Some of the best ideas emerge, not in moments of deep contemplation or studious silence, but in more convivial and relaxed circumstances. That was true of the idea for this special issue. It emerged in the course of a long lunch, and was the result of a suggestion by Dave Laing. He drew attention to the many ways in which music and literature were connected and the interesting questions and issues that their relationship raised. It would be a good theme, he said, for a special issue. He was right. The call for papers that we published produced a wealth of fascinating proposals. Sadly, there were too many to include here, and it was a difficult task to select the few that are published in the following pages.

This paper explores the similarities between industrial music and ‘cyberpunk’ science fiction literature. Besides the obvious instances where there are direct references to each other, there are further connections between music and literature that are explored here. Situating the two forms within the tradition of twentieth-century Western dystopias, the focus of the paper is on the similarity of themes (relationship to technology, control by a totalitarian elite, apocalyptic worlds, resistance groups), techniques (in language or structure), moods (the tones and attitudes), and imagery (through language or music) used to illustrate and enhance these themes.

Scholars in the field of literary theory have defined clearly the role of signifying in African-American literature. This article identifies one aspect of the signifying tradition and its influence on the early blues tradition. Since the Signifying Monkey is the ultimate trickster in the African-American narrative tradition, this article presents evidence for considering the blues singer as a trickster figure at several different levels. First, the singer identifies with the trickster's character traits through pseudo-autobiographical content in song narratives, particularly in expressing socially aggressive or unacceptable exploits. Second, the trickster figure can be perceived as the singer's alter ego, as in songs about the boll weevil and similar folk characters. Third, the topics or tropes associated with crossroads and railways, used frequently in blues texts, relate to the liminal nature of Esu-Elegbara (the African ancestor of the Signifying Monkey), who embodies the boundary between the word and its (mis)interpretation.

Music and literature have long-standing links. Music has drawn on literature, and vice versa. The advent of the phonograph transformed the condition of music in myriad ways. It made music more accessible and more portable. It also created a new industry of music makers: record producers and engineers, recording artists and record journalists. In this paper I examine the literary responses to the phonograph, and argue that novelists such as Jules Verne, Sinclair Lewis, Bram Stoker and Thomas Mann were among the first to respond to the phonograph, helping to demystify many of the fears that accompanied a machine that was able to preserve sound. I suggest that novelists and short stories, well in advance of phonographic historians and analysts, identified the ways in which records and recordings were incorporated into the day-to-day lives of individuals.

This article is about the role of García Márquez and particularly macondismo as an ideology in establishing the canonic validity of vallenato as a folk genre from the Colombian Caribbean. García Marquez' chronicles of the early 1950s are seen as foundational texts on the aesthetics and value of vallenato; texts which influence subsequent writings on the topic. One of the main topics explored is how these texts acquire canonic validity through the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is then that macondismo – the Latin Americanist celebration of magical realism – becomes an interpretive metaphor for Colombia and vallenato music becomes the sonorous emblem of this metaphor. This occurs through García Marquez' writings, his multiple interventions in Colombian vallenato festivals, and the way vallenato is subsequently taken by a journalistic elite of the country as representing a macondian sonorous paradigm. The article explores how these different elements coalesce in constructing a genealogy of aurality for vallenato, setting the parameters of its interpretive significance through multiple processes of folklorisation of the genre.

Harold Bloom's theory of poetic influence has been applied to studies of Western art music, but rarely to studies of popular music. This article investigates the applicability of his theory to the music of British progressive rock keyboardist Keith Emerson. It will be argued that, while Emerson's overtly intertextual music for The Nice cannot be well illuminated with this theory, Bloom can help us explore and interpret some delicate aesthetic aspects of the important style change from The Nice to Emerson, Lake and Palmer (ELP). Emerson felt the anxiety of The Nice's influence upon ELP, changed his style because of it, and led the new group to prog rock superstardom. Bloom's six revisionary ratios can indeed shed light on those subtle qualities which were necessary for a progressive rock ideology to be ‘mainstreamed’ and sold as commodity – qualities that resulted from a process of ‘misreading’.

