What is a ‘hook’? Delson's Dictionary defines it as ‘[t]hat part of a song, sometimes the title or key lyric line, that keeps recurring’ (Hurst and Delson 1980, p. 58). According to songwriters Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, hooks are ‘the foundation of commercial songwriting, particularly hit-single writing’. Hooks may involve repetition of ‘one note or a series of notes … [or of] a lyric phrase, full lines or an entire verse’. The hook is ‘what you're selling’. Though a hook can be something as insubstantial as a ‘sound’ (such as da doo ron ron), ‘[i]deally [it] should contain one or more of the following: (a) a driving, danceable rhythm; (b) a melody that stays in people's minds; (c) a lyric that furthers the dramatic action, or defines a person or place’ (Kasha and Hirschhorn 1979, pp. 28, 29).

Rosie and the Originals released their only 45 rpm single in early 1960. ‘Angel Baby’, the A side, reached number five in America, but it never even saw the light of day on the British charts. The song is dismissable, a one-hit wonder from singer Rosie Hamlin that didn't deserve a follow-up. But the B side is something else entirely: for one thing, one of the Originals is hogging the mike, Rosie is nowhere to be heard – a mystery that the label doesn't explain. The record is much as Lennon describes: after a revved-up guitar intro, the drums vanish and leave everyone else playing straight off the top of their heads. The listener eavesdrops on a sloppy rhythm and blues concoction, with jealous lyrics sung to unrehearsed riffing – it's so sloppy, so incoherently diffuse that it's more laughable than it is danceable. To say ‘Give Me Love’ sounds spontaneous doesn't begin to suggest its strangeness; the musicians themselves don't seem to know where the next downbeat is going to land. The listener has trouble making sense of the music, but then again, so do the musicians. Far from backing up Rosie's wilful début, it sounds as though someone left the tape machine running during an early morning musical reverie – sounds that were completely random became crystallised on tape. It unveiled the would-be Originals as crudely inspired amateurs, who weren't even able to sustain their facade as a group from one side of a 45 rpm single to the other.

Current musicology has not developed such a methodical or systematic knowledge of melody as it has of other aspects of music. Music schools have courses and examinations in harmony, counterpoint, musical forms, etc., but not in melody; in the same way, books dealing with melody are rare exceptions.

Between 1976 and 1983 Argentina witnessed the full development of a phenomenon which has come to be known as rock nacional (‘national rock’). At first sight it might appear no more than a matter of musical consumption, fashioning its participants simply as ‘artists’ on one side and ‘public’ on the other. But it has proved an original form within which the young create and inhabit a space of their own, relatively protected from the assaults of the military dictatorship (which had made them its principal victims), and has come to constitute, with the passing of the years, a counter-culture and a social movement.

In April 1961 the Beatles made their second trip to Hamburg, West Germany, to play a three-month engagement at the Top Ten Club. At this time the group comprised five members – John Lennon (rhythm guitar), Paul McCartney (rhythm guitar), George Harrison (lead guitar), Stuart Sutcliffe (bass guitar) and Pete Best (drums).

Late at night, in a discotheque in a Latin American country whose political system is dominated by the military and is not particularly known for its respect for human rights, a crowd is dancing salsa, a generic term covering Caribbean dance music. The song is Willie Colón's ‘El general’. It starts with a roll of drum beats and a sarcastic description of the general getting up in the morning to put on his uniform and dictate orders to the president. A thrill of fifes follows and a stentorean shout: ‘To the right!’ The verse describes citizens as delighted not to have a free press and a dangerous democratic system with its tricky politicians. The military gazette is very enjoyable and it is reassuring to have a regime which puts men with strange ideas behind bars. In the discotheque, the crowd continues dancing. The next stanza says the general is rumoured to be about to retire: What will happen to the country and the people without him? ‘For a long time I've wanted to thank you,’ is the refrain, ‘goodbye and thank you, my general.’

The very existence of popular music research in its various aspects can be considered, with its investment of attention, as a general value judgement on the music's potentialities. Moreover, we should not forget that a serious interest in popular music research would probably not have been possible without the emergence of more ambitious musical products testifying to a need for emancipation. Even so, perhaps because of a bitter awareness of its own roots in the same cultural and political processes, popular music research has somehow more and more tended to ignore ‘quality’ products in the field, whether because of their decline since the 1970s, or for the sake of some ‘scientific’ suspension of value judgement.

