Popular notions of value in art – even popular definitions of art itself – are much indebted to the idealist narratives of late romanticism and its maximalised form, elite modernism. Since artistic value is normally imputed to one side of a dialectically related pair of oppositional terms, two principal strategies exist by which to ascribe value to the music you love, find interesting, or want to study: either show how it merits the positive term of the valorising pair (if necessary redefining the specific markers of that term), or attack the narrative underlying the binary itself. A typical postmodernist strategy is to do both these things simultaneously, so as to collapse notions of value into a win-win polysemy.

This is an age of jazz. This is an age of having long, tangled hair, and of [young men] wearing an earring, and of wearing caps backwards [with the visor in the back]. And it is also a period of rap. Some raps are known as bhattirap and some are known as party rap. And some are meaningless raps. But at this moment it is a time of deuseerap. Deuseerap!!

Opening rap in ‘Deusee rey extended mix’ by Brazesh Khanal

(translated from Nepali; underlined words are sung in English)

Throughout Asia, the English word ‘mix’ (or variant thereof) is being used today to characterise a new mode of musical borrowing and syncretism distinctive of several pop musics that have emerged in the 1990s. Earlier modes of pop music borrowing typically involve timbral, rhythmic and melodic adaptations of both indigenous and foreign materials, in which contrasts between different musical elements are smoothed over so that they can be integrated into unified musical expressions. In contrast, the new ‘mix’ music of India (Greene 2000, pp. 545–6), Nepal (Greene 1999A; Henderson 1999), Japan (Condry 1999), Indonesia (Wallach 1999) and South Asian diasporic communities (Manuel 1995) employs the latest sound studio technologies in order to reproduce more precisely than ever before the precise timbres, rhythms and tunings of sound bites of both foreign pop and indigenous music. Yet as these foreign and indigenous sounds are coming more sharply into focus in Asian soundscapes, their meanings and histories seem to be going out of focus. For one thing, a ‘mix’ commonly takes the form of a sonic montage: abruptly juxtaposed musical styles heard in rapid succession that project only a weak sense of overarching form. In this ‘mix’ configuration, foreign and indigenous sounds sometimes present themselves as inscrutable sound bites – snippets detached from their original musical and cultural contexts. Mixes typically celebrate sonic contrasts, rather than attempt to reach or move the listener within any single musical idiom. Moreover, foreign sounds travel to Asia so quickly through radio, music television, recordings and the Internet, that they are detached from their histories and original cultural contexts, and often present themselves as suggestive, intriguing, but underdetermined cultural indexes. This point is taken up below in an analysis of Nepali heavy metal, one of the elements in the mix. Both Western pop and indigenous sounds become perspectival constructs, taking on a range of meanings and affective forces in different listener experiences. Mix music embodies new, understudied and essentially postmodern musical aesthetics (in the sense of Manuel 1995) that have taken root in Asian and other world communities.

Opera and operatic images have invaded nearly all aspects of popular culture. Films (even silent films), radio, television, literature and numerous other media have all, to one degree or another, appropriated either actual opera or operatic devices and conventions. One important realm of popular culture that has appeared relatively immune to operatic influence, however, is rock music. Though several studies have illustrated the impact of ‘classical’ instrumental music on heavy metal and pop music, no serious scholarship has as yet explored the considerable influence exerted by opera, and its conventions, on various forms of rock music (Aledort 1985; McClary and Walser 1990; Walser 1992; Covach 1997). This essay examines the various manifestations of opera in rock music with particular concentration on works by Queen, Nina Hagen, Klaus Nomi and Malcolm McLaren that employ specific instances of operatic vocality or borrowing. Such opera–rock fusions are often predicated upon the transgression of conventional musical boundaries and often reflect an analogous rejection of traditional cultural boundaries surrounding sexual orientation, gender and class. Long overlooked, recognising opera's cross-relations with rock offers new insights into the postmodern blurring of traditional distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art and broadens our understanding of both genres.

Back in 1982, Max Paddison suggested that Frank Zappa's 1960s' Mothers of Invention recordings deserved to be read in the context of Adorno's views on mass culture. Based on a ‘critical, self-reflective attitude’ (Paddison 1982, p. 216) towards their musical processes, as anticipated in Adorno's essay, ‘Music and technique’ of 1959, these records could be seen to mount an incisive critique of the ‘culture industry’. The title of a series of essays in Telos (Spring 1991), ‘Special Section on Musicology: popular music from Adorno to Zappa’, locates Zappa in a debate about Adorno's continuing relevance where theories of popular music are concerned. More recently, Ben Watson's Frank Zappa, The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (1994) uses a theoretical admixture of Marx and Freud in which Adorno looms large. (The dust jacket photograph of Watson mirrors the photograph of Adorno at Oxford in December 1935 which now adorns the 1997 paperback edition of Paddison's Adorno's Aesthetics of Music.) The influence of Adorno remains in Watson's later essay in The Frank Zappa Companion (1997), which takes Dada as a crucial point of reference. Central to all this remains the question of Zappa's identity and status as an avant-gardist, and it is this issue which concerns me here. I agree that the Mothers' albums, together with later work, can be made to represent a radical popular music. It's the word ‘represent’ that causes the problem.

