This article discusses an extraordinary body in popular music, that belonging to the person with anorexia which is also usually a gendered body – female – and that of the singer or frontperson. I explore the relation between the anorexic body and popular music, which is more than simply looking at constructions of anorexia in pop. It involves contextually thinking about the (medical) history and the critical reception and representation, the place of anorexia across the creative industries more widely, and a particular moment when pop played a role in the public awareness of anorexia. Following such context the article looks in more detail at a small number of popular music artists who had experience of anorexia, their stage and media presentations (of it), and how they did or apparently did not explore their experience of it in their own work and public appearances. This close discussion is framed within thinking about the popular music industry's capacity for carelessness, its schedule of pressure and practice of destruction on its own stars, particularly in this instance its female artists. This is an article about a condition and an industry. At its heart is the American singer and drummer Karen Carpenter (1950–1983), a major international pop star in the 1970s, in the Carpenters duo with her brother Richard; the other figures discussed are Scottish child pop star Lena Zavaroni (1963–1999), and the Welsh rock lyricist, stylist and erstwhile guitarist of the Manic Street Preachers, Richey Edwards (1967–1995 missing/2008 officially presumed dead).

Timbre is a key aspect of musical practice and aesthetics. Artists use instrumentation, vocal technique, and production technology to create precise tone colours; listeners are able to identify genres, artists and connotations through timbre. However, critical assessment of its ephemeral musical agency is scarce. This article develops a theory of timbre. Goth music, which privileges tone colour in production, performance, and aesthetic, is a case in point for the ungraspable agency of this musical parameter. Timbral analyses of two goth tracks, Veil of Light's ‘Cold skin’ and Sopor Aeternus and the Ensemble of Shadows's ‘Dreamland’, will assess tone colour's relation to identity and difference (Walser), signification and corporeality (Barthes, Ihde), and the surplus of meaning and embodiment (Dolar). The article will argue that timbral aesthetics are characterised by the paradox of present absence: it indicates corporeality and meaning but simultaneously exceeds both. Tangible but also disembodied, immersive but also meaningless, it is no wonder that goth exploits timbre's dark agency.

This article contributes to the growing research base in Turkish popular music studies with a focus on indie music from Istanbul. It situates this music within Turkey's contemporary social, cultural and political landscapes, and in relation to the country's historical cultural narrative. Istanbul indie musicians’ responses to the 2013 Gezi protests suggest that indie's counter-hegemonic aesthetics are being explored and engaged with in alignment with ‘Third Republicanism’, an emerging vision for Turkey that holds liberalism and human rights as its core ideals where the ‘First’ and ‘Second’ Republican visions held secularism and Islam respectively.

This article profiles the music of three politically motivated hip hop emcees. It combines textual and musicological analysis with ethnographic data to examine the ways in which these women use music to empower themselves and to contribute to meaningful, positive change in post-industrial, post-bankruptcy Detroit. These narratives are significant because they combat the dominant, hegemonic two-dimensional representations of African American women that are epitomised in commercial hip hop and popular culture at large. Further, in a context where art and activism are connected, their work challenges the current controlling images and sexual scripts that dominate both commercial music industry representations and scholarship on women in hip hop. The artists we profile exemplify a new kind of musical movement where women are agents and creative solutionaries. At times, they are explicitly critical of the narrow range of black womanhood presented in popular culture and in other instances, they focus on issues such as the environment, race relations, racialized bodies, poverty and abuse, all the while challenging the hip hop industry and popular culture norms that communicate who black women are and who they should be.

In the 1990s, a vibrant reggae and dancehall scene emerged in several German cities, and in the early 2000s songs of reggae artists such as Gentleman, Seeed or Jan Delay rose to the top of the German pop charts. In this article, the German reggae scene of this time is depicted in respect to its formation, infrastructure, transnational relationships and sub-genres, and is related to general social and cultural developments in reunited Germany, e.g. a new national self-consciousness, tendencies towards a multi-ethnic society and new kinds of youth scenes. These findings are illustrated by a close reading of two songs from the seminal albums Searching for the Jan Soul Rebels by Jan Delay and New Dubby Conquerors by Seeed, both released in 2001. While Jan Delay's lyrics reflect the singer's commitment to the antifascist youth scene, Seeed celebrates a hedonistic lifestyle in the new capital Berlin.

In this article I focus on the genre of ‘vaporwave’, using the artist 18 Carat Affair as a case study, to explore the way the genre works as a project that produces, and takes pleasure in, a kind of ‘memory play’. As a genre, vaporwave is a style of music collaged together from a wide variety of largely background musics such as muzak®, 1980s elevator music and new age ambience. Vaporwave's ‘memory play’ is a project that takes remembering as its audio-visual aesthetic. The pleasure of vaporwave is therefore understood as a pleasure of remembering for the sake of the act of remembering itself. To explore this theme, I examine vaporwave's memory play using the terms of Chris Healy's ‘compensatory nostalgia’, as well as the idea of ‘ersatz nostalgia’ as discussed by Arjun Appadurai and Svetlana Boym.