This article investigates how the concrete sound of and recording process behind a pop tune relate to the possibilities and constraints of its electronic media. After a brief presentation of some theoretical issues related to the question of mediation and materiality, we address the claim that digitisation erases the material aspects of mediation through an investigation of contemporary popular music. Through a close analysis of the sound (and the silence) in Madonna's song ‘Don't Tell Me’, from the album Music (2000), as well as in a handful of related examples, we argue that one can indeed identify specific aural qualities associated with digital sound, and that these qualities may be used to achieve different aesthetic effects as well as to shed light on mediation and medium specificity as such.

Much of the discourse surrounding sampling practice has been couched in an archaic rhetoric of originality and creativity, predicated on the reproductive mode of creation rather than the practice's own creative logic. These notions have emerged from a metaphysics which privileges the origin as the centre of semantic production. However, this discursive preoccupation with the past is not entirely irrelevant in sampling practice. Rather, the historically inscribed aura of the original holds a redefined, but necessary, place in the practice.

This essay examines the theoretical underpinnings of the discussion so far, then reconciling these with the specific culture of sample-based hip-hop production. Through close readings of some musical examples, it posits a theoretical framework for sampling practice which takes its unique properties into account. By mapping the trajectory of several samples from source to new incarnation, the sample is revealed as the space of simultaneous play and rupture, where the past both defines the present and is effaced by it. As such, sampling creates a tradition that involves the past without deferring to its structures and limitations, restoring a revised mode of agency to the practice.

Even though electronic and computer-based technologies are commonly used in music composition, performance and recording, this field of technology use has, with a few exceptions, remained fairly unexplored within social studies of technology. In this article, the role of technology in music production is investigated by applying the notion of script (Akrich 1992) to an empirical study of users of the Roland MC303 Groovebox, a self-contained instrument for making techno, rap, jungle, hip-hop, acid and other styles of electronic (dance) music. The study focuses especially on individual differences between users' perceptions of the musical-stylistic directedness of the Groovebox and how they construct different user scripts and more advanced needs as they become more familiar with the instrument. The latter observation highlights the relevance of a user trajectory, the notion that enthusiast technology users may keep on using a specific technological artefact through various usage modes or scripts over time.

This article looks at the popular music industry in Singapore and argues that there exists a ‘cultural cringe’ for domestic English-language music, which is considered as inferior to English-language music from Western countries. Singaporean consumers of popular music use the English language as a signifier of authenticity and consequently quality of musicians. Local musicians are deemed ‘inauthentic’ because consumers perceive the local variant of English spoken in Singapore is inferior to other variants of English spoken in Western countries. There is thus an underlying sub-text of an inferiority complex coming out of the post-colonial experience that effectively diminishes the possibility of success as English-language musicians. Yet, such a phenomenon is not observed in the vernacular Malay and Chinese-language music industries. In the final analysis, this article suggests that modernisation and modernity for Singapore is neither completely localised nor completely imposed: there exists a negotiation in the popular cultural sphere based on historical (colonial) baggage.

During the early 1970s the American songwriter, musician and producer Van Dyke Parks completed work on a series of albums exploring the musical contours of the circum-Caribbean region and, through them, broader patterns and issues in twentieth-century US–Caribbean relations. Focusing on the connections between the United States and the (former) British colony of Trinidad and Tobago as articulated via the latter's calypso and steel band traditions, these recordings (two solo albums and two productions) not only explore the grammar, vocabulary and subject matter of a new world music before the phrase ‘world music’ was conceived; they also invite a range of scholarly interpretations. Drawing on a selection of theoretical concepts – notably cultural imperialism, the Black Atlantic, minstrelsy, and world music itself – this article offers a set of formalist and contextualist readings intended to rehearse Parks' Caribbean work as both a case study in (and a challenge to aspects of) the inter-disciplinary analysis of popular music.

This paper examines the recent historical trajectory of the idea of citizenship in Brazil through the perspective of Tom Zé, a composer and musician noted for his juxtaposition of avant-garde poetics and popular music. My study begins with his participation in the watershed Tropicália movement of the 1960s, focusing on his critique of consumer society and its implications for popular citizenship. In the early 1970s, the figure of the bourgeois citizen, or senhor cidadão, appears in his work as a caustic critique of those who benefited most from the expansion of capitalism during the period of authoritarian rule. With the re-emergence of civil society and redemocratisation in the 1980s, Tom Zé's work reveals a more affirmative notion of citizenship premised on the discourse of self-represenation among working-class subjects. Finally, this paper discusses Tom Zé's most recent work and its contribution to insurgent forms of citizenship in contemporary Brazil involving historically marginalised and impoverished urban communities within the context of neo-liberal globalisation.

This article addresses problems of authorship and creative authority in popular music, in particular in view of a pervasive split between modes of aesthetic production (involving modernist assemblage, multiple authorship, and the late capitalist logic of major label policies) and modes of aesthetic reception (which tend to take popular music as the organic output of individual performers). While rock musicians have attempted to come to terms with this phenomenon by either performing a ‘Romantic’ sense of authenticity (basically by importing folk values to the production process) or ‘Modernist authenticity’ (by highlighting experimentation and alienation), Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, creators of Gorillaz, found a third way which ingeniously allows them to do both. By creating a virtual rock band, and by hiding their own media personalities behind those of their virtual alter egos, they brought themselves into a position which allows them to produce ‘sincere’ popular music which ‘playfully’ stages the absurdities of major label music business while very successfully operating within its very confines.