In Paris on 22 June 1963, the French youth magazine Salut les copains celebrated its first year in print by organising a free outdoor concert on the Place de la Nation. The artists headlining the gig were young male and female pop singers who had been propelled to the top of the French charts thanks to the regular broadcasting of their music on the show Salut les copains (on private radio station Europe

The debate over the cultural value of the Beatles was as vehement as it was significant in 1960s and early 1970s Britain. Lennon and McCartney's early compositions received some early critical plaudits, Sgt. Pepper sought to blur distinctions between high and low culture and the band members’ side projects forged links with the avant garde. To accept the Beatles as artists, however, required critics

This article discusses the characteristics of image in Ugandan hip-hop with a particular focus on representations of activism and excess. Locating Uganda as a fragile site on the basis of widespread political, social and economic marginalisation, this examination considers members of Uganda's first generation of hip-hop artists, to argue that both activism and excess act in singular response to these

This article focuses on a series of regional, national and international jazz competitions organised by the Jazz Club de Belgique between 1932 and 1939. In the early 1930s, contests for amateur jazz bands began to emerge in various European countries such as the UK, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Using the Belgian competitions as a case study, this article demonstrates that these were instrumental in

Research exploring the relationship between misogyny and music has been divided between those who argue that certain music causes, confirms or is a manifestation of misogyny. Yet this often takes for granted the link between certain genres (predominantly hip hop, rap and metal) and misogynistic 'messages'. Instead of asking what types of music might be misogynistic, this article instead asks how music

The phenomenon of British R&B is most often understood in terms of young, white, middle-class British men turning to the ‘down-home’ sounds of black American men for musical motivation. This article offers a revision to this dominant narrative by reinserting ‘slim, lively Irish girl’ Ottilie Patterson, the UK's most popular blues singer before 1963. I analyse the content and context of Patterson's

In late 1970, John Lennon began promoting his first post-Beatles solo album, Plastic Ono Band, which he described as ‘first-person music’ to Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner. This essay situates the album and two of Lennon's promotional interviews within an emergent politics of individualism in order to explore how self-expression became an aesthetic practice and critical value in rock music. The album's

This article traces how Tanzanian Bongo Flava hip hop has shifted from a politically conscious genre at the dawn of democratization and liberalization to its contemporary articulations, more commonly aligned with glamorous, geographically abstracted Western pop sensibilities. It argues that ‘swag’, as an intimately embodied and musically performed charisma, has served as a connective thread across

This article explores relationships between the significant growth of foreign tourism to Iceland, following the 2008 economic crash, and the popular music festival Iceland Airwaves. I consider the effects of Iceland Airwaves on popular music in Reykjavík during the festival and outside of the festival season. My focus is primarily on how the local population experiences Iceland Airwaves and musical

This article closely examines the song ‘The Rains of Castamere’, from the television series Game of Thrones (2011–19), to draw broader conclusions about how ‘medieval’ music manifests in contemporary popular culture and how music for television has become increasingly important in the last few decades. This article argues for the relevance of ‘The Rains of Castamere’ in popular music from three perspectives:

Country music has been popular in Ireland since the 1960s, most notably in the work of homegrown performers. Despite the durability of this appeal in the face of huge changes in Ireland and in the Irish music industry over a half-century, it remains curiously underexamined in the literature on Irish popular music. In this paper, I wish to argue the following: (1) Country music did not simply arise

The process of becoming a rock musician strongly relates to the organisational form of the band (Bennett 1980; Green 2002; Behr 2010). At all levels of ambition and success, membership of a band provides the musician with a natural entry point for performing to an audience and forging a potential career (Smith 2013a). The ‘micro-organisational’ (Bennett 2001) development of a band, therefore, is an

This article draws from a wider research project undertaken in 2018 in Armidale, a small regional city in New South Wales (NSW) Australia, to explore the challenges commercial venues face in presenting and maintaining a regular live music programme. An analysis of the main themes suggests that the issues regional venues encounter are often qualitatively and/or quantitatively different from those facing

This study aims to make the contemporary Hungarian jazz field the focus of a sociological investigation, based on a critical reinterpretation of Bourdieu's relational theory of artistic fields. It aims to grasp the logic of symbolic distinctions by analysing the free/mainstream dichotomy. This dichotomy of historically constituted poles is understood as a system of structuring oppositions that play

