Houston Baker locates the blues at the crossroads of lack and desire, at the place where the hurts of history encounter determined resistance from people who know they are entitled to something better (Baker 1984, pp. 7, 150). Like the blues singers from whom he learned so much, Hank Williams (1923 to 1953) spent a lot of time at that particular intersection. There he met others whose own struggles informed and shaped his music. Williams's voice expressed the contradictions of his historical moment – post Second World War America – a time when diverse currents of resistance to class, race and gender oppressions flowed together to form a contradictory, but nonetheless real, unity of opposites. Standing at a crossroads in history, at a fundamental turning point for relationships between men and women, whites and blacks, capital and labour, Williams's songs about heartbreak and failed personal relations indentified the body and the psyche as crucial terrains of political struggle in the post-war era.

In the early- and mid-1960s, as mainstream popular music began to reach and exploit the growing youth market, the country music genre was going through a number of important transformations (see Malone 1985; Hemphill 1970). During this period the country music industry, including record companies, recording studios, managing and booking agents, music publishers and musicians, was becoming more fully consolidated in Nashville. In addition, a different kind of dominant sound was beginning to coalesce, based on a more ‘uptown’ feel and intended for a more cosmopolitan audience accustomed to mainstream, adult pop music. The beat and whine of the honky-tonk song, as epitomised by the rural twang in the music of Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell and Webb Pierce, was being replaced as the dominant country music sound by the smooth and urbane ballad styles of Eddy Arnold, Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline. This shift was both caused by and helped to foster the development of a steady set of studio musicians who would appear on thousands of country recordings per year. The musical style that coalesced in Nashville studios through the regular collaboration of these musicians and the record label producers who loosely arranged them became known as the ‘Nashville Sound’, a marketable and identifiable name for a particular set of musical conventions. This sound, nearly as similar to Rosemary Clooney as it was to Hank Williams, called into question the generic boundaries between ‘country’ music and mainstream ‘pop’ music.

What is moving in rock and pop? This question concerns both what levels change in the popular music arena, and how music can initiate changes inside and outside itself. Revolution in popular music can mean radical transformations of music itself, as well as the way in which social and psychic changes express themselves in music. Musical forms can go through revolutionary changes, and musical content can thematise revolutions.

This article deals with one of the first Eurorock waves: Indorock. This style was created in Holland by people who for political reasons migrated from Indonesia to Holland during the 1950s. They warmed Holland up to the sounds of rock and roll. Unhappy with their prospects in the Dutch entertainment industry, they went east to make a living as professional musicians in Germany. There Indorock was the trend, until British Merseybeat swept it away.

During the 1960s bossa nova was the trademark of Brazilian popular music. In the 1980s a second wave of Brazilian popular artists, such as Milton Nascimento, Djavan, Ivan Lins and Caetano Veloso, has emerged on to the international popular music scene. These artists have been issuing and distributing their records through international labels, and have also had their music recorded by other artists and groups like Pat Metheny and Manhattan Transfer (recipient of a Grammy for their album Brasil). Milton Nascimento, who since 1968 has been playing in concerts around the world with jazz musicians such as saxophonist Wayne Shorter, also receives good reviews in Europe. The Observer describes Milton Nascimento as ‘one of the top musicians in the world’, whose poetry ‘… fuses emotion, feeling, experience, dreams, [and] hopes’ with ‘a burnished voice … tempered with a taut edge at times’, and ‘beautiful melodies which are deceptively intense and powerful even when surrounded by funky keyboards or lush strings’. For the reviewer: ‘His songs have summed up the collective feelings of a nation’. And for Brazilians what is the meaning of Milton Nascimento's music?

Several patterns emerge in bachata's discussions of love, sex and relationships with women. There is little sense of place in the songs – rarely is a specific place name mentioned or invoked, in marked contrast to other Caribbean musical genres associated with listeners of rural origins, in which place names are constantly invoked for affective purposes. The people in bachata songs do not seem to exist anywhere – except the bar, which, I suggest, is a metaphor for the urban shantytown itself. Neither is there a sense of movement, of going anywhere. There is no imagery of journey, or travel, unlike other musics, such as Brazilian popular music or US country music, in which the road and trucks figure prominently. People are neither being pulled or pushed anywhere – out of home, into home, out of work, into work.

Life, as expressed in bachata songs, seems fragmentary and lacks coherence – and in that sense, these songs are thoroughly modern. The songs as texts are vignettes, brief snapshots – bites, to use contemporary jargon – that evoke salient parts of events or situations, rather than descriptive narratives that carefully develop a story over time and place. (The only exceptions are the double entendre songs, in which narrative is more a necessity as a framework for the word play than an end in itself.)

Bachata songs focus on the pain of losing a woman, but the difficulties of city life are implicitly to blame. Given that both men and women experience this pain, it seems odd that bachateros express no sense of solidarity with women, of shared social and economic trouble, as can sometimes be found in rock songs, for example, where singers invoke the power of love to overcome economic hardship or social prejudice. Bachata expresses a strong sense of vulnerability, betrayal, alienation and despair; yet the songs' anger is directed not at those above – the middle and upper classes – who have indeed betrayed and abandoned the poor as a class: instead, men's wrath is directed below, to a group of people – women – even more vulnerable to exploitation than men themselves. As we have seen, in bachata women are often portrayed as the aggressors and men as victims. Yet men certainly know that even if they can no longer control women as they once may have, in the modern world men clearly exercise more power over their lives than women. Men can, in fact, afford the luxury of expressing vulnerability to emotional pain. Women are the silent ones; their voices are not heard, although their presence can nevertheless be felt intensely. These unresolved tensions, between owner and property, aggressor and victim, voice and silence, freedom and control, order and chaos, are all symbolically explored in bachata.