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 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.

Understandings and discourses about age have tended to be instrumental to popular music in terms of production, promotion and consumption, and many studies of popular music have taken younger people, and especially ‘youth’ cultures, as their subject matter. Where older people have been considered, the focus has mostly been retrospective, that is on their experiences when young and their attitudes to contemporary ‘youth’ cultures, rather than relationships between the temporal dimension of the life course and music. As the case of danzón illustrates, stereotypes that older people are resistant to novelty, change and possibility are ill founded. Moreover, where age is used to justify rescuing ‘cultural traditions’, caution may be called for and analysis required to assess what lies behind such claims and why. In Veracruz, the older age of the majority of danzón performers is evoked to ‘authenticate’ this local ‘tradition’, and justify its ‘rescue’ and promotion by Veracruz's culture industries. Yet, older people are not considered repositories of ‘tradition’ or sought out as ‘authentic’ practitioners. Instead, many older performers are new to danzón.

A growing tendency to study Australian popular musics as an aspect of Australian cultural studies has begun to bear fruit in the form of long overdue appraisal of the socio-cultural and musical significance of these musics. Yet in our justified enthusiasm for the exciting horizons made visible by this development, it is possible to forget that music research can serve more traditional but nevertheless important functions. In the study of popular musics, in particular, knowing how music was played can be more important than knowing what piece of repertoire was performed. For example, discovering what was ‘done’ to music in performance can tell us about the sound of unrecorded genres and can facilitate (for whatever reason) the reconstructed performance of these genres. Knowing that specific performance gestures (such as ‘flattened’ or ‘blues’ notes) were applied can of course increase our understanding of the social, cultural, and even the political nature of specific musics. In this article I am mostly concerned with applying this notion of ‘doing things’ to music to the retrieval of musical information about a specific ensemble. This more or less indigenous ensemble, which was promoted in 1918 as ‘Australia's First Jazz Band’, has captured the imagination of Australian jazz writers and is widely considered to represent the beginning of Australian jazz (Bissett 1979, p. 9).

Gypsy folk music is of a distinctive character compared with that of the other East European ethnic communities. The pecularities differentiating it from these other forms of folk music – improvisation and a readiness to adopt new influences – have continued to be of significance. While in several cases the folk music of peoples who have established themselves in national states is kept alive by artificial means (e.g. by promoting folk singing groups, by teaching folksongs in schools and by various revival movements), the vast majority of Gypsies have preserved their traditional music as an almost exclusive musical language.

This article takes an imagined, transnational living room as its setting, examining jazz's place in representations of the ‘modern’ middle-class home across the post-war West, and exploring the domestic uses that listeners both casual and committed made of the music in recorded form. In magazines as apparently diverse as Ideal Home in the UK and Playboy in the US, a certain kind of jazz helped mark a new middlebrow connoisseurship in the 1950s and 60s. Yet rather than simply locating the style in a historical sociology of taste, this piece attempts to describe jazz's role in what was an emergent middle-class sensorium. The music's sonic characteristics were frequently called upon to complement the newly sleek visual and tactile experiences – of furniture, fabrics, plastics, the light and space of modern domestic architecture – then coming to define the aspirational bourgeois home; an international modern visual aesthetic was reflected back in jazz album cover art. But to describe experience or ambience represents a challenge to historical method. As much as history proper, then, it's through a kind of experimental criticism of both music and visual culture that this piece attempts to capture the textures and moods that jazz brought to the postwar home.

UK drill music frequently features as a prime suspect in newsrooms and courtrooms that charge it with driving the ‘knife crime epidemic’ in Britain's major conurbations. Such prejudicial assumptions about the role of drill in inciting violence are largely unfounded, but nevertheless inform criminal justice policy that leads to unjust and discriminatory outcomes. While drill rappers consciously post violent content on YouTube to increase viewership and gain popularity, the role of YouTube in facilitating and profiting from this traffic in violent imagery is rarely questioned in criminal proceedings – enabling, as it does, the weaponisation of such videos as ‘bad character evidence’ in court. Drawing on a selection of YouTube videos that represent drill rappers as dangerous ‘criminals’, this article argues that such videos function as a resource for the criminalisation of drill by police and prosecutors who present drill lyrics as personal testimony that is robbed of its fictive qualities, and makes rappers vulnerable to prejudicial ruling and discriminatory treatment within the criminal justice system.

Considerable time and print has been expended in attempting to define and date the first British brass band. This controversy should take a subordinate place to the more interesting questions that can be applied to the topic of brass bands when, unambiguously, they do exist as a fairly widespread activity and can reasonably be regarded as the active embryo of the standard ensembles which eventually formed the brass band ‘movement’.

Before the advent of ‘world’ music in the culture of globalisation, The Incredible String Band in the 1960s added elements of Moroccan and other international music into their work. In the context of an exploration of the band's journey to the east, this article argues that the ISB's ‘exotic’ sounds became the aural signifier of the psychedelic, and that the ISB's aesthetic of appropriation veered from fetishisation, and also homage and parody, to ritualised adaptation. The ISB's pre-‘world’ use of international music was self-consciously naive, but it may have enabled later modes of cultural appropriation.

This paper considers references to Oklahoma in blues recordings from 1924 to 1941, and the paradox that, although the reality of life for African-Americans in that state was little different from life in the Deep South, the recordings usually speak of migration to Oklahoma in optimistic terms. The notion that the Indian Nation (a.k.a. ‘the Territory’) had been a refuge for runaway slaves is rebutted, together with the conclusion that optimistic references in the blues preserve this idea as a collective memory. What is being recalled is rather the period between the Civil War and statehood (1907): the former slaves of Native Americans in Oklahoma became tribal members, gaining the civil and property rights accorded to tribes-people, and the black townships movement offered the prospect of autonomy and self-government on the frontier. Two songs which take a negative view of Oklahoma's Jim Crow reality are also considered.

Common knowledge has it that Elvis Presley stood for sexual liberation – because his gyrations caused the first controversy, he liberated Western culture from the curse of sexual repression. Beyond the female fans that play a role in that image, Elvis has a vast number of male followers. With more than 20,000 members, the Official Elvis Presley Fan Club of Great Britain (OEPFC) is the largest fan club in the world. According to the president, half the members are male (Slaughter 1996, p. 1). This means that thousands of male fans are dedicated enough to stay in one organisation. Over 400 smaller clubs remain active, so Elvis still has thousands of male devotees. What can be said about how these fans relate to their idol? More fundamentally, what are the most suitable research methods, ideas and approaches to use when answering that question?

This is the place

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

streams black, the merman in his armoured body

We circle silently

about the wreck

we dive into the hold

I am she: I am he ...

(‘Diving into the Wreck’: Rich 1973, p. 24)

Were Adrienne Rich to dive again today into the wreck – of history, of collective memory, of identity – she might be surprised to find Polly Jean Harvey already there, feasting in the depths on plots and symbols, greedily stuffing her storytelling sack. Like Rich, with her dual-sexed narrator (‘I am she: I am he’), Harvey enjoys playing at multiple selves, and in doing so, she tells stories that are fuelled equally by the fires of female and male, hetero- and homosexual desire. In the final stanza of her celebrated poem, Rich creates another memorable conundrum of syntax: ‘We are, I am, you are/by cowardice or courage/the one who find our way/back to this scene’ (Rich 1973, p. 24). With her suggestive pronoun games, Rich calls for a uniting of forces in the excavation of a troubled past. This seems to be Harvey's conviction as well. Hers is a musical dramatic stage upon which multiple characters, in combined voices and disparate musical styles, act out disorienting and sometimes disturbing tales of identity, sexuality and power.