In collaboration with the Cairene composer Fathy Salama, Youssou N'Dour released an album that appeared in Dakar in 2003 as Sant Yàlla (‘Praise God’), and internationally in 2004 as Egypt. Sung in Wolof to the accompaniment of an Egyptian orchestra, the album consists of a suite of eight interrelated pieces, seven of which are praise songs to Senegalese Sufi shaykhs, while the remaining piece praises God, the Prophet Mohammed, and some important Mauritanian shaykhs. In this essay I argue that in bringing Senegalese Islam to the international arena, N'Dour uses his stature as a world-class musician to both articulate and participate in the creation of a Sufi modernity, namely a way of being a Sufi Muslim in a globalised world. In addition to being a personal journey for Youssou N'Dour, both musically in its orientation towards the East rather than the West, and in his own religious faith, Sant Yàlla/Egypt also echoes many of the current preoccupations of Muslim intellectuals and artists as they seek to renew and reinterpret their own local religious traditions for a global audience.

This paper examines two of the most common signal processing techniques, namely, equalisation and dynamics processing. As with all signal processing techniques, equalisation and dynamics processing modify audio signals in particular ways to suit the evolving requirements of a mix. Rock and electronica records currently feature the most extroverted uses for these techniques and, thus, the clearest examples for a field guide like this. It is for this reason, and this reason alone, that I focus on records from these two genres. I begin this field guide by suggesting a definition for ‘signal processing’ which is sufficiently broad to account for every technique that recordists currently use. I then relate that definition to the concept of ‘frequency response’. In my opinion, this concept is crucial to any understanding of signal processing – a core component of the knowledge base for audio engineering, which is the discipline under which signal processing is typically subsumed; the concept of ‘frequency response’ guides many of the decisions about signal processing that recordists make, especially those concerning equalisation. Finally, I explain how equalisation and dynamics processing work, and I offer a field guide to their most common applications on hit rock and electronica records today.

This article falls into three loosely related parts. The first and third of these are derived from addresses given to the Popular Music Research Symposium at Exeter in September 1982, and at the Festival des Politischen Liedes in East Berlin in February 1982 respectively. The second forms a newly written bridge.

Irving Berlin's 200-odd songs written between 1907, the date of the first one, and late 1914, when his first complete show for the musical stage (Watch Your Step) opened at New York's Globe Theatre, are virtually identical to one another in their published piano/vocal format. Like other Tin Pan Alley songs of the early twentieth century, most of them consist of a brief piano introduction, a few bars of vamp, then several verses, each followed by a chorus. All are in major keys and most have a tempo marking of moderato. Piano introductions are drawn from either the first or last phrase of the chorus, the vamp anticipates the melodic beginning of the verse, and both verse and chorus are usually made up of four 4-bar phrases in C or four 8-bar phrases in other metres.

Both Popular Music and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) have been in existence for almost a generation. Given the radical social and political changes affecting the general spheres of work, education and research since the establishment of those two institutions in 1981, it is perhaps time for popular music scholars to review their own historical position and to work out strategies for the brave new world of monetarism facing those who will hopefully survive another generation after we quinquagenarian baby boomers of the rock era have disappeared from the academic scene. Of course, such a process of intellectual and ideological stocktaking requires detailed discussion of a wide range of political, economic and social issues that cannot be covered in a single article. I will therefore restrict the account that follows to a discussion of one particular set of historical strands affecting the development of popular music studies. This part of our history is virtually unknown in the anglophone quarters that have, for obvious reasons of language and music media hegemony, dominated the international field of popular music studies. It is, however, as I hope to show, a story of considerable relevance to more general problems of music education and research at the turn of the millennium. I shall return to these broader issues at the end of the article.

Scholarship on the moral panics around rock music has long focused on racial fears and anxieties about a youth culture that might escape societal control, but little serious attention has been paid to the conservative Christian anti-rock discourse that surfaced publicly in the United States in the 1960s. This article addresses that gap by situating this construction of rock as an inherently evil corrupting force for 'traditional' religious, family, and national values within a larger cultural context, and arguing that it illuminates the rise of contemporary conservative morality politics in the U.S. Not merely the ravings of a few extremists, this discourse represents a worldview and rhetorical mode that was once widespread within a small religious subculture but has since developed—together with the social and cultural power of that subculture—into one of the central political frames of contemporary American life, helping lay the groundwork for today's culture wars.

