Although canon formation has been discussed in popular music studies for over a decade, the notion of what constitutes ‘the popular music canon’ is still vague. However, considering that many scholars resent canon formation due to the negative effects canons have exerted on other academic fields, analysis of canon formation processes in popular music studies seems desirable: awareness of these processes can be a valuable tool for scholars’ assessment of how their academic choices contribute to canon formation. Based on an examination of the reception history of Queen in the popular mainstream, music criticism and academia, this article argues that a universally valid popular music canon does not exist and that canon formation in popular music is based on the same criteria as in the ‘high’ arts, i.e. transcendence, historical importance and ‘greatness’, although the latter is replaced by ‘authenticity’ in the popular music context. While canons can be theorised in various ways, a model that distinguishes between canonic strata according to listeners’ relationship to music is particularly useful as it reveals the relative importance of the three canonic criteria within different strata and how they are applied.

There appeared in the summer of 1982 a song written and performed by three German structuralists, a song characterised by the simplicity – to the point of banality – of its musical structure and instrumentation. Intended as a critical intervention in the production of ordinariness in popular music, ‘Da Da Da’ reached number one in the British charts, and Trio's appearance on the British TV show, Top of the Pops, was no more threatening than that of Captain Sensible or any other novelty act: welcome to the whacky world of deconstructive minimalism. Clearly the intended meanings of the song were not always the ones it evoked for the listener. Recordings have a way of taking on a life of their own in their meetings with the public; in Voloshinov's phrase, the production of meaning is intersubjective, involving artists, promotional campaigns, disc jockeys and the audience. This article addresses particularly the role of the listening subject in the construction of a song's meanings.

This article considers the parameters and implications of the look of 1960s girl groups such as the Marvelettes, the Shirelles and the Shangri-Las through an examination of approximately two hundred images taken from title pages for songs, from LP covers, and from ads and publicity photos. An overwhelming majority of these visual images depict the members of an ensemble as equal and visually interchangeable, for the members dressed in the same clothes and accessories, sported the same hair style and stood in the same pose. This uniformity supported the chatty teenage dialogue which typified the girl group lyrics. Perhaps more importantly, it also invited the audience member to identify herself with the members of the group. Such a message of belonging was an important part of a marketing strategy aimed at the increasingly multiracial teen market of the period.

This article is inspired by the voices and perceptions of elder music fans and performing musicians, especially those older than 70 years of age. Based upon field interviews and ethnographic observations, it challenges the deleterious influences of social labelling and ageist perspectives (including casual yet damaging attributions of nostalgic yearning) that tend to delegitimise the musical interests or tastes of older citizens. By also emphasising musical performance, the article explores the active forms of music making as a strategy that mitigates notions of elders as non-productive consumers. The analysis further engages the contexts of musical performances within regulated institutional settings of assisted living residences, interrogating the logic and discourses of commercial management or State bureaucracies as they are expressed through organised musical recreation activities.

The literary canonisation of Hamlet means that it is now most frequently encountered as a printed text. This crucially reconfigures its character, since Shakespeare wrote for sound, not print, and for an audience habituated to finely nuanced auditory semiotics. Hamlet generates its own soundscape as the major bearer of meanings. Apart from dialogue, its complex repertoire of auditory effects includes instrumental music and song. If we examine the play as an acoustic experience, we can situate it more ‘soundly’ in its epoch, and perhaps also reinterpret its puzzles, most notably Hamlet's procrastination, an issue that only began to be raised by later critics working in a more print-oriented era. If we reclaim the sonic dimensions of the play, his inexplicable indecisiveness may be seen as the point, not the puzzle, of the play, and a metaphor of the liminal epistemology of Shakespeare's age.

The practice of curation in popular music may be seen as a form of historical enquiry that works in a similar way to the critical projects of the ‘new museology’. Self-curation can be employed by musicians to re-present their work as a historiographical project of popular music and as an intervention in dominant critical accounts of the musicians' creative practices. The challenge to conventional historiography can be understood as a project of archaeology in the Foucauldian sense, where discourses surrounding objects and their histories may be contested and reinvigorated through a process of recollecting/re-collecting that also recalls Walter Benjamin's challenge to historicism. Using the work of Robert Fripp and King Crimson as an example of musician-curated recordings, I argue that legal and economic control may become a basis for aesthetic control, through which histories of creativity may be rewritten. The act of recollection/re-collection becomes a route through which musicians are able to engage with critical contexts and genre formations, and to contribute actively to the material culture of their own history.

