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.

The purpose of this paper is to provide some historical perspective on the so-called loudness war. Critics of the loudness war maintain that the average volume level of popular music recordings has increased dramatically since the proliferation of digital technology in the 1980s, and that this increase has had detrimental effects on sound quality and the listening experience. My point is not to weigh in on this debate, but to suggest that the issue of loudness in sound recording and playback can be traced back much earlier than the 1980s. In fact, loudness has been a source of pleasure, a target of criticism, and an engine of technological change since the very earliest days of commercial sound reproduction. Looking at the period between the turn-of-the-century format feud and the arrival of electrical amplification in the 1920s, I situate the loudness war within a longer historical trajectory, and demonstrate a variety of ways in which loudness and volume have been controversial issues in – and constitutive elements of – the history of sound reproduction. I suggest that the loudness war can be understood in relation to a broader cultural history of volume.

The first decade of the 21st century has seen a concurrent rise of pop-rock screen productions in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, particularly feature films, documentaries and TV series informed by the guitar and/or band culture. This paper probes the popularisation of pop-rock in the region and asks what gender and sexual expressions have been mobilised in such productions and representations. The paper juxtaposes dominant gender tropes, such as the failing male rocker in search of rebirth (Korea), romantic youth pursuing authenticity (Japan), dazzling but also bedazzled rocker-girl on stage (Japan), indie music goddess in control of subdued femininity (Korea) and peripheral girl-with-acoustic-guitar who chronicles boys' sorrow (Taiwan). Responding to the familiar myth of rebellion in pop-rock discourses, our inter-referential analysis suggests that East Asian pop-rock screen is about the making of heterotopias rather than utopias.

How is music appropriated and recirculated on the web, across different claims to authority over its movement? Complicating broad accounts of online ‘piracy’ or ‘sharing’, this paper explores rules of appropriation and recirculation in the field of archival hardcore blogging, in close readings of blogs that try to reconstruct a system of regulating principles and regulated practices. In relations among themselves, bloggers claim (and quarrel over) a non-proprietary ‘custodial’ authority over the music they post, which supports a range of privileges from attribution to exclusivity. Relations between bloggers and property-holders reveal intricate entanglements of different forms of authority (rather than straightforward oppositions between discrete logics of gift and commodity) – in which bands and labels might appeal to subcultural credibility in the same breath as legal copyright. While drawing on concepts of norm and gift that emphasise and valorise the sociality of appropriation, this paper insists on the ambivalence and contestation across different practices of appropriation, and between practices of appropriation and property – recovering an intricate interrelation among the legal, economic and social lives of musical works.

Bruce Springsteen's body of work contains a striking number of songs with homoerotic or queerly suggestive content. Moreover, his live performances often push the limits of the homosocial, ‘queering’ onstage relationships through everything from lingering kisses with the late saxophonist Clarence Clemons to intimate microphone sharing with guitarist and real-life best friend Stevie Van Zandt. In this paper I trace Bruce Springsteen's consistent performative engagement with queer desire over the course of his 40-year career through a close reading of both lyrics and performance (including onstage, and in video and still photography). I examine how Springsteen's queer lyrical content and performative acts contrast critically with dominant readings of his hypermasculine, ‘all-American’ image, and suggest that Springsteen's regular deployment of homosocial and homoerotic imagery in both lyrics and performance – far from being an exception to his more mainstream persona – actually constitute a kind of queer aesthetic vital to, and consistent with, his artistic vision of love and community.

Linguistic diversity poses a significant but not insuperable obstacle to transnational flows of popular music in East Asia. This paper reviews strategies that are used to overcome language barriers, especially the use of English by mainstream artists. Although this strategy has met with some success, it can be problematic in that it involves the negotiation of new artist identities with audiences. This negotiation of identities is illustrated by an analysis of YouTube comments on two English-language music videos by established Asian-language singers – Tata Young's ‘Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy’ and Utada Hikaru's ‘Easy Breezy’, which indicates that language, ethnic and gender identities are all problematised when these singers choose to sing in English.

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.