This article builds on research about gender in music practice, concerned with skewed musical canons, ratios and quotas of gender representation, unfair treatment and power dynamics, and the exclusionary enmeshment with music technologies. The aim is to critically discuss what ‘gender’ is understood to be, how it has been studied and how gendered power has been challenged, in order to suggest new routes

This article explores the construction of hybrid authenticity by Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour, an XM Radio programme that aired between 2006 and 2009. Dylan's foray into radio presents compelling questions about the role of his star image in advancing a corporate strategy of premium radio that requires subscription access. Through narration and curation, a performed freeform radio format and fragments

Recent popular music and film studies have revealed the political functions of documentaries about musicians. These studies suggest that such documentaries make powerful interventions into the field of music production as they construct the value of their subjects and their work. Owing to the expense and complexity of broadcast equipment, production companies have tended to favour documentaries about

The music that was produced in Dunedin, New Zealand, during the 1980's occupies a unique place in the global indie music canon. In writing about this supposed ‘Dunedin sound,' critics and scholars alike have fixated on the city's remoteness: it is believed to be distant from metropolitan centres of music industry power and influence, and consequently supported a subversive and democratised local music

Hip-hop studies have historically centred on issues of the ‘street’ or virtuosic lyricism and flow, foregrounded as evidence of the ‘seriousness’ of the genre. While these have undoubtedly been valuable theoretical approaches, the prominence of social networking in the 2010s (with its vast implications for communication and identity politics) has sculpted a generation of rappers whose vocal style and

This article explores popular-musical invocations of the Northern Ireland conflict (1968–1998), focussing specifically on the period between the IRA hunger strike of 1981 and the British Government's Broadcasting Act in 1988. Whilst most songs addressed to the ‘Troubles’ were marked by (lyrical) abstraction and (political) non-alignment, this period witnessed a series of efforts that issued upfront

If there is a single narrative that captures the modern understanding of transformative crossroads magic it is the spurious fable of the selling of Robert Johnson's soul. When, in the palaeoanthropology of 20th century rock and roll music, the biographers of the short-lived blues legend claimed that he had been down to the Dockery Plantation crossroads at midnight to sell his soul to the Devil in exchange

In the Soviet Union, song competitions had an important role in presenting new artists and songs. The Mikrofona aptauja contest of Latvian radio (1968–1994) was the main forum for new Latvian pop music. It had a reputation for expressing nationalist feelings within the limits of Soviet censorship. In 1988, with the rise of new political movements in the Soviet Union, the competition became a venue

This article analyses the main cultural and political factors that contributed to the emergence of local Anglophone music in Russia between 2008 and 2012. While Russian indie groups had extensively sung in English before (with scarce public recognition), a conjunction of circumstances encouraged the appearance of a conspicuous Russian Anglophone music scene in the Medvedev years. These were a perceived

This article argues that contemporary systems theory explanations are insufficient when accounting for ‘in the moment’ creative musical performance. The system model's focus on a domain-changing contribution from an individual fails to offer a satisfactory account of the construction and assessment of the more everyday distributed and collaborative creativity undertaken by many popular music instrumentalists

For more than two decades, a trend in popular music scholarship has been the publication every few years of an edited collection of analytical essays (e.g., Covach and Boone 1997; Moore 2003; Everett 2008). These multi-author volumes sometimes have a specific analytical concern, such as intertextuality (Burns and Lacasse 2018), but more typically they simply bring together a variety of essays written

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the course of one year in London and Bristol to examine the performance of rap in English youth centres. Youth centres play a significant role in supporting and shaping rap culture. However, historically dominant narratives within hip-hop studies and hip-hop culture depict rap as a vernacular cultural form that emerges from ‘the street’, and

This article explores the relationship between the human time of music making and the temporal layers that pervade the natural resources of musical instruments. It therefore offers case studies on two of popular music's most common instruments, the electric guitar and the synthesiser, and their symbolic and material temporalities: guitar players’ quest for ‘infinite sustain’ from Santana to today's

This article introduces three situated moments – or plateaux – in order to partially uncover the particular affinities between popular music and the ‘logic of waste’ in the Anthropocene Era, from early phonography to the present digital realm (with a focus on the UK, United States, and British India). The article starts with a ‘partial inventory’ of the Anthropocene, outlining the heuristic values

