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.

This article discusses the characteristics of image in Ugandan hip-hop with a particular focus on representations of activism and excess. Locating Uganda as a fragile site on the basis of widespread political, social and economic marginalisation, this examination considers members of Uganda's first generation of hip-hop artists, to argue that both activism and excess act in singular response to these circumstances. Finding articulation in strivings for economic freedom and social justice, the Ugandan hip-hop image reveals negotiations of histories of colonialism and of contemporary neoliberal capitalism: in doing so, it raises intersections of race and gender, informed by hip-hop's significance as a multi-billion-dollar global industry. This cross-disciplinary inquiry combines ethnomusicology with media, cultural and visual studies in dialogue with political economy.

This paper offers a case history of the BBC's ambivalent engagement with dance music during the Second World War. It examines what ‘dance music’ meant to the BBC, musicians, and the public, and how they contested and performed those meanings in the context of new social dance practices and the growing popularity of what became known as ‘swing’ in Britain. Although broadcasting in effect disembodied music closely associated with the physical, the BBC was a primary way for people to access dance music which supported their bodily acts of leisure and regimentation. The BBC's study and regulation of dance music centred around two goals: pleasing important groups in national service and broadcasting morale-boosting music. The problem of whether these goals were congruent lay at the heart of the issue, for the youth active in national service emerged as the primary audience for the two genres – ‘swing’ and ‘sentimentality’ – about which the BBC felt most dubious.

This article addresses notions of ‘Norwegianness’ in rap music. Based on comparative audiovisual analyses and close readings of two different versions of Norwegian rap group Karpe Diem's 2010 hit ‘Byduer i dur’, the author's main objective is to question how issues concerning ethnicity and cultural belonging are negotiated through audiovisual representations and in the self-fashioning of the artists. The analyses and readings rest upon two central issues. First, to uncover how Karpe Diem's spectacle of ‘otherness’ might be considered alongside aspects of ethnicity, cultural belonging and national identity within a Norwegian context. Secondly, to argue that identity is constructed as flexible and free-floating, which provides an opportunity to reconsider notions of ‘Norwegianness’ through musical performance. By proposing a decentred approach to analysing audiovisual texts, the author intends to shed light on how Karpe Diem's performances could be read as part of a discourse on nationhood in contemporary Norwegian society. Following this, the national trauma of 22 July 2011 should be considered a significant backdrop for the readings and critical discussions undertaken throughout this paper.

Discussions of rock or contemporary popular music are very often suffused with suggestions of massive and remarkable ‘change’ (in musical style, in surrounding fashions, etc.). Just as often, however, they are filled with virtually opposite visions of endless repetition, or continual ‘sameness’ (the music all merely sounding alike). Diverging in this way, views of change in popular music tend towards extreme polarisation – so much evidently depending upon the scale and scope of comparison, and indeed much of the problem centring on the domain or level in music isolated as the one most likely to offer explanation of the underlying processes.

The very existence of popular music research in its various aspects can be considered, with its investment of attention, as a general value judgement on the music's potentialities. Moreover, we should not forget that a serious interest in popular music research would probably not have been possible without the emergence of more ambitious musical products testifying to a need for emancipation. Even so, perhaps because of a bitter awareness of its own roots in the same cultural and political processes, popular music research has somehow more and more tended to ignore ‘quality’ products in the field, whether because of their decline since the 1970s, or for the sake of some ‘scientific’ suspension of value judgement.

Ever since the first systematic study of Peruvian music (d'Harcourts 1925), musicologists have puzzled over the relationship of pentatonic, or five-note music, to other modes of music in the Andes. At that time the enquiry was related to the general musicological debate over whether the pentatonic was the universal form of primitive ‘scale’, from which all other musical scales have evolved. This debate was enmeshed with the hypothesis of nineteenth-century anthropology, that this most basic form of musical system could be derived from a human physiological capacity to distinguish the consonances of the intervals of the fourth, the fifth and the octave. Within this evolutionary paradigm, the accumulation of examples of pentatonic melody from the Peruvian Andes was easily interpreted as further evidence of the universality of this form among primitive people.

