This article addresses the growing global phenomenon of automated holographic concerts given by virtual pop stars called ‘Vocaloids’. Alternately acclaimed by music journalists as ‘the future of music’ and derided as ‘a robo-show, a concert simulacrum’, Vocaloid concerts across the past 10 years have sparked feelings of anxiety and prompted debate about the loss of human interaction at pre-programmed concerts. In this article, I extend Vocaloid research from recent work that addresses Vocaloid's creative online community into the middle of arenas of screaming fans, drawing on participant observation, reception history and live performance analysis in order to demonstrate the importance of participatory fandom in Vocaloid culture and its implications for 21st-century concepts of liveness. I argue that the creation of cultural meaning and the most significant interactions occur within the audience itself, when online amateur music-making communities intersect with participatory fandom at live concert events.

This article draws on psychogeography to explore suburban Bushey, Hertfordshire (UK), where the popular music duo Wham! formed and created the foundation for the later career of George Michael. It locates this neglected cultural narrative within the context of parental postcolonial and metropolitan journeys, arguing that migrations from the margins of the British Empire and across London form part of a ‘spatial moral order’. Exploring how a distinct pop group emerged at a particular time, it emphasises the importance of family and friendship within the suburban landscape of school, home, a pub, church halls, and a scout hut. A focus on the formation of Wham! contributes to debates about the postcolonial journeys and suburban circumstances that have shaped UK popular music since the end of World War II, and illustrates how psychogeography can contribute to the study of popular music.

The state's coercive engagement with Black youth expressive culture, and rap music in particular, is a topic of mounting public and scholarly concern. Rap lyrics and videos made by defendants and codefendants are regularly used as evidence in court cases in ways that incite bias against young people in the dock. At the same time, the performance and circulation of rap music are increasingly monitored and constrained by the police and other bodies. Thus, as this special issue explores, the prosecuting and policing of rap music serves as a double-punch against Black youth: the state both showcases rap music as criminal evidence in the courtroom to lock down prosecutions and, at the same time, surveils rappers and suppresses the music's creation and dissemination and, in so doing, the income streams of those who make it.

Through perspectives from the sociology of emotions and multimodality as an analytical tool, this article analyses the cultural aspects of the Identitarian movement through the case of the Danish Generation Identitær (GI) and its online videos. The analysis shows that the group shares an understanding of societal problems and emotions of nostalgia and anger connected to this worldview and demonstrates that the group's use of fashwave music style fits its worldview and emotions. Furthermore, the article argues that the coded language associated with fashwave music is part of what defines the community of GI and that the music binds its members to a collective consciousness. Therefore, this article presents an analysis of the cultural style of fashwave, an important contribution to the study of the broader cultural and social ecology of newer far-right groups and milieus, such as the Identitarian movement.

Between artists and the audience, the concert promoter holds an important position within the music industry. This article, based on an empirical study of promoters in Norway, aims to analyse how concert promoters think, what their motivation and attitudes are like, their goals and their perceptions of a good concert and a good promoter. Drawing from both qualitative and quantitative data, we identify two dimensions in concert promotion: a paternalistic and a demand-driven approach. We also identify five typologies of concert promoters: the idealist, the curator, the rationalist, the entrepreneur and the instrumentalist.

On 12 November 2017, the Philippine celebrity musician Pilita Corrales was singing the popular song ‘Ikaw’ (‘You’) at a gala event in Manila, attended by some of the world's most powerful politicians at the time, US President Donald Trump and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Suddenly, she noticed a male voice singing along with her, its intonation off, its volume increasing. Aware that the event was being recorded, Corrales at first tried to disregard the intruding voice. Eventually however, she could no longer ignore it and, shielding her eyes from the lights with one hand, she tried to spot the uninvited singer in the audience. ‘Where are you, sir’? she asked. Realising that the singer was on one of the balconies, it dawned on her that he was none other than Duterte himself. After giving Duterte room to sing a section by himself, she then joined the president in the song's finale (BBC News 2017; Guardian News 2017; Rappler 2017).

The history of the Chinese punk scene in the scientific literature or in retrospective testimonies is traditionally dominated by a Beijing-centric approach, which stresses the importance of Beijing punk bands in the 1990s for the formation of this youth subculture. However, at the same time another punk scene was emerging in Wuhan, and no convincing argument has been provided to explain how, at the same time, in two Chinese cities, a punk movement appeared. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews and collection of data, this article aims to explain how in the mid-1990s young Chinese succeeded into territorialising a foreign subculture in two different Chinese cities.

