The electromagnetic recording system came to Brazil in 1927 – just about two years or so after its establishment in Europe and the United States. With its higher technical specificities and capabilities, the electromagnetic system provided an opportunity for high-pitch and low-voice interpreters of song to be recorded. It seems likely that these artists would not have been recorded at that time had the mechanical system still been in vogue. At least in Brazil, this was the ‘revolution’ associated with the electromagnetic recording system: a new artistic generation emerged from the poor and middle-class inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro – then Brazil's capital city – to help produce what most prominent popular music critics and historians dub the ‘Golden Age’ in Brazilian popular music (see, for instance, Vasconcellos 1974; Tinhorão 1981; Cabral 1996). In my view, this Golden Age coincides with and is tantamount to the inception of a field of cultural and artistic production of popular music. Despite an obvious contrast in proportion and impact, there are nevertheless clear sociological similarities between this decisive moment in the history of Brazilian popular music and those moments Bourdieu (1993) describes in nineteenth-century French literature, theatre and impressionist painting.

Popular music studies has rarely exhibited the kinds of disciplinary coherence found in closely related disciplines mostly due to the field’s adoption and adaptation of methodological and theoretical innovations from a variety of disciplines, notably sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, media studies and musicology. However, many commentators continue to seek disciplinary coherence without making any critical aesthetic distinctions between the medium and materials of popular music. Distinctions and interrelationships between the literal or material aspects of popular music and the social or cultural processes of making meaning from popular music are central to the definition of a particular but not exclusive field of analysis. Through such distinctions, the very category ‘popular music’ can be understood as a more flexible and supple distinction based on an understanding of methods of construction, production and mediation in specific relation to the technical, contextual and sociological aspects of music. I use different performances of ‘Hound Dog’, the practices of ‘turntablism’, and the exigencies of Muzak as examples for analysis offering ways in which the aesthetic, material and contextual aspects of popular music can be understood in order to incorporate the actual sound of music into the analysis of its social, cultural and musical construction.

Hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan sold only one, expensive copy of their album, Once Upon A Time in Shaolin. This exemplifies recent strategies by popular music artists to establish their work as art, with what Walter Benjamin calls ‘aura’, in response to the accessibility and dematerialisation enabled by digital technology as well as longstanding cultural condescension. Critics argue that popular music should not be restricted but shared, with digital technology increasing opportunities for shared consumption. This article considers the fate of music's aura in the age of mechanical reproduction, arguing that it does not disappear but is dispersed and diversified. The digital acceleration of mass reproduction has drawn mixed responses from artists, fans and commentators, and Shaolin and similar projects show how the separation of music from its physical commodity form has brought renewed attention to perennial tensions between the popular, artistic and commercial aspects of popular music.

This essay aims to expand on existing narratives of medieval music performance by exploring recent interpretations of the troubadours. Recent advances in the field of ethnomusicology, popular music and medieval music reception suggest the need to view medieval music performance in ways other than the conventional narrative of early music performance. This article focuses on the troubadours, originally song-makers in the late medieval Midi, or South of France. Based on my interviews with recent ‘living troubadours’ in the United States and France, I present evidence for multifarious musical interpretations of the art de trobar, or medieval troubadour art. Living troubadours under consideration here include Eco-Troubadour Stan Slaughter from Missouri and Occitan rap group Massilia Sound System from Marseille. The latter claim a special distinction as living descendants of the original troubadours; the former views himself as more remotely related to medieval music. And while all the different musicians considered here offer widely contrasting interpretations of the medieval art de trobar, they do have in common certain recent musical influences, along with a view of folk music as an open-ended, and musically flexible category. All of these artists are also united in their belief that the essence of folk song is an urgent message which, though it may range from recycling to anti-centralist politics, consistently controls the musical medium. What the groups considered here have in common with traditional early music groups is their creative use of contemporary influences to evoke for their audience the Middle Ages.

