The French rock group Carte de Séjour rose to national fame in 1986 with their Charles Trenet cover ‘Douce France’, a North African-inflected song that provided an ironic commentary on the ties that bind Maghrebi immigrants and their descendants to France. Journalists and academics have hailed Carte de Séjour as the first example of an empowered beur music group in French popular culture, but their lack of extended success tells a different story. This article is the first full-length academic study to examine Carte de Séjour's exact contribution to French popular music and to the so-called beur and anti-racist movements of the 1980s. By questioning the common view regarding the ‘subversive’ power of French-Maghrebi artists, this article argues that Carte de Séjour's lack of success was due to their controversial representation of ‘Arabness’ in music and performance, their instrumentalisation by the Socialist Party, and their conflictual relationship with France's intellectual and political establishment at the time.

The terms underground, alternative and commercial are widely used in discussions of popular music scenes in Havana and around the world. In Cuba, the words alternative and underground are often used interchangeably, in critical as well as popular discourse. I propose a working definition of, and a distinction between, these terms in Havana, since to render them synonymous reduces their usefulness. The distinction between underground and commercial, in contrast, is widely seen as self-evident, by critics as well as by fans. However, a simplistic dichotomy glosses over the interpenetration of these terms, which are of limited use as analytical categories. This discussion of terminology is grounded in an analysis of the politics of style in Havana hip hop.

Since its emergence in the early 1970s, glam rock has been theoretically categorised as a moment in British popular culture in which essentialist ideas about male gendered identity were rendered problematic for a popular music audience. Drawing on a Bourdieusian theoretical framework, the article argues that while this reading of glam is valid, insufficient attention has been given to an examination of the relevance of educational capital vis-à-vis the construction of self-identity in relation to glam. It is therefore concerned with raising questions about social class in addition to interrogating questions of gender. The article draws on the ethno-biographies of a sample of glam's original working class male fans: original interviews with musicians and writers associated with glam, as well as published biographical accounts. In doing so it contends that glam's political significance is better understood as a moment in popular culture in which an educationally aspirant section of the male working-class sought to express its difference by identifying with the self-conscious performance of a more feminised masculinity it located in glam.

This article reports on a study of participants in a Weekend Warriors Program for ‘lapsed’ rock musicians in Melbourne, Australia. It observes musicians over a six-week period that included a jam session, coaching sessions and a gig (concert). It examines the learning pathways of participants and their goals and experiences alongside those of the programme organisers within the comparative context of music learning practices among young and older musicians and in the light of academic research into the midlife ageing process. A question that arises from the data is the extent to which the experience and actions of middle-aged women musicians coincides with the literature on gender in youth rock music scenes and the literature on music, ageing and gender. The article concludes that the Weekend Warriors Program draws on the learning practices that the musicians involved had adopted in their youth and which act as a catalyst for their further musical and social participation and self-directed group learning. Age appeared to create no barrier to their enjoyment or their achievements; indeed in many ways it seemed to make them less inhibited and self-conscious in realising individual objectives that were further encouraged by working within a supportive if loosely bonded group.

Difficulty is most often associated, not with popular music, but with the avant-garde. How do popular music listeners listen to albums that present compositional, performance or conceptual elements from the avant-garde? This paper explores where difficulty lies for listeners when they listen to, situate and evaluate albums that sit on the intersection between the popular and the avant-garde. The paper focuses on the online collaborative discourse of readers of a British music magazine (The Word), to explore how, while ‘difficult albums’ might be considered sui generis and dislocated from the norms of popular music, the aesthetic discourse of The Word's readers shows that to engage with difficult albums is to explore how they are able to be connected with a range of musical histories and practices, as well as to multiple personal experiences of popular music.

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.

This article presents the concept of virtual liveness and demonstrates its relevance in an analysis of ‘Vane’, one of John Oswald's plunderphonic pieces. It argues that even when encountering a piece of music that lacks a physically co-present audience, lacks largely unmediated acoustic sound and lacks a live performer, the term ‘performance’ may still be usefully applied. In these cases, however, the sense of liveness that invokes this idea of performance is often more virtual than actual. ‘Vane’ sounds not just like a combination of Oswald's two source recordings (Carly Simon's and Faster Pussycat's versions of ‘You're So Vain’), but like a new technological entity: Oswald's manipulations of his source material result in sounds that are decidedly ‘of the machine’, even as they invite us to sing along with Carly Simon's and Faster Pussycat's performances. We enter into a complex network of references between the performances represented in the original recordings and this new, virtual performance – the performance, ultimately, of a sounding cyborg.

