On 12 November 2017, the Philippine celebrity musician Pilita Corrales was singing the popular song ‘Ikaw’ (‘You’) at a gala event in Manila, attended by some of the world's most powerful politicians at the time, US President Donald Trump and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Suddenly, she noticed a male voice singing along with her, its intonation off, its volume increasing. Aware that the event was being recorded, Corrales at first tried to disregard the intruding voice. Eventually however, she could no longer ignore it and, shielding her eyes from the lights with one hand, she tried to spot the uninvited singer in the audience. ‘Where are you, sir’? she asked. Realising that the singer was on one of the balconies, it dawned on her that he was none other than Duterte himself. After giving Duterte room to sing a section by himself, she then joined the president in the song's finale (BBC News 2017; Guardian News 2017; Rappler 2017).

This article explores the relationship between the meaning of style in Idol-format TV shows, and the political style which many scholars consider central for understanding populism today. Inspired by Jacques Rancière's notion of aesthetic regimes, I theorise what I call ‘the regime of style’ as a set of aesthetic principles shared across these fields. I explore the case study of Miri Regev's term as Israel's Minister of Culture and Sports, showing how she implemented a long-term strategy combining deliberate scandals that pitted her against ‘the cultural elite’, and the endorsement of pop music styles associated with publics that traditionally support her party (Likud). What ties these complementary strategies together is that they perform a ‘flaunting of the low’ (Ostiguy 2017). In refocusing the conversation on contested hierarchies of taste, Regev's own appeal partakes in the aesthetic economy of Idol-format shows, where style is fetishised as a transparent performance of identity.

In recent years, rap music has been growing rapidly within the Greek cultural landscape. This paper places emphasis on a particular politicised current within the genre, examining closely two recent examples from the Greek context. Although such performances have already been broadly discussed as ‘populist’ within public debate, this paper aims at rigorously assessing this claim. To do so, it first turns to contemporary populism research in order to articulate a consistent and operational approach that can be utilised in the analysis of rap performances. Against the background of a minimal definitional consensus highlighting populism's people-centrism and anti-elitism, this contribution will then focus on (a) the performative dimension of populism and its occasional extra-political conditioning and (b) populist performances within popular music, namely rap. Could one designate rap music as a locus of populist performance(s)? How could such a hypothesis be substantiated through the analysis of concrete examples from the contemporary Greek scene?

This article addresses the relationship between popular music and populism through three government-commissioned songs, produced for occasions of national remembering during the post-2010 Orbán regime in Hungary, namely ‘Barackfa’ (2013), ‘Egy szabad országért’ (2016) and ‘Hazám, hazám’ (2020). All three songs are one-off collaborations of artists representing various music genres. We ask, firstly, what aesthetic forms make these songs potentially suitable for the performance of national unity, solidarity and the ‘people’, and secondly, how the songs’ structure, production and dissemination can be interpreted as attempts by government commissioners and creators to gain popularity. Drawing on Ostiguy's performative approach to populism, combined with the notion of collective speculation and musical affordances, we identify three main strategies of constructing the ‘people’ in the songs: singing together as sound, legacy and practice; the pop ‘mega-event’; and the use of the folk music aesthetic as ‘mother tongue’.

Our article addresses the connection between popular music and far-right populism, as exemplified by the Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ). We discuss the specific mainstreaming and normalizing potential of popular music for far-right populist politics, by means of songs that do not qualify as political or politicized music in the sense of carrying a clear political message. We introduce a multi-step methodology that addresses performative aspects of actual situations of reception (fieldwork) and in-depth analyses of the music and its affordances (group analysis). Based on this approach, we argue that these ambivalent, sometimes even contradictory musical performances take on a life of their own within a specific arrangement that we will term an assembled politicity, in the sense of a political potential activated through situational arrangements. In this way, the FPÖ's musical programme affords far-right populist interpretations through music that appears to be unsuspicious.

The Chilean nueva canción (‘new song’) movement is one of Latin America's most enduring musical phenomena. Strongly associated with the rise of left-wing political forces in the 1960s, and then with anti-dictatorship protests in the 1970s and 1980s, nueva canción is deeply embedded in Chilean political consciousness. This article provides a new perspective on the movement by exploring its populist elements and considering these in relation to Communist Party cultural policy. It focuses on a significant historical moment – the Chilean Communist Party's 1971 Assembly on the Chilean Revolution and the Problems of Culture – to ascertain how the political potential of ‘Chilean new song’ was viewed by this key partner in the Chilean coalition government. Through this examination, this article offers new insight into the political positioning of CNS, illustrating the movement's socio-political role in terms of the broader ideological principles and imperatives of the vía chilena (‘Chilean road’) to socialism.

Populism is a discursive construct that represents popular interests and values by ‘pretend[ing] to speak’ for the people who are constructed separate and opposed to a powerful elite. Yet populism, in its various forms and accents, ‘can adapt flexibly to a variety of substantive ideological values and principles’. This is manifested in ‘the people’ not being a prefixed natural category, but a signifier that acquires meaning through discourses and contexts. This article considers how populism is articulated in hip hop videos that criticise two authoritarian-populist politicians: America's Trump and Turkey's Erdoğan. Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies, Eminem's ‘The Storm’ and Ezhel's ‘Yarınımız Yok (We have no tomorrow)’ are analysed to demonstrate how oppositional popular music can articulate its own brands of populism, transcending contexts, yet shaped by them.