The Duke Ellington orchestra's 1971 visit to the Soviet Union (USSR) marked their most important and publicised State Department tour, following acclaimed 1960s State tours they made to the Middle East, Near East, Asia and Africa. The Soviet tour occurred during the efforts of President Richard Nixon to establish détente at the height of the Cold War between the United States, the Soviet Union and China. Ellington found not just acceptance in Communist and satellite countries, but rabid enthusiasm that belied official Soviet government disdain or censorship of American jazz. While he was magnanimous as usual to Soviet fans and engaged in no political grandstanding, Ellington wanted his performances and presence to embody the differences between what he viewed as the freedom and democracy of his home country, and the current situation in the Soviet Union. Ellington's multi-layered vision of freedom, and the various struggles that he, the band, and State Department officials encountered during the tour provided a sharp contrast to the domineering official Soviet presence. The tour exposed the limits of what the closed society of the Soviet government could shield from their own people. Ellington made a strong impact, the strongest that any American artist had yet made in the Soviet Union.

In the last decade, multi-racial hip-hop scenes in Kharkiv, a predominantly Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainian city close to the Russian border, have fostered the development of socially-conscious hip-hop among African students. Drawing on musical elements from their respective home countries, the US and local hip-hop traditions, African male youths use Ukrainian-, Russian- and English-language lyrics to express concerns about socio-economic status, personal struggle and racial inclusion. This study analyses how African musicians use hip-hop as a social means through which to fight the escalating violence against dark-skinned foreigners and migrants. It draws on ethnographic data to identify several ways in which African-performed hip-hop has influenced contemporary public opinions regarding ‘black’ identity in eastern Ukraine.

This article investigates the relationship between biography and authenticity within the aesthetics of grunge musician Kurt Cobain, using the 2002 Riverhead Press volume of his journals as a primary source. Focusing on Cobain's fascination with the human form and with bodily fluids, I argue that his idea of the ‘sick body’ functioned as a central metaphor that shaped his approach to various media (prose, lyrics, drawing and singing) such that there was a homology between these different forms. I draw on excerpts from the Journals to show the meanings that he associated with the ‘sick body’, including the ways in which it indexed his own biography of physical pain and social marginalisation. Using the Nirvana song ‘Hairspray Queen’ as a case study, I then show the interactions between musical and linguistic signs of the sick body and how these interactions reveal Cobain's ideas on music's meaning. Ultimately, I argue that in song lyrics and performance, Cobain prized scatological imagery, eviscerating vocals and unintelligible lyrics as a means to signal the ‘authenticity’ of his art.

This article explores the mobilisation of Indian popular music in the Tata-AIG life insurance company television advertisement ‘Tree of Love’ (2004). I address ways in which music representing different periods of Hindi film, along with visual representations of Indian material culture, have been integrated into an advertising narrative that alludes to India's technological and economic development. I suggest that a range of aural and visual signs subtly complement each other in creating a narrative that not only marks the passage of time, but reframes past social and economic debates into contemporary terms. I contextualise this advertisement – and the signs that it uses – within the field of the Indian insurance industry, as well as within the social-historical context of modern India. Then, utilising elements of Peircean semiotic theory, I closely analyse the aural representations of the passage of time and different eras of Indian musical culture. The analysis ties together the interactions of musical and non-musical signs with the cultural memories that the commercial is designed to evoke. Ultimately, I argue that musical meaning in this advertising context emerges from the complex interaction of these aural and visual signs, and produces memory as much as it reflects it.

Popular music occupies a dominant position in the musical landscape of contemporary Africa, yet academic study of popular music is still in its infancy in most parts of Africa. This may be due in part to the absence of theoretical frameworks that stimulate popular music discourses from the African perspective. This paper is an attempt to fill this lacuna. Based on a critical and qualitative analysis of data gathered from field situations, participant observation, interviews and published literary materials on the subject matter, the paper theorises that the creation of African popular music is characterised by two significant processes: indigenisation and syncretisation. The paper further states that African popular music is a socially responsive phenomenon, sustained through the interplay of cross-cultural and trans-national social dynamics. The paper therefore proposes ‘social reconstructionism’ as a new theoretical paradigm for the analysis of African popular music. The paper also suggests that the term ‘African pop’ should be adopted as a generic name for all popular music forms in Africa.

While many rock artists explored the compositional possibilities of the concept album in the 1960s and 1970s, Nashville's country music community largely ignored the format. But a few artists working on the fringes of country music – and who, notably, aligned themselves with the countercultural images and attitudes of the time – did begin to experiment with the format in the first years of the 1970s. Chief among them was country songwriter and recording artist Willie Nelson who, by the dawn of the 1970s, was on the verge of breaking away from Music Row to seek more lucrative opportunities in Texas. This article explores the role that Nelson's experimentation with the concept album played in his efforts to adopt a countercultural image, develop a younger audience and challenge the hegemony of the country music industry. Moreover, close examination of Nelson's compositional approach to three albums – Yesterday's Wine (1971), Phases and Stages (1974) and Red Headed Stranger (1975) – reveals that Nelson consciously blended the singles-based approach to songwriting that predominated in 1960s and 1970s Nashville and the extended narrative and musical forms of contemporaneous rock music to create musical products that suited the needs of country radio and rock fans alike.

A number of scholars have written on characteristics of vocal melody in popular music, but little attention has been paid at the level of phonetic detail. This study argues that the phonetic structure of a melody can contribute in important ways to a song's reception and success, given the ways that listeners react and respond to vocalised melody. This article discusses different ways in which stressed syllables in familiar pop songs alliterate, and it investigates the way these patterns interact rhythmically with metre.

To a considerable extent, the mythology of rock and roll rebellion is predicated upon a similarly mythologised male sexual potency that Simon Frith and Angeld McRobbie have characterised as ‘aggressive, dominating, and boastful, … [constantly seeking] to remind the audience of [its] prowess, [its] control’ (Frith and McRobbie 1990, p. 319). In this article, I look to Roy Orbison – a musician who was a key figure in the genesis of rock and roll, but who nevertheless subverts this phallocentric meta-narrative. Focusing on the 1987 concert film, Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night, I argue that Orbison's staid performance style, unusual voice and unconventional songwriting as evidenced (and amplified) by that film trouble the purportedly monolithic rock and roll masculinity, and the concomitant mythology of rebellion. At the same time, however, I propose that even as normative masculinity appears to be destabilised, a close reading of the film reveals that the performance situates Orbison within a different masculinist discourse: the 19th-century Romantic discourse of masculine genius that continues to inflect 21st century notions about artists and art music. Thus, in Black and White Night, normative and non-normative masculinities are thoroughly imbricated, each simultaneously destabilising and reaffirming the other.

In post-apartheid popular culture, there is a tension between the persistence of ‘race’ as a structural category of difference, and its transformation in the lives of young South Africans. In this paper, through the examination of case-studies, I explore how popular music may allow for the mediation of this tension. Drawing on Heidegger's notion of an ‘equipmental whole’ to conceptualise ‘race’, I discuss the specific ways in which individuals may come to an awareness of the potential fluidity of racial identities, and the role of music-listening practices in this process. I argue that reflecting on articulations between music and racial categories allowed listeners to critique understandings of ‘race’ underpinning post-apartheid political discourse. Such a critique enabled listeners either instrumentally to affirm a reconfigured understanding of a racial identity, or to reject ‘race’ as a meaningful category of difference altogether.