Opera and operatic images have invaded nearly all aspects of popular culture. Films (even silent films), radio, television, literature and numerous other media have all, to one degree or another, appropriated either actual opera or operatic devices and conventions. One important realm of popular culture that has appeared relatively immune to operatic influence, however, is rock music. Though several studies have illustrated the impact of ‘classical’ instrumental music on heavy metal and pop music, no serious scholarship has as yet explored the considerable influence exerted by opera, and its conventions, on various forms of rock music (Aledort 1985; McClary and Walser 1990; Walser 1992; Covach 1997). This essay examines the various manifestations of opera in rock music with particular concentration on works by Queen, Nina Hagen, Klaus Nomi and Malcolm McLaren that employ specific instances of operatic vocality or borrowing. Such opera–rock fusions are often predicated upon the transgression of conventional musical boundaries and often reflect an analogous rejection of traditional cultural boundaries surrounding sexual orientation, gender and class. Long overlooked, recognising opera's cross-relations with rock offers new insights into the postmodern blurring of traditional distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art and broadens our understanding of both genres.

Every weekday evening on Columbia Broadcasting's (CBS) Late Show, host David Letterman delivers his tongue-in-cheek top ten lists. The lists have become one of the most recognisable symbols of American popular culture. Part of the humour lies in the pithy ranked statements about current events. However, much of the fun resides in Letterman's mockery of our obsession with rankings – rankings of everything from automobiles to college football teams to human attractiveness. The humour is sustained from night to night, week to week, year to year because of our uneasiness with rankings as a very powerful and enduring value-organising tool.

A number of scholars have written on characteristics of vocal melody in popular music, but little attention has been paid at the level of phonetic detail. This study argues that the phonetic structure of a melody can contribute in important ways to a song's reception and success, given the ways that listeners react and respond to vocalised melody. This article discusses different ways in which stressed syllables in familiar pop songs alliterate, and it investigates the way these patterns interact rhythmically with metre.

Recently we have been talking in the Editorial Group of the journal about the term ‘popular’, and wondering in particular about its epithetic role next to ‘music’. Some of us have questioned what the term now means, partly because it has been used less and less in media studies and cultural sociology over the last few years. Others have pointed to the fact that it remains a vital concept, even a rallying point, in certain fields such as musicology and politics.

Anyone visiting Brazil today in search of an idealised ‘Brazilian Sound’ might, at first, be disappointed with the popular music scene. The visitor will soon realise that established musical styles such as bossa nova and MPB (Música Popular Brazileira (Brazilian Popular Music)), with their well-defined roles within the Brazilian social and political scene of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, have lost their immediate appeal with some contemporary audiences, and especially with Brazilian urban youth. In the 1990s, Brazilian radio and TV are saturated with a variety of new local genres that borrow heavily from international musical styles of all kinds and use state-of-the-art electronic apparatus. Hybrid terms such as samba-rock, samba-reggae, mangue-beat, afro-beat, for-rock (a contraction of forró and rock), sertaneja-country, samba-rap, and pop-nejo (a contraction of pop and sertanejo), are just a few examples of the marketing labels which are loosely applied to the current infusion of international music in the local musical scene.

Introduction: Irishness and the ‘gift of song’

A key element in the range of stereotypes characteristically assigned to the Irish has been their natural proclivity for music and song, a feature of colonial discourse that can be traced back even to the Norman invasions of the twelfth century. However, the powerful link between the Irish and musicality (along with a host of other, considerably less attractive traits) was finally consolidated in the Victorian era at the height of the British imperial project (Curtis 1971; Busteed 1998). Irish music by this stage was constructed as a specific ethnic category based on the assumption that there was an identifiably Irish musical style that existed as an expression of the people, a reflection of their innate feelings and sensibilities. Music, therefore, became a feature of ‘race’, taking on properties for the coloniser that appeared to transcend the passage of time, that remained fixed and unchanging.

This paper examines the recent NSW state government reassessment of the role of live music venues, and the gradual inclusion of live music within broader urban cultural policy across Australia. Focusing on Sydney, it maps the live music venue at the intersection of competing policy agendas, alternatively viewed as ‘vibrant’, exciting sites that represent a rejuvenated inner-city culture; or as sites of disruption, encouraging anti-social activity on the margins of legality (or sometimes both). The ‘rehabilitation’ of live music in the eyes of key government sectors was not simply a matter of ‘good’ cultural policy, but the result of a combination of many factors. The paper documents and analyses a six-year campaign by various stakeholders to implement noise, building code, late-night trading and liquor law reforms designed to ensure the survival of live performance venues and scenes.

