When musicians ‘cover’ a previously recorded song, they provide an intertextual commentary on another musical work or style. This paper considers several ways in which such commentaries engage constructions of authenticity, focusing on two covers by the Pet Shop Boys: ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, originally by U2, and ‘Go West’, first recorded by the Village People. I analyse the musical sound, performance style, and lyrical themes of each pair of songs, as well as the discourse surrounding their production and reception. I also consider how scholars have theorised authenticity in the interpretive traditions engaged by these songs. I argue that the Pet Shop Boys’ version of ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ is subversive, poking fun at certain common ways of expressing authenticity in 1980s rock, while their cover of ‘Go West’ repositions disco - a genre that has widely been construed as inauthentic - as a type of ‘roots music’ for the gay community of the 1990s.

This article looks at a particular moment in the relation between popular music and social protest, focusing on the traditional (trad) jazz scene of the 1950s in Britain. The research has a number of aims. One is to reconsider a cultural form dismissed, even despised by critics. Another is to contribute to the political project of cultural studies, via the uncomplicated strategy of focusing on music that accompanies political activism. Here the article employs material from a number of personal interviews with activists, musicians, fans from the time, focusing on the political development of the New Orleans-style parade band in Britain, which is presented as a leftist marching music of the streets. The article also seeks to shift the balance slightly in the study of a social movement organisation (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, CND), from considering it in terms of its ‘official’ history towards its cultural contribution, even innovation. Finally, the article looks at neglected questions around Americanisation and jazz music, with particular reference to power and the past.

In the first forty years of his career, American pianist Keith Jarrett has established a reputation in multiple stylistic directions. Jarrett has typically incorporated influences as varied as bebop, country, rock, gospel, minimalism, baroque and classical styles into his often lengthy improvisations. Vital to his musical persona, but less obvious, is the influence North Indian classical music has had in shaping Jarrett's improvisatory strategies. Although he never formally studied Indian music, and although his instrument – the piano – is far removed from the conceptual backdrop of North Indian raga performance, Indian music was a central component in the artistic climate out of which his improvised solo recitals grew.

A cultural climate of global influences was the backdrop to the development of Jarrett's solo concerts. Therein, perhaps, lies one key to understanding the spell that this music has cast on large and international audiences. With this format, Jarrett tapped into the ambiance of a particular historic moment, which combined a desire for change with the discovery of spiritual and musical traditions outside the Western world.

In this paper I will demonstrate how explicit and implicit references to classical Indian principles of music making helped shape Jarrett's unique free solo concerts.

The term ‘world music’ usually conjures up images of musics from ‘remote’ corners of the world. However, that remoteness is not always geographical and can, for example, be chronological. Tôgi Hideki, a former musician from the Imperial court in Japan, has sought to introduce court music - gagaku - to a wider audience through the reworking of traditional gagaku pieces and new compositions for gagaku instruments. Gagaku boasts a history of over 1,200 years and its esoteric nature inhibits popular interest. Tôgi Hideki’s popularised gagaku, on the other hand, has found a new audience for gagaku, and his music serves as a bridge introducing Japanese back to a remote part of Japanese musical culture.

Popular music in Hong Kong is the production of a multi-faceted dynamic of international and local factors. Although there has been much attention to its growth from different perspectives, there has been no single study that systematically addresses the complicated interplay of the two interrelated processes of globalisation and localisation that lie behind its development. The main aim of this paper is to explore how social circumstances mediate musical communication among Hong Kong popular artists and audiences, and contribute to its growing sense of cultural identity – how locality emerges in the context of a global culture and how global facts take local form. Firstly, I propose a conceptual framework for understanding the cultural dynamics of popular music in terms of the discourse of globalisation and localisation. Secondly, I consider local practices of musical consumption and production. Thirdly, this paper discusses the impact of the global entertainment business on local popular music. I conclude with a summary of the effects of the interaction between globalisation and localisation on Hong Kong popular music.

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.

The Raincoats were one of a handful of British, all-female punk bands successful enough to release records and tour internationally. Since the late 1970s, critics intrigued by the idea that music can enact gender, have heard their music as somehow embodying femininity. I explore the discursive origins of the Raincoats music as ‘feminine music’ before analysing their music to determine the specific nature of their work as female punk musicians. The Raincoats took advantage of punk's ideology of amateurism to shatter traditional (read: masculine) subjectivity in rock music. Analysing their music reveals the ways in which their music triggers listening that encourages an understanding of their music as feminine.