Because of their brevity, many pop songs of the last 50 years seemingly elude the application of narrative theory. But the deliberate lengthening of individual tracks during the early years of progressive rock exposes them to precisely that kind of examination. One such song is ‘Supper's Ready’, which closes the 1972 Genesis album Foxtrot. This allegorical 23-minute epic, abundant with references to the Book of Revelation, provides an intriguing model for the ‘concept song’, and confounds the listener's expectations – lyrical, musical, narrative, structural and temporal. In this article I explore the seven tableaux of ‘Supper's Ready’, paying particular attention to the treatment of the apocalyptic theme, apply formalist and narrative theories of interpretation, and consider ways in which the song's design demands that the listener engage with both its concept and its construction.

This article concerns the regional city of Tamworth, New South Wales, Australia, a place that prides itself on its reputation as Australia's home of country music. We consider the ongoing memorialisation of country music in Tamworth, and how the processes associated with the project of articulating country music's past work to create and maintain something that can be recognised (and experienced) as a dominant narrative or an Australian country music ‘canon’. Outlining a number of instances in which the canon is produced and experienced (including in performances, rolls of honour and monuments built around the city), the article explores the ways in which this narrativisation of Australia's country music history contributes to a certain kind of memory of the genre's past.

Based on ethnographic interviews, this paper examines how Japanese hip-hop DJs distinguish themselves in the global marketplace in ways that reflect on Japan's two self-images: its impenetrable uniqueness and its adeptness at assimilating other cultures (cf. Ivy, Iwabuchi). Following the autoexoticist strategies of Takemitsu and Akiyoshi, DJ Krush and Shing02 draw on Japanese uniqueness by integrating Japanese instruments (e.g. shakuhachi, shamisen, taiko), genres (biwa narrative), and aesthetics (ma, imperfection) into their works; Evis Beats takes a more parodic approach. At the DMC World Championships, Japanese DJs including DJ Kentarō have competed on the basis of eclecticism and originality in assimilating multiple sound sources. While countering the stereotype of the Japanese as imitators, this emphasis on originality may place some contestants too far from prevailing trends, putting them at a disadvantage. Both strategies imply that Japanese artists experience anxieties regarding their authenticity, necessitating strategies to differentiate themselves.

Scholarship on the moral panics around rock music has long focused on racial fears and anxieties about a youth culture that might escape societal control, but little serious attention has been paid to the conservative Christian anti-rock discourse that surfaced publicly in the United States in the 1960s. This article addresses that gap by situating this construction of rock as an inherently evil corrupting force for 'traditional' religious, family, and national values within a larger cultural context, and arguing that it illuminates the rise of contemporary conservative morality politics in the U.S. Not merely the ravings of a few extremists, this discourse represents a worldview and rhetorical mode that was once widespread within a small religious subculture but has since developed—together with the social and cultural power of that subculture—into one of the central political frames of contemporary American life, helping lay the groundwork for today's culture wars.

This paper examines the ways in which hip-hop has taken root in Korean popular culture. The processes that began in the early 1990s include appropriation, adaptation and ‘cultural reterritorialisation’. By looking at recent Korean hip-hop outputs and their associated contexts, this paper explores the ways in which Korean hip-hop has gained its local specificities. This was achieved by combining and recontextualising Afro-American and Korean popular musical elements and aesthetics in its performance and identification in the context of the consumption and commodification of Korean hip-hop as a ‘national(ised) cultural product’.

The bonding between black and brown immigrants in Britain has resulted in the emergence of a new musical genre called Bhangra, which hybridises Punjabi dhol rhythms with those of reggae, rap and hip hop. Bhangra's appropriation of Black sounds that are considered ‘Kool’ in the West has not only given Asian youth a new, distinctive voice in the form of ‘Asian dance music’ but has also led to the reinvention of Punjabi folk tradition in consonance with the lived realities of multicultural Britain. This essay examines various aspects of sonic hybridisation in ‘the diaspora space’ by British Asian music producers through tracing the history of Bhangra's ‘douglarisation’, beginning in the 1990s with Apache Indian's experiments with reggae. It covers all forms of mixings that came in between, including active collaborations, rappings, remixings, samplings and so on that made Punjabi and Jamaican patois dialogue in the global popular cultural space. The essay explores the possibilities of a ‘douglas poetics’ for Bhangra by juxtaposing the celebration of sonic douglarisation in postmodern narratives of migrancy and hybridity against the stigmatisation of biological douglarisation in miscegenation theories and ancient Indian pollution taboos.