Patricio Manns (b. 1937) is a Chilean singer, songwriter, writer, poet, novelist and journalist. He was one of the group of singers who came together in the Peña de los Parra, the club founded by Angel and Isabel Parra in Santiago in 1965 which became the crucible where neo-folklore metamorphised into nueva cancíon (‘New Song’). Manns' relationship with nueva cancíon has been a fundamental, although at times an ambivalent one. Unlike many of the other musicians he has constantly involved himself in non-musical and political activity. Recently he has been the European spokesperson for the Chilean resistance movement, the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, which claimed responsibility for the assassination attempt in October 1986 on President Pinochet.

Although known as the ‘Naughty Nineties’, the last years of the nineteenth century are characterised by a succession of anti-liberal backlashes most notoriously including the Vizetelly prosecution of 1889 (principally involving Emile Zola's novels), Oscar Wilde's trials of 1895 (indirectly about homosexuality) and the pillorying of feminist reformers. Instead of becoming more sexually permissive, the English fin de siècle was in many respects deeply conservative, not only in bureaucratic responses to these sexual controversies but also in the creation of political organisations to represent and lobby for conventional moral values. Social purity campaigners' efforts to eradicate indecency in music-hall performance fits into this pattern, and provides insight into the continuity between the class politics of leisure reforms, control of artistic production and hegemonic sexual mores.

This article presents a case study of ecocritical black metal, delving into the apocalypticism of the California-based black metal band Botanist, who conjures a world in which plants have violently destroyed human civilisation. It first contextualises Botanist amidst the broader current of environmentalism in extreme metal as well as within wider cultural explorations of plants as subjective beings capable of violence. The article then examines how Botanist taps into the logic of apocalyptic environmentalism, as the music presents the essential narrative of apocalyptic bioterrorism: humanity, with wanton hubris, has sown the seeds of its own destruction, and earned whatever horrors befall it on the way to elimination. With its bleak outlook and strident sound world, Botanist's music threatens to destabilise listeners’ assumptions about their place in the world and offers an example of what apocalyptic ecological urgency in music could sound like.

Authenticity is a key concept in the evaluation of rock music by critics and fans. The production of fakes challenges the means by which listeners evaluate the authentic, by questioning central notions of integrity and sincerity. This article examines the nature and motives of faking in recorded music, such as inventing imaginary groups or passing off studio recordings as live performances. In addition to a survey of types of fakes and the motives of those responsible for them, the article presents two case studies, one of the ‘fake’ American group the Residents, the other of the Unknown Deutschland series of releases, purporting to be hitherto unknown recordings of German rock groups from the 1970s. By examining the critical reception of these cases and taking into account ethical and aesthetic considerations, the article argues that the relationship between the authentic (the ‘real’) and the inauthentic (the ‘fake’) is complex. It concludes that, to judge from fans’ responses at least, the fake can be judged as possessing cultural value and may even be considered as authentic.

In recent work in film and cultural studies, the set of social configurations, practices of everyday life, and ideological formations that constitute twentieth-century ‘modernity’ have been increasingly the subject of research and debate. Fuelled by a renewed interest in critical phenomenologies of modernity, most prominently the work of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, scholars have focused the debate on the specific historicity of visual culture in the early years of the twentieth century, in order to illuminate the contradictory and fragmented nature of modern mass cultural experience. Fusing the theoretical traditions of critical theory with the empirical and theoretical interest in contradiction and contestation typical of cultural studies, not only does this debate open new perspectives for considering the problem of mass and/or ‘popular’ visual culture, it can also contribute to rethinking the way we discuss the historicity of popular music. Conversely, a more precise understanding of the historicity of popular music practice in modern mass culture, its institutions and modes of experience, can broaden the scope of this debate beyond the spectacles of visual culture to the ‘attractions’ of the acoustic.

Emerging in the early 1970s, the work of Outlaw country artists might be heard as exploring a crisis of masculinity resulting from developments in the women's liberation movement. Building on recent research in recorded sound studies, this essay explores how the vocal staging practices deployed in Outlaw country recordings offer a unique musical exploration of the duality of the outlaw's masculinity. Using case studies drawn from Waylon Jennings' Outlaw-era recordings, this article examines how Jennings, working with co-producers ‘Cowboy’ Jack Clement, Chips Moman and Willie Nelson, among others, deployed vocal staging practices in conjunction with other musical practices to construct narratives that reveal the ‘outlaw’ character's psychological turmoil and reflect the complicated state of working-class American masculinity in the age of women's liberation.

