Drawing on a range of biographical, historical, ethnographical and musicological sources, this article presents the social and historical factors contributing to the evolution in the early 20th century of a local variant of rebetiko around the Lakkos brothel district in Heraklion, the largest city in Crete. It explores the influence of a wider multicultural context on local music-making and reveals the relationship between the social life and economy of the Lakkos area and its musical and stylistic sensibilities. Emphasis is also placed on the musical culture of local subcultural space, particularly with respect to the functions of musical practices in everyday life and the poetics of improvised songs. Investigation of the social world in Lakkos suggests that the forerunners of rebetiko can be explored as a hybrid music scene associated with cross-cultural interaction between different social and ethnic groups and musical traditions. The societal and aesthetic codes of this scene, with its low life themes, coarse melodies and allegedly alien influences were seen by local elites as compromising the moral values of respectable society and subverting efforts to cultivate a national identity.

The Duke Ellington orchestra's 1971 visit to the Soviet Union (USSR) marked their most important and publicised State Department tour, following acclaimed 1960s State tours they made to the Middle East, Near East, Asia and Africa. The Soviet tour occurred during the efforts of President Richard Nixon to establish détente at the height of the Cold War between the United States, the Soviet Union and China. Ellington found not just acceptance in Communist and satellite countries, but rabid enthusiasm that belied official Soviet government disdain or censorship of American jazz. While he was magnanimous as usual to Soviet fans and engaged in no political grandstanding, Ellington wanted his performances and presence to embody the differences between what he viewed as the freedom and democracy of his home country, and the current situation in the Soviet Union. Ellington's multi-layered vision of freedom, and the various struggles that he, the band, and State Department officials encountered during the tour provided a sharp contrast to the domineering official Soviet presence. The tour exposed the limits of what the closed society of the Soviet government could shield from their own people. Ellington made a strong impact, the strongest that any American artist had yet made in the Soviet Union.

This article considers emergent musical dialogues and official cultural collaborations between Brazil and Angola in light of recent literature theorizing the Lusophone Atlantic. As Angola restructures following a long civil war and Brazil takes a leading role among the rapidly developing BRIC nations, new questions arise pertaining to the African heritage in Brazilian music, and to Brazil's role in Angolan cultural initiatives and musical markets. Through examination of Brazilian discourse about such exchanges, combined with a comparative analysis of three versions of Angolan musician Teta Lando’s 1974 song, ‘Angolano segue em frente’ (Landos original, a recent Brazilian rerecording, and a Brazilian remix), I reveal a South-South dialogue that builds on historical connections yet also establishes new resonances in musical evocations of Atlantic affinities and flows.

Before WWII, Hugues Panassié (1912–1974) was Europe's leading critical authority on jazz, and by the time of his death he had published a dozen books on jazz music and been President of the Hot-club de France for over 40 years. Yet despite this life's worth of efforts made in jazz's name, Panassié's reputation is no longer a good one: pointing to the fantasies of black exceptionalism and Noble Savagery present in his work, historians have tended to dismiss the critic as a racist primitivist, one in thrall to that contemporary negrophilie most familiar today from early-century Parisian visual art. Indeed Panassié used the term ‘primitive’ himself, and positively. But this article traces the ultra-conservative writer's intellectual and religious formation to show that, rather than contemporary negrophilie, it was a religious and cultural heritage quite distant from the modern European encounter with blackness that first informed Panassié's primitivism. Although this re-reading does not aim to ‘rehabilitate’ someone who remains a troublesome and reactionary figure, the article nevertheless goes on to explore how, in his primitivist rejection of European modernism, Panassié sometimes pre-empts important arguments made by the postmodern jazz scholarship that would seem to marginalise the critic's historical contributions.