This article considers the integral role music plays in drag in general and ‘femme’ gender performance (or queer performances of femininity) in particular. Drawing from ethnographic interviews with performers and observations of their performances, I delineate some of the purposes music can serve in these contexts: a tool for character development, a musical lingua franca with which to establish a dialogue with the audience; a part of a nuanced intertext that troubles the cohesiveness of a musical plot or ideological discourse; a fan strategy for staking ownership over a beloved song or genre. I argue that femme gender performers critically stage their own consumption of the popular music they enjoy, interrupting its narratives and rhythms with their choreography and reterritorialising it with their dancing bodies.

Ever since its sovereignty reverted to China, Hong Kong has been torn between its national (in terms of China and its ‘soft’ power) and global status (as ‘Asia's World City’). In this special context, Hong Kong's singular, ambiguous but prolific existence ceased. This paper endeavours to map ‘Cantopop’ (Chinese popular songs) on the new media landscape and examine its decline in the context of the rise and fall of cover versions. Cantopop was once very popular, not only in Hong Kong but also in its neighbouring regions. Its rise in the 1970s was a result of its typical hybridity, an important aspect of which was influenced by the use of cover versions that changed its soundscape. In the mid-1990s, the Cantopop market started to shrink significantly. A radio campaign for localisation advocated the release of original songs aimed at enhancing the development of Cantopop, but in the end proved to have the opposite effect. In the new millennium, ‘Mandapop’ (Mandarin popular songs) has taken on the role as the trend setter of the Chinese popular music industry. We argue in this paper that Cantopop's decline is the result of Hong Kong's loss of hybridity.

This article proposes that the recent history of the live solo multi-instrumentalist, more conventionally known as the ‘one-man band’, might serve as a useful window onto broader transformations in postmodern culture. If the one-person band has historically been understood as a humorous, culturally devalued phenomenon, with its practitioners occupying marginal race and class positions, the recent visibility of solo multi-instrumentalism in indie and experimental rock attests to its altered status in contemporary culture. The present discussion situates the shifting fortunes of the one-person band in relation to the contemporary hegemony of neoliberal conceptions of subjectivity. In their performance of nimble, flexible and omni-competent self-reliance, artists such as Theresa Andersson, Robert Fripp and Andrew Bird model some of the key qualities idealised by theorists of a free-market ‘entrepreneurial selfhood’.

This article examines the practice and recent rise in the use of various aspects of Japanese popular culture in hip hop, particularly as manifest in the work of RZA, Kanye West and Nicki Minaj. Often these references highlight the high-tech, futuristic aesthetic of much Japanese popular culture and thus resonate with concepts and practices surrounding Afro-futurism. Drawing on various theories of hybridity, this article analyses how Japanese popular culture has informed constructions of African American identity. In contrast to the often sensational media coverage of racial tensions between African American and Asian communities, the nexus of Japanese popular culture and African American hip hop evinces a sympathetic connection based on shared notions of Afro-Asian liberation and empowerment achieved, in part, through a common aesthetic of technological mastery and appropriation. The synthesis of Asian popular culture and African American hip hop represents a globally hybridised experience of identity and racial formation in the 21st century.

Singer, bass player and songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello has inspired a growing body of scholarship addressing her funky, political, ‘othered’ musical personae. Existing work celebrates Ndegeocello in the context of identity politics (most commonly feminist, Black Feminist/Womanist, Black Nationalist or Africanist). This tactic not only defies Ndegeocello's rejection of identity politics, but also oversimplifies her complex, sometimes divergent musical negotiations of selfhood. This article highlights the discursive tensions of engaging ‘Black’ with ‘queer’ with ‘woman’ with ‘musician’ by exploring her most contradictory performances of self, particularly those which other scholars argue are ‘feminist’ or ‘queer’. Identifying a scholarly gap around Ndegeocello's strikingly conflicted performances of Black queer gender in songs about same- and opposite-sex relationships, this queer of colour critique explores manner and process over essence, articulating experiential, situational, non-linear and even incoherent perspectives. In doing so, it offers an affect-oriented, politically and musically attentive alternative conceptual frame to identity politics.

This article examines the policies of the British Musicians' Union towards the employment of musicians who were not UK citizens in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s, with particular emphasis on an alleged ban on American musicians entering the country. Drawing on a number of hitherto largely ignored and/or unavailable sources, it argues that many previous accounts of these policies have simplified a more complex picture. We illustrate that complexity and suggest that the issues surrounding the ban are ones which continue to resonate.