On 29 September 1994, Cheb Hasni, the most renowned Rai singer living in Algeria, was gunned down outside his family's house in Gambetta, a quarter of the city of Waharan (Oran). He was one of many public figures (and some 50,000 others) who have been killed since the main opposition political party, the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) was prevented from assuming power by the annulment of elections that they would have won in 1991. Like the most notable of Algeria's victims of violence, which include journalists, lawyers, doctors, television presenters and top policemen, Hasni represented a version of Algerian identity that some people clearly could not tolerate. Responsibility for his assassination has not been claimed, but the manner of his death was identical to others carried out by the armed faction of the fundamentalist Islamic movement, the GIA (Armed Islamic Group). His death has possibly marked the demise of a genre of North African popular music known as Rai as it was produced in Algeria. Rai has been a particularly problematic idiom for Islamists and secularists alike. Both groups nurture distinct views of the place of Algeria, and Algerians in the world, and the role of Islam and liberal secularism in Algeria. Rai music constructs its own distinct trajectories linking local and global, ‘East’ and ‘West’, and, in this way, constitutes a distinct problem for Algerians, and indeed other North Africans today.

This paper focuses on the musical discourse of nostalgia evidenced in the songs of Dana International, an Israeli transsexual singer who took First Prize in the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest. It is organised around several songs featuring various compositional strategies, beginning with remakes of older songs and leading into new ones. Through quotation of music and/or lyrics, and the alteration and departure from the original, Dana premiers, transforms and renews songs in a way unique to her: she forces the audience to rethink what is natural and what is historically constructed, blurs distinctions between the sexes, past and present, the national and international, and draws on nostalgia as a powerful device to unsettle and question received truths. Her songs often mock and parody the masculinist, nationalist myths of mainstream Israeli culture, exposing the ideology of its artefacts. By promoting various types of blending, Dana challenges the notion of fixed borders. Despite the musical surface of popular song, which sounds international and without specific identity, the deep structures of these songs are in fact very much about complex questions of identity.

Hardcore Dance has spent years underground evolving from the still-current stereotype of frenzied thudding bass lines coupled to samples of the tunes of children's programmes, of a music for E-head ravers whose drug-induced dummy sucking became a potent symbol for a subculture stigmatised as infantile and stupid. That evolution has reached the point of ‘Jungle’, and now Hardcore Dance and Jungle are often used interchangeably as terms of description. It is this musical form which is analysed here as part of the evolution of modern dance music. Too often subcultural study has tended to give the impression that music is one element of a subcultural style and that it is style that drives the subculture. Instead, it is argued that music drives subcultural style, and that the evolution of Hardcore Dance serves as an especially salient example because it is a musical form which persistently resists reduction to typical codes for understanding music, both academic and those in the public sphere.

Irish rebel songs afford Scotland's Irish diaspora a means to assert, experience and perform their alterity free from the complexities of the Irish language. Yet this benign intent can be offset by how the music is perceived by elements of Scotland's majority Protestant population. The Scottish Government's Offensive Behaviour Act (2012) has been used to prosecute those singing Irish rebel songs and there is continuing debate as to how this alleged offence should be dealt with. This article explores the social function and cultural perception of Irish rebel songs in the west coast of Scotland, examining what qualities lead to a song being perceived as ‘sectarian’, by focusing on song lyrics, performance context and extra-musical discourse. The article explores the practice of lyrical ‘add-ins’ that inflect the meaning of key songs, and argues that the sectarianism of a song resides, at least in part, in the perception of the listener.

Of the seventy-five tracks issued as a historical survey of Australian country performers from 1936 to 1960, sixty-eight feature a yodelling interlude, and in many the yodelling forms the main part of the performance. The importance of this vocal technique in Australian country music, and its persistence till the present day is a striking feature of the genre. Prominent Australian performers such as Wayne Horsborough comment that yodelling before country audiences in the USA produces reactions of amazement, for the technique has been almost totally abandoned by current American performers. Yet because most historical commentary on Australian country music has stressed textual development, the presence of the yodel, a wordless interlude, is often merely noted, even if with an acknowledgement of the skill of performers in this technique. And for those in the present period wishing to promote Australian country music to a broader audience, the yodel tends to be a source of embarrassment. The country music industry today is preoccupied with ‘throwing off the hick image’ and emphasising the broad appeal of the genre, and to many current propagandists for Australian country music yodelling is an aspect of both the history and current state of the music which condemns them to commercial unacceptability. Yet it has remained popular with audiences and a significant number of performers, and recently a telemarketed album of yodelling songs by veteran country performer Mary Schneider sold at Australian platinum levels (Latta, 1991, p. 150). Country music clubs, which form a backbone of committed support for the genre, frequently organise local festivals where talent quests characteristically include yodelling competitions.

This article argues that controversial hip-hopper Eminem is more properly termed a genderphobe than a homophobe. Eminem consistently uses homophobic language to critique gender behaviour, not sexual orientation. Focusing on genderphobic lyrics more accurately reveals hip-hop culture's emphasis on gender behaviour rather than the emphasis on sexual object-choice that homophobia implies. The focus on genderphobia also highlights a discriminatory practice aimed toward external behaviour that is related to homophobia but operates differently in certain cultural realms. I ground my discussion by focusing on the centrality of authenticity in hip-hop and gender propriety's centrality in comprising hip-hop notions of authenticity. Additionally, I emphasise how all pop stars rely on personae to convey convincing images to the public. I conclude by analysing the Pet Shop Boys and Mariah Carey's ‘answer songs’, which directly address Eminem's genderphobia and authenticity.