In the last decade, multi-racial hip-hop scenes in Kharkiv, a predominantly Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainian city close to the Russian border, have fostered the development of socially-conscious hip-hop among African students. Drawing on musical elements from their respective home countries, the US and local hip-hop traditions, African male youths use Ukrainian-, Russian- and English-language lyrics to express concerns about socio-economic status, personal struggle and racial inclusion. This study analyses how African musicians use hip-hop as a social means through which to fight the escalating violence against dark-skinned foreigners and migrants. It draws on ethnographic data to identify several ways in which African-performed hip-hop has influenced contemporary public opinions regarding ‘black’ identity in eastern Ukraine.

The global significance of Latin American popular music is well documented in contemporary research. Less is known about Latin American music and musicians in Australia and New Zealand (collectively termed ‘Australasia’): nations that have historically hosted waves of migrants from the Americas, and which are also strongly influenced by globalised US popular music culture. This article presents an overview of Latin American music in Australasia, drawing on ethnographic research, with the aim of providing a historical framework for the understanding of this music in the Australasian context. It begins with an explanation of the early 20th-century conceptualisation of ‘Latin’ in Australasia, and an investigation into how this abstract cultural construction affected performance opportunities for Latino/a migrants who began to arrive en masse from the 1970s onwards. It then discusses the performance practices that were most successfully recreated by Latin American musicians in Australia and New Zealand, especially ‘Andean’ folkloric music, and ‘tropical’ dance music. With reference to prominent individuals and ensembles, this article demonstrates how Andean and tropical performance practices have developed over the course of the last 30 years, and articulates the enduring importance of Latin American music and musicians within Australasian popular music culture.

In this study, we report a corpus analysis of rock harmony. As a corpus, we used Rolling Stone magazine's list of the ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time’; we took the 20 top-ranked songs from each decade (the 1950s through the 1990s), creating a set of 100 songs. Both authors analysed all 100 songs by hand, using conventional Roman numeral symbols. Agreement between the two sets of analyses was over 90 per cent. The analyses were encoded using a recursive notation, similar to a context-free grammar, allowing repeating sections to be encoded succinctly. The aggregate data was then subjected to a variety of statistical analyses. We examined the frequency of different chords and chord transitions. The results showed that IV is the most common chord after I and is especially common preceding the tonic. Other results concern the frequency of different root motions, patterns of co-occurrence between chords, and changes in harmonic practice across time.

This article investigates the relationship between biography and authenticity within the aesthetics of grunge musician Kurt Cobain, using the 2002 Riverhead Press volume of his journals as a primary source. Focusing on Cobain's fascination with the human form and with bodily fluids, I argue that his idea of the ‘sick body’ functioned as a central metaphor that shaped his approach to various media (prose, lyrics, drawing and singing) such that there was a homology between these different forms. I draw on excerpts from the Journals to show the meanings that he associated with the ‘sick body’, including the ways in which it indexed his own biography of physical pain and social marginalisation. Using the Nirvana song ‘Hairspray Queen’ as a case study, I then show the interactions between musical and linguistic signs of the sick body and how these interactions reveal Cobain's ideas on music's meaning. Ultimately, I argue that in song lyrics and performance, Cobain prized scatological imagery, eviscerating vocals and unintelligible lyrics as a means to signal the ‘authenticity’ of his art.

This paper examines issues surrounding the production of a Carnival music video VCD in the home studio of the Bolivian indigenous (originario) musician and cultural activist Gregorio Mamani. On the one hand, continuities with rural productive practices suggest a model for the ‘home studio’ more resembling a ‘cottage industry’ than the kind of ‘isolated’ activity separate from family life that Paul Théberge has described for the case of North America (1997). On the other hand, the urban isolation, entrepreneurial motivations, and concern with promoting the individual that characterise Gregorio Mamani's home studio suggest the very antithesis of indigenous community values. Notwithstanding difficult relations with his community of origin and his use of technological artifice to construct (or even ‘fake’) an audiovisual impression of the communitas of Carnival, Mamani presents this work as a means to ‘strengthen culture’. Despite these contradictions, this low budget production – targeted at rural peasants and urban migrants – is shown to engage deeply with indigenous concepts of creativity and oral tradition, as well as potentially contributing to the construction of broader circuits of culture and ‘imagined communities’. Mamani's individualistic, yet influential, approach and his insistence that only one or two individuals are the composers in an indigenous community, challenges us to question the relationship between creativity and community.

