This issue of Popular Music is produced in honour of Paul Oliver, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to popular music scholarship.

Paul was a member of the original Editorial Board for Popular Music when it was set up in 1980 and continued to serve as a member of that body, and subsequently of the Editorial Group, until 1990. He was also a founding member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and has maintained a keen interest in the organisation, continuing to attend, and speak at, its international conferences. His vision of both the potential and the needs of the Association as a global network lay behind his proposal in 1985 that a project be undertaken to compile a worldwide encyclopedia of popular music, an idea which subsequently bore fruit in EPMOW (The Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World). All these achievements are worth celebrating in themselves, but it is Paul's outstanding contribution to scholarship in the area of vernacular – particularly African-American vernacular – music that we wish to honour with this issue.

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 author argues that the success of the Russian pop duo, t.A.T.u., and in particular their participation in the 2003 Eurovision Song Contest, is revealing of the multiple and contradictory ways in which Russia is currently engaging with concepts of the national and the international. Specifically, the essay considers t.A.T.u.’s performance of faux-lesbian pop eroticism as a productive flashpoint of East-West misreading and failed translation that might account for the pop duo’s very different reception in Russia and the West. The controversies and inconsistencies that have followed t.A.T.u are located in the larger context of ongoing debates over the redefinition of post-Soviet Russian national identity and Russia’s emerging role on the global pop cultural stage. From this perspective, it is argued, the t.A.T.u. phenomenon interfaces with aspects of both post-Soviet and international youth cultures, shifts in Russian attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and identity politics, and the contradictory commodification and transnational circulation of distinctive ‘European’ identities that is Eurovision’s stock and trade. Thus, a secondary question addressed by the author concerns the value of Eurovision itself as a subject suitable for serious scholarly engagement.

In this essay I propose an analysis of the Sanremo Italian Song Festival from 1964 to 1967, to which is added an introduction about its history and musical, social and cultural features. The aim of the essay is not only to propose a different perspective on the songs presented at the Festival in the 1960s, but also to re-configure our understanding of the popular music mainstream and the mechanisms of musical change in our mass-mediated and industrialised societies, as well as the question of identifying the peculiarities of the Italian canzone.

DH: Perhaps I could begin in the present and ask you how you see the status of the blues today in the black community in the US.

PO: There are a number of black writers who are interested in the arts, but I don't think blues has any significance for the black community as a whole, as gospel still has. Gospel is held together by the religious side, it's a different kind of structure. Rap seems to have taken over, at least as far as the younger generations are concerned.

DH: Do you sense any connection between rap and hip hop and the blues?

PO: There are connections, certainly, but I don't know how significant they are. There are superficial connections – for example the ‘Stackolee’ theme runs through several rap songs – but I'm not sure that is of any depth of significance. But rap songs do provide opportunities for people to express themselves as individuals; otherwise, there isn't a music that does that. As much as anything it's a functional connection, therefore, rather than a stylistic one.

DH: Rap lyrics are more outspoken in many ways than blues lyrics.

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.

This essay reconsiders the constituencies of fans and detractors present at prime and bursting 1970s dicsos. It argues for a more gender-inclusive conception of discos multiracial ‘gay’ revellers and for a particular convoluted conception of ‘homophobia’ as this applies to the Middle-American youths who raged against disco in midsummer 1979. Their historic eruption at Chicago’s Comiskey Park came just weeks after the chart reign of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’, today a classic emblem of gay culture in the post-Stonewall and AIDS eras and arguably disco’s greatest anthem. Disco inspired lovers and haters, too, among music critics. Critical adulation and vitriol are conjoined in the present reading of musical rhetoric, which explores disco’s celebrated power to induce rapture in devotees at the social margins while granting anti-disco critics’ charge of inexpressivity in its vocals. In ‘Survive’ musical expressivity is relocated in the high-production instrumentals, where troping of learned and vernacular, European and Pan-American, sacred and profane timbres and idioms defines a euphoric space of difference and transcendence. The use of minor mode for triumphant purposes is also a striking marker of difference in ‘Survive’ and is among the factors at work in the song’s prodigious afterlife.

