‘The Girl from Ipanema’ – or, in Portuguese, ‘Garota de Ipanema’ – is without doubt the song that turned bossa nova into a household term the world over. It was written by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes one afternoon in 1962, as they sat in the Veloso bar – now renamed ‘Garota de Ipanema’ – on Montenegro Street, where they had watched the young Helô Pinheiro walk past them on her way to Ipanema Beach. The song was first recorded in 1963 by Peri Ribeiro (Odeon) (Machado 1971), and since then over 300 other recordings have appeared on the market, both in Brazil and abroad (Cabral n.d.c, p. 10). When it was first launched in America on the ‘Getz/Gilberto’ album (Verve), interpreted by Astrud and João Gilberto in 1964, ‘The Girl from Ipanema' posed a serious challenge to the Beatles’ hegemony over the charts, rapidly moving to second place. With 4.2 million registered performances, it was only in the last four years that its ratings began to fall, but it is still among the world's most widely aired popular songs (Anon 1994c, pp. 124–5).

This article re-examines the use of arguments in favour of free speech when faced with difficult subjects in music, such as sexual violence against women. We present a new perspective on the 1985 US Senate Hearing on Record Labeling and challenge the orthodoxy that the Hearing was only a matter of free speech. Using critical discourse analysis we argue that the sexist environment of the Hearing, the misogyny of the musicians, plus homosocial bonding resulted in the PMRC's arguments being unaddressed as attention turned to censorship. Subsequent academic work has continued to focus on censorship, neglecting to investigate how music can propagate dangerous representations. This article indicates the need for a shift in popular music studies towards careful consideration of those aspects which are difficult and dangerous for women. It therefore opens up popular music to important new areas for critical examination and feminist analysis.

Hip-hop studies have historically centred on issues of the ‘street’ or virtuosic lyricism and flow, foregrounded as evidence of the ‘seriousness’ of the genre. While these have undoubtedly been valuable theoretical approaches, the prominence of social networking in the 2010s (with its vast implications for communication and identity politics) has sculpted a generation of rappers whose vocal style and self-representation disintegrate prior assumptions about hip-hop identity. These artists, who have flourished in tandem with the rise of streaming services, have been disparagingly dubbed ‘mumble rap’ by traditionalists owing to the apparent indecipherability of their vocals and a lack of emphasis on observational or poetic lyricism. In this article I argue that this myopic label undervalues the groundbreakingly post-verbal nature of the music being created by these rappers, and highlights the innovations of mumble rap, exploring the centrality of social media, memes and streaming to its existence while critically examining its protagonists’ unconventionally stylised vocals. After analysing the impact of streaming, information overload and audience participation (through social media hype and memes) on contemporary hip-hop, I survey the growth of melodic Auto-Tuned vocals and repetitive lyricism in the work of pioneering mumble rappers such as Future, before turning to an extended examination of Atlanta's Young Thug, whose controversially malleable vocal style, which prioritises experimentation with vocal textures while confounding the rules of hip-hop flow, is mirrored by his impulsive exploitation of social media and androgynous fashion sense, establishing him as the most revolutionary archetype of so-called mumble rap.

In order to take advantage of the promotional potential of the music video, the country music industry was forced to adapt a medium with conventions and aesthetic elements established by other musical genres – by pop and rock. And to reach its distinct market country music video also had to incorporate country's own established iconographic elements. This iconography is constructed and understood in two ways: through the traditional concerns of country music lyrics; and through the history of visual media based on and developed around the genre. Country music has, in fact, been associated with the screen since movies could first talk, from Jimmie Rodgers' 1929 movie short The Singing Brakeman through thousands of singing cowboy movies to the national television exposure that culminated in Hee Haw.