The rediscovery of democratic traditions of folk song in Germany after the Second World War was not just the counter-reaction of singers and academics to the misuse of German folk song by the Nazis. Such a shift to a more ‘progressive’ interpretation and promotion of folk tradition at that time was not distinct to Germany and had already taken place in other parts of the Western world. After firstly examining the relationship between folk song and national ideologies in the nineteenth century, this article will focus on the democratic ideological basis on which the 1848 revolutionary song tradition was reconstructed after the Third Reich. It will look at how the New Social Movements of West Germany and the folk scene of the GDR functioned in providing channels of transmission for this, and how in this process a collective cultural memory was created whereby lost songs – such as those of the 1848 Revolution – could be awakened from extinction. These processes will be illustrated by textual and musical adaptations of key 1848 songs such as ‘Badisches Wiegenlied’ (Baden Lullaby), ‘Das Blutgericht’ (The Blood Court) and ‘Trotz alledem’ (For all that) within the context of the West German folk movement and its counterpart in the GDR.

This paper explores ambiguities of political resistance and anti-war protest in Madonna’s music video, ‘American Life’. We begin by tracing the history of the making, promotion and eventual withdrawal of the video in the context of the military build-up and media campaign that preceded the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. In these opening sections, we focus in particular on the (perhaps deliberately generated) controversy surrounding the work, and its problematic relationship with contemporary corporate mass media. We then proceed to describe the visual contents of the video, and present three distinct readings of it: first, as a gesture of overt protest against the war; second, as a work that is unaware of the manner in which its signifying textures unwittingly and covertly celebrate the culture it would critique, thus nullifying its overt subversive gesture; and third, as a work that is in fact far more politically resistant than it knows, through an uncanny form of protest that is dependent upon this very complicity.

In the last decade, multi-racial hip-hop scenes in Kharkiv, a predominantly Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainian city close to the Russian border, have fostered the development of socially-conscious hip-hop among African students. Drawing on musical elements from their respective home countries, the US and local hip-hop traditions, African male youths use Ukrainian-, Russian- and English-language lyrics to express concerns about socio-economic status, personal struggle and racial inclusion. This study analyses how African musicians use hip-hop as a social means through which to fight the escalating violence against dark-skinned foreigners and migrants. It draws on ethnographic data to identify several ways in which African-performed hip-hop has influenced contemporary public opinions regarding ‘black’ identity in eastern Ukraine.

Popular music studies have experienced a strange fate in Italy. After a promising beginning in the 1970s and the early 1980s (with the direct contribution by musicians and scholars like Franco Fabbri and Umberto Fiori to the new intellectual formation), a situation of stasis followed. The latter was characterised by the presence of individual important voices but without the support of a constituency strong enough to guarantee in Italy the institutionalisation of this new field of research.

The subject of his article reflects what Robert Crawford has called ‘a growing wariness of notions of an essentialist Scotland’ (1994, p. 57). The article has been written partly as a contribution to the critique of ‘essentialist’ notions of national identity in gerneral and ‘Scottishness’ in particular. I share the concern of Stuart Hall (1990; 1995) and others (Massey 1991; Rose 1995) to challenge ideas which reproduce notions of the ‘boundedness’ or ‘purity’ of territorial and national identities; whilst recognising that such identities are, by definition, only likely to change slowly (Therborn 1995). My approach to the analysis of national identity is to try to follow the ‘social construction of reality’ thinking which informs much current writing on the relationships between ethnicity, place and identity (Jackson and Penrose 1993). From that point of view, regarding Scottish national cultural identity in the late twentieth century,

During the 2010s a new generation of queer hip hop artists emerged, providing an opportunity to engage with a set of politics defined by art, fashion, lyrics and music. A leading proponent of this movement was Azealia Banks, the controversial rapper, artist and actress from New York. This study instigates a critical investigation of her performance strategies in the track and video, ‘Chasing Time’ (2014), offering up various perspectives that probe into queer agency. It is suggested that techniques of sonic styling necessitate a consideration of subjectivity alongside genre and style. Employing audiovisual methods of analysis, we reflect on the relationship between gendered subjectivity and modalities of queerness as a means for demonstrating how aesthetics are staged and aligned to advanced techniques of production. It is argued that the phenomenon of eroticised agency, through hyperembodied display, is central to understanding body politics. This article opens a space for problematising issues of black female subjectivity in a genre that is traditionally relegated to the male domain.

The study of popular music often loses something in translation. The musical categories used by scholars and musicians in different locations vary widely in meaning, complicating both analysis and disciplinary divisions. Genre classifications also create blind spots which leave styles falling between the cracks out of the picture, impoverishing analysis and even denying musicians certain benefits. This paper examines the use of terms such as folklórico, tradicional, popular and típico by both lay people and scholars in Latin America, then turns to Dominican merengue típico as a case study showing how musical categories are often intensely local. I argue that – because it relies more on notions of place than on the ideas of time, class, race or production that inform other categorisations – the concept of típico is useful in examining transnational ‘roots’ musics which bridge nations, classes and modes of production. In addition, using musicians' and listeners' own categories can help us to question the canons of musical scholarship, musical nationalism and music marketing, thus creating new possibilities for both scholars and musicians.