This article examines the contested issue of defining the genre of bluegrass music. Interpreting this debate as a subjective negotiation and renegotiation of a category, it focuses on the discursive and musical means through which ontologies of bluegrass are framed. In doing so, the article adds to a growing body of literature that considers genre in popular music as a flexible construct involving both musical performance and cultural formations. The article begins by exploring the idea of bluegrass as constructed by Bill Monroe and a number of early bluegrass scholars, after which it invokes recent work on human cognition and categorisation to analyse the genre debate among bluegrass enthusiasts. The article ultimately proposes that such discourse, notwithstanding its apparent futility, can be regarded as a vital means for a genre's self-perpetuation.

The cultural turn in sociology and related fields of study has brought with it new understandings of the various ways social identities are formed. In a post-structural landscape, social identities must increasingly be regarded as reflexively derived ‘performative assemblages’ that incorporate elements of the local vernacular and global popular cultures. Building on the above reinterpretation of social identity, this paper takes as its central premise the notion that, in addition to its well-mapped cultural importance for youth, popular music retains a critical currency for the ageing audience as a key cultural resource of post-youth identification, lifestyle and associated cultural practices. In its examination of the relationship between popular music, ageing and identity, this paper uses illustrative examples drawn from ethnographic data collected by the authors between 2002 and 2009 in Australia and the UK.

‘The Boy with a Moon and Star on His Head’ was written and recorded by Cat Stevens in 1972. This paper briefly examines the song's subject matter, before analysing its musical structure and that of the words to the song. As well as the standard pattern of end rhyme, a pattern of internal rhyme is also analysed, using tools derived from literary analysis. The words to the song are transcribed by a method which mediates between transcription of the words that make it look like a poem and the words as they appear in sheet music. Finally, the song's pattern of internal rhyme is placed into a context that includes songs as well as poems, suggesting that the song is an exception that suggests a rule for words in the singer-song at the time of the song's appearance.

This article offers a sociological account of the labour of jazz musicians. The first part is concerned with elaborating a theory of jazz work based on Alasdair MacIntyre's notion of social practices. Applying this theory to recent empirical work with British jazz musicians, the article reveals how the virtuous pursuit of specific ‘internal goods’ is judged to be particularly prominent in jazz, suggesting that it might constitute an ethical practice in MacIntyrean terms. While MacIntyre's theory is argued to offer a congenial framework for an analysis of jazz, it is then compared and contrasted with more established readings of jazz practice – based on the work of Pierre Bourdieu – which suggest more objective and instrumental motivations for working in jazz. The article concludes by evaluating the relative merits of each approach.

The academic literature on mash-ups has been dominated by discussions about issues relating to their illegal nature and infringement of copyright. We aim to appraise this musical style with a socio-musicological approach to focus on its aesthetics. We argue that mash-ups are characterised by two underlying principles, namely contextual incongruity of recognisable samples and musical congruity between the mashed tracks. Through our close analyses of The Evolution Control Committee's ‘The Whipped Cream Mixes’ and Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, we describe how contextual incongruity often creates a humorous effect, which explains why many listeners react with smiles and laughter when hearing a new mash-up. In successful mash-ups, the combination of musical congruity and contextual incongruity results in the paradoxical response: ‘these two songs should definitely not work together … but they do!’

Any study of punk rock in Russia will in some way come into contact with the massive influence of Egor Letov, his band Grazhdanskaia Oborona, and their extensive output during the late 1980s. Academia has thus far been reluctant to study the band because of its leader's involvement with dubious right-wing movements and his many tasteless and provocative media stunts during the 1990s. By taking its point of departure in Letov's songs from four stages of his band's development, this article seeks to shed light on Grazhdanskaia Oborona's contribution to the development of punk in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. When it comes to Letov's extremist views in the latter half of his career it attempts to venture beyond reductionist notions of fascism, into the complex landscape of the paradoxical and often confusing mixture of extreme ideologies that sprang out of the Soviet collapse. It will argue that Letov's work – his songs – come over as a lot less contradictory and ideologically extreme than their author's political stunts would suggest. Their aesthetics and ideology are first and foremost punk.