In recent years there has been a marked resurgence of interest in early Motown songs, many of which have received widespread exposure via successful films such as The Big Chill, My Girl, The Commitments, Father of The Bride and Sister Act. The steady flow of CD re-releases and contemporary ‘covers’ further attests to the continuing appeal and relevance of the music.

Since the 1997 reissue of the 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, journalists, scholars and musicians have promoted this collection as the ‘founding document’ (Marcus 1997) and ‘musical constitution’ (Cantwell 1996) of the urban folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. This reception differs markedly from that of its original issue, which sold few copies and attracted only minor critical attention. This article provides an account of the transformation in the Anthology's cultural status – showing that the canonisation of the Anthology stems not just from its content, but from the interplay of its content and its sociohistorical context. I identify some of the factors that influenced the retrospective consecration of the Anthology, including the important work of key people, the growth of a new field (‘Americana’ music) and changes in the organisational structures of the recording industry.

Few popular songs released over the past thirty years start so memorably: that bass riff, ominous, music for Jaws before there was Jaws, so insistent and unforgiving that in GoodFellas (1990), Scorsese has de Niro do nothing but smoke a ‘square’ and look – icily – off screen while the riff sounds its ten-note pattern. And you know what the combination of de Niro's look, those sounds and that smoke mean: somebody is going to get ‘whacked’. Cream's 1968 hit, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, has been part of the shared culture of the world in which it has sounded for thirty years. In both Europe and America, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ (SYL) continues to receive airplay today. At high school and college sporting events across the US, pep bands continue to play it (Dan Farris, Assistant Director of Bands, Illinois State University, personal communication, 5 March 1997). A band played it, too, in a 5 April 1997 episode of the NBC television network series, Profiler.

In this article I investigate how power is (re)produced on and through the body, specifically on Toronto's raving bodies during the summer of 2000. Toward the end of 1999 and throughout 2000, Toronto's rave culture came under intense surveillance by institutional and discursive authorities such as city councillors, police, parents, community health organisations, public intellectuals, and the mass media. What ensued was a temporary ban of raves in Toronto on city-owned property. In response to this ban, Toronto ravers relied on liberal approaches such as educational programmes and state lobbying as a way to protect their ‘freedom to dance’. In light of these reactions, one of my primary questions is: As rave becomes more normative, what are its own disciplinary mechanisms or techniques of control that are asserted at the site of the raving body?

Among the most frequently repeated formulae in the description of the traditions most often called Afro-American music, in particular the styles of jazz, blues, soul and rock, is the concept of the `blue note’. It may also seem that this is a most widely accepted idea. The ‘blue note’ is usually thought of as a kind of basic element in those styles, as constituting the `ethnic’ or ‘African’ aspect of those musics as opposed to the ‘Western’ contributions of harmony.

My main attempt here is to step into the somewhat muddy waters of musicological and sociological/anthropoligical/ cultural studies discourses of ‘the blue’ and ask what the ‘blue idea’ really is about. In rethinking the concept of the ‘blue note’, I find it necessary to differentiate between two concerns that often seem to be somewhat unconsciously or muddily mixed together:

(1) the idea of the ‘blue note’ as referring to pitch, thinking of the note as an ‘item’, commonly thought of as the slight altering of the minor third and the flattened seventh; and

(2) the general concept of `blue feeling’ linked to the idea of playing ‘blue notes’: in short, the performance of music with a ‘blue feel’.

The community singing movement was a distinctive feature of English popular musical life in the mid-1920s. Although initiated by individuals who saw it as essentially educational, it was rapidly appropriated by sections of the press, and especially the Daily Express, as an instrument in the circulation wars of the period. It was typified by a restricted range of music comprising ‘national’ songs, hymns (with the performance of ‘Abide with Me’ at the FA Cup Final singing particularly important), and songs of the First World War. This mixture and the concomitant neglect of modern popular song reflects the rather nostalgic thrust behind activities, with calls for community singing to recreate a ‘Merrie England’ that would heal the deep social divisions of the 1920s. Whether the singers were fully aware of these various musical and socio-political agendas is unclear, but community singing undoubtedly enjoyed a period of considerable popularity, with the music appreciated for allowing displays of individual and collective emotion.

This article explores the interactions and tensions arising from a vibrant Canto-pop industry exported from Hong Kong to an interventionist nation-state of Singapore bent on discouraging the use of dialects by its ethnic Chinese population. Aside from highlighting the roles of technological and commercial factors behind the regional music networks, it seeks further to position this contemporary relationship within the larger historical and cultural context. The cultural politics involved here is not just an isolated phenomenon between two different cities. More importantly, the language policies of the Singapore government represent a haunting replication of the perennial attempts by central authorities in China to impose a more standardised linguistic and cultural identity on its dialect-speaking peripheries. This identity is based on not just the court language of Mandarin, but notions of ‘Chineseness’. This article goes on to question the extent to which Canto-pop could help foster a more hybridised identity transcending both the current dictates of the modern Singaporean state and the imagined cultural boundaries of a more historically entrenched Sino-centric realm.