This paper considers the nightclub shows of the Rat Pack, focussing particularly on The Summit performances at the Sands Hotel, Las Vegas, in 1960. Featuring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop, these shows encompassed musical, comic and dance routines, drawing on the experiences each member had in live vaudeville performance. The discussion outlines these individual histories, and draws attention to a shared fascination with impersonation, which forms an explicit and implicit part of the act, as the performers’ stage personas are already emulatory. In addition to the influence of vaudeville, the construction of the Rat Pack also draws on the structures of blackface minstrelsy, with the interactions of the five members being patterned on a fluid variant of the interlocutor–endmen relationships. The interweaving of these influences and performance styles underpins a dominant concern of the troupe, as the comic material frequently negotiates the racial, national and religious identities of the individual performers. In particular, this deals with their shared status of having immigrant ancestry, a status which I term as being ‘hyphenated-American’, suspended between historical, public and aspirational identities.

The device known as, among other terms, truck-driver modulation, arranger's modulation and pump-up modulation is an important procedure for popular music, and one that merits a place in the harmony textbook. Emerging from a discussion of nomenclature, this paper proposes the terms of its title, which distinguishes between modulation as part of the overall form of a track, and modulation as a technical device. Four models are presented for the modulation, with a final discussion of different models used in the one track.

This article addresses notions of ‘Norwegianness’ in rap music. Based on comparative audiovisual analyses and close readings of two different versions of Norwegian rap group Karpe Diem's 2010 hit ‘Byduer i dur’, the author's main objective is to question how issues concerning ethnicity and cultural belonging are negotiated through audiovisual representations and in the self-fashioning of the artists. The analyses and readings rest upon two central issues. First, to uncover how Karpe Diem's spectacle of ‘otherness’ might be considered alongside aspects of ethnicity, cultural belonging and national identity within a Norwegian context. Secondly, to argue that identity is constructed as flexible and free-floating, which provides an opportunity to reconsider notions of ‘Norwegianness’ through musical performance. By proposing a decentred approach to analysing audiovisual texts, the author intends to shed light on how Karpe Diem's performances could be read as part of a discourse on nationhood in contemporary Norwegian society. Following this, the national trauma of 22 July 2011 should be considered a significant backdrop for the readings and critical discussions undertaken throughout this paper.

Middlewood Sessions produced a kind of popular music that infuses the timbral aesthetics of jazz and orchestral music with the driving rhythms of dance music. This studio project, lasting for almost eight years, provided a rich resource for gaining insight into the increasingly prevalent context of the domestic project studio via a longitudinal case study approach. At the heart of this research is the desire to understand how people collaborate as part of a studio project, how people use technologies to make music and how all of this unfolds over time. To tackle the question of how to understand the shattered, scattered nature of creative practices, and in extending existing creativity research, I propose three ways of thinking about time: nests, arcs and cycles. While explicating this theoretical framework, something of the specific and idiographic nature of the case study, as an example of contemporary music production, is recounted.

As an artist understood to be foregrounding in hip hop topics such as the emotional experience of private relationships, Drake has the opportunity to shape the conceptions of masculinity that are especially hardened in the context of male rappers. Recognised for his niceness in terms of rap skill and personal decentness, Drake has established himself as a genuine person making intimate connections with his fans. However, this image depends on his disregard, in his interviews and his albums, for the effects of the commercialised hip hop genre on his music and his message. Although he presents himself as a model for his generation, this discounting of context limits Drake's possibilities as a public figure.

In Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, there have been a significant number of musical events in recent years that have been called ‘underground’. These have formed an underground scene that offered a cosmopolitan alternative to established ‘greenlandificated’ popular music. This paper accounts for the building of this underground scene by Nuuk youth, and asks why these young people valued musical change informed by a cosmopolitan outlook, while at the same time holding firmly to the conviction that their activities were a part of the dominant Greenlandic nation-building project. Social agents, which played key roles in building the Nuuk underground scene, described their activities as attempts to come to terms with a history in which Greenland has been perceived as a subaltern nation. This enquiry explains the nationalist logic behind a concern with performing similarity with Western nations in the Nuuk underground scene, as opposed to the more widespread romantic nationalist logic concerned with expressing a distinguishable national character. This further leads to an expansion of a position of cosmopolitan nationalism.