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 1 since 1959), and extensive coverage in the weekly magazine of the same name (since 1962). The 150,000-strong crowd at the concert exceeded all expectations, but also generated a sense of moral panic in the media as worried commentators speculated on the dangerous mindlessness of such ‘rhythmic’ music for impressionable French youngsters.

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 to rethink how art was created, disseminated and evaluated and how it interacted with contemporary social, economic and technological change. This article makes extensive use of contemporary journalism, scholarship and fan literature, much of it unstudied, to demonstrate that the rethinking process was contested and protracted. No consensus emerged. Claims made for their artistry, which contributed to a wider discourse elevating ‘rock’ over ‘pop’, were countered by cultural conservatives who defended their own status as artists and intellectuals by exposing the Beatles as kitsch.

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 circumstances. Finding articulation in strivings for economic freedom and social justice, the Ugandan hip-hop image reveals negotiations of histories of colonialism and of contemporary neoliberal capitalism: in doing so, it raises intersections of race and gender, informed by hip-hop's significance as a multi-billion-dollar global industry. This cross-disciplinary inquiry combines ethnomusicology with media, cultural and visual studies in dialogue with political economy.

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 the development of certain local jazz scenes, not only by offering budding talents an opportunity to be discovered, but more importantly in establishing a much-needed network of amateur and professional musicians, intermediaries, critics and fans. Furthermore, the argument is made that these events foreshadowed the first European jazz festivals to appear in the 1950s. Overall, it aims to demonstrate that the jazz contest is a valuable yet under-researched site for the promotion, socialisation, mediation, dissemination and popularisation of this music.

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 is discussed amongst those who actively espouse misogynistic views. Through content analysis of 1173 posts, from 6 ‘misogynistic antifeminist movement’ (MAM) forums, it shows that whilst hip hop, rap and metal genres and artists are the most commonly mentioned, there is significant variation in terms of musical preferences and justifications. Whilst masculinist lyrics were the main reasons for music preferences, this study shows how MAM communities’ musical judgments are a confluence of sonic and extra-musical discourses which are shaped and amplified within these online communities.

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 1961 album, Rhythm and Blues with Ottilie Patterson, drawing from contemporaneous mass-media discourse as well as Patterson's own notebooks held at Britain's National Jazz Archive. Patterson's performances captured on this record demonstrate how R&B was first publicly (re-)presented and understood in the UK. I argue that Patterson's work challenges the assumptions that (a) British R&B began with the formation of Alexis Korner's Blue Incorporated and (b) the R&B revival was predominately motivated by the appropriation and vicarious expression of African-American hypermasculinity.

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 reception and promotion help reveal how key political values – on individualism, rebellion and self-expression – began to be newly articulated to certain kinds of rock musicians after 1970. By understanding that process of articulation, popular music scholars may consider the contradictory political consequences of the broader valorisation of ‘first-person music’ since the 1970s.

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 political and economic transformations because of its capacity to generate phantasmatic deferrals to common experiences of dispossession. These fetishistic qualities mediate the attachments of artists and consumers within the splintering musical genre, holding open space to reach for a diversity of desired futures.

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 tourism in general. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Iceland between 2010 and 2018, I examine how musicians, politicians, festival management, tourism sector workers, business people, and other music industry workers approach and negotiate the rising role of popular music in Iceland's new tourism economy. This research contributes to broader understandings of how music festivals and musical tourism shape local musical life year-round, and it also offers insight into Iceland's internationally renowned popular music industry.

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: first, as a musical adaptation of the ‘medieval’ world of 'folk’ music popularised in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels (1996–); second, as a song embedded in the rich tradition of modern ‘medieval’ music, which itself is a modern reconstruction influenced by cinematic and literary tropes; and lastly, as a track that exemplifies the influence of fan culture in both shaping and responding to popular medievalist music.

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. (1) Country music did not simply arise ‘naturally’ in Ireland as a reflection of musical or national characteristics: it was promoted as such.

2. (2) Both popular and academic literature on the subject have tended to unreflectively echo the narrative that was introduced alongside the music in order to fix its audience.

3. (3) In so doing, the literature reproduces a set of anxieties about modernity as it arrived in Ireland, about the postcolonial condition and about authenticity, even as it attempts to locate Irish popular music within these concerns.

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 important career prerequisite for rock musicians (Behr 2015). However, the social and practical challenges of musicianship seem to be continuously underemphasised within the field of popular music studies (Cohen 1993; Kirschner 1998; Lashua 2017; Weston 2017; Kielich 2018). Therefore, in this article I will focus on an aspiring rock band's informal learning processes in becoming a small business together. The study provides insights into the educational and organisational aspects of band practices and contributes to the fields of popular music, education and organisation studies – fields that are converging in the emerging interdisciplinary research area of ‘organising music-making’ (Beech and Gilmore 2015).

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 their urban counterparts. This research found that regulatory issues, such as licensing, planning and noise, were not considered major impediments to regularly hosting live music. Rather, finding and accessing affordable quality bands in the numbers and styles needed to keep audiences coming to gigs, and getting audiences to regularly attend and spend money in the numbers needed to sustain the gigs, were identified as ongoing difficulties. Although venues in larger metropolitan cities are often confronted with similar problems, these are not the sort of issues that stand out in the research in this area. Rather the regulatory environment is emphasised. By drawing attention to the non-regulatory challenges regional venues face, important new avenues of research are opened up that will benefit live music scenes across Australia.

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 a decisive role in the position-takings and prestige-construction of jazz musicians. The analysis of qualitative data shows how different evaluations and interpretations of shared musical references are instrumentalised in order to occupy positions in the field. Further, this article argues that such a qualitative analysis of local jazz fields transcends the national context, since culturally hybrid jazz diasporas offer an excellent terrain for analysing how the circulation of transnational artistic references influences the cultural dynamism of local fields that are embedded within global networks of cultural production.

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 for research on gender and music practice. While we count ourselves among the scholars working in the field and critically investigate our own work as well as that of others, the article addresses some additional concerns to those of previous studies by examining how gender is ontologically constructed in these studies, how intersectional approaches can enrich analyses of gender in music practice and how the material dimensions of music practice can be actively addressed. The conclusions outline suggestions for broadening research in gender and music practice.

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 of radio history, Dylan's celebrity, voice and status as a vehicle for understanding the ‘American song tradition’ are solidified within the context of subscription satellite radio. In advance of the dominance of subscription streaming listening that companies like Spotify are now known for, Dylan's radio programme and recorded music of this period contribute to XM Radio's efforts to distinguish the satellite service from ‘traditional’ commercial format radio and to entice music listeners to become subscribers.

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 artists and work considered to be popular and historically significant. Over the past 15 years, however, new technologies have allowed musicians to make documentaries themselves, which they can release at the same time as their song or album. Using the example of Gotye and his album Making Mirrors, this article argues that these developments have led to powerful and distinct interventions into debates and themes within home music production for independent musicians. It also argues that the use of this technology on social media platforms challenges the relationships between text and process.