In recent times there has been an encouraging increase in the musicological study of Western popular music by members of the academy. Both Richard Middleton and Alan Moore have published important books that are emphatic about the need for such study (Middleton 1990; Moore 1993). Also there have been a number of articles in a variety of journals over the past several years that have either addressed the need for, suggested various approaches to, or actually taken a musicological approach to one or another aspect of popular music (Foret 1991; Brackett 1992; Hawkins 1992; Moore 1992; Taylor 1992; Walser 1992; Middleton 1993). Despite this flurry of activity, as far as this author is aware, there has been no academic musicological work, other than Robert Walser's recent study of heavy metal (Walser 1993), that has attempted to ferret out the component parts of a given genre through an analysis of a sizable body of repertoire. There is an acute need for such work if popular music scholars are going to begin to understand in concrete terms what is meant by terms such as rock, soul, funk, Merseybeat and so on. This essay is an attempt to begin such a study for the genre of southern soul music as it was manifested by Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee.

In recent years there has been a marked resurgence of interest in early Motown songs, many of which have received widespread exposure via successful films such as The Big Chill, My Girl, The Commitments, Father of The Bride and Sister Act. The steady flow of CD re-releases and contemporary ‘covers’ further attests to the continuing appeal and relevance of the music.

One evening in Leeds, in about 1913, the young J.B. Priestley had a brush with modernity:

… hot and astonished in the Empire, we discovered ragtime … It was as if we had been still living in the nineteenth century and then suddenly found the twentieth glaring and screaming at us. We were yanked into our own age, fascinating, jungle-haunted, monstrous … Out of these twenty noisy minutes in a music hall, so long ago, came fragmentary but prophetic outlines of the situation in which we find ourselves now, the menace to old Europe, the domination of America, the emergence of Africa, the end of confidence and any feeling of security, the nervous excitement, the frenzy, the underlying despair of our century … here was something new, strange, curiously disturbing … (Priestley 1962, pp. 66–7)

In the American record industry, independent record companies have long held a cultural status that far exceeds the actual economic impact they have in the market-place. Independent record companies, or ‘indies’, have become understood as innovative and creative oases for new or unconventional musicians in the midst of a capital-driven and profit-oriented record business. The development of a wide range of musical genres and styles – from rhythm and blues and soul to punk and industrial – are often attributed to the small companies that operated outside of the control of the larger ‘major’ labels.

Hardcore Dance has spent years underground evolving from the still-current stereotype of frenzied thudding bass lines coupled to samples of the tunes of children's programmes, of a music for E-head ravers whose drug-induced dummy sucking became a potent symbol for a subculture stigmatised as infantile and stupid. That evolution has reached the point of ‘Jungle’, and now Hardcore Dance and Jungle are often used interchangeably as terms of description. It is this musical form which is analysed here as part of the evolution of modern dance music. Too often subcultural study has tended to give the impression that music is one element of a subcultural style and that it is style that drives the subculture. Instead, it is argued that music drives subcultural style, and that the evolution of Hardcore Dance serves as an especially salient example because it is a musical form which persistently resists reduction to typical codes for understanding music, both academic and those in the public sphere.

The tenor is a rhythm instrument and the best statements negroes have made of what their soul is have been on tenor saxophone. Now you think about it and you'll see I'm right. The tenor's got that thing, that honk, you can get to people with it. Sometimes you can be playing that tenor and I'm telling you the people want to jump across the rail. (Ornette Coleman)

The monstrous machinations of the reissue CD market are reorganising our relations with ourselves, with our own and other peoples' pasts. This, in conjunction with the fact that baby-boomers have grown up, that pop music is no longer simply youth music, means that yesterday's and tomorrow's songs are not necessarily heard in that order, and that styles no longer grow and change in a linear fashion. In the simple act of repetition, thousands of albums, which, like Haydn's symphonies, were never intended for anything more than local consumption, are being underlined as worthy of recall, blessed with the glamorous radiance of digital sound. Musical nostalgia is highly seductive, but whilst it has resulted in considerable beauty and vigour in the hands of both Elgar and Stravinsky, it sounds predatory in the context of all those sixties music advertisements. More seriously – ‘lest we forget’ – political nostalgia, in the form of the search for the lost German Spirit, eventually proved genocidal. So, at a more personal level, I should be cautious about celebrating such a relic from my own past within the candy-coloured world of hippy psychedelia as the Incredible String Band.

As a child growing up in Finland in the 1950s, I heard all the popular songs of the day. We did not have a record player until 1957, and even then we never bought any pop records, as my father preferred classical music and I was getting interested in jazz. But the songs were all around us, and they still haunt me today. Many of them are now available on Compact Discs, and they are played regularly on the radio. Some of them are just Finnish language cover versions of records which were also popular in the USA and UK at the time, such as ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’ or ‘Only Love Me’. Others are unmistakably Finnish, sentimental waltzes and tangos and rousing comic songs. Whatever, it is obvious that record companies created something that has become a permanent part of Finnish culture.