There are few studies offering a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between popular music and youth cutting across both school and leisure sites. This article bridges missing links between girls and boys as performers and listeners of popular music in school and leisure sites. The aim is to investigate how high school pupils' discourses on popular music take place in different settings (i) with relation to gender, and (ii) with relation to the nature of musical practices. Through my ethnographic study conducted in Japan, pupils' techniques for employing popular music in various sites are clarified; firstly, in the formal site (classroom); secondly, in the semi-formal site (brass band club in school / high school band event); thirdly, in the informal site (boys as performers / visual band costume play gatherings). Three categorisations of popular music are theorised: ‘personal’, ‘common’ and ‘standard’. Boys' strategies for negotiation and differentiation, and girls' tactics for utilising common music in order to conceal their own personal music are found in each site.

This article looks at a remarkable cluster of popular musicians who contracted and survived poliomyelitis (‘infantile paralysis’) epidemics through the twentieth century, and ways in which they managed and, to varying extents, explored their polio-related impairments and experiences in their music. Drawing on medical history and disability studies, it focuses largely on the pop and rock generation of polio survivors – the children and young people from the 1940s and 1950s who were among the last to contract the disease prior to the successful introduction of mass vaccination programmes (in the West). These include Neil Young, Steve Harley, Joni Mitchell, and Israel Vibration. The article then looks in detail at the work of Ian Dury, who was for a while the highest profile visibly physically disabled pop artist in Britain, and who produced a compelling body of works exploring the experiences of disability.

From 1995–2000 I was Director of the Economic and Social Research Council's research programme on Media Economics and Media Culture. One of my tasks was to organise meetings of researchers in the field and to this end I ran a series of seminars at the British Phonographic Institute for people studying the music industry. These seminars were thematic, covering music industry strategies in global media markets; methods for measuring the value of the music industry; the uses of music; and musicians. A final meeting, held in the then about-to-be-opened National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield on 16 February 1999, brought together nearly all the UK's academic music industry researchers to discuss future research in the light of the MEMC Programme's findings. What follows is a report from both MEMC research and the Sheffield meeting. The aim is to provide an overview of the current research situation in Britain.

For young Australians in the early 1960s America was the icon of pop music and fashion. This was the result of the projection of America through the mass media and the numerous American rock'n'roll acts that were brought to Australia by Lee Gordon, an American entrepreneur who lived in Sydney (Zion 1984). This overall tendency led the American, A. L. McLeod, to observe when writing about Australian culture in 1963 that

in general, Australian popular music is slavishly imitative of United States models; it follows jazz, swing, calypso or whatever the current fashion is in New York or San Francisco at a few months distance. (McLeod 1963, p. 410)

Yet by late 1963 the potency of America was in decline. For while the Californian surf music craze made a somewhat delayed impact, especially in Sydney, the popularity of the Beatles was gathering momentum. This can be traced crudely through the Top Forty lists of the day: in Sydney the song ‘From Me To You’ entered the charts on 12 July 1963 and eventually reached number six (Barnes et al. 1979, p. 50).

Shifty harmonies in ‘West End Girls’

This first section is for readers interested in technical musical analysis. Others may wish to skip ahead to the next section: while one of my goals is to link technical, interpretive and political concerns, it is possible to read this paper with relatively little attention to the technicalities.

At the beginning of the Pet Shop Boys' ‘West End Girls’, after some street sounds and a sustained chord, there is a three-chord progression (Cmaj7, D, E), mingling harmonies from the keys of e minor and E major (0:21-0:24; see Example 1). The bass-line goes up, with a major triad over each note; only the third chord is free of additional, dissonant notes. The second chord sounds like a way of passing smoothly from the first one to the third.

The device known as, among other terms, truck-driver modulation, arranger's modulation and pump-up modulation is an important procedure for popular music, and one that merits a place in the harmony textbook. Emerging from a discussion of nomenclature, this paper proposes the terms of its title, which distinguishes between modulation as part of the overall form of a track, and modulation as a technical device. Four models are presented for the modulation, with a final discussion of different models used in the one track.