This article addresses problems of authorship and creative authority in popular music, in particular in view of a pervasive split between modes of aesthetic production (involving modernist assemblage, multiple authorship, and the late capitalist logic of major label policies) and modes of aesthetic reception (which tend to take popular music as the organic output of individual performers). While rock musicians have attempted to come to terms with this phenomenon by either performing a ‘Romantic’ sense of authenticity (basically by importing folk values to the production process) or ‘Modernist authenticity’ (by highlighting experimentation and alienation), Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, creators of Gorillaz, found a third way which ingeniously allows them to do both. By creating a virtual rock band, and by hiding their own media personalities behind those of their virtual alter egos, they brought themselves into a position which allows them to produce ‘sincere’ popular music which ‘playfully’ stages the absurdities of major label music business while very successfully operating within its very confines.

‘I think that no one really wants pop music to become art because it is enough as entertainment, and if it were just a bit better, one could not look at it with an indulgent smile…’ In this bitter way János Bródy, a member of the once legendary beat group, Illés, formulated his opinion about the institutions responsible for the production, function, reception and, last but not least, the quality of pop (rock, beat) music, that is to say, the music of the young in Hungary. Whether rock or pop can be regarded as art at all or whether it is by nature an inferior genre is a question beyond the scope of this article. I am concerned here with some of the basic functional principles of the institutions of pop life and their impact on the music itself in this country in the past fifteen to twenty years. I would like to discuss these problems in terms of autonomy and self-expression rather than in terms of claimed aesthetic values, since I find the former a basic condition of producing values in this type of music.t This belief is supported by a close look at the history of Hungarian pop: it seems that under favourable social and political conditions, that is, in a period of social and cultural dynamism, characterised by an open, tolerant or relatively supportive media policy, pop music can produce (as it obviously did in the second half of the sixties) artistic values too, and give authentic expression to the aspirations, attitudes and ethos of a very large segment of the young population.

An investigation of the reception and perception of early rock 'n' roll in various parts of the world may tell us little new about the music itself, but it can inform us on contemporary issues and attitudes in these places, and remind us of the ways in which popular music has been utilised by commercial and political forces controlling the mass media.

… it is not a question of introducing out of nowhere a science of everyone's individual life, but of innovating and rendering critical an already existing practice. (Antonio Gramsci)

Some years ago the concept of ambiguity was proposed as a central category in the analysis of everyday life. Henri Lefebvre, unorthodox French marxist and sociologist, suggested that precisely there, in the ‘explosive chronicle’ of daily life, it was both possible and necessary to find common ground between what was socially and culturally familiar and its eventual critique (Lefebvre 1958). The study of pop music, although rarely given attention in this context, brings us up immediately against the oscillating tensions of that cultural ambiguity which Lefebvre considered the heart of everyday life.

The events of 1989 mark a turning-point in German history. Among the other far-reaching economic and social consequences of German reunification, the German market for audio-visual media expanded considerably.

Anyone who can remember anything at all about pirate radio in the 1960s can usually remember two names: Radio Caroline and Radio London are synonymous with the offshore era. Between them they accounted for the majority of the audience who listened to the pirates, and the majority of the sponsors who advertised on them. But although they basically shared the same market rationale Caroline and London approached their task completely differently. London sought respect, prestige and accommodation. Its every move was geared towards being incorporated into the existing system of broadcasting, and its main purpose for existing seemed to be to bring about a legal commercial radio system in Great Britain. Radio Caroline had a very different rulebook and a very different guiding ethos. By a series of acts which culminated in a highly symbolic stand against what it saw as repressive legislation Caroline made explicit an underlying set of contradictions which anticipated in microcosm the wider philosophical and political contradictions of the 1960s counter-culture. For Radio London respect would eventually be won and the station's influence and programming legacy would endure in the shape of its replacement – BBC Radio One. For Radio Caroline there would be nothing like the same degree of influence. This contrast of approaches and outcomes between the two major pirate stations is at the very epicentre of the story of offshore radio.

This paper explores ethnographic findings gathered during my work as a DJ and academic, particularly in relation to a community arts project called Talking About Old Records. This project brings together teenagers and older people from a range of backgrounds at collaborative workshops using DJ technology and old records. These facilitate conversations about what music means to the participants. This paper puts the emphasis on the older people, exploring the emergence of generational musical identities from the 1940s onwards. Relationships between the spread of personal listening technologies, ‘youth music’ and the birth of the teenager in the 1950s are explored in the context of older people's fears about a loss of musical sociality, fears which are articulated against a background of cyclical manifestations of intergenerational musical conflict and scandal.

