On 1 July 1992 over 100,000 people assembled in various locations across Canada to see their favourite bands play live at the Great Canadian Party. Broadcast on television and radio, this Canada Day spectacle celebrated the country's 125th birthday, but rather than being organised by the state or a non-profit making citizen's movement, it was facilitated by more than $100,000 of corporate sponsorship. Drawing on fieldwork in Vancouver, I will argue that external funding initially helped Canadian musicians but soon allowed outside sponsors to control the live music industry. These sponsors could then co-opt anxieties about national unity in a selective celebration designed purely for their own ends. By addressing the Great Canadian Party's emergence and historic moment the following discussion will explore what it meant for Canada to be represented through a giant commercial, a commercial drawing on shared national identity in order to sell the products of a global industry. The Party revealed how judiciously agents of commerce could use popular culture to negotiate between geographic scales. Despite that success, however, the resistance of participating bands suggests that the Party could not secure full hegemony for its sponsor's project.

Introduction

Born in mortal opposition to the peculiarly modern forms of slavery that helped to usher in a new era of European world domination, the Maroon societies of the Americas have long provided theorists of identity operating in the realm that has come to be known as the Black Atlantic with a potent symbolic currency. Nowhere has this currency acquired higher value than in the Caribbean region, where questions of identity are so fundamentally bound up with histories of plantation slavery.

The runaway slave has had a special place in the literature of the anglophone Caribbean; and francophone, hispanophone and Dutch-speaking Caribbean writers have all displayed a similar fascination with the Maroon epic. In more recent times, popular music – a medium that has played a primary role in the constitution of a truly diasporic sense of identity spanning the Black Atlantic – has helped to carry consciousness of a heroic Maroon past across the globe. Both practitioners of Caribbean (or other Afro-American) popular musics and those who write about them continue to reference the Maroons of yore, often tracing the rebellious thrust of much of today's music to these original Black warriors, whose defiant spirit, it is felt, continues to inhabit and motivate the collective memory (Aly 1988, pp. 55–7, 65; Zips 1993, 1994; Leymarie 1994).

Introduction

The commercial Hindi language cinema is among the largest and oldest music film traditions on the planet. One of the most widely remarked and inflexible conventions of this highly stylised popular film genre is the regular appearance of song and dance scenes in almost every commercial Hindi film. A huge body of over 40,000 film songs (filmī gīt, as they are known in Hindi) has grown along with the thousands of Hindi sound films produced since 1931; unlike the more recent development of music video in the west, Hindi film songs have been intimately connected with larger narrative traditions and visual images from their very inception. Filmī gīt comprise one of the most intensely consumed popular music repertoires on the planet. Across the range of visual and sound media and on into live performance, the audience for film song must be numbered in the hundreds of millions throughout the South Asian subcontinent and diaspora.

Music's ‘malleability’ (Taylor 1997) has always facilitated its export and import from one location to another. Indeed, such processes are central to the creation and dissemination of new musical forms. Yet in our contemporary globalised world, such processes occur ever more extensively and rapidly giving rise to new forms of appropriation and syncretism. Record companies from the developed world find new audiences in the developing world (Laing 1986). Musicians from the West appropriate non-Western music, sometimes collaboratively (Feld 1994; Taylor 1997). Non-Western musicians and musicians from subaltern groups within the West create new syncretic forms drawing on both Western and non-Western music (Mitchell 1996; Lipsitz 1994, Slobin 1993). The resulting ‘global ecumene’ produces considerable ‘cultural disorder’ (Featherstone 1990, p. 6) whose results cannot easily be summarised.

The singular style of rhythm & blues (R&B) that emerged from New Orleans in the years after World War II played an important role in the development of funk. In a related development, the underlying rhythms of American popular music underwent a basic, yet generally unacknowledged transition from triplet or shuffle feel (12/8) to even or straight eighth notes (8/8). Many jazz historians have shown interest in the process whereby jazz musicians learned to swing (for example, the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra through Louis Armstrong's 1924 arrival in New York), but there has been little analysis of the reverse development – the change back to ‘straighter’ rhythms. The earliest forms of rock 'n' roll, such as the R&B songs that first acquired this label and styles like rockabilly that soon followed, continued to be predominantly in shuffle rhythms. By the 1960s, division of the beat into equal halves had become common practice in the new driving style of rock, and the occurrence of 12/8 metre relatively scarce. Although the move from triplets to even eighths might be seen as a simplification of metre, this shift supported further subdivision to sixteenth-note rhythms that were exploited in New Orleans R&B and funk.