This article is inspired by the voices and perceptions of elder music fans and performing musicians, especially those older than 70 years of age. Based upon field interviews and ethnographic observations, it challenges the deleterious influences of social labelling and ageist perspectives (including casual yet damaging attributions of nostalgic yearning) that tend to delegitimise the musical interests or tastes of older citizens. By also emphasising musical performance, the article explores the active forms of music making as a strategy that mitigates notions of elders as non-productive consumers. The analysis further engages the contexts of musical performances within regulated institutional settings of assisted living residences, interrogating the logic and discourses of commercial management or State bureaucracies as they are expressed through organised musical recreation activities.

This paper explores ethnographic findings gathered during my work as a DJ and academic, particularly in relation to a community arts project called Talking About Old Records. This project brings together teenagers and older people from a range of backgrounds at collaborative workshops using DJ technology and old records. These facilitate conversations about what music means to the participants. This paper puts the emphasis on the older people, exploring the emergence of generational musical identities from the 1940s onwards. Relationships between the spread of personal listening technologies, ‘youth music’ and the birth of the teenager in the 1950s are explored in the context of older people's fears about a loss of musical sociality, fears which are articulated against a background of cyclical manifestations of intergenerational musical conflict and scandal.

This article examines the expansion of the US children's music industry in the last decade. It considers the sanitising of Top 40 pop for child audiences in the Kidz Bop compilations, the entrance of Disney into the popular music market and the meteoric rise of tween music products such as High School Musical, Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers and Justin Bieber. It shows that, as children increasingly consume mainstream musical products, in the converse dynamic children's artists themselves play an increasingly prominent role in popular culture and in many ways have taken the lead both in commercial success and in stylistic innovations. Examining public expressions of age-based solidarity among celebrity musicians associated with children, this article argues that children's music is increasingly articulated through tropes of identity politics, and represents the early stages of a childhood counterpublic.

From her time as a young performance poet in New York in the late 1960s to her current position as punk rock's éminence grise, Patti Smith has foregrounded the image of the poet as privileged seer. This essay seeks to read Smith's romantic impulses within the context of her activity in the Poetry Project at St Mark's Church, the pre-eminent public face of the Lower East Side poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Ultimately, this essay will argue how Smith's complex negotiations between her understanding of the Poet as Visionary and the adamantly playful, diffuse and collaborative aesthetic characterising downtown New York's poetic community fed into the development of Smith's performative stance as proto-punk rock icon.

The late 20th century in Sweden saw the growth of music solely aimed at an elderly audience. This article discusses music within pensioner organisations, first assessing a cassette compilation marketed through the members' magazine of Sweden's largest pensioner organisation and, second, embarking on ethnographies of meetings within a study circle in music-listening arranged through a pensioner organisation, conducted in 1999–2000. The music selection in the cassette compilation diminishes certain genres of the included period and foregrounds others, adding up to a specific homogeneous national memoryscape. A central theme in the study circle was the production and negotiation of generational and individual memoryscapes. The two mediascapes produced different memoryscapes, one being nationally and temporally bounded, the other being at the same time local, transnational and transtemporal. To conclude, the article claims that if we wish to understand the nexus of ageing and music in contemporary society, we need to listen not only to musicians, entrepreneurs and care institutions, but also to their intended audiences.

The power ballad has become a mainstay of popular music since the 1970s. This article offers a history of the songs and discusses their place in the larger field of popular music genres. The songs are defined by the use of both a musical formula based on constant escalation and an expressive formula that combines the euphoric uplift created by rousing music with sentimental themes and ploys. Contrary to views that power ballads first appeared in 1980s rock and are primarily rock numbers, the songs emerged in the 1970s pop recordings of Barry Manilow and others, and from early on crossed genre lines, including pop, rock and R&B. These crossings result in an exchange between the fervour of the power ballad and the distinct expressive qualities of the other genres. This article also places the power ballad in the larger history of the ballad. The songs are part of a shift toward more effusive and demonstrative styles of ballads underway since the 1960s. In addition, the emotional excesses of the power ballad fit into a larger change in the expressive tone of works across different popular culture media. With those works, emotions are to be large, ecstatic and immediate.