In his article ‘Rock music and politics in Italy’, Umberto Fiori deploys the example of an open-air concert by Genesis in Tirrenia in the province of Pisa, promoted in the summer of 1982 by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) as part of its annual Feste dell'Unita, as a summary example of de-politicisation of the consumption and production of rock music in Italy, and the institutionalisation of the oppositional, dissenting aspects of rock music that had previously been so potent there throughout the 1970s. To Fiori, the Genesis concert represented

an unmistakeable step forward in the slow process of the ‘normalisation’ of the relationship between rock and politics in Italy. Explosive material until a few years before, rock music in the 1980s seems to have returned to being a commodity like any other, even in Italy. The songs are once again simply songs, the public is the public. The musicians are only interested in their work, and the organisers make their expected profits. If they happen to be a political party, so much the better: they can also profit in terms of public image and perhaps even votes. … Italy now learnt how to institutionalise deviation and transgression. An ‘acceptable’ gap was re-established between fiction and reality, desire and action, and music and political practice. (Fiori 1984, pp. 261–2)

With the publication of the article ‘Cycles in symbol production’ (Peterson and Berger 1975) a discussion started concerning the advantages and disadvantages of the production of cultural goods under market conditions. The analysis by Peterson and Berger showed a negative correlation between concentration in the recording industry, on the one hand, and the diversity and innovativeness of the music, on the other. Repetition of the analysis using data from the 1980s (Burnett 1990; Lopes 1992) has shown that for this period Peterson and Berger's hypotheses should be rejected. Is there a connection between concentration and diversity and innovation? Are there cycles in symbol production? There seems to be no conclusive answer. In this article, I will attempt to clear up this matter. First, I will repeat the analysis of the relation between concentration and diversity/innovation, using the same model as Peterson and Berger, but with different definitions for the variables concentration, diversity and innovation. Then I will suggest a new model, which can be helpful in uncovering other factors influencing diversity and innovation in the music industry. I will come to that later. Let me first give the reader a brief overview of previous research.

This article began, quite simply, as the presentation of a stage in the mapping-out of those harmonic practices which serve to distinguish rock and closely cognate styles (hereafter simply ‘rock’) from those of common-practice tonality on one hand, and jazz on another. It soon became apparent, however, that such a task necessitated some detailed consideration of the means by which the conclusions might be presented and, therefore, some careful consideration of analytic method. To my knowledge, there is as yet very little concern for theorising analytic method in rock music and, therefore, what follows may act as a tentative opening of a difficult debate. The issue at present is, simply, whether or not Schenkerian theory can be adequately applied to this music. My conclusion is that as yet it cannot, and I shall present my findings in that light, but the reasons for my position must, I think, be spelt out. Thereafter, my specific concern will be to investigate varieties of the use of the diatonic ‘flattened seventh’ in rock, which I shall do by focusing in turn on three issues, investigating them through the analysis of particular examples rather than through any larger generalisations.

In Britain the term ‘obscenity’ has enjoyed a chequered career. Obscene libel first became an offence in 1727 when an erotic book called Venus in the Cloister was found to contravene common law by tending to ‘weaken the bonds of civil society, virtue and morality’ (Robertson 1991, p. 180). Despite this, erotic literature remained freely available throughout the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century Britain got its first Obscene Publications Act. This came in 1857 and gave the police power to take books before local Justices who could order their forfeiture and destruction.

In 1989 the Western media left its consumers with the romantic impression that it was merely the students who were demonstrating for ‘democracy’, as if emulating the student demonstrations of twenty years before in Europe and America. But there were workers involved too, who had illegally organised unofficial labour unions, and beyond concerns about democratic rights, there was the impetus of a socio-economic crisis. Most of those killed by the tanks in Tiananmen were workers, not students. People from all walks of life had marched and demonstrated throughout China from Canton ti Lhasa. Nine months before the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989, reversals in official economic policy put a halt to investment and constructions, and the problem of unemployment of rural migrants who had come to the towns was exacerbated. This migration was illegal but had been tolerated since labour was needed for construction. In 1989 anywhere between 60 to 100 million unemployed and homeless people were moving around the country en masse. At one time 250,000 were camped at Canton railway station.

The phrase ‘big in Japan’ has become a popular cliché, used to describe acts which are meant to be enjoying Japanese success: anyone from Kylie Minogue to Primal Scream; from Dead or Alive to Blur. It seems that even the most unregarded artists can make it in Japan. Even Spinal Tap – the fictional, washed-up heavy metal band from Rob Reiner's film of the same name – were finally able to find success in Japan. The implication seems to be that the Japanese hunger for Western culture is so strong that even bands who have failed in their own countries can succeed in the Japanese market. Indeed, an expressed belief that Japanese listeners could not get enough of Western music was the usual reaction when I told acquaintances that I was studying the Japanese pop music market. This belief is perpetuated by music magazines, which regularly print stories detailing bizarre acts of devotion by Japanese fans.

Postmodern aesthetics has come to be recognised as a salient feature of much popular culture, including music. Urban subcultures, and especially migrant subcultures, may have inherent inclinations toward postmodern aesthetics, while at the same time retaining ties to modern and even pre-modern cultural discourses. The syncretic popular musics created by such subcultures may reflect these multiple cultural orientations by combining postmodern and more traditional characteristics. Thus, for example, punk rock and rap music can be seen to combine postmodern techniques of pastiche, bricolage and blank irony with modernist socio-political protest. Similar eclecticisms can also be found in the musics of some urban migrant subcultures, whose syncretic musics, like their senses of social identity, often self-consciously juxtapose or combine ancestral homeland traditions with the most contemporary cosmopolitan styles and attitudes. Interpretations of such musics may call for a particularly nuanced appreciation of the distinct aesthetic modes which may coexist in the same work.