In recent work in film and cultural studies, the set of social configurations, practices of everyday life, and ideological formations that constitute twentieth-century ‘modernity’ have been increasingly the subject of research and debate. Fuelled by a renewed interest in critical phenomenologies of modernity, most prominently the work of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, scholars have focused the debate on the specific historicity of visual culture in the early years of the twentieth century, in order to illuminate the contradictory and fragmented nature of modern mass cultural experience. Fusing the theoretical traditions of critical theory with the empirical and theoretical interest in contradiction and contestation typical of cultural studies, not only does this debate open new perspectives for considering the problem of mass and/or ‘popular’ visual culture, it can also contribute to rethinking the way we discuss the historicity of popular music. Conversely, a more precise understanding of the historicity of popular music practice in modern mass culture, its institutions and modes of experience, can broaden the scope of this debate beyond the spectacles of visual culture to the ‘attractions’ of the acoustic.

In a tiny inner city pub

The amps were getting stacked

Leads were getting wound up

It was full of pissed Anzacs

‘Got no more gigs for Tuesday nights’ said the barman to the star,

‘We're putting pokies in the lounge and strippers in the bar’

The star, he raised his fingers and said ‘fuck this fucking hole’

But to his roadie said ‘it's the death of rock and roll’

‘There ain't no single place left to play amplified guitar

Every place is servin' long blacks if they're not already tapas bars

(TISM (This Is Serious Mum), ‘The Last Australian Guitar Hero’, 1998)

Introduction: local music-making

A number of recent studies have focused upon the places and spaces of popular music performance. In particular, analyses of British live music contexts have examined the role of urban landscapes in facilitating production/consumption environments. Building upon Simon Frith's (1983) initial exploration of the synthesis of leisure/work ideologies and popular music, Ruth Finnegan's detailed examination of amateur music practices in Milton Keynes (1989) and Sara Cohen's account of the Liverpool scene (1991) reveal the benefits of engaging in detailed micro-studies of the local. Paul Chevigny's history of the governance of New York City jazz venues (1991) similarly provides a rich insight into performance contexts and the importance of hitherto unnoticed city ordinances in influencing the production of live music.

In this paper I attempt first to identify some of the ways in which the growth of Welsh-language popular music and of more assertive and confident ideas of identity among young Welsh speakers were closely linked in the period 1960–85. Secondly, I briefly examine some elements of a period of diversification and crisis that occurred in the 1990s, and finally I attempt to identify three positions from which different musicians and audiences that I have been involved with seem to be currently rehearsing, negotiating and constructing contrasting roles and stances.

Introduction: Irishness and the ‘gift of song’

A key element in the range of stereotypes characteristically assigned to the Irish has been their natural proclivity for music and song, a feature of colonial discourse that can be traced back even to the Norman invasions of the twelfth century. However, the powerful link between the Irish and musicality (along with a host of other, considerably less attractive traits) was finally consolidated in the Victorian era at the height of the British imperial project (Curtis 1971; Busteed 1998). Irish music by this stage was constructed as a specific ethnic category based on the assumption that there was an identifiably Irish musical style that existed as an expression of the people, a reflection of their innate feelings and sensibilities. Music, therefore, became a feature of ‘race’, taking on properties for the coloniser that appeared to transcend the passage of time, that remained fixed and unchanging.

ROY BREWER

Introduction

From the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, Memphis, Tennessee was home of one of the most successful recording industries in the USA and its popular recorded releases began to rival those of Nashville, Los Angeles, New York and Detroit. Solo artists, song writers, session musicians and arrangers became overnight successes and a rebellious and influential upstart recording industry emerged. But the growth was too fast and, fuelled by zealous egos and competition, an infrastructure was never formed resulting in a musical and financial cataclysm from which the Memphis music community has yet to recover. This article is about those classically trained string musicians who were hired to play in the studios of Memphis during that era.

It's funny how the difference in each nation organised a different rhythm almost. The beat, the beat is different, it's much faster here than in the States. Mainly in bush music it's like that, if you call it bush music. You know this, this lagerphone? Well this lagerphone beat is usually much faster than you would hear in America, that's the way we felt it when we first arrived. Now it's fine, it fits, you know! But for some reason, it didn't quite [fit], it was just a bit too fast for what I was used to from the States. (Glasco 1998)

Frederique Glasco, a participant at the 1998 Top Half Folk Festival held in Mt Isa, Queensland, talks here about the unsettled experience she had upon hearing what she described as an ‘Australian rhythm’: it felt different, it was too fast, it did not ‘fit’ to her own sense of rhythm. Yet, her initial perception changed after living for a time in Australia and this new rhythmic pulse did feel appropriate to her in her new surroundings. Two questions arise from this: first, how does a musical coding of space help create a sense of place? Second, how does engagement with this aural symbol create an identity through connections to place? In this paper I am interested in examining this relationship between music and place by focusing on participation in the community music festival, specifically participation in the 1998 Top Half Folk Festival, which was held in northern Queensland.