Juan Garcia Esquivel's compositions and band arrangements of the late 1950s and early 1960s – his so-called ‘space-age bachelor pad music’ – feature exotic and futuristic instruments, dazzling stereo effects, textless vocalisations, and an array of colourful harmonic resources. This paper situates Esquivel's music within the venerable tradition of the Pastoral mode, a specialised narrative mode met in certain literary and musical works. I begin with an account of the musical pastoral, illustrated with reference to Renaissance madrigals, opera libretti, and especially French concert music from the turn of the twentieth century. In the music of ‘impressionist’ composers, pastoral conventions include a preponderance of ‘slithery’ sounds such as tremolo, trills, glissandi, gauzy timbres, colouristic harmonies and, especially, an over-abundance of motivic material. The steady parade of new themes, with little repetition, and rapidly changing orchestral colours impart a hedonistic atmosphere, consistent with the ‘fantasy of plenitude’ associated with the literary Pastoral. Esquivel's music, I claim, represents a transposition of this bucolic style, in which the ephemeral sounds of the flute and harp are transformed into their space-age counterparts: theremin, vibraphone, buzzimba, and the ‘zu-zu-zu’ of the Randy Van Horne Singers. Esquivel's music, I argue, reconstitutes the particular erotic configurations of classic pastoral: in place of fauns and nymphs are suave bachelors and their dates. The paper concludes with a discussion of representations of the ‘leisurely bachelor’ in other contemporaneous media.

Musical borrowings, or samples, have long been a means of creating lineage between hip-hop and older genres of African-American music such as funk, soul, and rhythm and blues. DJs who sample from this so-called ‘Old School’ attempt to link hip-hop to older, venerable traditions of black popular music. This article investigates the importance of 1970s pop and culture to hip-hop music. This era is depicted as a time in which African-American identity coalesced, and a new political consciousness was born. The primary source for images of the 1970s was and continues to be blaxploitation film, a genre of low-budget, black-oriented crime and suspense cinema. This article will detail how blaxploitation distilled certain societal concerns of the 1970s, and how in turn hip-hop feeds off blaxploitation both dramatically and musically, reusing its story lines and sampling its soundtracks.

The Original Dixieland Jazz Band's visit in 1919–1920 has been well documented as the beginning of jazz in Britain. This article illuminates a more complex evolution of the image and presence of jazz in Britain through consideration of the cultural and musical antecedents of the genre, including minstrel shows and black musical theatre, within the context of musical life in Britain in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The processes through which this evolution took place are considered with reference to the ways in which jazz was introduced to Britain through imported revue shows and sheet music.

It is an extremely significant but often neglected fact that another group of American musicians, Will Marion Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra, also came to Britain in 1919. Remarkably, extensive comparisons of the respective performances and reception of the ODJB and the SSO have not been made in the available literature on jazz. Examination of the situation of one white and one black group of American musicians performing contemporaneously in London is extremely informative, as it evidences the continuing influence of the antecedents of jazz and the importance of both groups in shaping perceptions of jazz in Britain.

This paper offers an introduction to a distinct group of musical consumers: bootleg collectors and tape traders. It begins by defining the types of recording under discussion before outlining some of the discourse surrounding the collection of unauthorised recordings. Bootleg collectors and tape traders exist in a relationship of mutual distrust with the legitimate music industry: collectors view the industry as a barrier to musical experience while the industry views these collectors as at best a nuisance and at worst as having a detrimental impact upon official sales. The paper argues, however, that the relationship is in fact more complex. It shows that through an intensification of discourses of authenticity, collectors of unauthorised recordings actually provide ideological support for the recording industry, helping valorise musical commodities and thus maintain a dialectical relationship between collectors and the legitimate industry.

This article considers the parameters and implications of the look of 1960s girl groups such as the Marvelettes, the Shirelles and the Shangri-Las through an examination of approximately two hundred images taken from title pages for songs, from LP covers, and from ads and publicity photos. An overwhelming majority of these visual images depict the members of an ensemble as equal and visually interchangeable, for the members dressed in the same clothes and accessories, sported the same hair style and stood in the same pose. This uniformity supported the chatty teenage dialogue which typified the girl group lyrics. Perhaps more importantly, it also invited the audience member to identify herself with the members of the group. Such a message of belonging was an important part of a marketing strategy aimed at the increasingly multiracial teen market of the period.

Despite the rampant popularity of space, alien and futuristic imagery in popular culture, little scholarship has recognised the impact of such themes on popular music. This article explores the complex relationship between the numerous uses of space, alien and techno futuristic themes in popular music and the construction of various marginalised identities. Arranged roughly chronologically from early 1950s rock and roll to late 1990s techno, I discuss how many artists, such as Bill Haley, David Bowie and George Clinton, have used such imagery to promote various nonconformist ideologies and identities ranging from African-American empowerment to Gay and Lesbian agendas. This article also relates developments in scientific space research and popular science fiction culture to corresponding uses of space and alien imagery in various forms of popular music. In general, popular music's use of futuristic space and alien themes denotes a related neo-Gnostic withdrawal and alienation from traditionally dominant cultural structures in an attempt to unite us with a common ‘other’ that transcends divisions of race, gender, sexual preference, religion or nationality.

