This article is part of a larger attempt to map the movement of jazz within its cultural field, and as such is less concerned with its musicological properties than with the means of its production, consumption and the associated technology and rhetoric. It is the last of these that I am most interested in just here: the question of finding appropriate ways of talking about jazz. I want to suggest that certain kinds of commentary ostensibly dedicated to conferring artistic legitimacy on the music in effect reshape it so that it can be more easily fitted into a political economy.

But there isn't Al. If Al were there he would be giving a private performance to Chris Roberts as patron: an odd conception in the present-day world. In fact Al Green sings in a domain that is public although the musical commodity of the disc or tape turns it into a potentially solitary experience. In his comment Roberts has been captured by the Romantic understanding of the song: that its essence is (artistic) interiority made exterior. He is not alone in his fantasy of access to the pop singer. It constitutes the prevailing, if unformulated, view – a considerable irony in the postmodern world of late capitalism. The past few decades have witnessed the development of a global light-entertainment industry whose cultural objects partake in an increasingly closed circle of signification through pop videos, television advertising, soap operas and the tabloids. This (hyper)reality coexists today with the pursuit of the ever more soulful vocal, as if in a doomed attempt to crack open the reified commodity, by dint of the singer's passion to force something human across the gulf between exchange value and use value.

Angela McRobbie (1992) has recently observed that what is currently missing from Marxist cultural studies is a sense of urgency. In part, I believe this lack of urgency is the result of cultural studies' tendency ultimately to privilege theory over lived experience; the lived experiences of the post-baby boom generation seem especially neglected. As a 1991 issue of Spin magazine told its readers:

Magazines and newspapers such as Time and the New York Times are … comparing you unfairly to the dynamic and euphoric baby boomers – the authentic prototype of youth culture, at least as they would have it. They're saying you, the members of the twentysomething generation, have no distinctive identity, no culture to call your own, only recycled bits from the past. Ask yourself this question: Do you recognize yourself in this portrait? No? We didn't think so. (Owen 1991, p. 68)

This is the story of a rock venue in an English city. Hardly, it might be supposed, the stuff of great drama; there are, after all, rock venues throughout England. Most towns and cities of any size have at least one. But this venue, the Waterfront in Norwich, is distinctive, if not unique, in at least two respects.It was purpose-built and, more importantly, it was largely financed, not by private enterprise, but by the city's Labour council. Norwich's local politicians risked both financial and political capital so that their city could host performers like Nitzer Ebb, Dumpy's Rusty Nuts, Labi Siffre and Orzic Tentacles (all of whom appeared at the Waterfront in the space of a week in November 1991). The £1 million project opened in late 1990, amid much publicity and intense criticism from the opposition parties and local residents: these complaints continued into the venue's second year, when it received a further subsidy of £30,000 from the council. Why did the council take these risks? What were the political interests and values which led to this novel policy development?

The radio networks of North America and Britain provide one of the most important promotional outlets for recorded music, setting programming agendas at radio stations and influencing the talent acquisition policies of record labels throughout the world. For many years there have been sharp contrasts in the way in which music radio has operated and been organised in these two countries. The promotion of records in Britain has mainly been directed towards one national non-commercial station, Radio 1, which plays an eclectic mixture of musical styles. In the United States radio promotion has been aimed across a complex of commercial stations which broadcast ‘narrowcast’ music very clearly defined according to various ‘formats’. However, the recent re-regulation of the broadcasting system in Britain has resulted in a proliferation of regional commercial stations that are responding to increasing competition by introducing narrowcasting policies similar to those of North America. With Radio 1's share of listeners declining and the prospect of national commercial stations being granted licences and further challenging Radio 1's dominance of pop broadcasting, it seems particularly pertinent to contrast the practices of record companies and radio stations in Britain and North America and highlight how they directly effect the production and consumption of pop music.

During the last decades in most Western countries music education on all levels has undergone significant changes. In response to changes in the musical field in society at large, various popular music styles, previously almost totally neglected in institutional forms of music teaching based on Western art music, have been given increasing significance in the curricula of music education. This development has not, however, taken place without controversies. In most popular music genres the theoretical framework, learning principles and aims of musical practices differ in significant respects from those of the regulated activities of traditional institutions of music education, and the successful integration of popular genres into such institutions requires that these differences be acknowledged and resolved rather than ignored.