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to analyse shifting themes in the meanings of Hong Kong popular songs relating to ideological and political changes in Hong Kong since the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident (TSI). In particular, the paper examines the relationship between Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China (PRC) concerning the transmission of Hong Kong popular music, and argues that Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese popular musics articulate fluctuating political meanings. Attention will be focused predominantly on the lyrics, but some aspects of the music are also invoked. After highlighting the political and cultural relations between Hong Kong and the PRC, I discuss the social transformations and the struggles for democracy delineated in Chinese popular music during the 1989 TSI. This is followed by an examination of the intensification of the conflict between the PRC and Hong Kong over the dissemination of popular songs carrying democratic messages in Hong Kong. Finally, the paper considers the rise of patriotism and/or nationalism through lyrics rooted in the notion of educating Hong Kong Chinese people into accepting the cultural and political identity of mainland China, and the promotion of popular songs in the official language of the PRC, Putonghua, since the late transitional period.

Say somethin' positive, well positive ain't where I live

I live around the corner from West Hell

Two blocks from South Shit and once in a jail cell

The sun never shined on my side of the street, see?

(Naughty By Nature, ‘Ghetto Bastard (Everything's Gonna Be Alright)’, 1991, Isba/Tommy Boy Records)

If you're from Compton you know it's the 'hood where it's good

(Compton's Most Wanted, ‘Raised in Compton’, 1991, Epic/Sony)

Introduction

Hip hop's capacity to circumvent the constraints and limiting social conditions of young Afro-American and Latino youths has been examined and celebrated by cultural critics and scholars in various contexts since its inception in the mid-1970s. For instance, the 8 February 1999 issue of US magazine Time featured a cover photo of ex-Fugees and five-time Grammy award winner Lauryn Hill with the accompanying headline ‘Hip-Hop Nation: After 20 Years – how it's changed America’. Over the years, however, there has been little attention granted to the implications of hip hop's spatial logics. Time's coverage is relatively standard in perceiving the hip hop nation as a historical construct rather than a geo-cultural amalgamation of personages and practices that are spatially dispersed.

The fact is, if you want to make a difference in music, you have to change the machine. (Christie 1998)

In my book Rock Formation I borrowed from Walter Ong and Jacques Attali when I noted that, ‘The ability to record sound is power over sound.’ (Jones 1992, p. 51) I continue to believe that statement to be true. Arguments that I then made about the increasing role computers would play in the production of music have been borne out. They were not hard forecasts to make: one only had to imagine that the processing power of computer chips would continue to increase according to Moore's Law and then extrapolate the possibilities such increases would create for sound recording and reproduction. Even comments I made, vaguely tongue-in-cheek, expecting that we would have, in addition to the ability to record high-quality digital audio in the home, the ability to press CDs at home, and print colour inserts for CD jewel boxes, thus creating not only home studios but home pressing plants, have become a reality. However, with but a few years' hindsight, I want to append to these an argument that recording sound matters less and less, and distributing it matters more and more, or, in other words, the ability to record and transport sound is power over sound. Consequently, technology is an even more important element to which popular music scholars must attend.

Introduction

The concern of this article is with a particular set of harmonic practices that rock musicians, particularly those who participate in the domain of guitar-oriented ‘alternative’ rock, have been using with noticeable frequency in the last ten years. I am also interested in discussing the concept of the power chord (a term I shall explicate more clearly below) as a device in rock that has facilitated the above-mentioned set of harmonic practices

The observations made in this paper come out of a previous research inquiry of mine into the devices which alternative musicians use to differentiate their music from other styles of mainstream rock. Also, the pursuit of this topic is partly a response to Allan Moore's admonition that ‘there is as yet very little concern for theorizing analytical method in rock music’, and his call for a ‘mapping-out of those harmonic practices that serve to distinguish rock styles . . . from those of common-practice tonality . . . and jazz’ (Moore 1995, p. 185).

There has been some rather pointed criticism recently of musicological analyses of popular music (see Shepherd 1993; Frith 1990) on the charge that analysing music's purely sonic dimensions (i.e. melody, harmony, rhythm, structure, etc.) does not really help us understand musical communication. Speaking as a songwriter, however, I would argue that many musicians in rock are indeed concerned with harmonic progression (or ‘the changes’, to use the vernacular term) as an important device or jumping-off point in the process of songwriting. It also seems reasonable to suggest that harmonic progression is a contributing factor in the affective power of a song, although its importance here is likely to be variable and quite open to debate.

