This article focuses on three recent manifestations of cumbia in Buenos Aires, Argentina: digital cumbia released by ZZK Records; retro cumbia orchestras; and a newer strand of digital cumbia, música turra. The first two are identified with the middle class, whereas the third emerged from the clases populares (‘popular classes’). Música turra is underpinned by government policies towards digital inclusion, while middle-class incursions into the traditionally working-class sphere of cumbia, too, suggest increasing social cohesion. However, the digital fascination of música turra contrasts with an embrace of the analogue and acoustic in middle-class cumbia. These developments point to the emergence of a post-digital ethos and a shift from a digital to a post-digital divide, also running along class lines, analysed here through a Bourdieusian lens of taste and distinction. While transnational in nature, the post-digital ethos appears in Buenos Aires in a distinctive local form, articulated to growing Latin Americanism and post-neoliberalism on the part of the middle class.

Rap and ragga musics have found a place on the musical landscape of Malawi over the last decade, exemplified in a nation-wide scene characterised by competitions. Recordings and associated materials of rap and ragga that inform Malawian youth interpretations tend to emphasise male participation and masculine symbols. Competitions are male-dominated in their organisational structure and participatory roles. Though the articulated focus of these events is the musical component, movement practices are at the core of the scene, comprising part of contestants' performances and the more informal activities of spectators. Female involvement as dancers is much greater than as music-makers, making attention to dance crucial for understanding gender dynamics. Our exploration of intersections between dance, music, gender and class provides insight into the reasons for and implications of male dominance in this popular music/dance scene.

Using pictures to sell music is hardly a new concept. Examples of pictures being set to pre-recorded music with the aim of producing a piece of audio-visual entertainment can be found as early as the first decade of this century. At the Paris World Fair in 1900, stars of the theatre appeared in short film sketches with synchronised gramophone sound (Olsson 1986). From 1905 through to about 1914 in Sweden, a number of commercially available music recordings were used as the basis of short films which were shown in cinemas with various types of mechanical inventions and much human ingenuity being applied to ensure, though not always achieving, synchronisation. Those portrayed in the films were often actors who mimed the songs (Furhammar 1985, 1988).

Roxette is surely one of the most successful new Euro-bands to arrive in recent years. Sales of the 1988 album ‘Look Sharp’ are over 6 million units, while the 1991 album ‘Joyride’ has already surpassed that mark making it one of the biggest selling albums of the year around the world. Still Roxette has a long way to go before reaching the hundreds of millions its Swedish predecessor Abba sold over their twelve-year-long career. While Roxette are dressed for success into the nineties they most certainly learned their career moves from Abba. This is a topic we shall have cause to return to but first I would like to discuss the transnational music companies and their European strategies. Then I shall examine recent developments and changes in the Swedish market-place before returning to a concluding look at different career models of Swedish pop stars.

On a Saturday night of January 1930 several thousand African men clad in loin cloths and the calico uniforms of domestic servants thronged a concert in the Workers' Hall of the Durban branch of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU) in Prince Edward Street. To the pounding sounds of hundreds of sticks, successive teams of dancers, some of them trained by Union officials from the rural hinterland, rushed to the stage performing the virile, stamping ingoma dance. The Zulu term ingoma (lit. ‘song’) covers a broad range of male group dances like isikhuze, isicathulo, ukukomika, isiZulu, isiBhaca, umzansi and isishameni. The kinesic patterns of ingoma are inseparably linked to choral songs in call-and-response structure and, as such, constitute a complex statement of the unity of dance and song in Zulu performance culture. The peak of Zulu-speaking migrants' dance culture, ingoma evolved out of the profound transformation of traditional rural Zulu culture through impoverishment, dispossession and labour migration around the first World War. But on that night of January 1930, at the climax of the spectacle, the ingoma dancers struck a particularly defiant note:

Who has taken our country from us?

Who has taken it?

Come out! Let us fight!

The land was ours. Now it is taken.

We have no more freedom left in it.

Come out and fight!

The land is ours, now it is taken.

Fight! Fight!

Shame on the man who is burnt in his hut!

Come out and fight! (Perham 1974, p. 196

Analyses of music and environment are proliferating, yet new conceptions are needed to make sense of growing ecological crisis in the Anthropocene. From an empirical project tracing guitars all the way back to the tree, I argue for deeper conceptual and empirical integration of music into the material and visceral processes that constitute ecological crisis itself. Musicians are not only inspired by environmental concerns for compositional or activist purposes. They are entangled in environmental crisis through material and embodied relations with ecosystems, especially via the musical instruments we depend upon. I foreground three ‘more-than-musical’ themes to make sense of unfurling forces: materiality, corporeality and volatility. Musical instruments are gateway objects that invite contemplation of material and corporal relations. Such relations bind together musicians and non-human others. Material and corporeal relations with increasingly threatened upstream forests, and endangered tree species, are being confronted and reconfigured. In the context of ecological crisis, guitars do much more than make pleasing acoustic sounds. Via guitars we co-generate, with non-human others, a sound track of crisis both melancholy and hopeful.