For young Australians in the early 1960s America was the icon of pop music and fashion. This was the result of the projection of America through the mass media and the numerous American rock'n'roll acts that were brought to Australia by Lee Gordon, an American entrepreneur who lived in Sydney (Zion 1984). This overall tendency led the American, A. L. McLeod, to observe when writing about Australian culture in 1963 that

in general, Australian popular music is slavishly imitative of United States models; it follows jazz, swing, calypso or whatever the current fashion is in New York or San Francisco at a few months distance. (McLeod 1963, p. 410)

Yet by late 1963 the potency of America was in decline. For while the Californian surf music craze made a somewhat delayed impact, especially in Sydney, the popularity of the Beatles was gathering momentum. This can be traced crudely through the Top Forty lists of the day: in Sydney the song ‘From Me To You’ entered the charts on 12 July 1963 and eventually reached number six (Barnes et al. 1979, p. 50).

Gypsy folk music is of a distinctive character compared with that of the other East European ethnic communities. The pecularities differentiating it from these other forms of folk music – improvisation and a readiness to adopt new influences – have continued to be of significance. While in several cases the folk music of peoples who have established themselves in national states is kept alive by artificial means (e.g. by promoting folk singing groups, by teaching folksongs in schools and by various revival movements), the vast majority of Gypsies have preserved their traditional music as an almost exclusive musical language.

Probably the most famous photograph of the entire anti-rock movement features record burnings held in August 1966. A crowd of elementary school-age children and a clean-cut disc jockey stand before a bonfire; one grinning boy presents a copy of Meet the Beatles to the camera prior to tossing it on the flames. This particular bonfire was organised by radio staion WAYX in Waycross, Georgia, but it was only one of many in response to comments made by John Lennon.

Among the ever-growing body of publications on popular music, all but a small minority have tended to deal exclusively with the capitalist world. The relative neglect of the workings of popular music in socialist countries has led to an unfortunate lacuna in descriptive studies and, perhaps more importantly, a potential bias in theoretical studies. Popular cultures in socialist states may share many features with their counterparts in the capitalist world, but they are also likely to differ in several important aspects, including, for example, the role of the market, of the bureaucracy, of state cultural policy, the limits on commercialism and the entire ideological climate fostered by socialism. Consequently, many of the theoretical generalisations about popular music, based on studies of the capitalist world, must be revised or qualified when socialist countries are considered.

The term ‘protest song’, which became so familiar in the context of the anti-war movement in the United States during the 1960s, has been widely applied to the songs of socio-political commitment which have developed out of traditional folksong in most of the countries of Latin America over the past twenty years (see Pring-Mill 1983 and forthcoming). Yet it is misleading insofar as it might seem to imply that all such songs are ‘anti’ something: denouncing some negative abuse rather than promoting something positive to put in its place. A more helpful designation is that of ‘songs of hope and struggle’, enshrined in the titles of two Spanish American anthologies (C. W. 1967 and Gac Artigas 1973), which nicely stresses both their ‘combative’ and their ‘constructive’ aspects, while one of the best of their singers – the Uruguayan Daniel Viglietti – describes his own songs as being ‘in some measure both de protesta and de propuesta’ (i.e. as much ‘proposing’ as they are ‘protesting’). The document with which this article is chiefly concerned uses the term ‘revolutionary song’, which clearly covers both those aspects, but such songs may be seen to perform a far more complex range of tasks than any of those labels might suggest, as soon as their functions are examined ‘on the ground’ within the immediate context of the predominantly oral cultures of Latin America to which they are addressed: cultures in which traditional folksong has retained its power and currency largely undiminished by the changes of the twentieth century, and in which the oral nature of song (with the message of its lyrics reinforced by music) helps it to gain a wider popular diffusion than the more ‘literary’ but unsung texts which make up the greater part of the genre of so-called ‘committed poetry’ (‘poesía de compromiso’) to which the lyrics of such songs clearly belong (see Pring-Mill 1978, 1979).

Subversion of satisfaction is the name of the game in pop rock music. The constant changes in artists and sounds perpetually subvert conventional meanings of desire and pleasure, and we ‘can't be satisfied’. Consumer mythologies of style and fashion work to condense the fulfilment of our desires into the act of buying that which is ‘new’, now. Clearly, such change seldom includes any significant disruption of the everyday acceptance of the ‘natural’ order of things. Since meaningful change is a threat to corporate control, it is the superficial change of the subversion of satisfaction – vital to increasing profits, it seems – that has been institutionalised.