Understanding how recorded and amplified stage musics contribute towards producing the Anthropocene necessitates attending to complex transnational flows of material, capital and labor, and how they coalesce into technological objects. This is complicated by the wide array of sites, practices and knowledges involved during various stages of the production process, from initial resource extraction, to smelting, component manufacturing, technology assembly, and distribution. To develop a suitable technological ethics, and to understand what happens to environments and to human, animal and plant lifeworlds, requires one to resist abstraction and undertake a global accounting of resource ecologies with recourse to planetary-scale political economy. Towards this goal, I provide a partial account of an early 2000s mic preamp, a mundane but nonetheless fetishised recording studio technological object. I focus on two metals, tin and tantalum, that are primarily extracted for electronics manufacturing, and two building blocks of electronics, solder and capacitors, which are essential for making contemporary electronics.

popular music performance raises important questions about music-making as process. these questions are addressed through dealing with a further issue: the difference between music journalism and academic discourse on music. a dialogic structure is adopted. first, in a short paper, tim quirk examines film of the who playing at the isle of wight in 1970. he shows how pete townshend's performance moves through a cycle, from incompetence to the extraordinary: paradoxically, formulaic performance prompts sincerity (and so an extraordinary performance) on the part of townshend. jason toynbee responds by arguing that quirk's writing is able to open up, as journalism, an approach to performance not available to academics. what is at stake is the foregrounding of subjectivity in the writer (quirk) and, through this, the inter-subjectivity of performer and audience. quirk's own response follows, and there is then a second round of responses which develops these issues.

Though federal law in the United States provides for the protection of artistic property, including music, African-American blues musicians, since the appearance of their first commercial records in the 1920s, have generally not received their due. Part of the problem came from the difficulty of squaring the discrete notions of folk composition and artistic property in those early days. But the exploitation of black artists was largely attributable to common practices in the record industry whose effects were multiplied in this case by the near total defencelessness of the victims. Imitations and cover versions led to a veritable despoliation of black talent which has only belatedly received legal compensation and public recognition.

Technological change has had a significant effect on market structure and management strategy in the content industry. This paper presents a survey of changes in firm organisation and marketing strategy in the Japanese music industry from a historical perspective. The market structure has changed from vertical integration within a closed system to vertical separation within an open system due to an increase in distribution channels. In addition, developments in the media have led to changes in the marketing strategies of record companies, and this has accelerated the rate of turnover of hit music. Record companies thus need to revise their marketing approach to match the change in sales pattern.

Even though electronic and computer-based technologies are commonly used in music composition, performance and recording, this field of technology use has, with a few exceptions, remained fairly unexplored within social studies of technology. In this article, the role of technology in music production is investigated by applying the notion of script (Akrich 1992) to an empirical study of users of the Roland MC303 Groovebox, a self-contained instrument for making techno, rap, jungle, hip-hop, acid and other styles of electronic (dance) music. The study focuses especially on individual differences between users' perceptions of the musical-stylistic directedness of the Groovebox and how they construct different user scripts and more advanced needs as they become more familiar with the instrument. The latter observation highlights the relevance of a user trajectory, the notion that enthusiast technology users may keep on using a specific technological artefact through various usage modes or scripts over time.

Since the international breakthrough of The Sugarcubes and Björk in the late 1980s, the Anglophone discourse surrounding Icelandic popular music has proven to be the latest instance of a long history of representation in which the North Atlantic island is imagined as an icy periphery on the edge of European civilization. This mode of representation is especially prominent in the discourse surrounding post-rock band Sigur Rós. This article offers a critical reading of the band's reception in the Anglo-American music press during the period of their breakthrough in the UK and USA. Interpretative strategies among listeners and critics are scrutinised using the concept of borealism (Schram 2011) in order to examine attitudes towards the Nordic regions evident in the portrayals of Sigur Rós. Reception issues then form the basis for a musical analysis of a seminal track in the band's history, aiming to demonstrate how specific details in Sigur Rós's style relate to its reception and the discourse surrounding it. The article finds that much of the metaphorical language present in the band's reception can be linked to techniques of musical spatiality, the unusual sound of the bowed electric guitar and non-normative uses of voice and language.