This essay tracks a predominant fantasy of music in global liberal-capitalist culture: music as ‘the only real magic’. Although discussion of music's ‘magic’ has been characterized as a vestige of Romanticism, I argue that it became a cornerstone of ordinary/everyday music discourse circa 1900, around the time that sociologists defined modernity as mostly bereft of magic and configured the aesthetic as its remaining stronghold. Juxtaposing claims of magic in ordinary music discourse with a coeval archive of these ‘disenchantment’ narratives, I trace music's institutionalization as magic in the historical moment from around 1900 to the present. This history reveals that music remains commonly experienced as ‘the only real magic’ insofar as it offers deeply ameliorative forms of affective connection felt to be scarce in other domains. Accordingly, it indicates the immense healing power that music has accrued particularly over the last century while also adumbrating the conditions of scarcity from which this potency has emerged.

Sampling has been criticised as ‘a mixture of time-travel and seance’, ‘the musical art of ghost co-ordination and ghost arrangement’, and a process that ‘doubles (recording's) inherent supernaturalism’ (Reynolds, S., 2012, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past, London, Faber and Faber, pp. 313–14). Yet out of all the sample-based music forms, hip-hop receives the lion's share of attention in popular music literature; critics are puzzled by its appeal, scholars identify a plethora of problems in its function, and practitioners and audiences alike are mesmerised by its effect. Rap producers attribute an inherent ‘magic’ to working with past phonographic samples and fans appear spellbound by the resulting ‘supernatural’ collage. The author examines the music's unique recipe of phonographic juxtaposition, exploring the conditions of this ascribed ‘magic’, investigating gaps in perception between emotional and intellectual effect and deciphering parallels in the practice and vocabulary mobilised against a range of genres in performance magic.

With a return to authoritarian rule only a few years after the initially successful 2011 revolution, some Egyptian DIY musicians have made it a point to avoid the political. These musicians consider the ordinary politics of discursive critique and public protest to be ineffective and have opted to continue the revolution by appealing to the ineffable properties of listening as a less ideologically driven way to produce social change. This article explores how and why the sonic ineffable is believed to be a more utopian form of politics. It argues that mobilizing ‘magic’ is a particularly positioned solution to political failure that obscures the relations of power it perpetuates. Building from 30 months of ethnographic research conducted in Egypt among DIY musicians between 2010 and 2017, it avoids a romanticisation of the ineffable, showing instead how utilising the ambiguity between the conscious and subconscious aspects of sonic experience is a political tool not removed from power.

This article discusses the role of music performance in football matches, highlighting the importance of the belief in its sonic powers as a trigger for causal relations between events. Music functions as a communicational axis linking the physical realm to mystical or intangible dimensions. By performing music and sounds on terraces, fans believe that they can change the course of the match, interfering in the mood, the bodies and, eventually, the result. Magic is a shared belief among fans, players and journalists, one that is activated through sounds and rituals. In football, the idea of magic is often perceived and referred to as a causal explanation for achievements and defeats that could hardly be understood or explained through rational and scientific knowledge. Music is a key feature in this process.

Magic and mystery shroud Florence + the Machine's and Bat for Lashes's performances and interviews, which frequently frame the two groups’ frontwomen, Florence Welch and Natasha Khan, as ‘witchy’ or magical, or spur comparisons to Pagan aesthetics. This article investigates the unique ways the two bands use Pagan influences to speak to mainstream and Pagan audiences. Ultimately, the two groups set themselves apart from other bands through marketing that fuses commercialism with an esoteric religion. Florence + the Machine and Bat for Lashes create a ‘Pagan chic’ that draws in listeners through videos, instrumentation often featuring harp and tom-tom drums, fantasy-oriented lyrics, and stage props which use a Pagan lens to respond to current political events reminiscent of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.

Taking inspiration from a press article comparing doom metal and New Age music, I explore individualism and magic in these musical cultures, reflecting on the ‘dirty, soothing secret’ suggested in that article's title. I trace the loosely defined characteristics of New Age music in the limited academic research on the topic, before situating the music in the wider New Age milieu which centres around the epistemological authority of the seeking self among diverse spiritual resources. Then, I examine the claims made about metal in the news article, drawing out themes which also relate to individualism and magic. Finally, I return to the concepts of the dirty, the soothing and the secret, arguing that these are not merely incidental aspects of the mainstream reception of New Age and metal music, but in fact can be understood as contributing to the magical potential of such music for listeners.

When the English blues scholar Paul Oliver, who died in 2017 aged 90, was interviewed for a special issue of Popular Music in his honour, on the occasion of his 80th birthday (issue 26/1, January 2007), it was striking how much of the conversation revolved around a recurring flow of ideas for future research, to be undertaken by him or by anyone else who came with credentials appropriate to the enterprise (such as musicology, a discipline that he never considered himself well enough versed in to allow engagement). It didn't enter his mind that he might become a research subject himself. Now, with Christian O'Connell's book, he has; and it is his own methods that are under scrutiny, not, or not directly, the blues that he spent a long adult lifetime investigating (and for which he was such a knowledgeable and, for many who read his books or heard him speak live or on air, inspiring advocate), nor the social and economic life of the African American working class who created the music that continued to fascinate him. What is under the microscope is how he depicted both of those things.