What is the cost of music in the so-called Anthropocene? We approach this question by focusing on the case of sound-recording formats. We consider the cost of recorded music through two overlapping lenses: economic cost, on the one hand, and environmental cost, on the other. The article begins by discussing how the price of records has changed from the late 19th to the 21st century and across the seven

Understanding how recorded and amplified stage musics contribute towards producing the Anthropocene necessitates attending to complex transnational flows of material, capital and labor, and how they coalesce into technological objects. This is complicated by the wide array of sites, practices and knowledges involved during various stages of the production process, from initial resource extraction,

Tanya Tagaq's work is political, often tackling themes of environmentalism and Indigenous rights. The Inuk throat singer uses live performance and audiovisual media to engage themes of climate change and give voice to environmental violence. Her work diversifies the discourse of environmentalism to include the voices and environmental trauma experienced by marginalised peoples, specifically North American

The study of the recorded artefact from a musicological perspective continues to unfold through contemporary research. Whilst an understanding of the scientific elements of recorded sound is well documented the exploration of the artistic nature of this endeavour from a production viewpoint is still developing. This study presents an understanding of the phenomenological aspects of Heavy Metal music

MCs (rappers) such as Cardi B, Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Big Sean and Young Thug use triplet rhythms in their rapping, a practice that is known as triplet flow. This paper argues that the prevalence of triplet flow is one of the most aurally salient features of contemporary hip hop, and exemplifies the popularity and influence of the Atlanta-centred genre of trap music through its sparse, slow beats.

This article examines the politics of race, religion and nation in relation to blackface minstrelsy during the first decades of the twentieth century. Having been superseded by more modern amusements, minstrelsy was outdated as a performance genre, yet the minstrel show served as a forum for Neil O'Brien and the Knights of Columbus fraternal society to participate in the invention of a white American

This article presents a case study of ecocritical black metal, delving into the apocalypticism of the California-based black metal band Botanist, who conjures a world in which plants have violently destroyed human civilisation. It first contextualises Botanist amidst the broader current of environmentalism in extreme metal as well as within wider cultural explorations of plants as subjective beings

This article explores the German band Corvus Corax and their reinterpretion of the Middle Ages as a creative answer to Germany's problematic history of nationalism. Invoking the community ideals and ideological values of the 1960s and 1970s, which, in the context of the GDR took on even more significance, Corvus Corax borrowed ‘authentic’ medieval texts and melodies, rendering them in acoustic arrangements

We trace the history of Indonesian Islamic metal bands, including Purgatory, Tengkorak and Kodusa, and the One Finger Movement that revolved around these bands (centred mainly on Jakarta). We look at the differences in symbols, heroes, rituals and values between One Finger Movement bands and the Bandung (Indonesia) secular Death Metal scene. We also study Bandung Death Metal band Saffar, which was

This article re-examines the use of arguments in favour of free speech when faced with difficult subjects in music, such as sexual violence against women. We present a new perspective on the 1985 US Senate Hearing on Record Labeling and challenge the orthodoxy that the Hearing was only a matter of free speech. Using critical discourse analysis we argue that the sexist environment of the Hearing, the

Analyses of music and environment are proliferating, yet new conceptions are needed to make sense of growing ecological crisis in the Anthropocene. From an empirical project tracing guitars all the way back to the tree, I argue for deeper conceptual and empirical integration of music into the material and visceral processes that constitute ecological crisis itself. Musicians are not only inspired by

Popular music in Israel has recently seen a surge in the use of Arabic in music made by Israeli-Jewish musicians. Most of these, although descendants of immigrants from Arab countries, never acquired Arabic at home or in school, owing to national ideology which sought to label Arabic as the language of the non-Jewish other. This article reveals and contextualises this recent trend, offering a typology

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

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

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

This article charts the development of ‘Inter-Asian’ popular music in contemporary music studies. Given the large number of universities that teach Asian pop music and ever-increasing number of Asian music scholars, inter-Asian popular music in contemporary music studies has largely been underrepresented. The lack of suitable concepts, vocabularies and theories that elucidate accurately Asian music

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

Over the past few years Mr. Polska, a Dutch rapper of Polish origin, has been enjoying a growing popularity in the Netherlands. Mr. Polska uses his Polish roots to position himself on the Dutch music scene and creates a persona that leans heavily on essentialised and exoticised stereotypes about Poland and the Polish. This article tries to answer two questions: what kind of image of Poland and the