On 12 July 1989, the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) announced that the Greater London FM licence would go to London Jazz Radio (LJR). This franchise was allocated as part of the expansion of commercial radio in Britain. As in most other countries, the British state owns the electromagnetic spectrum. This allows the government to choose who can broadcast over the airwaves. However, unlike most industrialised countries, the British state chooses not to use all the frequencies made available for broadcasting under international treaties. Instead, there has been a ‘duopoly’ between the radio stations of the state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and commercial stations authorised by the IBA. This limitation on the number of radio stations makes the British broadcasting system seem backward compared not only with the USA, but also the rest of the European Community. However, this oligopoly is now slowly collapsing. The licencing of LJR was a first stage of a period of rapid growth in commercial radio in Britain.

The East of Germany, the Bundesländer of the former GDR, is an important centre of Goth activity. The Goth scene is remarkably large in this part of Germany, and one of the most important yearly Goth festivals, the Wave-Gotik-Treffen, takes place in Leipzig. This article investigates the specific characteristics and internal dynamics of East German Goth subcultures after German reunification. Combining subcultural theory and Gothic criticism with Derrida's notions of spectrality and hauntology, the potentials of Gothic as a form of cultural criticism are explored in an investigation of the psycho-social wasteland of the undead GDR. It will be argued that post-Cold War unification has not only led to a new political order, but has also given rise to a new type of Gothicism, as East German Goth subculture is haunted by ‘spectres of Marx’ that provide a critical engagement with globalised capital and media. As a specifically German version of the worldwide Goth scene, moreover, it marks the local boundedness of globalised subcultures.

Popular music policy making incorporates the art and rationality of ‘governmentality’. In doing so it seeks to move beyond benign policy making efforts and some of the prevailing approaches to cultural policy studies – primarily arts policy – to apply interventionary strategies into the space dominated by global recording companies. Major recording companies and the business-as-usual approach of Return on Investment dominates local and national popular music through the macro-level perspective of global trade regimes, thereby avoiding the micro-level activities needed by citizens locally. Critical approaches to the potential loss of localised music production in the face of globalisation are drawn from the heterodox, interdisciplinary schools of institutional economics which, in this case, uses instrumentalism to create a model that insists on research-based popular music making policies that respond to citizen needs. Using examples from the Australian experience, the Instrumental Policy Behaviour Process (IPBP) is proposed as a model for generating localised, resource-allocating approaches to popular music policy making.

The globalisation of reggae continues to engender a wide range of highly poignant re-inscriptions and re-interpretations of reggae's sound and of Rastafarian thought. One of the most compelling of these has been the negotiation of Rastafarian and Christian ideologies within the context of Protestant reggae bands and artists. The application of Rastafarian thought, dress and language to the evangelical concerns of Protestants – at times paradoxical, at others ingenious – signals an important moment of inter-religious contact that opens a window onto the complexities and multiple meanings that attach to music and to religious systems as they travel between the local and the global. This essay considers music by Christafari (United States), Sherwin Gardner (Trinidad and Tobago), and Stitchie (Jamaica), and considers questions related to the parallel globalisation of reggae and Rastafari. It does this by interrogating the extent to which authenticity, positionality, and religious context inform the use of and interpretation of Rastafari symbols within gospel reggae. In so doing, I introduce a concept that I call the negotiation of proximity, and offer some reflections on the ways that the Rastafari elements within gospel reggae might be understood in new, global (and newly localised) contexts.

The contemporary popular music audience in Japan is exposed to a large variety of music, both domestic and imported; tastes are well defined. In particular, such factors as: the singer's ‘image’, what I call maintaining a standard formula, ambiguity and sentimentalism can be pinpointed as important to the music's appeal. In spite of this, the similarities of Japanese popular music to Western musical styles can suggest that a conventional musical analysis will be sufficient for understanding this music. Thus, many critics who evaluate Japanese popular music usually consider it merely a parody of the ‘correct’ styles that they are accustomed to hearing. Concentrating merely on the musical analysis, however, underestimates the cultural factors that give Japanese popular music distinctive characteristics which are highly valued in Japan. To offset the shortcomings of such analysis, this article is an attempt to examine Japanese popular music in terms of those cultural factors most important to popular music genres. The first section is a general review of current trends in popular music in Japan, paying particular attention to the characteristics that make the music uniquely ‘Japanese’.