This article explores the mobilisation of Indian popular music in the Tata-AIG life insurance company television advertisement ‘Tree of Love’ (2004). I address ways in which music representing different periods of Hindi film, along with visual representations of Indian material culture, have been integrated into an advertising narrative that alludes to India's technological and economic development. I suggest that a range of aural and visual signs subtly complement each other in creating a narrative that not only marks the passage of time, but reframes past social and economic debates into contemporary terms. I contextualise this advertisement – and the signs that it uses – within the field of the Indian insurance industry, as well as within the social-historical context of modern India. Then, utilising elements of Peircean semiotic theory, I closely analyse the aural representations of the passage of time and different eras of Indian musical culture. The analysis ties together the interactions of musical and non-musical signs with the cultural memories that the commercial is designed to evoke. Ultimately, I argue that musical meaning in this advertising context emerges from the complex interaction of these aural and visual signs, and produces memory as much as it reflects it.

In collaboration with the Cairene composer Fathy Salama, Youssou N'Dour released an album that appeared in Dakar in 2003 as Sant Yàlla (‘Praise God’), and internationally in 2004 as Egypt. Sung in Wolof to the accompaniment of an Egyptian orchestra, the album consists of a suite of eight interrelated pieces, seven of which are praise songs to Senegalese Sufi shaykhs, while the remaining piece praises God, the Prophet Mohammed, and some important Mauritanian shaykhs. In this essay I argue that in bringing Senegalese Islam to the international arena, N'Dour uses his stature as a world-class musician to both articulate and participate in the creation of a Sufi modernity, namely a way of being a Sufi Muslim in a globalised world. In addition to being a personal journey for Youssou N'Dour, both musically in its orientation towards the East rather than the West, and in his own religious faith, Sant Yàlla/Egypt also echoes many of the current preoccupations of Muslim intellectuals and artists as they seek to renew and reinterpret their own local religious traditions for a global audience.

As music increasingly links the global and the local and vice versa, fusions of diverse musical genres and styles burgeon. Globalisation theory (specifically Appadurai) has spurred explorations of musical hybridity and cross-fertilisation among scholars from different academic fields focusing on music. In this essay, I argue for the necessity of understanding global cultural interactions and musical appropriations or exchanges in the context of the ambivalences of the globalised mass diffusion and the power asymmetries involved. The purpose of this paper is to contextualise contemporary theoretical considerations by describing the Yoremensamble project – a government-sponsored cultural project in which a group of urban mestizo musicians from northwestern Mexico appropriated local indigenous musical expressions to produce an album titled ‘Hombre digno’ (‘Dignified man’). The album is just one of many projects around the globe in which artists self-consciously re-localize global popular music styles. The resulting sonic fusions point to the need for a critical cultural analysis of such translocal and global phenomena which is rooted in ethnography.

Popular music occupies a dominant position in the musical landscape of contemporary Africa, yet academic study of popular music is still in its infancy in most parts of Africa. This may be due in part to the absence of theoretical frameworks that stimulate popular music discourses from the African perspective. This paper is an attempt to fill this lacuna. Based on a critical and qualitative analysis of data gathered from field situations, participant observation, interviews and published literary materials on the subject matter, the paper theorises that the creation of African popular music is characterised by two significant processes: indigenisation and syncretisation. The paper further states that African popular music is a socially responsive phenomenon, sustained through the interplay of cross-cultural and trans-national social dynamics. The paper therefore proposes ‘social reconstructionism’ as a new theoretical paradigm for the analysis of African popular music. The paper also suggests that the term ‘African pop’ should be adopted as a generic name for all popular music forms in Africa.