The functions and meanings of the global discourse of American and British rock in national literatures have hardly been studied so far. This article focuses on the very interesting case of Spanish literature after Franco. The central question is: How has rock functioned in the literature of the new Spain, both as intertext and as cultural memory? To be more specific, the main purpose of this contribution is to study the presence, functions and meanings of rock in the narratives of two leading authors of two generations of post-Franco novelists: Antonio Muñoz Molina (1956) and Ray Loriga (1967). Particular attention will be paid to the complicated processes of memory and oblivion articulated by explicit and implicit references to rock in the pivotal novels El jinete polaco (Muñoz Molina 1991) and Héroes (Loriga 1993), and to their functions and meanings in the historical-cultural process of memory and trauma in post-Franco Spain.

The literary canonisation of Hamlet means that it is now most frequently encountered as a printed text. This crucially reconfigures its character, since Shakespeare wrote for sound, not print, and for an audience habituated to finely nuanced auditory semiotics. Hamlet generates its own soundscape as the major bearer of meanings. Apart from dialogue, its complex repertoire of auditory effects includes instrumental music and song. If we examine the play as an acoustic experience, we can situate it more ‘soundly’ in its epoch, and perhaps also reinterpret its puzzles, most notably Hamlet's procrastination, an issue that only began to be raised by later critics working in a more print-oriented era. If we reclaim the sonic dimensions of the play, his inexplicable indecisiveness may be seen as the point, not the puzzle, of the play, and a metaphor of the liminal epistemology of Shakespeare's age.

31 Songs (re-titled Songbook in the United States) is ‘a little book of essays about songs I loved’ written in 2002 by Nick Hornby, author of the 1996 hit novel High Fidelity and latterly pop critic of the New Yorker. Hornby's assumption of the role of music critic echoed the wish of the protagonist of High Fidelity whose No. 1 in a list of ‘my five dream jobs’ was ‘NME (New Musical Express) journalist 1976–1979’.

Leaders of the Harlem Renaissance – intellectuals such as Jessie Faucet, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. DuBois – hoped to gain respect for African Americans through participation in emblems of high culture such as poetry, novels, serious plays, and the highest of all classical music genres: the symphony.1 They encouraged artists to mine folk themes for use in new, elevating works, transforming ‘indigenous’ materials into uplifting examples of high cultural resonance. Artists themselves, however, were ambivalent about privileging ‘high’ art, and especially so when making and writing about music. Indeed, as Samuel Floyd has argued, the most vibrant music to come out of the Harlem Renaissance took the form of blues, boogie woogie, and hot jazz, found in venues such as clubs, juke joints, rent parties, and stage shows (Floyd 1990, pp. 5–6).

The appearance of On the Road in 1957 signalled the emergence of a new movement in American literature, soon to be called the Beat Generation (Kerouac 1957). Along with Allen Ginsberg's ‘Howl’ of 1956, Kerouac's work brought a new awareness of an intellectual counter-culture bubbling under the conservative surface of 1950s America. The content of these writers' poetry and prose, with its open and honest depiction of hetero-, homo-, and bisexual activity, drug abuse, petty crime, and social deviance was enough to create a sensation, but it is the style that gives the works their permanence and interest today. Kerouac himself used the term ‘bop prose’ to describe his efforts to reform fiction along the lines of avant-garde jazz, where immediacy of expression and technical fluency combine to open new possibilities, supposedly not present in more traditional methods of composition.

Autobiographies: the contemporary catalogue is huge and bookstore shelves are heavy with the weight of life-stories. Ex-Presidents, actors, cooks, criminals, Nobel prize winners, preachers, poets and CEOs all write them. Rock stars write them, too – ‘marquee names’ like Tina Turner, Melissa Etheridge, Grace Slick, and Meatloaf, but also minor figures such as Dallas Taylor, the former drummer for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. And plenty of others, including – to name just a handful – Chuck Berry, Ronnie Spector, Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, both Ray and Dave Davies, Dee Dee Ramone, Martha Reeves, Eric Burdon, and John Cale.