Introduction

In 1996 a small independent record company, Oh Boy Records, set up a ‘chat page’ on its web site where fans of its major artist, John Prine, could exchange typed messages in close to real time. The page became a place where fans could ‘virtually’ meet to get information or exchange experiences and opinions relating to Prine. Through the chat page a fan community was established, in that the chat page became a meeting place that could not exist within real-world boundaries. John Prine has had some recent commercial and critical success, but Prine fans are still a minority in most geographic communities, and are, to some extent, isolated by the lifestyle of their 35-plus age group. It could be said that the one and only place where Prine fans could regularly gather was online through the chat page provided by the record company. The Oh Boy Record's homepage became a symbolic anchor – a recognition of shared experience and a sign of community. While music communities are usually associated with ‘local’ places, ‘the notion of “communities” or localities as bounded geographic entities increasingly has been seen as problematic to the study of music in urban settings’ (Gay 1995, p. 123). Communities exist through dialogue; through an exchange of past social history and current social interaction. Developments in communication technology have contributed to a ‘deterritorialization of space within a global cultural economy’ (Fenster 1995, p. 85), to a point where ‘local’ is no longer disconnected from ‘global’ and the identity of a specific place is located both in ‘demarcated physical space’ and in ‘clusters of interaction’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, p. 8). In the absence of a communal physical space, the Oh Boy home page became the site of a ‘local’ Prine community.

In an article entitled ‘Sexist Pulp ads attacked’, the Independent on Sunday (IoS) reported public reaction to the posters advertising Pulp's new album This is Hardcore (posters had been defaced with the words ‘this is sexist’), and described the advertisements as part of a turn away from political correctness towards a new ‘anything goes’ realism (Kelly and Clay 1998). The poster shows the naked upper torso of a woman face down on a red leather cushion, in an awkward and ambivalent posture, with lipsticked, half-open mouth. Emblazoned across the centre of the image (which is a reproduction of the album cover) are the words ‘This is Hardcore’ in pink capitals. A leader in the paper on the same day, under the heading ‘This is violent. This is offensive’, interprets the image as a demeaning, sexist and violent representation of women and as an offence to the record-buying public. The leader asserts that ‘Just to sell a few songs, it shows a woman violated’, and concludes with the words: ‘To ban it [the poster] now would only generate more publicity for Pulp. So the only advice we have is for anyone thinking of buying the album. Don't bother.’ (IoS Leader, 1998, p. 4)

Music makes mutations audible. (Attali 1977)

In his opening remarks as host of the 1998 Grammy Award Show, sitcom actor, substance abuser and convicted drunk driver Kelsey Grammer promised that Marilyn Manson's ‘skinny white ass’ would not be appearing on the show. It was a truly extraordinary moment. Referring explicitly to his own teenage daughter, Spencer, Grammer couched this slur in the form of an inside joke for the baby boomer parents of children with seemingly inexplicable musical tastes. In so doing, he affirmed not only the intractable conservatism of the Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences but also the arrogant hegemony of his own generation within mainstream musical culture. The show proceeded to reward Bob Dylan with Album of the Year, James Taylor with Best Pop Album and Elton John with Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, while lavishing unbridled approbation upon the newest crop of corporate hit-makers, including Babyface, LeAnn Rimes, Hanson and the ubiquitous Spice Girls. Mitch Miller could not have orchestrated a more thoroughgoing tribute to the pop music status quo in America.

Introduction

There are no traces of the mid-Finnish village ‘Perikylä’ on existing maps. It features only in the ‘old folks’ memories', says the retired bus-driver, Matti Tulijoki, who wrote a melancholic waltz in memory of his native five-farm village, ‘in a weak moment’. He called the waltz ‘Memories of Perikylä’, and I have chosen it for analysis from the repertoire of the amateur musical group Virtain pelimannit, in which Mr Tulijoki is an accordion player and a pelimanni. Pelimanni is a term that has been used in Finland for centuries to denote a musician who plays a folk instrument. It is also used for the players who, from the start of the Finnish folk music movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, joined the groups that were being formed all over the country, carrying the name of each municipality. This paper uses the case study, Music and Identity at Grassroots Level (Järviluoma 1997), in which I analysed the ways in which one such amateur music ensemble creates and maintains different sides of its identity. The group comes from Virrat, a country town of 9,000 people in central Finland. One of the central themes of the case study was place, and I will draw upon the study here to examine how ‘place’ is present in both the players' music and their speech about music.

From 1995–2000 I was Director of the Economic and Social Research Council's research programme on Media Economics and Media Culture. One of my tasks was to organise meetings of researchers in the field and to this end I ran a series of seminars at the British Phonographic Institute for people studying the music industry. These seminars were thematic, covering music industry strategies in global media markets; methods for measuring the value of the music industry; the uses of music; and musicians. A final meeting, held in the then about-to-be-opened National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield on 16 February 1999, brought together nearly all the UK's academic music industry researchers to discuss future research in the light of the MEMC Programme's findings. What follows is a report from both MEMC research and the Sheffield meeting. The aim is to provide an overview of the current research situation in Britain.