Robert Johnson's 1936–37 recordings are widely held to have consummated the Delta blues style, and to have provided one of the very few pre-war influences on rock. Yet it is his pathetic life and the occasional metaphysical imagery of his lyrics that have commanded critical attention. Consequently we have as yet still to discover what precisely makes his music take on such historical significance. It seems to me that two features of Johnson's music demand our attention: first, his inflections of pitch and timbre; second, his irregular, and often syncopated, metres. This article scrutinises, and extrapolates from the latter.

What does music mean, if anything? The question is one of the hardy perennials of musical aesthetics, and there is no shortage of answers to it. Indeed, there is a plethora of seemingly unrelated answers. We can talk about music's internal structure, about its symmetries and directional motions, about patterns of implication and their realisation or lack of realisation; moving from ‘the music itself’ to listeners' reponses, approaches like this offer a psychological approach to meaning (and the work of Leonard Meyer and Eugene Narmour provide the best known examples). Or we can approach the music from the opposite direction, talking about the context of its creation, the context of its performance, and the context of its reception; here the assumption is that music acquires meaning through its mediation of society. Or again, we can oscillate between these two viewpoints, on the assumption that meaning arises from the mutual mediation of music and society. That is the central assumption of musical hermeneutics, whether we are applying this term to the work of Hermann Kretzschmar in the 1880s or that of Lawrence Kramer in the 1980s.

As a musical form, punk is often associated with urbanity, as embodied in the scenes in both London and New York, and in an Australian national context by the scenes in Melbourne and Sydney. In Perth, Western Australia – a primarily middle-class suburban city without a distinct inner city – punk was expressed differently. While the music itself exemplified many of the stylistic traits associated with the genre, punk in Perth was articulated through the city's isolation, its affluence and its suburban nature. Utilising interviews with key players in the Perth punk scene of the late 1970s, this paper seeks to illustrate the ways in which urbanity was constructed and voiced through Perth punk, in a city that constructed itself in opposition to traditional notions of the inner city's urban lived environment.

The Northern Soul scene is a dance-based music culture that originated in the English North and Midlands in the early 1970s. It still thrives today with a mix of forty-year-olds and new converts, and its celebration of 1960s' soul has an international following. Centred on the detail of the dance techniques, and musical and cultural context, the analysis presented here is developed from an ethnographic study. It uses a concept of competence and the example of a classic record to explore the meanings of dance for the scene's participants. The importance of solidarity, senses of identity through gender, place and ethnicity, and the relationship of the scene with African–American culture are explored. The study draws conclusions about the way that dance can be theorised and analysed, and argues that a full analysis requires an exploration of the relationship of physical movement to space, music and senses of identity.

This paper explores the social origins and development of music relayed through loudspeakers in British factories during World War Two, focusing on the BBC programme Music While You Work, which provided a national soundtrack for factory work, and the contemporary institutions of Industrial Psychology, which promoted music as a highly ‘valuable’ accompaniment to work and formulated scientific principles governing its broadcast. Combining archival evidence from these organisations, the paper first outlines the historical circumstances of development, detailing the form of broadcasts and of the music itself. Subsequently, the causes of music's introduction to the factory are analysed. The central argument advanced is that the music resulted centrally from top-down initiatives from a ‘human relations school’ coalition of institutions and individuals, in which the aims of increased productivity and the humanisation of the workplace intermingled, but in which the aim of increased productivity dominated. Concluding remarks assess the argument and relate it to the growing literature on contemporary practices of the sound-tracking of social life.

Those things that go under community music and people who call themselves community music practitioners and organisations, have got to remember all the community music that is happening anyway. But at this point in time I think that it is incredibly important to develop community music activities, to fuel the fire and create examples of what the possibilities are. The real community music will happen when that is generating spontaneously out of community. (Linsey Pollak, 28 January 1993)

In ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ (DDR), an arcade and home video game distributed by the Japanese entertainment corporation Konami, players move their feet in specific patterns set to electronic dance music. Only by achieving a high accuracy rate can a player advance from one level to the next. DDR enjoys worldwide popularity among teenagers and young adults, partially due to the marketing of the game's ‘soundtracks’ as separate, purchasable collections of underground techno, house, and drum ‘n’ bass. This article considers the Internet communities of DDR fans and their debates concerning ‘mainstream’ culture and musical taste.