International discourse on Yaogun Yinyue (mainland Chinese rock music) has been coloured by the early identification of Chinese rock ‘n’ roll with the aborted student democracy movement of the late 1980s. This has led to a simplistic valourisation of Western representations of rock rebellion by the global mass media, characterised by a lack of awareness of changing social circumstances within the People's Republic of China over the past decade. Originally, Yaogun Yinyue did indeed share a generational root with student radicals who expressed frustration with the severely limited life choices in a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) controlled state. However, in response to the periodic political crackdowns during the post-Tiananmen massacre era, most current mainland rock musicians have consciously avoided rhetoric which might lead to unhealthy repercussions for their careers. ‘Empathetic’ Western rock critics may be disillusioned to learn that recently many Chinese rock musicians not only reject popular reifications of rock ‘n’ roll but also express vehemently anti-foreign sentiments (Barme 1996, p. 202). Historical Sino-Western antagonisms have combined with individual resentments of foreign record companies' exploitative practices to create genuine suspicion about the West as a cultural and economic hegemon. This article offers a social and historical analysis in an attempt to reframe the meanings of Chinese rock as cultural product.

Radio and the recording business have, since the beginning of the last century, had a profound impact upon existing musical life whenever and wherever they have decisively and irreversibly established themselves. Their arrival restructures and redefines the social relations of music in many aspects of its production, performance and reception. Radio and recording technologies have had a significant impact on the livelihoods of all those who one way or another try to make a living from music (composers, performers and - in Europe - publishers, for instance). Performance itself is transformed as new norms are set in place which call for new levels of technique and interpretation. Finally the conditions of musical reception are reconfigured and new `taste publics' emerge, potentially in conflict with each other, as musical life is totalised into a new and complex unity.

At the height of its success in the first half of the 1970s, progressive rock was perhaps a surprisingly popular genre; surprising since its exponents strove to fuse classical models of composition and arrangement with electric instruments and extend the form of rock music from the single song to the symphonic poem, even the multimovement suite. Album and concert sales were extremely high; even albums that were greeted with less than critical approval (itself a rare occurrence) such as Jethro Tull's A Passion Play and Yes's Tales from Topographic Oceans (both 1973) sold well (the latter reached number one in the UK Top 10 album charts upon its release). Today, the dominant critical characterisation of progressive rock is of overblown, pretentious musicians in ridiculous garb surrounded by banks of keyboards playing bombastic, overlong compositions in time signatures that you couldn't dance to: a music as far removed from ‘real’ rock ‘n’ roll as could be imagined; a music that failed both as rock music but also as classical music. (All these negative characteristics are to be found, for instance, in David Thomas's (1998) coverage of Yes's latest UK tour.) This characterisation is only partly unfair. It arose in the wake of punk, which sought to sweep away what its proponents saw as the empty virtuosity of rock dinosaurs. Punk sought to reclaim rock music for `ordinary' people to be played in intimate venues - not stadia - by people who didn't need to be conservatoire trained.

As a particular type of gatekeeper, rock critics play a significant role in shaping the representations of artists for an admittedly small, but influential, population, as well as establishing an artist's place in music history. In Sound Effects, Simon Frith (1983) maintains that rock critics are ‘opinion leaders’ and are the ‘ideological gatekeepers’ of the community for which they write. Additionally, I argue that rock critics function as Gramscian ‘organic intellectuals’ who articulate the ideas held by the population of which they are a part (Gramsci 1971, pp. 5-14). The community that rock critics represent and speak for is made up of an overlapping network that comprises those connected with college radio, record collectors, local music scene participants, musicians and various record company employees, among others. Frith (1996, p. 18) argues in Performing Rites that if ‘social relations are constituted in cultural practice, then our sense of identity and difference is established in the process of discrimination’. By understanding the ways in which evaluations are made within the communities that rock critics are a part of, we can gain a better understanding of the communities themselves. Because there are no sustained scholarly writings that examine rock criticism in North America from a historical, sociological or communicative perspective, it is important to begin examining the profession of the rock critic, as well as the discourse generated by rock criticism.