This article explores the admissibility and use of rap music as evidence in English criminal trials. It presents findings from an analysis of over 30 appeal cases. As well as unpacking the link between rap, race and gangs that is prevalent in these cases, the article challenges the categorisation of rap as ‘bad character evidence’, and critiques the way in which questions of relevance and prejudicial effect have been addressed by the courts. In particular, when making admissibility decisions, the courts appear to give little consideration to the cultural context, artistic conventions or social influences within the rap music genre, or the racialised nature of rap evidence. It is argued that, if rap is to be admissible evidence, a much more rigorous and informed approach is required.

This article explores the relationship between the meaning of style in Idol-format TV shows, and the political style which many scholars consider central for understanding populism today. Inspired by Jacques Rancière's notion of aesthetic regimes, I theorise what I call ‘the regime of style’ as a set of aesthetic principles shared across these fields. I explore the case study of Miri Regev's term as Israel's Minister of Culture and Sports, showing how she implemented a long-term strategy combining deliberate scandals that pitted her against ‘the cultural elite’, and the endorsement of pop music styles associated with publics that traditionally support her party (Likud). What ties these complementary strategies together is that they perform a ‘flaunting of the low’ (Ostiguy 2017). In refocusing the conversation on contested hierarchies of taste, Regev's own appeal partakes in the aesthetic economy of Idol-format shows, where style is fetishised as a transparent performance of identity.

This paper presents an analysis of Frank Zappa's aesthetic values, drawing on two examples: his writing and his music. This paper examines Zappa's musical techniques and contextualises them within art criticism; Zappa's discussion of his own music and theories of art in The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989) further help align his work with contemporary aesthetic theories, namely those of Levinson (Music, Art, and Metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2011) and Berleant (‘Further ruminations on music’, New Sound International Journal of Music, 50/2, pp. 129–37, 2017). Together, Zappa's techniques and his own testimony suggest an aesthetic standpoint underpinning his discography that emphasises referentiality as well as subjectivity and the role of the public in the musical experience. Indicating a more sympathetic view of popular opinion, distinct from the Adornian condemnation of mass culture with which Zappa is often attributed, this analysis of Zappa's aesthetic beliefs subsequently indicates a position sympathetic to both popular and avant-garde musics.

This paper considers the role of the rap music expert in criminal cases involving the use of rap as evidence. In addition to describing ways that an expert can help the defence challenge the use of rap, both before and during trial, it also offers strategies for intervening beyond the criminal justice system. These strategies may require an expert to balance the roles of objective observer on the one hand and criminal justice advocate on the other, but whatever the risks or challenges associated with this balancing act, this paper argues that doing so opens up important avenues for intervention and impact that can more effectively end the racially motivated and unjust practice of ‘rap on trial’.

When an iconic pop star dies, agency regarding that artist's persona and work is distributed in ways that transform the artist's significance and reveal much about the societies in which the artist participated. This article examines Macedonian pop singer Toše Proeski, an iconic star celebrated throughout former Yugoslavia who died in 2007 at age 26. For Macedonians and people throughout former Yugoslavia, Toše represented ideals of a moral alternative to corruption and violence, and of international recognition of Macedonia that could engender economic and political stability. The article argues that, after the death of Toše, such ideals that are distant from reality are displaced to a ‘remembered future’, a future that would have occurred had he lived. The agency of the living transforms a dead artist into a nostalgic bridge to a remembered future, producing a cathartic, if temporary, satisfaction of longings for unattainable ideals.

In recent years, rap music has been growing rapidly within the Greek cultural landscape. This paper places emphasis on a particular politicised current within the genre, examining closely two recent examples from the Greek context. Although such performances have already been broadly discussed as ‘populist’ within public debate, this paper aims at rigorously assessing this claim. To do so, it first turns to contemporary populism research in order to articulate a consistent and operational approach that can be utilised in the analysis of rap performances. Against the background of a minimal definitional consensus highlighting populism's people-centrism and anti-elitism, this contribution will then focus on (a) the performative dimension of populism and its occasional extra-political conditioning and (b) populist performances within popular music, namely rap. Could one designate rap music as a locus of populist performance(s)? How could such a hypothesis be substantiated through the analysis of concrete examples from the contemporary Greek scene?

