This article examines Googoosh, the reigning diva of Persian popular music, through an evaluation of diasporic Iranian discourse and artistic productions linking the vocalist to a feminized nation, its ‘victimisation’ in the revolution, and an attendant ‘nostalgia for the modern’ (Özyürek 2006) of pre-revolutionary Iran. Following analyses of diasporic media that project national drama and desire onto her persona, I then demonstrate how, since her departure from Iran in 2000, Googoosh has embraced her national metaphorization and produced new works that build on historical tropes linking nation, the erotic, and motherhood while capitalising on the nostalgia that surrounds her.

This article presents the historical transformation of Finnish commercial radio popular music policies from 1985 to 2005 and contemplates the role of terrestrial radio in contemporary digital age. It argues that a sender-centred paradigm of early commercial radio was replaced swiftly by receiver-centred paradigm, which has been applied since the early 1990s. The change of radio music cultures is described in detail by dividing it into three different eras: Block Radio, Format Radio and Media Convergence. The study draws on the research project consisting of case studies analysing the music content of various radio stations. The primary empirical data is composed of 32 interviews of radio personnel and the analysis of 4,500 individual songs broadcast by popular music radio stations with newspaper and journal articles supporting the primary data. Radio music culture is approached theoretically from the ethnomusicological perspective and thus defined as all practices that have an effect on broadcast music, including the processes of acquiring, selecting and governing music. The empirical results of the study show that the transformation of radio music cultures is affected by economic, technological, legal, organisational and cultural factors.

Flamenco music has consistently been misrepresented as an exclusively aesthetic construct only concerned with the transmission of essential and timeless values and with the production of beauty. This insidious mystification is a consequence of the influence that several decades of nacionalcatolicismo (the ideological construction of Franco's Spain) has had over flamenco, together with its obscure and unclear origins, about three centuries ago. This paper will suggest that, against this commonly held belief, flamenco music frequently has a political agenda, which may be explicitly expressed in the lyrics of the cantes, or implicitly apparent in the formal and ideological structure of flamenco itself and its recordings. Camarón and Pachón's seminal La leyenda del tiempo (Polygram, 1979) will be explored both in its own right as one of the peaks of contemporary (new) flamenco and also as a clear showcase of how flamenco may be politicized in various ways and serve a clearly ideological purpose without neglecting its musical and aesthetic role.

Previous studies of indie music from the 1980s and 1990s have noted that it uses a number of stylistic markers – involving production values, singing style instrumentation and lyrical themes – to convey difference from a perceived mainstream. However, the ideal of difference also influences other aspects of songwriting. As a case study, this article examines early songs by the highly regarded indie band Pavement in which irregularity in phrasing and hypermeter supports a narrative of differentiation. Recurring strategies for creating irregularity include thwarting expected closure at the ends of phrases, using the sounds of words to project conflicting cues for grouping boundaries and creating highly irregular hypermetric lengths. These metric and phrasing devices, when heard in the context of songs, often have vivid narrative or expressive implications.

This article studies the ways that Post-Internet ideas inform much contemporary musical production. Drawing on interviews conducted with musicians/artists self-consciously highlighting Post-Internet themes in their work, including Arca, Ryan Trecartin, 18+, Holly Herndon and ADR, the paper emphasises the significance of the term ‘Post-Internet’ for contemporary identity politics. It outlines the Post-Internet ideas of Karen Archey, Robin Peckham and Nathan Jurgenson, illuminating their indebtedness to posthuman discourses through a study of the music of Holly Herndon. It then introduces the notion of ‘digital queering’, a trend located in the work of many Post-Internet musicians. Mykki Blanco, 18+, Arca and Ryan Trecartin fuse the posthumanism of Post-Internet identity with the fluid gender deconstructions of queer theory. This is inspired by the ability to perform multiple ‘selves’ online as well as the intimate relationship with digital networks that is a consequence of Post-Internet ideas.

This article focuses on Arcade Fire's 2004 first album, Funeral. It is analytical in orientation, offering close (analytical) readings of Funeral's 10 tracks from the standpoint of reception of the album as particularly ‘emotional’. In order to explain Funeral's generation of extreme emotion, the article applies tools from current formal theory, particularly the theory of sentence phrase-structure. It connects sentence form with Spicer's notion of (ac)cumulative processes. With a nod to Osborn's article on ‘terminal climax’, it shows how Arcade Fire's sentential forms are unusually directed towards anthemic climaxes, associated with emotional breakthrough. The article also explores the tension in the music, grounded in the indie ethos in general, between ‘spectacular’ stasis and forward motion.

This article examines the complex racial and national politics that surrounded British post-punk musicians’ incorporation of and identification with dub-reggae in the late 1970s. I analyse this historical moment from sociological, intra-musical and discursive perspectives, reading the musical incorporation of dub-reggae by The Police, Gang of Four and Joy Division against the backdrop of the era's music press discourse. I also unpack discursive representations of Jamaican musicians and ask: what role does subaltern performativity play in contributing to ‘imaginary’ critical conceptions of dub, particularly concerning the Jamaican melodica player Augustus Pablo? I conclude by suggesting that post-punk musicians’ incorporation of dub-reggae represents neither an unencumbered post-colonial socio-musical alliance nor a purely colonial one, but rather exceeds and therefore problematises these two positions.