For more than two decades, a trend in popular music scholarship has been the publication every few years of an edited collection of analytical essays (e.g., Covach and Boone 1997; Moore 2003; Everett 2008). These multi-author volumes sometimes have a specific analytical concern, such as intertextuality (Burns and Lacasse 2018), but more typically they simply bring together a variety of essays written by a variety of authors using a variety of methods to analyse music from a variety of styles. Strategically, the editors of these volumes will pitch this lack of any strong unifying theme as an advantage, asserting that the broad range of approaches gives the reader a sense for the diversity of current perspectives (as in, for example, the preface to Spicer and Covach 2010 or the introduction to von Appen et al. 2015). To be fair, the exclusive focus on analysis, particularly close readings of the ‘text’ itself, makes the chapters of these collections hold together more than, say, the articles in any regular issue of Popular Music. However, with typically only a dozen or so contributions in each volume, these multi-author works often seem like scattershot glimpses into the vast universe of possible analytical approaches and musical styles.

Using Norwegian hip hop as an example, this article argues that public sphere theory offers a fruitful theoretical framework in which to understand the political significance of music. Based on a musical and lyrical analysis of Lars Vaular's ‘Kem Skjøt Siv Jensen’ (Who Shot Siv Jensen) – a song that recently became the subject of extensive public political discourse in Norway – this article first highlights how the aesthetic language specific to hip hop music constitutes a form of political discourse that may be particularly effective in addressing and engaging publics. Further, the analysis brings attention to how hip hop music is characterised by phatic, rhetoric, affective and dramatic modes of communication that may be of value to democratic public discourse. Lastly, this article examines the expressive output of ‘Kem Skjøt Siv Jensen’ in light of Habermas' concept of communicative rationality. In conclusion, the article contends that the dichotomy between (‘rational’) verbal argument and (‘irrational’) musical expressivity constructed within public sphere theory is contrived and, moreover, that hip hop expressivity under certain conditions does conform to the standards of communicative rationality.

This article addresses the uses that record companies have made of two rhetorical tropes. The first is that only one in 10 artists succeed. The second is that they are investing in new music. These two notions have been combined to give the impression that record companies are taking risks both economically and aesthetically. They have been employed to justify the companies’ ownership of sound recording copyright and their system of exclusive, long-term recording contracts. More recently, the rhetoric has been employed to combat piracy, extend the term of sound recording copyright and account for the continuing usefulness of record companies. It is the argument of this article that investment in new music is not necessarily risk-taking; rather, it is the policies derived from risk-taking that provide the financial security of record companies.

It is frequently claimed that cultural processes in South Asia are best understood as being informed by an ethos of ‘Unity in Diversity’. The same cannot be said for culture as it has been, and still is, experienced by Indian South Africans. Far from being the homogeneous group to which apartheid South Africa relegated Indian South Africans in 1948 for the purposes of political control, the ‘Community’, as it is euphemistically called by politicians of all kinds, is plagued by sectarianism and conflict. This contest engages individuals and genuine communities who are seeking to establish a freely chosen identity, economic stability and political status.

This article explores the mobilisation of Indian popular music in the Tata-AIG life insurance company television advertisement ‘Tree of Love’ (2004). I address ways in which music representing different periods of Hindi film, along with visual representations of Indian material culture, have been integrated into an advertising narrative that alludes to India's technological and economic development. I suggest that a range of aural and visual signs subtly complement each other in creating a narrative that not only marks the passage of time, but reframes past social and economic debates into contemporary terms. I contextualise this advertisement – and the signs that it uses – within the field of the Indian insurance industry, as well as within the social-historical context of modern India. Then, utilising elements of Peircean semiotic theory, I closely analyse the aural representations of the passage of time and different eras of Indian musical culture. The analysis ties together the interactions of musical and non-musical signs with the cultural memories that the commercial is designed to evoke. Ultimately, I argue that musical meaning in this advertising context emerges from the complex interaction of these aural and visual signs, and produces memory as much as it reflects it.