Academic work on popular music has had a difficult and intermittent relationship with work on gender and sexuality. Bursts of intense debate have been followed by years of scholarly silence, and questions that were raised in the early days of rock writing remain unresolved today. Is rock a male form? And if so, is this achieved through the gender of the performers? of audiences? through the sexuality of the performance, or the discourse of the songs? Is rock's ‘serious’ status guaranteed by its binary definition as the opposite of ‘pop’, seen as ‘for the girls’? And if a rock/pop divide now seems absurdly outdated, do we not see its gender divisions reconstituted within the new forms? On the other hand, what happens to these divisions when boys, too, decide they ‘just want to have fun’? And why have musicians been so much happier ‘flirting’ with gay identities than coming out as gay?

The British rock music press prides itself on its liberalism and radicalism, yet the discourses employed in music journalism exclude women from serious discussion both as musicians and as fans. In particular, the notion of credibility, which is of vital importance to the ‘serious’ rock music press, is constructed in such a way that it is almost completely unattainable for women.

The most important and influential part of the British music press was until recently its two weekly music papers, Melody Maker (MM) and the New Musical Express (NME), both published by IPC magazines. The NME, launched in 1949, contains reviews, concert information and interviews with performers and describes itself as ‘a unique blend of irreverent journalism and musical expertise’ (www.ipc.co.uk). MM, which started life in 1926 as a paper for jazz musicians, had similar content but a greater emphasis on rock, as opposed to pop, music. It was relaunched in 1999 as a glossy magazine, before ceasing publication or, as IPC put it, merging with the NME, in December 2000.

One of the ironies of popular music studies is that the music that is the most popular, in terms of contemporary chart success, is rarely discussed by academics writing in the field. In this article I want to suggest that this is because some forms of ‘mainstream’ chart pop music, and the discourse of the magazines that promote this type of music, pose a threat to the certainties of both gender and genre that underpin ‘serious’ popular music. The music I am concerned with here is that provided by ‘boy bands’ like Boyzone, Westlife or Five, and ‘girl groups’ like The Spice Girls, Atomic Kitten or Precious, as well as mixed-sex groups such as Steps, SClub7 and Hear'Say, and singers such as Britney Spears and Billie – music that is the mainstay of magazines such as the UK publications Smash Hits, Top of the Pops and Live and Kicking. I shall argue that this music, and the way of enjoying music promoted by the magazines that support it, can best be understood in terms of a carnivalesque disruption that challenges all stable ideas about what makes music good, and what popular music should be about. Furthermore, I shall argue that, just as this music is perhaps the only form of popular music to have a predominantly female audience, the threat that it poses is the threat of the feminine, and of female encroachment into what is still predominantly a male, and masculine, world.

In the two or so years since Cher's ‘Believe’ rather unexpectedly became the number one selling British single of 1998, the vocoder effect – which arguably snagged the track such widespread popularity – grew into one of the safest, maybe laziest, means of guaranteeing chart success. Since then, vocoder-wielding tracks such as Eiffel 65's ‘Blue (Da Ba Dee)’ and Sonique's ‘It Feels So Good’ have held fast at the slippery British number one spot for longer than the now-standard one week, despite their artists' relative obscurity. Even chart mainstays such as Madonna (‘Music’), Victoria Beckham (with the help of True Steppers and Dane Bowers) (‘Out of Your Mind’), Steps (‘Summer of Love’) and Kylie Minogue (the back-ups in ‘Spinning Around’) turned to this strange, automated-sounding gimmick which also proved to be a favourite with the poppier UK garage outfits (you can hear it on hits such as Lonyo/Comme Ci Comme Ca's ‘Summer of Love’, for example).

Cyborgs, fembots and posthumans: electronic dance music and the biopolitics of fucking machines

In the technophilic West, netizens, infomorphs and the audio digerati triumphantly-if-precociously herald this as the dawn of disembodiment. These reality hackers dream in binary code. They yearn to manufacture human-alien hybrids, ethical androids and genetically programmed clones. They already engineer digital soul divas, aural cyborgs, Nintendo's voluptuously overdrawn robo-bimbos, and the supernaturally and surgically perfect bodies purchased at Lasers R' US. They share the meat-hating philosophies of the cyber-protagonists of Neuromancer, Snow Crash and Software. They willingly computerise their passions via text sex, MUD-based gender masquerades, naughty newsgroups, techno-fetishistic video games, virtual reality-based erotic escapades, and pornosonic digital samples. Nonetheless, it seems that for the rest of us to join these intrepid cybernauts in their Age of immaterial Information, our too-solid bodies must first be anaesthetised with utopian visions and sounds of an incorporeal future. So electronic dance music, popular culture and modern science inject the flesh with fantasies of immortality, limitless pleasures, and unadulterated agency. With their tax-funded market research and their potent techno-imaginings, entertainment systems, netters, digital dance music producers, and radically hopeful scientists prepare human matter to be dematerialised and devoured byte by agonising byte. In other words, they passionately fabricate the human-machine hybrid also known as the cyborg, the fembot and the posthuman. These techno-organic entities traverse the space between desire and dread; their indeterminate forms simultaneously destabilise and reconfigure the dualistic limits of liberal humanist subjectivity. Each incarnation plots the feared consequences and perplexing possibilities of boundary transgressions between the human and the machine quite differently.