L’Orchestra, a cooperative established in 1974/75, based in Milan, Italy, was a unique organisation, involving musicians, sound and lighting engineers, music critics and teachers, and concert managers. It was started as a kind of artists’ union, a federation of folk, rock, political song, jazz, avant-garde groups, but in a few months it became a concert agency and a record company; it held music courses for amateurs and published music tutorials; it helped managing the first multipurpose art/social centre in Milan. L’Orchestra promoted studies along various disciplinary perspectives (sociology, music education, ideological criticism, semiotics) that in some respects embody and in others help explain the development of popular music studies and of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) in Italy.

Paul Oliver never described himself as an ethnomusicologist but much of his work is strongly ethnomusicological in approach. This article looks at his pioneering research in these terms, re-examines some of his ideas about African retentions in the blues as put forward in his book Savannah Syncopators, discusses critically the reliability of sonic evidence for establishing historical connections between different kinds of music, and concludes that such evidence is acceptable when supported by other kinds of data.

The trend in popular culture away from idealising mature, strong ‘men’ in favour of young, androgynous ‘boys’ can in part be traced to how pop music impresarios such as Lou Pearlman present sexuality to their huge market of young listeners. During their time under the management of Wright Stuff, 1996–1998, the Backstreet Boys were the most popular manufactured boyband in the world, and as such influenced the sexual development of millions of young women and men. This paper examines how, during this period, the presentation and marketing of the Backstreet Boys, and their youngest member Nick Carter in particular, encouraged queer readings, and how those subtle queer subtexts in the music and videos may have affected their (mostly) young, uncritical audience.

From 1923 to 1931, record companies based in the northern USA stocked their catalogues of Southern vernacular music, particularly African-American blues and white ‘old-time’ music, largely with ‘location recordings’ made in Southern cities such as Atlanta, Memphis and Dallas. These recording trips, which are sometimes characterised as speculative, were in fact partly planned, the uncertainty of discovering recordable new talent offset to some extent by the prior booking of artists with whom the companies had already had success. The evidence for this careful planning, however, has been somewhat obscured by the unscheduled discovery, in Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927, of Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family, whose commercial success and stylistic innovations would have enormous influence on country music.

Although the canzone napoletana (Neapolitan song) is the best-known Italian popular music in the world, it is also the most misunderstood. It is mostly associated with operatic or quasi-operatic vocal styles, but all the other Neapolitan popular voices, the performance features and even the history of this musical genre are less well known. This essay in particular considers how the porous Neapolitan voice is a ‘space’ for complex negotiations between different musical styles, and how through this voice (that admits within itself the existence of other vocal styles) Neapolitan composers, musicians and singers articulate different relationships between music, history and nostalgia.

Since the beginning of modern canzone, cover versions have represented a shortcut to importing and exporting songs across national borders. By breaking language barriers, these records have played the role of ambassadors of Italian music abroad and, vice-versa, of Anglo-American music at home. Although cover records mania boomed especially in the 1960s, the history of Italian popular music is disseminated by such examples, including exchanges with French- and Spanish-speaking countries as well. After reflecting on the nature of ‘cover’ and offering a definition that includes its being a cross-cultural space most typical of Italy and other peripheral countries in the age of early contact with pop modernity, the paper focuses on the economic, aesthetic and sociological paradigms that affect the international circulation of cover records and suggests a few theoretical explanations that refuse the obsolete ‘cultural imperialism’ thesis in favour of a more flexible view hinged upon the notion of ‘deterritorialisation’. In the final section the paper provides a short history of Italian records that were hits abroad, decade by decade, and ends by highlighting those artists that played the role of cultural mediators between Italy and the world.

Though federal law in the United States provides for the protection of artistic property, including music, African-American blues musicians, since the appearance of their first commercial records in the 1920s, have generally not received their due. Part of the problem came from the difficulty of squaring the discrete notions of folk composition and artistic property in those early days. But the exploitation of black artists was largely attributable to common practices in the record industry whose effects were multiplied in this case by the near total defencelessness of the victims. Imitations and cover versions led to a veritable despoliation of black talent which has only belatedly received legal compensation and public recognition.