Since the international breakthrough of The Sugarcubes and Bjork in the late 1980s, the Anglophone discourse surrounding Icelandic popular music has proven to be the latest instance of a long history of representation in which the North Atlantic island is imagined as an icy periphery on the edge of European civilization. This mode of representation is especially prominent in the discourse surrounding

This article explores the case of a musician performing pro-Zapatista revolutionary songs in a restaurant in a city in southern Mexico which has undergone rapid gentrification since the turn of the century. It highlights the particular set of constraints on, and possibilities for, musical creativity that emerged in an urban setting in which space was increasingly ordered around the accumulation of

This article discusses the development of a live music network in Larnaca, Cyprus. It is the result of a 9 month field research project centred on a specific music venue and it is based on interviews with members of four local prominent rock bands and the venue manager. These interviews were further informed by several discussions with numerous audience members, the result of the author's participatory

Using Swedish metal band Ghost as a primary case study, this article examines how anonymous bands mediate their identity through the use of masks. The isolation of the band members’ ‘real’ identities from their musical performance complicates traditional modes of ‘knowing’ the performer, but in turn enables the formation of a multitude of connectivities, as audiences utilise masked bodies as sites

The cultural theorist Jon Stratton is a key inspiration in this account of the original British Glam Rock phenomenon and a sample of its global scions since the 1970s. Subsequent to Stratton's (1986) call for further critical work on this popular music formation, Stuart Hall (1992), in an unconnected piece, speculated on what the future of Cultural Studies, Stratton's disciplinary home, might look

The emergence of punk in Britain (1976-78) is recalled and documented as a moment of rebellion, one in which youth culture was seen to challenge accepted values and forms of behaviour, and to set in motion a new kind of cultural politics. In this article we do two things. First, we ask how far punk’s challenge extended. Did it penetrate those political, cultural and social elites against which it set

Social mood in Finland shifted from generally positive in the spring of 2006 to generally negative by the spring of 2009. We identify this change in mood via eight indicators, including the onset of a financial and macroeconomic crisis, a decline in measures of sentiment, a rise in radical politics and the demise of an iconic business unit of one of the country's most successful firms. From the standpoint

Lo-fi music is commonly associated with a recording aesthetic marked by an avoidance of state-of-the-art technologies and an inclusion of technical flaws, such as tape hiss and static. However, I argue that lo-fi music is not defined merely by the presence of such imperfections, but by a discourse which deliberately draws attention to them. Album liner notes play an important role in this discourse

During the 2010s a new generation of queer hip hop artists emerged, providing an opportunity to engage with a set of politics defined by art, fashion, lyrics and music. A leading proponent of this movement was Azealia Banks, the controversial rapper, artist and actress from New York. This study instigates a critical investigation of her performance strategies in the track and video, ‘Chasing Time’

This article contributes to the growing research base in Turkish popular music studies with a focus on indie music from Istanbul. It situates this music within Turkey's contemporary social, cultural and political landscapes, and in relation to the country's historical cultural narrative. Istanbul indie musicians’ responses to the 2013 Gezi protests suggest that indie's counter-hegemonic aesthetics

This article discusses an extraordinary body in popular music, that belonging to the person with anorexia which is also usually a gendered body – female – and that of the singer or frontperson. I explore the relation between the anorexic body and popular music, which is more than simply look- ing at constructions of anorexia in pop. It involves contextually thinking about the (medical) history and

Hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan sold only one, expensive copy of their album, Once Upon A Time in Shaolin . This exemplifies recent strategies by popular music artists to establish their work as art, with what Walter Benjamin calls ‘aura’, in response to the accessibility and dematerialisation enabled by digital technology as well as longstanding cultural condescension. Critics argue that popular music

This article addresses the uses that record companies have made of two rhetorical tropes. The first is that only one in ten artists succeed. The second is that they are investing in new music. These two notions have been combined to give the impression that record companies are risk taking both economically and aesthetically. They have been employed to justify the companies’ ownership of sound recording

This article examines Googoosh, the reigning diva of Persian popular music, through an evaluation of diasporic Iranian discourse and artistic productions linking the vocalist to a feminized nation, its ‘victimisation’ in the revolution, and an attendant ‘nostalgia for the modern’ (Ozyurek 2006) of pre-revolutionary Iran. Following analyses of diasporic media that project national drama and desire onto