Disfrutar recordando tiempos de ayer al compás de música aprendida a fuerza de bailarla. Revivir la emoción de aquellos Momentos involvidables y sentir que somos los mismos . . .

To enjoy while remembering moments of yesteryear to the rhythm of music learned by force of dancing to it. To live again the emotion of those unforgettable moments and feel that we are the same . . .

Slogan on a poster for Changó Viejoteca, 1995

In the southwest Colombian metropolis of Cali, recorded music has come to exert an unusually strong force on local popular culture in this century. Not only did recordings play a key role in establishing Cuban music, and later, salsa, as the principal musical style of the city, they also became the basis for the record-centred dance scene that predominated in Cali during the 1940s through to the 1970s, and continued to be important as the live scene flourished during the 1980s and 1990s. The centrality of recorded music for Caleños (the inhabitants of Cali) challenges the privileging, in most scholarly work, of live performance as more ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ than its mediated versions. Indeed, for many decades, ‘playing music’ in Cali literally meant putting on a record, as a source of music for other social and expressive activities. The term disco (literally, record disc) still exists as a local synonym for ‘song’, even when it is a live rendition of a song, e.g. ‘vamos a tocar ese disco’ (let's perform that song).

From their release in the 1960s, the LPs of the Beatles have dominated the various selections and lists which routinely purport to identify the most popular/most influential/best albums of the popular music era. Throughout each subsequent decade, the verdicts expressed in audience polls, in critics' choices and in the comments of other musicians have served to effectively maintain and enhance the group's reputation.

There is, however, an additional way - often alluded to, but rarely investigated - in which the albums of the Beatles are celebrated. Almost without exception, the album covers themselves have been seen as groundbreaking in their visual and aesthetic properties, have been congratulated for their innovative and imaginative designs, have been credited with providing an early impetus for the expansion of the graphic design industry into the imagery of popular music, and have been seen as largely responsible for allowing the connections between art and pop to be made explicit.

Among the most frequently repeated formulae in the description of the traditions most often called Afro-American music, in particular the styles of jazz, blues, soul and rock, is the concept of the `blue note’. It may also seem that this is a most widely accepted idea. The ‘blue note’ is usually thought of as a kind of basic element in those styles, as constituting the `ethnic’ or ‘African’ aspect of those musics as opposed to the ‘Western’ contributions of harmony.

My main attempt here is to step into the somewhat muddy waters of musicological and sociological/anthropoligical/ cultural studies discourses of ‘the blue’ and ask what the ‘blue idea’ really is about. In rethinking the concept of the ‘blue note’, I find it necessary to differentiate between two concerns that often seem to be somewhat unconsciously or muddily mixed together:

(1) the idea of the ‘blue note’ as referring to pitch, thinking of the note as an ‘item’, commonly thought of as the slight altering of the minor third and the flattened seventh; and

(2) the general concept of `blue feeling’ linked to the idea of playing ‘blue notes’: in short, the performance of music with a ‘blue feel’.

There’s no doubt about it. A Conference with a single theme is amazingly comforting. If the theme is centred on a group as well known as the Beatles, then it is doubly so. ‘Journalistic texts on popular music are often disposed towards music which they themselves like and would listen to by choice (often thinly veiling race and gender prejudice). This is characterised by their attraction to a certain type of more subversive-seeming, more lyrically and structurally complex music.’ ‘You want a piece of music to encapsulate the period it was written in, and Sgt. Pepper does seem to do that.’ `It was a decisive moment in the history of Western Civilisation.’ Although these somewhat eulogistic reflections were written in the early 1970s, the attraction to the Beatles has continued unabated. Richard Lloyd Perry, writing in The Independent on Sunday, 21 February 1999, observed: ‘Ironically, given their reputation at the time as slurring Scousers, the Beatles are honoured as custodians of linguistic clarity - an observation echoed in many of the papers presented at the Conference.