The examination of ‘subcultures’ and their concomitant musical practices has produced a large and varied body of work, a recent (and notable) portion of which has been concerned with what might be referred to generally as ‘dance music’ scenes (Thornton 1996; Reynolds 1998; Fikentscher 2000). Concurrent with this focus (and sometimes enmeshed with it) has been a burgeoning interest in gender/sexuality and music (Ortega 1994; Whiteley 1997, 2000; Barkin and Hamessly 1999). While recent reassessments of ‘subcultural’ formations situated within the postmodern era have suggested inherent complexities, contradictions and a fluidity of self-definition (Lipsitz 1994; Manuel 1995; Young and Craig 1997; Bennett 1999), thus problematising a strict conflation of ‘subcultural’ with ‘subversive’ (or ‘refusal’; cf. Hebdige 1979), this second term often appears as a de facto correlate when discussing ‘subcultures’ defined by homosexuality. This may be due, in part, either to the unfortunate collapsing of the terms ‘queer’, ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’ – the first of which, despite its rather protean status, may indeed count ‘subversiveness’ as a sedimented component of its meaning – into one, undifferentiated pool of generic descriptives, and/or to the role of the researcher (the ethnographer, for example) in constructing the ‘object of study’ as somehow ‘other’ (Fabian 1983; Abu-Lughod 1991).

Shifty harmonies in ‘West End Girls’

This first section is for readers interested in technical musical analysis. Others may wish to skip ahead to the next section: while one of my goals is to link technical, interpretive and political concerns, it is possible to read this paper with relatively little attention to the technicalities.

At the beginning of the Pet Shop Boys' ‘West End Girls’, after some street sounds and a sustained chord, there is a three-chord progression (Cmaj7, D, E), mingling harmonies from the keys of e minor and E major (0:21-0:24; see Example 1). The bass-line goes up, with a major triad over each note; only the third chord is free of additional, dissonant notes. The second chord sounds like a way of passing smoothly from the first one to the third.

Common knowledge has it that Elvis Presley stood for sexual liberation – because his gyrations caused the first controversy, he liberated Western culture from the curse of sexual repression. Beyond the female fans that play a role in that image, Elvis has a vast number of male followers. With more than 20,000 members, the Official Elvis Presley Fan Club of Great Britain (OEPFC) is the largest fan club in the world. According to the president, half the members are male (Slaughter 1996, p. 1). This means that thousands of male fans are dedicated enough to stay in one organisation. Over 400 smaller clubs remain active, so Elvis still has thousands of male devotees. What can be said about how these fans relate to their idol? More fundamentally, what are the most suitable research methods, ideas and approaches to use when answering that question?

The sky is the limit

We rising, we rising, we woman rising,

(Easlyn Orr, cited in Ottley 1992, p. 154)

In February 1999, two women of Afro-Caribbean ancestry won their respective societies' highest musical honours. On 14 February, Singing Sandra was crowned Trinidad-Tobago's Calypso Monarch 1999 – the second woman ever to win this coveted title, a full twenty-one years after the country's first woman calypso monarch, Calypso Rose. Two weeks later in the USA, Lauryn Hill received five Grammy awards, the most in any single year for a female performer or a hip-hop artist. This trend continues in Great Britain, where ‘rude girl’ DJ Patra has a growing posse of fans, and in West Africa where the pop music stylings of Benin's Angelique Kidjo and Mali's Oumou Sangaré enjoy mass followings.

This is the place

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

streams black, the merman in his armoured body

We circle silently

about the wreck

we dive into the hold

I am she: I am he ...

(‘Diving into the Wreck’: Rich 1973, p. 24)

Were Adrienne Rich to dive again today into the wreck – of history, of collective memory, of identity – she might be surprised to find Polly Jean Harvey already there, feasting in the depths on plots and symbols, greedily stuffing her storytelling sack. Like Rich, with her dual-sexed narrator (‘I am she: I am he’), Harvey enjoys playing at multiple selves, and in doing so, she tells stories that are fuelled equally by the fires of female and male, hetero- and homosexual desire. In the final stanza of her celebrated poem, Rich creates another memorable conundrum of syntax: ‘We are, I am, you are/by cowardice or courage/the one who find our way/back to this scene’ (Rich 1973, p. 24). With her suggestive pronoun games, Rich calls for a uniting of forces in the excavation of a troubled past. This seems to be Harvey's conviction as well. Hers is a musical dramatic stage upon which multiple characters, in combined voices and disparate musical styles, act out disorienting and sometimes disturbing tales of identity, sexuality and power.

The aim of this annual Popular Music bibliography is to provide a record of recent books on popular music and to offer brief, sometimes critical guidance to them whenever possible. Coverage is restricted to books and some booklets (with the exception of important yearbooks and some special issues of journals), and includes revised editions as well as notable reissues. Omitted are translations of books previously published in English except those which include some significant additions.

This edition contains entries for books published in 2000, plus a few items published in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999, information on which was not available when the lists for Popular Music 16/3, 17/3, 18/3 and 19/3 were compiled.

To a fundamental list of British, American and Japanese titles that I compiled were incorporated an extensive list of American books by B. Lee Cooper, a comprehensive list of books in German by Bernhard Hefele and a sizable list of books in French by Christophe Pirenne. Dave Laing, the coordinating editor of the journal, contributed another sizable list of mainly British and American books as well as correcting a preliminary list.

Contributions on books in other languages, especially Spanish, are welcome.

The Editors wish to apologise that the review of the Beatles 2000 conference (in Popular Music 20/1) inadvertently appeared without the author's name. The author was Sheila Whiteley of the University of Salford.