Emerging in the early 1970s, the work of Outlaw country artists might be heard as exploring a crisis of masculinity resulting from developments in the women's liberation movement. Building on recent research in recorded sound studies, this essay explores how the vocal staging practices deployed in Outlaw country recordings offer a unique musical exploration of the duality of the outlaw's masculinity. Using case studies drawn from Waylon Jennings' Outlaw-era recordings, this article examines how Jennings, working with co-producers ‘Cowboy’ Jack Clement, Chips Moman and Willie Nelson, among others, deployed vocal staging practices in conjunction with other musical practices to construct narratives that reveal the ‘outlaw’ character's psychological turmoil and reflect the complicated state of working-class American masculinity in the age of women's liberation.

Bruce Springsteen's body of work contains a striking number of songs with homoerotic or queerly suggestive content. Moreover, his live performances often push the limits of the homosocial, ‘queering’ onstage relationships through everything from lingering kisses with the late saxophonist Clarence Clemons to intimate microphone sharing with guitarist and real-life best friend Stevie Van Zandt. In this paper I trace Bruce Springsteen's consistent performative engagement with queer desire over the course of his 40-year career through a close reading of both lyrics and performance (including onstage, and in video and still photography). I examine how Springsteen's queer lyrical content and performative acts contrast critically with dominant readings of his hypermasculine, ‘all-American’ image, and suggest that Springsteen's regular deployment of homosocial and homoerotic imagery in both lyrics and performance – far from being an exception to his more mainstream persona – actually constitute a kind of queer aesthetic vital to, and consistent with, his artistic vision of love and community.

Although canon formation has been discussed in popular music studies for over a decade, the notion of what constitutes ‘the popular music canon’ is still vague. However, considering that many scholars resent canon formation due to the negative effects canons have exerted on other academic fields, analysis of canon formation processes in popular music studies seems desirable: awareness of these processes can be a valuable tool for scholars’ assessment of how their academic choices contribute to canon formation. Based on an examination of the reception history of Queen in the popular mainstream, music criticism and academia, this article argues that a universally valid popular music canon does not exist and that canon formation in popular music is based on the same criteria as in the ‘high’ arts, i.e. transcendence, historical importance and ‘greatness’, although the latter is replaced by ‘authenticity’ in the popular music context. While canons can be theorised in various ways, a model that distinguishes between canonic strata according to listeners’ relationship to music is particularly useful as it reveals the relative importance of the three canonic criteria within different strata and how they are applied.

Scholarship on the moral panics around rock music has long focused on racial fears and anxieties about a youth culture that might escape societal control, but little serious attention has been paid to the conservative Christian anti-rock discourse that surfaced publicly in the United States in the 1960s. This article addresses that gap by situating this construction of rock as an inherently evil corrupting force for 'traditional' religious, family, and national values within a larger cultural context, and arguing that it illuminates the rise of contemporary conservative morality politics in the U.S. Not merely the ravings of a few extremists, this discourse represents a worldview and rhetorical mode that was once widespread within a small religious subculture but has since developed—together with the social and cultural power of that subculture—into one of the central political frames of contemporary American life, helping lay the groundwork for today's culture wars.

This article considers the integral role music plays in drag in general and ‘femme’ gender performance (or queer performances of femininity) in particular. Drawing from ethnographic interviews with performers and observations of their performances, I delineate some of the purposes music can serve in these contexts: a tool for character development, a musical lingua franca with which to establish a dialogue with the audience; a part of a nuanced intertext that troubles the cohesiveness of a musical plot or ideological discourse; a fan strategy for staking ownership over a beloved song or genre. I argue that femme gender performers critically stage their own consumption of the popular music they enjoy, interrupting its narratives and rhythms with their choreography and reterritorialising it with their dancing bodies.

This article proposes that the recent history of the live solo multi-instrumentalist, more conventionally known as the ‘one-man band’, might serve as a useful window onto broader transformations in postmodern culture. If the one-person band has historically been understood as a humorous, culturally devalued phenomenon, with its practitioners occupying marginal race and class positions, the recent visibility of solo multi-instrumentalism in indie and experimental rock attests to its altered status in contemporary culture. The present discussion situates the shifting fortunes of the one-person band in relation to the contemporary hegemony of neoliberal conceptions of subjectivity. In their performance of nimble, flexible and omni-competent self-reliance, artists such as Theresa Andersson, Robert Fripp and Andrew Bird model some of the key qualities idealised by theorists of a free-market ‘entrepreneurial selfhood’.

Singer, bass player and songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello has inspired a growing body of scholarship addressing her funky, political, ‘othered’ musical personae. Existing work celebrates Ndegeocello in the context of identity politics (most commonly feminist, Black Feminist/Womanist, Black Nationalist or Africanist). This tactic not only defies Ndegeocello's rejection of identity politics, but also oversimplifies her complex, sometimes divergent musical negotiations of selfhood. This article highlights the discursive tensions of engaging ‘Black’ with ‘queer’ with ‘woman’ with ‘musician’ by exploring her most contradictory performances of self, particularly those which other scholars argue are ‘feminist’ or ‘queer’. Identifying a scholarly gap around Ndegeocello's strikingly conflicted performances of Black queer gender in songs about same- and opposite-sex relationships, this queer of colour critique explores manner and process over essence, articulating experiential, situational, non-linear and even incoherent perspectives. In doing so, it offers an affect-oriented, politically and musically attentive alternative conceptual frame to identity politics.

Israeli popular music includes many quotations from earlier Israeli songs as well as other Israeliana references. Quotations may take various forms, from cover versions to the mere evocation of song titles. This phenomenon preceded the rockisation of Israeli music, had its apex in the 1970s with early rockisation, and is continuing today, despite a certain decline. The purpose of the quotations is often a mere interaction with traditional materials, but it also sometimes expresses a striving towards an experience of life that is more sincere. Two subtopics of special significance are adolescence and political critique. Since earlier hegemony in Israel was maintained by the old left, the rock music rebellion was not as anti-capitalistic as in the Woodstock Festival, rather manifesting anti-authoritarian trends similar to (but milder than) those encountered in Eastern Europe.