This essay explores the political significance of Balinese death/thrash fandom. In the early 1990s, the emergence of a death/thrash scene in Bali paralleled growing criticism of accelerated tourism development on the island. Specifically, locals protested the increasing ubiquity of Jakarta, ‘the centre’, cast as threatening to an authentically ‘low’, peripheral Balinese culture. Similarly, death/thrash enthusiasts also gravitated toward certain fringes, although they rejected dominant notions of Balinese-ness by gesturing elsewhere, toward a global scene. The essay explores the ways in which death/thrash enthusiasts engaged with local discourses by coveting their marginality, and aims to demonstrate how their articulations of ‘alien-ness’ contributed in important ways to a broader regionalism.

Veteran Egyptian shaabi singer Shaaban Abd al-Rahim recently attained superstar status as the ‘interpreter of the pulse of the Egyptian-Arab street’ due to a pop hit proclaiming his hatred for Israel. Shaaban’s notoriety has been further enhanced by his abortive sponsorship of an ‘indigenous’ sandwich marketed in Egypt by McDonald's. Contracted by the fast food giant precisely because of his popularity, the singer was soon after dismissed in the wake of political pressure outside Egypt regarding the song that had made him a star. The deliberate turn to a singer like Shaaban for product sponsorship, especially for a commercial to be broadcast by state-run media, underscores weakening boundaries between what is ‘classically’ approved and what is still considered to be ‘vulgar’ or ‘low-class’ music, however popular it is among wide sectors of the population. For the moment, at least, Shaaban has become a figure with whom even a scornful intelligentsia must contend.

From the mid-1980s, rock music emerged as the leading musical culture in the major cities of the Soviet Union. In writings and research on this ‘Soundtrack of Perestroika’, attention has been primarily paid to the words rather than the sounds. Russian rock critics and academics, as well as those who participate in Russian rock culture, persistently emphasise the literary qualities of Russian rock music and most still prefer to approach rock as a form of musical poetry - ‘Rok poèziya’. This seems out of step with the growing emphasis on an interdisciplinary approach within popular music studies. The aim of this article is to investigate and discuss some of the core arguments that underpin notions of Russian rock music's literary qualities. This may help to uncover some specific national characteristics of rock in Russia, whilst at the same time questioning the need for, and value of, a literary approach to the study of Russian rock.

This article explores the interactions and tensions arising from a vibrant Canto-pop industry exported from Hong Kong to an interventionist nation-state of Singapore bent on discouraging the use of dialects by its ethnic Chinese population. Aside from highlighting the roles of technological and commercial factors behind the regional music networks, it seeks further to position this contemporary relationship within the larger historical and cultural context. The cultural politics involved here is not just an isolated phenomenon between two different cities. More importantly, the language policies of the Singapore government represent a haunting replication of the perennial attempts by central authorities in China to impose a more standardised linguistic and cultural identity on its dialect-speaking peripheries. This identity is based on not just the court language of Mandarin, but notions of ‘Chineseness’. This article goes on to question the extent to which Canto-pop could help foster a more hybridised identity transcending both the current dictates of the modern Singaporean state and the imagined cultural boundaries of a more historically entrenched Sino-centric realm.

Johnny Rotten / John Lydon was and remains the first voice of British punk and yet consistently refuses to identify with punk as a subculture. In revisiting his observations on his career with the Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd (PiL) in the 1976–1980 period, this article considers how ‘narratives of self’ enable us to gain insights into individual subjectivity and the (trans) formation of identity. Through this material we can investigate the role of Lydon's idiosyncratic cultural capital in his creative process. It is suggested that this investigation requires us to consider ideas of cultural continuity and flow in relation to Lydon, the creative contexts within which he operated and the relationship between progressive music, punk and post-punk in the 1970s.

On the way to my library there is a little shop named ‘World Music. The Oasis of Music from Asia, Africa’. One morning I stopped my bike and went in just curious to see what world music could be in my little town. In the racks even the smallest country from Asia or Africa was represented with one or two CDs, most of them produced in Paris or London. The other customers were half my age (around thirty to thirty-five, nobody over fifty or under twenty). The owner, an immigrant who has lived in Sweden for more than ten years, had this to say:

The youngsters do not come here, all my customers are between twenty-five and forty. There is a growing interest in world music: people with money are visiting foreign countries as tourists and when they come home they come to me, asking for artists or groups they have heard. Most of them have an academic background and speak English fluently.