This article focuses on the role of protest music in the biggest social movement of recent Turkish history. It is the result of three years of fieldwork triangulating musical and cultural analysis with ethnographic methods. Motives of the protest, strategies of the movement, agency of musicians and participatory performances are investigated and contextualised in an analysis of Turkey's cultural changes. The function of music shifted from framing the protest to encouraging political action and fostering a sense of belonging to the collective identity of the Gezi Park movement. Music even became political activism. By underlining different functions played by music in the case of the Gezi Park movement, this article problematises the relevance of music for social movements.

Before WWII, Hugues Panassié (1912–1974) was Europe's leading critical authority on jazz, and by the time of his death he had published a dozen books on jazz music and been President of the Hot-club de France for over 40 years. Yet despite this life's worth of efforts made in jazz's name, Panassié's reputation is no longer a good one: pointing to the fantasies of black exceptionalism and Noble Savagery present in his work, historians have tended to dismiss the critic as a racist primitivist, one in thrall to that contemporary negrophilie most familiar today from early-century Parisian visual art. Indeed Panassié used the term ‘primitive’ himself, and positively. But this article traces the ultra-conservative writer's intellectual and religious formation to show that, rather than contemporary negrophilie, it was a religious and cultural heritage quite distant from the modern European encounter with blackness that first informed Panassié's primitivism. Although this re-reading does not aim to ‘rehabilitate’ someone who remains a troublesome and reactionary figure, the article nevertheless goes on to explore how, in his primitivist rejection of European modernism, Panassié sometimes pre-empts important arguments made by the postmodern jazz scholarship that would seem to marginalise the critic's historical contributions.

perhaps the first digital sample to become well known within popular music was actually a piece of western art music, the fragment of stravinsky's firebird captured within the fairlight computer musical instrument, the first digital ‘sampler’, as ‘orch5’. this loud orchestral attack was made famous by bronx dj afrika bambaataa, who incorporated the sound into his seminal 1982 dance track, ‘planet rock’. analysis of kraftwerk's ‘trans europe express’, also sampled for ‘planet rock’, provides an interpretive context for bambaataa's use of orch5, as well as the hundreds of songs that deliberately sought to copy its sound. kraftwerk's concerns about the decadence of european culture and art music were not fully shared by users of orch5 in new york city; its sound first became part of an ongoing afro-futurist musical project, and by 1985 was fully naturalised within the hip-hop world, no more ‘classical’ than the sound of scratching vinyl. to trace the early popular history of orch5's distinctive effect, so crucial for early hip-hop, electro, and detroit techno, is to begin to tell the post-canonic story of western art music.

The first Scandinavian records appeared in 1899. By 1925, over 27,000 sides had been made in the region, and recordings had become an established part of musical life. Half of the recordings were made by the Gramophone Company, the market leader, but there were at least a dozen competing firms. The companies had to find out by trial and error what types of music would be attractive to customers. Early recording artists were mostly well-known personalities from opera, theatre or music halls, and their repertoire had already been tried on the stage.

Most Scandinavian records were pressed in Germany or the United Kingdom, and the companies also promoted their international repertoire in the region, but customers preferred local artists. A hundred years ago, opera singers were the only internationally known recording artists. Popular music was tied to local languages and traditions, and a demand for imported popular music only emerged after World War One, with the growing popularity of modern dance music.

From the mid-1980s, rock music emerged as the leading musical culture in the major cities of the Soviet Union. In writings and research on this ‘Soundtrack of Perestroika’, attention has been primarily paid to the words rather than the sounds. Russian rock critics and academics, as well as those who participate in Russian rock culture, persistently emphasise the literary qualities of Russian rock music and most still prefer to approach rock as a form of musical poetry - ‘Rok poèziya’. This seems out of step with the growing emphasis on an interdisciplinary approach within popular music studies. The aim of this article is to investigate and discuss some of the core arguments that underpin notions of Russian rock music's literary qualities. This may help to uncover some specific national characteristics of rock in Russia, whilst at the same time questioning the need for, and value of, a literary approach to the study of Russian rock.

In this article I explore the manner in which elements from a non-Western music appear in pop music and jazz. The music under discussion is that of the Indian subcontinent and the classical music of North India in particular. The essay covers references to Indian music in pop, rock and jazz from the sixties to the present day but concentrates mainly on the sixties and seventies, and, in the world of pop, on the music of the Beatles. The influence of orientalism on Western music is not a recent phenomena, as Reck (1985) notes, but its appearance in pop during the sixties meant that it reached a larger audience than ever before.

This article is a study of the musical style of Randy Newman, one of the most intriguing singer–songwriters in the United States today. Since Newman's is hardly a household name, let me begin with a biographical note. Born in New Orleans in 1943, Randy Newman moved to Southern California at the age of five and has lived there ever since. While still a teenager he became staff songwriter for a small publishing company, and in 1966 achieved his first commercial success with a song recorded by Judy Collins, ‘I Think It's Going To Rain Today’. He began recording for Warner Brothers/Reprise in 1968, and has released an album every two or three years since then. Except for one hit, ‘Short People’ (1977), his music has appealed to a relatively small but devoted following. Unlike many contemporary songwriters, Newman is classically trained, and is a skilled orchestrator who writes his own arrangements, as well as arrangements for other artists and occasional film scores.