There is an apocryphal legend that when Louis Armstrong was asked whether he considered his music to be folk music he replied: ‘Wal, yeah, I guess so: leastways, I never heard of no horse making it.’ If and when we talk of Bob Dylan as a folk singer, we do so partly of course in this fundamental sense: his music is of, about and for people. But we also mean — as Satchmo's interviewer must have done — that Dylan calls on resources and techniques that pertain to oral cultures rather than ostensibly to our own. Unlike ‘real’ folk song, Dylan's words and music are written down; yet what is notated is no more than an approximation to the sounds heard, which are created empirically for each performance, from verbal inflection and from the body's gestures. Dylan is a ‘folk’ artist in that his sources are absorbed at a more or less pre-conscious level: from the monody and banjo-picking of ‘poor white’ Americans and the traditions of white British folk music behind them; from the black blues and the African heritage it stemmed from; and from some more sophisticated, or at least literate, sources such as white hymn, march and parlour ballad. To these musical roots there are literary parallels: Dylan's verses have been deeply influenced by rural folk ballads, by the poetry of the blues, by the Bible, by Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (scarcely less pervasive in the Bible belts than the Good Book itself), by Hymns Ancient and Modern, by children's rhymes and by runic verse of all kinds, including Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, which are close to the core of Dylan's experience and which, although literary, were sung by the poet himself to improvised, presumably folk-like, tunes. In his early days Dylan operated with his voice — untrained, ‘natural’, veering between speech and song — and his acoustic guitar.

The Finnish government has historically been active in regulating the practices of popular music. At the same time, the music industry, rock media and musicians have traditionally insisted on markets free from state intervention. This article focuses on the history of the interrelationship between cultural policy and popular music, especially rock exports, in Finland. It argues that the high level of organised forms of culture and the lure of internationalism form the historical basis for the nation-state–popular music relationship in Finland. Following the demands for ‘competitive society’ in the 1990s and the international breakthroughs of Finnish pop and rock music performers after 2000, this relationship has intensified. Contemporary policy is in many ways healthier than in the past, yet it also raises crucial questions about hierarchies and identity relationships in popular music and society.

This article explores how the use of mobile phones has changed the contemporary Finnish soundscape. The change manifests itself firstly via telephone conversations which have spread from private premises to public places and secondly via interchangeable ringing tones. Drawing on research carried out among cellular phone users, the article argues that the ringing tones are selected on the basis of musical taste, so they can no longer be regarded as impersonal telephone signals. They can be used as a means of distinction and identity like any music. Even if the quality of ringing tones is inferior to the original interpretation of the tune, they can still be considered to be music, because of their personal and collective associations.

It has been a long time since Japan was first considered an economic power. Japanese automobile, electronic and computer companies have entered the world market and are now competing fiercely with each other. Their financial power and technologies are focused both domestically and overseas, and their launch into culture through advertising strategies is another facet of that power which has emerged since the 1980s (Un'no 1990).

This article presents the historical transformation of Finnish commercial radio popular music policies from 1985 to 2005 and contemplates the role of terrestrial radio in contemporary digital age. It argues that a sender-centred paradigm of early commercial radio was replaced swiftly by receiver-centred paradigm, which has been applied since the early 1990s. The change of radio music cultures is described in detail by dividing it into three different eras: Block Radio, Format Radio and Media Convergence. The study draws on the research project consisting of case studies analysing the music content of various radio stations. The primary empirical data is composed of 32 interviews of radio personnel and the analysis of 4,500 individual songs broadcast by popular music radio stations with newspaper and journal articles supporting the primary data. Radio music culture is approached theoretically from the ethnomusicological perspective and thus defined as all practices that have an effect on broadcast music, including the processes of acquiring, selecting and governing music. The empirical results of the study show that the transformation of radio music cultures is affected by economic, technological, legal, organisational and cultural factors.