Despite the debates surrounding media audiences, it seems that little work within popular music studies has engaged directly with those who consume, listen to and use popular music as part of their everyday lives. The purpose of this paper is therefore to examine issues relating to popular music audiences through an analysis of my own research which has involved conducting unstructured group discussions with teenagers at a comprehensive school in East Sussex, South England, during the Summer term of 1999. These young people articulated the significance of popular music in their lives in terms of its usefulness within the context of their daily routines, rather than as a meaningful source for identity investment.

Going for the One was a good rebirth of Yes at that time, to find its feet and really know what it wanted to do. And we made ‘Awaken’ . . . (Morse 1996, p. 58).

Since the release of their third recording, The Yes Album, in March 1971, the music of the English band Yes has been associated with the rock music substyle called ‘progressive rock’. The first two Yes albums showcase a very capable, inventive group of musicians who drew freely from the multitude of sounds around them, emulating aspects of the various musical styles they found engaging. However, it was not until they composed the works appearing on The Yes Album that the band coupled this eclecticism with a quest for originality to develop a voice highly idiosyncratic when judged against prevailing popular music styles. Subsequent albums reveal a predeliction for experimentation and expansion, and successful record sales in both the UK and US encouraged further development in the same direction. Although not members of the ‘first wave’ of progressive rock bands, Yes became ‘codifiers’ and for many, especially later detractors, the flagship of the ‘progressive' fleet. Before I go on to describe and illustrate, through the analysis of a particular song, aspects of Yes's musical language, I will briefly describe the environment in which it appeared and flourished.

For some reason, the working lives of music makers are not often given the attention in popular music studies which might be expected. The launch of the UK Year of the Artist – celebrating the role of artists in society – immediately before the 2000 conference of the UK branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), meant that it was especially timely, then, for the IASPM event to address this state of affairs. The conference, The Popular Musician: Performance, Poetics, Power, was held at the University of Surrey, 7–9 July 2000, and took as its central theme the position of musicians – in the music industry, in relation to fans and audiences and in the media, politics and society.

The most recent of the informal Critical Musicology study days focused on the concept of authenticity in popular music. The day consisted of seven short papers on this subject and was followed by a group discussion of issues raised by these papers.

In his opening paper, ‘ “We stripped it apart like a car and put it back together totally again”: music's authenticity-speak in the age of digital technology, c.1985’, Dai Griffiths (Oxford Brookes University) was keen to draw attention to the way that sampling technology had been interpreted, both in terms of practice and of discursive context, as a marker of identity. His historical framework made reference to earlier practices of cover and intertextual reference from the early 1960s onwards. Referring to A Tribe Called Quest and Beck, even with samples, it looked as though racial authenticity was still at issue. The role of sampling in the rendering of authenticity was also considered by Rupert Till (University College, Bretton Hall) in his paper ‘Club cultures and authenticity’. Making reference to hip-hop and dance music, he suggested that there are different authenticities for different kinds of popular music. Drawing on Sarah Thornton's (1995) study of club culture in which the underground is considered authentic and the commercial, inauthentic, Till gave examples of some of the alternative means by which it is considered possible to be financially successful and yet retain an aura of authenticity.

Thanks to the generous support of the Municipality of Bogota, the Academia Superior de Artes of Bogota and the Colombian Ministry of Culture, IASPM held its Third Latin American Conference under excellent technical and organisational conditions. Almost seventy papers and plenaries were presented and debated in the Luis Angel Arango Library in Bogota between 23 and 27 August 2000. Scholars took part from Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Canada, the US, the UK, Switzerland and Spain.

In the intense disciplinary upheavals of the last fifteen years or so within music scholarship, music analysis has been one of the most contentious areas of debate The sense of conflict arises from a confluence of factors: all music scholars who wish to describe the details of musical style must employ some form of music analysis, yet the very strengths of music-analytical practice Ð its ability to describe musical events with precision, its ability to explain details of musical style and demonstrate structural interrelationships Ð are couched in a technical meta-language that seems resistant to socio-cultural analysis, an area of particular interest for those involved in the self-critique of the field. Concurrent with the apearance of what are probably the best-known denouncements of analysis as formalist and tautological by Joseph Kerman in the early to mid-1980s, musicologists who were sympathetic to aspects of KermanÕs critique explored ways to harmonise the description and analysis of musical details with methods of analysis derived from different aspects of cultural theory. Many of the scholars seeking new applications for music analysis also pursued the related project of understanding the socio-historical context for music analysis itself and of unpacking the aesthetic values couched within the apparently neutral practice of analysis.

20 Years of Madonna: New Approaches to Madonna's Cultural Transformations

In the six years since the publication of The Madonna Connection, Madonna, perhaps one of the most consistently transgressive and self-transforming artists of the late 20th century and early 21st century, has presented a set of strikingly new challenges to cultural analysis.