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).

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).

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.

Paul McCartney's Give my Regards to Broad Street opened in New York City (and in 319 cinemas across the USA) on 26 October 1984, following the most intense publicity campaign that the McCartneys and 20th-Century Fox could mount. Apart from a wave of magazine interviews with Linda and Paul, a new video, No More Lonely Nights gave a cute synopsis, and the song itself was released as a single; a soundtrack album was produced and McCartney's own company, MPL Communications, put out a songbook including music and pictures from the film plus a forty-eight page screenplay (McCartney 1984). Despite all this, and an $8,000,000 investment by Fox the movie quickly sank like a stone and was withdrawn from distribution after a couple of weeks. Most people have never seen Give my Regards to Broad Street.

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).

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.