This article examines some of the ways in which Australia's First Peoples have responded to serious community health concerns about alcohol through the medium of popular music. The writing, performing and recording of popular songs about alcohol provide an important example of community-led responses to health issues, and the effectiveness of music in communicating stories and messages about alcohol has been recognised through various government-funded recording projects. This article describes some of these issues in remote Australian Aboriginal communities, exploring a number of complexities that arise through arts-based ‘instrumentalist’ approaches to social and health issues. It draws on the author's own experience and collaborative work with Aboriginal musicians in Tennant Creek, a remote town in Australia's Northern Territory.

This paper considers the Mike Figgis film Red, White & Blues as a history of blues music in Britain. The film was produced as part of a series celebrating the centenary of the blues, and not unnaturally its British focus begins with the 1950s and 1960s. The paper argues, however, that it is an incomplete history because it fails to consider how the British blues genre and scene developed subsequently. It also argues that the film focuses too much on the memories and performances of the musicians. It fails to consider the industrial context in which any ‘new’ genre can emerge, and pays almost no attention to the role of its consumers, the audiences and fans across the country that were an integral part of its development. The paper suggests that research into that aspect of the British blues scene would complement the various documentary accounts of the music and musicians.

Harold Bloom's theory of poetic influence has been applied to studies of Western art music, but rarely to studies of popular music. This article investigates the applicability of his theory to the music of British progressive rock keyboardist Keith Emerson. It will be argued that, while Emerson's overtly intertextual music for The Nice cannot be well illuminated with this theory, Bloom can help us explore and interpret some delicate aesthetic aspects of the important style change from The Nice to Emerson, Lake and Palmer (ELP). Emerson felt the anxiety of The Nice's influence upon ELP, changed his style because of it, and led the new group to prog rock superstardom. Bloom's six revisionary ratios can indeed shed light on those subtle qualities which were necessary for a progressive rock ideology to be ‘mainstreamed’ and sold as commodity – qualities that resulted from a process of ‘misreading’.

The approach of this article complements those of previous critics that account for the rise of the ‘mature’ style of Tin Pan Alley chiefly in terms of the internal logic of the field of American popular music. It suggests that the so-called golden age of the Alley (ca. 1920–1940) should be considered in broader cultural terms, provided by modernisation and especially the growth of a ‘cool’, urban sensibility, representing a crucial reassessment of Victorian emotional style. In their contributions to this reassessment, the Alley greats stretched the conventions of popular song-writing in a number of ways, usually described vaguely in terms of ‘wit’, ‘sophistication’ and the like. Qualifying these concepts by lyrical analysis, the article suggests that the self-reflexive use of irony, linguistic play and ‘realist’ imperatives makes a number of songs approach contemporary ‘high’ literature in such a way that it makes sense to speak of a popular modernism.

This paper focuses on the use of rhythmic play in the compositional strategies of rock musicians. Such play is seen as both embodying an attitude on the part of the performer-composer in which music as pure structure tests one's skill and imagination in sonic reality, and as an attempt at a special kind of communication with his or her audience. In this latter capacity the musical work becomes an unspoken or hidden challenge to the listener as a kind of in-group or insider knowledge. Listening thus becomes a window into the creative act, bands and their audiences forming an extended community based on trust, respect and a sense of shared ownership.

The blues is a complex and subtle musical language that warrants careful analysis and sustained debate. There are legitimate concerns with the application of music-theoretical paradigms to blues music, but we should not allow such concerns to undermine all attempts to address the blues as a serious and coherently structured music. This paper explores the notions of ladder, level and chromatic cycle as an insightful set of theoretical tools in analysing the music of Robert Johnson. Key sources in developing this analytical approach are the scholarship of Gerhard Kubik and the spatially oriented analytical methods of neo-Riemannian theory. The notions of ladder, level and chromatic cycle are explored with close reference to Johnson's ‘Kindhearted Woman’ and through a more general consideration of the scale-degree content of his vocal parts.