Drawing on a range of biographical, historical, ethnographical and musicological sources, this article presents the social and historical factors contributing to the evolution in the early 20th century of a local variant of rebetiko around the Lakkos brothel district in Heraklion, the largest city in Crete. It explores the influence of a wider multicultural context on local music-making and reveals the relationship between the social life and economy of the Lakkos area and its musical and stylistic sensibilities. Emphasis is also placed on the musical culture of local subcultural space, particularly with respect to the functions of musical practices in everyday life and the poetics of improvised songs. Investigation of the social world in Lakkos suggests that the forerunners of rebetiko can be explored as a hybrid music scene associated with cross-cultural interaction between different social and ethnic groups and musical traditions. The societal and aesthetic codes of this scene, with its low life themes, coarse melodies and allegedly alien influences were seen by local elites as compromising the moral values of respectable society and subverting efforts to cultivate a national identity.

Before WWII, Hugues Panassié (1912–1974) was Europe's leading critical authority on jazz, and by the time of his death he had published a dozen books on jazz music and been President of the Hot-club de France for over 40 years. Yet despite this life's worth of efforts made in jazz's name, Panassié's reputation is no longer a good one: pointing to the fantasies of black exceptionalism and Noble Savagery present in his work, historians have tended to dismiss the critic as a racist primitivist, one in thrall to that contemporary negrophilie most familiar today from early-century Parisian visual art. Indeed Panassié used the term ‘primitive’ himself, and positively. But this article traces the ultra-conservative writer's intellectual and religious formation to show that, rather than contemporary negrophilie, it was a religious and cultural heritage quite distant from the modern European encounter with blackness that first informed Panassié's primitivism. Although this re-reading does not aim to ‘rehabilitate’ someone who remains a troublesome and reactionary figure, the article nevertheless goes on to explore how, in his primitivist rejection of European modernism, Panassié sometimes pre-empts important arguments made by the postmodern jazz scholarship that would seem to marginalise the critic's historical contributions.

In this study, we report a corpus analysis of rock harmony. As a corpus, we used Rolling Stone magazine's list of the ‘500 Greatest Songs of All Time’; we took the 20 top-ranked songs from each decade (the 1950s through the 1990s), creating a set of 100 songs. Both authors analysed all 100 songs by hand, using conventional Roman numeral symbols. Agreement between the two sets of analyses was over 90 per cent. The analyses were encoded using a recursive notation, similar to a context-free grammar, allowing repeating sections to be encoded succinctly. The aggregate data was then subjected to a variety of statistical analyses. We examined the frequency of different chords and chord transitions. The results showed that IV is the most common chord after I and is especially common preceding the tonic. Other results concern the frequency of different root motions, patterns of co-occurrence between chords, and changes in harmonic practice across time.

In collaboration with the Cairene composer Fathy Salama, Youssou N'Dour released an album that appeared in Dakar in 2003 as Sant Yàlla (‘Praise God’), and internationally in 2004 as Egypt. Sung in Wolof to the accompaniment of an Egyptian orchestra, the album consists of a suite of eight interrelated pieces, seven of which are praise songs to Senegalese Sufi shaykhs, while the remaining piece praises God, the Prophet Mohammed, and some important Mauritanian shaykhs. In this essay I argue that in bringing Senegalese Islam to the international arena, N'Dour uses his stature as a world-class musician to both articulate and participate in the creation of a Sufi modernity, namely a way of being a Sufi Muslim in a globalised world. In addition to being a personal journey for Youssou N'Dour, both musically in its orientation towards the East rather than the West, and in his own religious faith, Sant Yàlla/Egypt also echoes many of the current preoccupations of Muslim intellectuals and artists as they seek to renew and reinterpret their own local religious traditions for a global audience.

The East of Germany, the Bundesländer of the former GDR, is an important centre of Goth activity. The Goth scene is remarkably large in this part of Germany, and one of the most important yearly Goth festivals, the Wave-Gotik-Treffen, takes place in Leipzig. This article investigates the specific characteristics and internal dynamics of East German Goth subcultures after German reunification. Combining subcultural theory and Gothic criticism with Derrida's notions of spectrality and hauntology, the potentials of Gothic as a form of cultural criticism are explored in an investigation of the psycho-social wasteland of the undead GDR. It will be argued that post-Cold War unification has not only led to a new political order, but has also given rise to a new type of Gothicism, as East German Goth subculture is haunted by ‘spectres of Marx’ that provide a critical engagement with globalised capital and media. As a specifically German version of the worldwide Goth scene, moreover, it marks the local boundedness of globalised subcultures.

In 2001, Montreal disc jockey Tiga, with the help of Finnish producer Jori ‘Zyntherius’ Hulkkonen, recorded and released a techno cover version of ‘Sunglasses at Night’, a song popularised in 1983 by fellow Canadian Corey Hart. This paper examines how a so-called ‘unoriginal’ musical practice such as the cover version, when re-contextualised into a brand new musical genre (a process called ‘trans-stylisation’), can engender new meaning, especially when it comes to the generic identity purveyed by the song's enunciator. The analysis of this new ‘original’ utterance relies on the theory of hypertextuality and describes, on the musical, lyrical and visual levels, the transformative processes from the hypotext (Hart's version) to the hypertext (Tiga's), thereby shedding new light on the poetics of the cover version and on the representational modalities of the postmodern subject.

Before the advent of ‘world’ music in the culture of globalisation, The Incredible String Band in the 1960s added elements of Moroccan and other international music into their work. In the context of an exploration of the band's journey to the east, this article argues that the ISB's ‘exotic’ sounds became the aural signifier of the psychedelic, and that the ISB's aesthetic of appropriation veered from fetishisation, and also homage and parody, to ritualised adaptation. The ISB's pre-‘world’ use of international music was self-consciously naive, but it may have enabled later modes of cultural appropriation.