The East of Germany, the Bundesländer of the former GDR, is an important centre of Goth activity. The Goth scene is remarkably large in this part of Germany, and one of the most important yearly Goth festivals, the Wave-Gotik-Treffen, takes place in Leipzig. This article investigates the specific characteristics and internal dynamics of East German Goth subcultures after German reunification. Combining subcultural theory and Gothic criticism with Derrida's notions of spectrality and hauntology, the potentials of Gothic as a form of cultural criticism are explored in an investigation of the psycho-social wasteland of the undead GDR. It will be argued that post-Cold War unification has not only led to a new political order, but has also given rise to a new type of Gothicism, as East German Goth subculture is haunted by ‘spectres of Marx’ that provide a critical engagement with globalised capital and media. As a specifically German version of the worldwide Goth scene, moreover, it marks the local boundedness of globalised subcultures.

In 2001, Montreal disc jockey Tiga, with the help of Finnish producer Jori ‘Zyntherius’ Hulkkonen, recorded and released a techno cover version of ‘Sunglasses at Night’, a song popularised in 1983 by fellow Canadian Corey Hart. This paper examines how a so-called ‘unoriginal’ musical practice such as the cover version, when re-contextualised into a brand new musical genre (a process called ‘trans-stylisation’), can engender new meaning, especially when it comes to the generic identity purveyed by the song's enunciator. The analysis of this new ‘original’ utterance relies on the theory of hypertextuality and describes, on the musical, lyrical and visual levels, the transformative processes from the hypotext (Hart's version) to the hypertext (Tiga's), thereby shedding new light on the poetics of the cover version and on the representational modalities of the postmodern subject.

The study of popular music often loses something in translation. The musical categories used by scholars and musicians in different locations vary widely in meaning, complicating both analysis and disciplinary divisions. Genre classifications also create blind spots which leave styles falling between the cracks out of the picture, impoverishing analysis and even denying musicians certain benefits. This paper examines the use of terms such as folklórico, tradicional, popular and típico by both lay people and scholars in Latin America, then turns to Dominican merengue típico as a case study showing how musical categories are often intensely local. I argue that – because it relies more on notions of place than on the ideas of time, class, race or production that inform other categorisations – the concept of típico is useful in examining transnational ‘roots’ musics which bridge nations, classes and modes of production. In addition, using musicians' and listeners' own categories can help us to question the canons of musical scholarship, musical nationalism and music marketing, thus creating new possibilities for both scholars and musicians.

While many rock artists explored the compositional possibilities of the concept album in the 1960s and 1970s, Nashville's country music community largely ignored the format. But a few artists working on the fringes of country music – and who, notably, aligned themselves with the countercultural images and attitudes of the time – did begin to experiment with the format in the first years of the 1970s. Chief among them was country songwriter and recording artist Willie Nelson who, by the dawn of the 1970s, was on the verge of breaking away from Music Row to seek more lucrative opportunities in Texas. This article explores the role that Nelson's experimentation with the concept album played in his efforts to adopt a countercultural image, develop a younger audience and challenge the hegemony of the country music industry. Moreover, close examination of Nelson's compositional approach to three albums – Yesterday's Wine (1971), Phases and Stages (1974) and Red Headed Stranger (1975) – reveals that Nelson consciously blended the singles-based approach to songwriting that predominated in 1960s and 1970s Nashville and the extended narrative and musical forms of contemporaneous rock music to create musical products that suited the needs of country radio and rock fans alike.

Before the advent of ‘world’ music in the culture of globalisation, The Incredible String Band in the 1960s added elements of Moroccan and other international music into their work. In the context of an exploration of the band's journey to the east, this article argues that the ISB's ‘exotic’ sounds became the aural signifier of the psychedelic, and that the ISB's aesthetic of appropriation veered from fetishisation, and also homage and parody, to ritualised adaptation. The ISB's pre-‘world’ use of international music was self-consciously naive, but it may have enabled later modes of cultural appropriation.

A number of scholars have written on characteristics of vocal melody in popular music, but little attention has been paid at the level of phonetic detail. This study argues that the phonetic structure of a melody can contribute in important ways to a song's reception and success, given the ways that listeners react and respond to vocalised melody. This article discusses different ways in which stressed syllables in familiar pop songs alliterate, and it investigates the way these patterns interact rhythmically with metre.