This essay argues that the widespread but not widely recognised adaptation of Frankenstein in contemporary dance music problematises the ‘technological’ constitution of modern copyright law as an instrument wielded by corporations to exert increasing control over cultural production. The argument first surveys recent accounts of intellectual property law’s responses to sound recording technologies, then historicises the modern discourse of technology, which subtends such responses, as a fetish of industrial capitalism conditioned by Frankenstein. The increasing ubiquity of cinematic Frankenstein adaptations in the latter two decades of the twentieth century outlines the popular cultural milieu in which Detroit techno developed its futuristic aesthetic, and which provided subsequent dance music producers with samples that contributed to techno’s popularisation. These cultural and economic contexts intersect in an exemplary case study: the copyright infringement dispute in 1999 and 2000 between Detroit’s Underground Resistance (UR) techno label and the transnational majors Sony and BMG.

The first Scandinavian records appeared in 1899. By 1925, over 27,000 sides had been made in the region, and recordings had become an established part of musical life. Half of the recordings were made by the Gramophone Company, the market leader, but there were at least a dozen competing firms. The companies had to find out by trial and error what types of music would be attractive to customers. Early recording artists were mostly well-known personalities from opera, theatre or music halls, and their repertoire had already been tried on the stage.

Most Scandinavian records were pressed in Germany or the United Kingdom, and the companies also promoted their international repertoire in the region, but customers preferred local artists. A hundred years ago, opera singers were the only internationally known recording artists. Popular music was tied to local languages and traditions, and a demand for imported popular music only emerged after World War One, with the growing popularity of modern dance music.

The blues genre is commonly (and not incorrectly) regarded as a key marker of African-American identity and one with ‘deep’ (folk, or ‘down home’) roots. But this status is inadequately understood unless it is placed in a context of inter-racial exchange, in which ‘roots’ are a product of a complex transaction between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’. This territory is explored in terms of a thematics of loss, nostalgia and trauma, evident both in blues content and in the historical structure of revival to which the genre has been continually subject. A useful background is the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a nostalgic celebration of nostalgia with a blues/bluegrass inter-racial dimension, and a productive theoretical framework is provided by Lacan's approach to fantasy, loss and nostalgia.

By offering a historical reconstruction of the process of contextualisation of hip hop culture in Italy over the last fifteen years, the article assesses the current status of canzone d’autore and its changing configuration under the impact of rap music. From a theoretical point of view, the conceptual framework combines the sociological definition of ‘field of cultural production’ elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu with the related literature on social and symbolic boundaries. From a methodological point of view, the analysis is based on the data collected by Club Tenco (a cultural organisation which plays an institutional role within the field of canzone d’autore) as well as on a series of qualitative interviews carried out with a number of Italian rappers and cantautori. Special attention is paid to a very few crucial figures that can be considered paradigmatic examples in the dynamic process of boundary-making of the two cultural (sub-)fields of Italian rap and canzone d’autore.

This article examines a very basic question for popular music studies: what is ‘the music industry?’ It surveys the usage of the term in various arenas and argues that it is often used in ways which state or imply that the industry is a homogenous unit with shared objectives and interests. However, the reality is that this picture is, at best, outdated and an inaccurate portrayal of the organisational structure of the global music economy in the mid-2000s. In addition, to think of a single ‘music industry’ rather than music industries, plural, is simplistic and does little to aid understanding of those cultural industries which are primarily concerned with the creation, management and selling of music, either as a physical/digital product, a performance, or as a bundle of intellectual property rights. We tease out the implications of this, especially as they relate to understanding what is routinely referred to as ‘the music industry’ and the development of policies for it.

Paolo Conte is the most internationally successful of the Italian singer-songwriters who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. He is also among the most idiosyncratic, eclectic and unusual exponents of what Franco Fabbri has defined as the canzone d’autore (author’s song). Nonetheless he remains a rather arcane, cult figure in the Anglophone world – an example of what Simon Frith has called ‘the unpopular popular’. A combination of apparent opposites – the provincial and the cosmopolitan – his music appropriates a global sweep of influences without being definable as ‘world music’. Characteristics of both his rough, untrained singing style and wry, ironic and opaque compositions have strong affinities with US singer-songwriters like Tom Waits and Randy Newman, and he draws heavily on early American jazz influences, although he remains quintessentially Italian. This makes him difficult to categorise in the world music market.