This article examines the policies of the British Musicians' Union towards the employment of musicians who were not UK citizens in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s, with particular emphasis on an alleged ban on American musicians entering the country. Drawing on a number of hitherto largely ignored and/or unavailable sources, it argues that many previous accounts of these policies have simplified a more complex picture. We illustrate that complexity and suggest that the issues surrounding the ban are ones which continue to resonate.

The hip-hop activism of Pittsburgh's 1Hood Media has been a key element of the success of several contemporary social justice campaigns, such as the 2010 Justice For Jordan Miles police brutality case. After offering some background on 1Hood Media and a discussion of constitutive rhetoric, this study offers a close reading of 1Hood's rhetorical appeal, focusing on the ways in which the audience is constituted as both collective and individual subjects whose participation in the narrative is essential to its closure. 1Hood Media's texts focus on a diverse range of victims of injustice who suffer at the hands of police brutality and murder, and other forms of systemic oppression. The villains in these narratives are institutional forces, such as racist police forces, or corrupt Wall Street banks. By focusing on music, lyrical and visual features of 1Hood's cultural products, this study contributes to studies of popular music, hip-hop, rhetoric and cultural politics.

The origins of syncopation in 20th-century American popular music have been a source of controversy. I offer a new account of this historical process. I distinguish between second-position syncopation, an accent on the second quarter of a half-note or quarter-note unit, and fourth-position syncopation, an accent on the fourth quarter of such a unit. Unlike second-position syncopation, fourth-position syncopation tends to have an anticipatory character. In an earlier study I presented evidence suggesting British roots for second-position syncopation. in contrast, fourth-position syncopation – the focus of the current study – seems to have had no presence in published 19th-century vocal music, British or American. It first appears in notation in ragtime songs and piano music at the very end of the 19th century; it was also used in recordings by African-American singers before it was widely notated.

For a mid-twentieth century historian of the music hall, blackface minstrelsy was the ‘oddest form of entertainment imaginable’. He found it ‘incomprehensible’ why people during the Victorian period had delighted in the ‘extraordinary spectacle of the apparently sane white man blacking his face and hands with burnt cork, painting his lips and eyes to resemble those of an African nigger, and then, to complete the incongruity, attiring himself in English evening dress while he sang ditties allegedly emanating from the cotton plantations of Ole Virginny!’ (Felstead 1946, p. 55). There are a number of things to be said about this evaluation, the first being that its severe disparagement of one of the most popular cultural forms of the Victorian period in Britain was, during that period, exceptionally rare. Indeed, the lack of criticism attests to its enduring popularity. From their first wave of success in the late 1830s and early 1840s, minstrel acts, troupes and shows figured as a staple item of the popular stage throughout the remaining decades of the century. What began with its early boom in the second quarter of the century continued to prove attractive to successive generations across all social classes, and among men and women of the large urban centres, provincial towns and outlying rural areas alike.

For many, art is a product: the painting to be observed and contemplated, the concert to be heard and enjoyed. There is, however, another conception of art – art as activity – and it is in this context that Howard Becker (1984) develops his concept of art worlds. Art worlds, Becker argues, include more than the artists who create the work which the public commonly defines as art. Any given art world will consist of the network of people whose co-operative activity produces that art world's certain type of artistic product (Becker 1984, p. x). Organised according to their knowledge of the art world's goals and conventions for achieving those goals, the art world includes five basic categories of people: the artists who actually create and produce the art; the producers who provide the funds and support for the production of the art; the distributors who bring the art to the audience; the audience who purchases and collects the art; and finally, the critics, aestheticians and philosophers who create and maintain the rationales according to which all these other activities make sense and have value. These rationales, however, are not merely descriptive but prescriptive. For despite the efforts of those who would keep an art world static in its products and function, art worlds are dynamic. Changes in the art world are often made in response to changes in the rationales - i.e., the philosophical justifications for an art world's art - which identify the art world's product as ‘good’ art and explain how that art fills a particular need for people and society (Becker 1984, p. 4).

In this article I examine Lennox's earliest performance strategies, and her reasons for employing them, as well as some of the reactions to her adoption of transvestism as a sartorial style. I discuss three videos from Lennox's 1988 LP Savage, which, in my view, marked a radical shift in her approach to depicting gender through performance. I argue that Lennox may be more productively viewed by keeping in mind performance ideals of music hall and other popular musical theatre styles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally I discuss Lennox's challenge to late twentieth-century gender construction using Judith Butler's theories of the performative nature of gender and of the subversive reiteration of gender, outlined in her books Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, and suggesting ways in which Lennox's performance embodies these theories, while extending them to include a broader range of sexualities.