In 1963, Amiri Imamu Baraka, a.k.a. LeRoi Jones, launched an Afrocentrist attack on the American white establishment that has been sustained, with variations, for forty years. He made a powerful case that the white commodity industry had systematically exploited and then debased authentic African-American music. In the meantime, a new kind of Afrocentrism has appeared, associated with the meteoric rise of Wynton Marsalis at New York's Lincoln Center. With the help of rhetoric similar to Baraka's, Marsalis has showcased and expanded the kind of black jazz he regards as authentic. However, the two men represent overlapping but also divergent points of view on the cultural politics of African-American music. This study compares these perspectives in detail, suggesting that behind the revealing differences between the two, both suffer from a formally similar outmoded essentialism.

A suppressed note is one that is consistently left out of the collection of pitch classes (different musical notes) in a musical piece and later appears with considerable emphasis. The Beatles frequently use the technique of suppressed notes, due to their tendency to compose pentatonic melodies, which leave ‘holes’ in the diatonic scale. These holes are usually filled in later in the song, when the pentatonicism is broken. The suppressed note then attracts special attention, both because it is a new note that the melody had previously avoided and because it appears at a peak moment, which is shaped by other parameters as well (e.g. as a melodic peak in a metrically accented position) and is connected to a textual turning point. The paper peeks at the Beatles' repertoire through the keyhole of the suppressed note.

The scholarly literature on popular music has rarely addressed music awards shows and the role of the state with regard to popular music. In an effort to deepen what is known about both sets of issues, this article utilises the concept of a promotional state to examine Canada's Juno Awards. A promotional state employs state intervention to support domestic popular music, and the promotional state in Canada has been connected to the Junos in three ways (through Canadian content regulations, public broadcasting and government funding). The historical, political economic analysis in the article considers how the role of the promotional state has undergone changes with regard to the Juno Awards. There has been some ‘hollowing out’ of the promotional state's role since the Junos began in 1971, but the article contends that (in the interests of private capital) the role of this state has continued and even increased in some respects.

Popular music plays important roles in two related films portraying Brazilian slum life. Based on a 1953 play by Vinícius de Morais, Marcel Camus's 1959 film Orfeu Negro, and a 1999 feature by Brazilian director Carlos Diegues titled Orfeu, augment traditional samba styles with bossa nova and rap, respectively. Interpreting musical style as allegorical texts within fictive landscapes, this paper examines conflation and conflict among musical meanings, Brazilian social histories, and discursive identities marking the twentieth century. Broad aspects of Brazilian political and socio-cultural development are implicated, such as authoritarianism, the politics and sociology of race, technological advances, mass media, and modes of modernisation. Here, bossa nova and rap engage society through reflexive and generative interpretations within a narrative designed to illustrate connections between processes of innovative, trans-national cultural production, myths of national identity, social change, and the powerful role of popular music in film.

The popular image of record collectors is of obsessive males, whose ‘train spotting’ passion for collecting is often a substitute for ‘real’ social relationships. This image can draw on some support from academic discussions of collectors and collecting, but it represents only a partial account of record collectors. This paper draws on interviews with sixty-seven self-identified record collectors to show how they demonstrate a complex mix of characteristics: a love of music; obsessive-compulsive behaviour, accumulation and completism, selectivity and discrimination; and self-education and scholarship. As a social practice, record collecting presents itself as a core component of individual social identity and a central part of the life cycle.

Jeff Buckley seemingly resisted entrapment by the ‘Oedipal’ myths of family, corporate rock, and the cult of dead celebrities, as well as the branding of his image and identity, but his rebellious, self-mythologising anti-narrative simulated the phantom narrative he opposed. In a postmodern context, Buckley's impossible search for absolute artistic authenticity, integrity and originality, given his ambivalence about his ethereal voice – the signature of his father – found expression in hybridised ambiance, modernist collage, and postmodern pastiche.

The vision of a dynamic and intelligent Celestial Jukebox, in which any cultural artifact is available to dedicated appliances or home computers via wired or wireless channels, animates many predictions for the future of media delivery. The chief proponents of this vision are transnational media firms selling hardware, software and content. Despite a prolonged downturn in the global economy for media and software, the technical and legal design of the Celestial Jukebox nears completion. We examine the development and implications of the Jukebox as it is manifested in several online music services available to US consumers (which we term Music Service Providers, or MSPs), in which the ‘Big Five’ record companies (Universal, Sony, Warner, BMG and EMI) provide content and/or hold equity stakes. First, we identify and describe the Celestial Jukebox's key technical components – Customer Relationship Management (‘eCRM’ or ‘CRM’) and Digital Rights Management (‘DRM’) software – and their intermeshing characteristics. We then discuss the implementation of CRM/DRM in MSPs and list the primary stakeholders in the leading MSP systems. We conclude with a discussion of the MSPs' role in advancing what Vincent Mosco terms a ‘pay-per’ society, in which cultural goods are purchased on a transitory, rather than permanent, basis.