In 2003, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks denounced President George W. Bush from a concert stage in London, England leading to serious career consequences for the country music trio. In response to three years of public criticism and radio boycotts, the Dixie Chicks released their single ‘Not Ready to Make Nice’, with an accompanying video critiquing the oppressive institutional power that sought to silence them. Through an analysis of music, text and images in this song, this paper explores how the Dixie Chicks responded to the backlash and regained their voice in the music industry. The paper offers a critical summary of the political incident, an interpretation of the images of symbolic containment and resistance that are prevalent in the video, and an interpretation of the musical elements in relation to the lyrics and images. Through the intersection of lyrics, music and images the Dixie Chicks create a platform of resistance to the social and institutional oppression they experienced.

In critical writing on the music of Dave Brubeck, little attention has been paid to the use of polyrhythm, despite the fact that this has been central to Brubeck's approach to jazz since the late 1940s. Focusing on work recorded by the ‘classic’ Dave Brubeck Quartet, the article aims to re-evaluate Brubeck's use of polyrhythm by situating it within a cultural history of modernity, rather than the established discourses of jazz musicology. The article revisits the early 1960s to reconstruct the context provided for the music not only by articles printed in the music press, but also by news stories and features run in the popular press, and by the visual signifiers that coalesce around Brubeck. Articulated through the key tropes of modernity and difference, the press's construction of Brubeck during this period signals the broad cultural context of Modernism as an alternative frame within which his musical practice might be usefully situated. The article explores how two key cultural artefacts emerging from this context – Brubeck's Oakland home, and the Miró canvas featured on the cover of the album Time Further Out – might serve to provide a productive means by which to re-evaluate the radical potential of Brubeck's polyrhythm.

This paper argues that the Internet strategy created and used by Berlin musicians, Einstürzende Neubauten, emulates many aspects of Attali's (2006) hopes for the future of music – in particular, the creation of new social relations through a participatory listening and, in Chris Cutler's words (2008), to be ‘research as well as entertainment’. I set out to show that Neubauten's use of the world wide web made their Supporter Initiative a radical innovation. My evidence is that their Subskribentenmodell provided access during 2002–2007 to web-streamed ‘open studio’ rehearsals which facilitated a new relationship between artist and recipient in its declaration of fallibility and attention to feedback. Secondly, I argue that Neubauten's international network of 2,000 Unterstützers (not Anhängers) became a virtual and actual ‘extended family’ who created the cottage industry ethos necessary for successful independence. This family not only supported the band financially and contributed to artistic and practical decisions – as with the DIY Berlin concert Grundstück – but also provided grass roots knowledge and skill for independent dissemination and touring (in 2008) of Alles Wieder Offen. Finally, this anti-record company model now offered a paradigm to ‘infect’ other fringe artists and hence upheld Beuysian/Cageian social aims of art.

In light of the growing literature on DJ culture, this article explores how technological change is having a significant impact on specific areas of music production and distribution within contemporary electronic dance music culture. An ethnographic methodology is employed, based around research conducted in the Sydney dance music scene between 2002 and 2007. The aim of the article is to reveal some of the discourses and reactions in DJ practice that result from shifts in technology. With the increasing use of CDs, mp3s and computer programs such as Ableton Live, the notion that vinyl and turntables represent the authentic technology of DJ culture seems somewhat redundant. The physical movement required to mix vinyl records has meant that the associated skills of DJing have become bound up in notions of physical and visible manipulation of technology, and so the use of technology that does not require and afford such physical expression has raised questions around the fundamental skills of DJing. As such, it would seem that there needs to be a redefinition of the concept of DJing, and a reframing of the skills and abilities seen as being essential to DJ practice.

There has been a marked resurgence of interest in progressive rock music both commercially and critically, with a number of articles and books now reassessing its styles, meanings, politics and appeal. Despite this, there has been a tendency to define progressive rock through a ‘symphonic orthodoxy’ which preferences a limited, albeit highly successful, number of British groups operating in a relatively narrow sonic landscape. This article questions that orthodoxy by drawing on the lay definitions and understandings of fans to extend the definitions and geographies of progressive rock, and to characterise it as a European meta-genre. It examines the meta-genre's formative years at the beginning of the 1970s, and argues that progressive rock was inspired by the explorations of a European youth counterculture whose music was influenced by local socio-political and economic contexts, as well as by the music and attitudes of the American counterculture and of European Romanticism.

This essay challenges the received wisdom that teenpix of the 1950s were dominated by a soundtrack of rock 'n' roll. I argue that this cycle of film production was marked by a diversity of musical genres, styles and types. Not only rock 'n' roll, but rhythm 'n' blues, folk, rockabilly, swing, West Coast jazz, bebop, Latin music such as the mambo, the rhumba, the cha cha chá, and Caribbean calypsos were all heavily featured in these films. This study is carried out through a focus on the temporal arrangements – fads, cycles, trends – that govern serial production and consumption of movies and popular music. Following Philip Ennis' thesis that rock 'n' roll is best defined by its ability to ‘crossover’ musical boundaries – to move, for example, across the pop, country, and rhythm 'n' blues charts – I argue that the film industry chose not to overly limit the music it had on offer and instead provided a varied package, some of which, it expected, would crossover and appeal to diverse and capricious teenage tastes.

Indie pop, like rock and other independent genres more generally, has had a complicated relationship with mass culture. It both depends upon and simultaneously deconstructs notions of authenticity and truth. Independent genres have invited scholarly analysis and critique that often seek to unmask indie as ‘elite’ or to show the extent to which indie musics are, ironically, defined and shaped by consumer capitalism. Using songwriter Stephin Merritt's music and career as a case study, this essay explores the kinds of authenticities at work in indie pop. Indie pop, I argue, is a genre especially adept at generating ‘personal authenticity’. It is useful to turn to the concept of kitsch, understood here as an aesthetic and not a synonym for ‘bad’. Kitsch functions to cultivate personal attachment in the face of impersonal mass culture; it is this aesthetic, I argue, that indie pop has cultivated through its lo-fi and often nostalgic sound world and through its dissemination, which has relied upon dedicated collectors. The ‘honesty’ of this music does not arise from an illusion of unmediated communication, but instead from the emphasis on the process of mediation, which stresses the materiality of the music and the actual experience of listening.