quality in the narration. The title of the song is highly symbolic of the divergence of Yugoslav folk music into a continuing narodna muzika (folk; literally, ‘people's’ music) and an emerging pop stream.

Claudia Gorbman, in her afterword to Unheard Melodies, looks forward to the ‘new’ phenomenon of the increased use of recorded popular music in the movies. She questions whether the contemporary use of popular music is essentially different from its use in the traditional Hollywood musical, wherein conventional practice permits a musical number to disrupt the narrative flow, and answers that ‘a hybrid is emerging, unlike diegetic music which is normally not listened to, and also not as focused as musical numbers issuing from the magic world of the musical’ (Gorbman 1987, p.162). Certainly, the music video, as Gorbman admits, in its ‘kaleidoscope of forms’ (ibid.) is changing the relationship between visuals and music, so that there is no longer a habitual hierarchy of sound supporting image, or vice versa. It is this shifting relationship and the way in which pop music specifically operates upon the narrative structure of cinema that I wish to explore here.

If the North East is typical of other English regions, then the following propositions will have to be severely modified or given up: that there was a distinct ‘break’ between pre-industrial and industrial workers’ culture; that concert hall was a London phenomenon; that it originated mainly from petit-bourgeois ‘free-and-eases’; and that it reached its peak in Edwardian England, as music hall. Further, I will contend that ‘leisure’ and ‘work’ cannot rationally be separated in the study of workers’ culture, that social historians and students of culture need each other and that the concept of ‘folk song’ does more harm than good.

This paper presents an analysis of enka, a type of Japanese popular song. I shall attempt to elucidate the musical characteristics of enka by examining its musical scales, melodies, vocal techniques and rhythms. We shall see, however, that enka is a composite genre, not characterised by a single type of scale or rhythm. Furthermore, it is virtually impossible to understand enka without reference to other types of Japanese popular song. Thus some discussion of such other genres will also be required.

Recent years have seen an increase in pop music on television, replacing its more traditional incidental music. It is now dominant as stock music on television, filling expanding continuity and advertising spaces. The licensing of pop music for screen use is increasingly important for the music industry, spawning a new form of ‘multipurpose music’ which, as well as being music in its own right, can also be resold as stock music for television. While in the 1980s there was a rush to tie-in pop music with films, in the 1990s, it increasingly was to tie pop music with television. This article documents and explores this transition.

This article argues that the production and reception of certain recent electronic musics has resonated with criticisms of the perceived degenerative effects of digital technology on culture and ‘humanity’ – such as the lack of attention it promotes or the ‘information overload’ it causes – in an at least partially positive way. The resulting ambivalent aesthetics, sometimes thought of as one of ‘Internet music’, embraces particular negative notions of digital mediation in ways that can and have been thought of as satirical, exploratory or ‘accelerationist’. I examine three facets of this aesthetics: maximalism, kitsch and the uncanny valley. I also question the legitimacy of dramatising, even positively, digital media and culture as effectively ‘degenerate’.

The biographies of most stars work on the misconception that a performer's true, private self can be discretely separated from the meaning of their public image. Whether it is a serious study of a major artist or a trashy exposé of a behind-the-scenes scandal, the organisational logic is usually the same: the writer assumes that since a media image is a false representation of an actual person, digging deep into the background and lifestyle of any star can only help to reveal something of what that person is ‘really’ like.

Introduction

Born in mortal opposition to the peculiarly modern forms of slavery that helped to usher in a new era of European world domination, the Maroon societies of the Americas have long provided theorists of identity operating in the realm that has come to be known as the Black Atlantic with a potent symbolic currency. Nowhere has this currency acquired higher value than in the Caribbean region, where questions of identity are so fundamentally bound up with histories of plantation slavery.

The runaway slave has had a special place in the literature of the anglophone Caribbean; and francophone, hispanophone and Dutch-speaking Caribbean writers have all displayed a similar fascination with the Maroon epic. In more recent times, popular music – a medium that has played a primary role in the constitution of a truly diasporic sense of identity spanning the Black Atlantic – has helped to carry consciousness of a heroic Maroon past across the globe. Both practitioners of Caribbean (or other Afro-American) popular musics and those who write about them continue to reference the Maroons of yore, often tracing the rebellious thrust of much of today's music to these original Black warriors, whose defiant spirit, it is felt, continues to inhabit and motivate the collective memory (Aly 1988, pp. 55–7, 65; Zips 1993, 1994; Leymarie 1994).

JB was proof that black people were different. Rhythmically and tonally blacks had to be from somewhere else. Proof that Africa was really over there for those of us who had never seen it – it was in that voice. (Thulani Davis, quoted Guralnick 1986, pp. 242–3)

If there is any black man who symbolizes the vast differences between black and white cultural and aesthetic values, Soul Brother No. 1 (along with Ray Charles) is that man. (David Levering Lewis, quoted Guralnick 1986, p. 240)

Brown has never been a critics' favorite principally because of the apparent monotony of so many of his post-1965 recordings. But attacking him for being repetitive is like attacking Africans for being overly fond of drumming. Where the European listener may hear monotonous beating, the African distinguishes subtle polyrhythmic interplay, tonal distinctions among the various drums, the virtuosity of the master drummer, and so on. Similarly, Brown sounds to some European ears like so much harsh shrieking. (Robert Palmer 1980, p. 141)

During the 1960s James Brown single handedly demonstrated the possibilities for artistic and economic freedom that black music could provide if one constantly struggled against its limitations … He was driven by an enormous ambition and unrelenting ego, making him a living symbol of black self-determination … Motown may have been the sound of young America, but Brown was clearly the king of black America. (Nelson George 1988, pp. 98–9)

This article addresses the ongoing impact of Canadian Content Regulations as applied to commercial radio. While commercial broadcasters have repeatedly called for a relaxation of the regulations in response to the changing music industry, particularly the increased impact of the Internet, it is possible to demonstrate that the regulations have had a positive impact on Canadian listening habits. An examination of the ‘national’ charts provided by Last.fm, a website that tracks users’ listening habits, shows that Canadian users listen to Canadian tracks in excess of the amounts currently regulated for radio. Commercial broadcasters’ claims that the regulations prevent them from competing fairly with new technology thus run counter to such evidence. As official charts, and hence commercial playlists are still reliant on older modes of tracking music, via in-store purchases, an incomplete picture of the current state of the industry exists, and it is this picture that seems to shape the claims made by the commercial industry. Additionally, this paper explores the rise of a successful Canadian ‘scene’, spearheaded by bands such as Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene, that demonstrates the impact of policy in creating a national music culture that is confident enough to no longer have to be explicitly Canadian, either sonically or lyrically. Cancon regulations would appear to have aided in situating Canadian acts comfortably within a wider music culture within Canada.

Early popular and theoretical work in popular music studies often bestowed implicit or explicit legitimacy on forms of music cultivating or preserving a ‘live’, ‘unplugged’, ‘acoustic’ and hence ‘authentic’ sound. Over the past fifteen years, much popular music scholarship (Frith 1986; Goodwin 1992; Cutler 1984) has rightly problematised this approach. It is important to note, however, that interpretations of popular music texts or scenes that depict the electrification or digitalisation of sound as uncomplicatedly pro-social or progressive remain problematic themselves. Within popular music production today, few areas exist where these aesthetics of recorded music have failed to penetrate. But there is one sub-field of popular music where the characteristic sounds of recording studio technology are still relatively new. It warrants the attention not only of those engaged in the study of popular music, but also of those involved in the exploration of virtual environments. This sub-field is the contemporary stage musical.