This article is about the role of García Márquez and particularly macondismo as an ideology in establishing the canonic validity of vallenato as a folk genre from the Colombian Caribbean. García Marquez' chronicles of the early 1950s are seen as foundational texts on the aesthetics and value of vallenato; texts which influence subsequent writings on the topic. One of the main topics explored is how these texts acquire canonic validity through the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is then that macondismo – the Latin Americanist celebration of magical realism – becomes an interpretive metaphor for Colombia and vallenato music becomes the sonorous emblem of this metaphor. This occurs through García Marquez' writings, his multiple interventions in Colombian vallenato festivals, and the way vallenato is subsequently taken by a journalistic elite of the country as representing a macondian sonorous paradigm. The article explores how these different elements coalesce in constructing a genealogy of aurality for vallenato, setting the parameters of its interpretive significance through multiple processes of folklorisation of the genre.

Our article addresses the connection between popular music and far-right populism, as exemplified by the Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ). We discuss the specific mainstreaming and normalizing potential of popular music for far-right populist politics, by means of songs that do not qualify as political or politicized music in the sense of carrying a clear political message. We introduce a multi-step methodology that addresses performative aspects of actual situations of reception (fieldwork) and in-depth analyses of the music and its affordances (group analysis). Based on this approach, we argue that these ambivalent, sometimes even contradictory musical performances take on a life of their own within a specific arrangement that we will term an assembled politicity, in the sense of a political potential activated through situational arrangements. In this way, the FPÖ's musical programme affords far-right populist interpretations through music that appears to be unsuspicious.

This essay tracks a predominant fantasy of music in global liberal-capitalist culture: music as ‘the only real magic’. Although discussion of music's ‘magic’ has been characterized as a vestige of Romanticism, I argue that it became a cornerstone of ordinary/everyday music discourse circa 1900, around the time that sociologists defined modernity as mostly bereft of magic and configured the aesthetic as its remaining stronghold. Juxtaposing claims of magic in ordinary music discourse with a coeval archive of these ‘disenchantment’ narratives, I trace music's institutionalization as magic in the historical moment from around 1900 to the present. This history reveals that music remains commonly experienced as ‘the only real magic’ insofar as it offers deeply ameliorative forms of affective connection felt to be scarce in other domains. Accordingly, it indicates the immense healing power that music has accrued particularly over the last century while also adumbrating the conditions of scarcity from which this potency has emerged.

On the way to my library there is a little shop named ‘World Music. The Oasis of Music from Asia, Africa’. One morning I stopped my bike and went in just curious to see what world music could be in my little town. In the racks even the smallest country from Asia or Africa was represented with one or two CDs, most of them produced in Paris or London. The other customers were half my age (around thirty to thirty-five, nobody over fifty or under twenty). The owner, an immigrant who has lived in Sweden for more than ten years, had this to say:

The youngsters do not come here, all my customers are between twenty-five and forty. There is a growing interest in world music: people with money are visiting foreign countries as tourists and when they come home they come to me, asking for artists or groups they have heard. Most of them have an academic background and speak English fluently.

This article investigates how the concrete sound of and recording process behind a pop tune relate to the possibilities and constraints of its electronic media. After a brief presentation of some theoretical issues related to the question of mediation and materiality, we address the claim that digitisation erases the material aspects of mediation through an investigation of contemporary popular music. Through a close analysis of the sound (and the silence) in Madonna's song ‘Don't Tell Me’, from the album Music (2000), as well as in a handful of related examples, we argue that one can indeed identify specific aural qualities associated with digital sound, and that these qualities may be used to achieve different aesthetic effects as well as to shed light on mediation and medium specificity as such.