Music sharing on social media increasingly involves ‘imagined listening’, a form of sociality based on how we think that others listen to music (as well as on our own imagining of sounds) and typically mediated by the exchange of visual prompts, such as the thumbnail images associated with a particular streaming link or recording. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted online and offline with Spanish migrants in London, I show how practices of music sharing based on imagined listening articulate specific moral economies. In these economies, users imbue the sharing of music with positive value, as something that contributes to human flourishing and balances the negative aspects of social media and the world. I also consider how users reckon with the algorithmic manipulations of social media platforms and the fleeting forms of user engagement characteristic of an online world in which there is more music than could ever be heard.

UK drill music frequently features as a prime suspect in newsrooms and courtrooms that charge it with driving the ‘knife crime epidemic’ in Britain's major conurbations. Such prejudicial assumptions about the role of drill in inciting violence are largely unfounded, but nevertheless inform criminal justice policy that leads to unjust and discriminatory outcomes. While drill rappers consciously post violent content on YouTube to increase viewership and gain popularity, the role of YouTube in facilitating and profiting from this traffic in violent imagery is rarely questioned in criminal proceedings – enabling, as it does, the weaponisation of such videos as ‘bad character evidence’ in court. Drawing on a selection of YouTube videos that represent drill rappers as dangerous ‘criminals’, this article argues that such videos function as a resource for the criminalisation of drill by police and prosecutors who present drill lyrics as personal testimony that is robbed of its fictive qualities, and makes rappers vulnerable to prejudicial ruling and discriminatory treatment within the criminal justice system.

The multiple impacts of COVID-19 on the music-culture industry have been duly discussed in a variety of public discourses, academic and otherwise. However, there is still a dearth of studies that investigate alternative face-to-face practices of live music performance and organisation during the pandemic's significant constraints on social behaviour. The present work aims to fill this gap by offering an anthropological angle on live music practices during COVID-19. It specifically draws on fieldwork that I could carry out in the autumn of 2020 at a live music venue – ‘Palace’ in the Swiss city of St Gallen – owing to a ‘liberal’ handling of the COVID-19 crisis by the St Gallen authorities. This article documents accordingly the challenges and adjustments that Palace had to undergo during pandemic times from the perspectives of producers, musicians and audiences alike. The primary focus here is on exploring changes in the venue's management, programming, audience composition and especially the musical-aesthetic experience of the venue's pandemic-compliant gigs. Finally, the article draws on the musings of my interlocutors as to whether Palace was in their experience a place outside the pandemic, to tackle the larger question of how COVID-19 has affected people's perceptions of live gigs and urban nightlife more generally.

The myth of the deal with the devil at the crossroads frames the reception of Robert Johnson's corpus, particularly lyrics that directly or indirectly reference otherworldly forces. Setting aside the myth, I analyse the uncanny sonic qualities in his performances that evoke a spectral presence. A close examination of vocal and guitar timbre that considers harmonic resonance, chimera effect and other ‘eerie’ qualities of the music breaks down musical elements other than lyrics that evoke the myth of supernatural power. Humming, mumbling and talking, corner loading, falsetto, simultaneous rhythm and lead, among other acoustic effects, contribute to a complex soundscape with spectral resonances. Taking a lead from Johnson's mentor Ike Zimmerman and his fondness for practising in the cemetery, my analysis of timbral quality informed by Freud's concept of the uncanny seeks to explore what we hear, how it is produced and the origin that we construct for the sounds.

This article addresses the relationship between popular music and populism through three government-commissioned songs, produced for occasions of national remembering during the post-2010 Orbán regime in Hungary, namely ‘Barackfa’ (2013), ‘Egy szabad országért’ (2016) and ‘Hazám, hazám’ (2020). All three songs are one-off collaborations of artists representing various music genres. We ask, firstly, what aesthetic forms make these songs potentially suitable for the performance of national unity, solidarity and the ‘people’, and secondly, how the songs’ structure, production and dissemination can be interpreted as attempts by government commissioners and creators to gain popularity. Drawing on Ostiguy's performative approach to populism, combined with the notion of collective speculation and musical affordances, we identify three main strategies of constructing the ‘people’ in the songs: singing together as sound, legacy and practice; the pop ‘mega-event’; and the use of the folk music aesthetic as ‘mother tongue’.