In this paper, I examine several aspects of pop-rock music that are characterised by the childlike use of language. Relying on the theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – particularly on their concept of ‘becoming-child’ – I locate, describe and analyse three distinct childlike strategies common in pop-rock: the use of gibberish and nonsense that unbinds language from sense, enabling it to release its own expressive intensities; the utilisation of baby talk and other childlike vocal mannerisms, drawing attention to the physical properties of the act of singing as bodily experimentation; and different forms of repetition that ‘shake’ sense out of words, allowing them to draw their own lines of flight. Foregrounding these strategies, I ultimately claim, expands our understanding of pop-rock music while problematising its traditional interpretation as ‘rebellious’ music, offering its positive, productive qualities and ‘minoritarian’ politics as an alternative to the restricting dichotomy between oppression and liberation implied by the concept of rebellion.

Between about 1580 and 1690, early modern England experienced three interrelated developments: first, the growth of a successful commercial popular music industry, centred on London, which served a socially broad national market; secondly, the development of political parties, emerging from the political and religious turmoil of the period, which impinged significantly upon the newly burgeoning popular music industry and its markets; thirdly, a substantial increase in the per capita consumption of alcoholic drinks across all social classes, for reasons of sociability rather than health or nutrition. This article explores the unexpected effects of these changes on cultures of politics, drink and song across the whole period. In particular, it explores the way in which the Cavaliers of the 1650s and the new ‘Tory’ party of the 1680s used the medium of song to encourage excessive drinking and the political and social denigration of sobriety in order to promote loyal obedience.

Is the proportion of German language music in total record sales in Germany a cause for optimism or for concern? This question is very difficult to answer as the national branch of the IFPI only supplies statistics on ‘national repertoire’ and not specifically on ‘national language repertoire’ – and even that covers music sung in any language, not only in German. Since the call for a music quota for radio stations lacks a precise definition (German or German language) there is some reason to suspect that the real aim behind this discussion is not to support German music culture but rather national economic interests. As a matter of fact, the average proportion of German language songs in the charts is currently the highest it has been in the last thirty years.

An analysis of the Top 20 in the national end-of-year charts of various European countries shows that the number of national language songs is generally increasing again after a substantial decline in the 1980s and 1990s. This is the case not only with record sales but also with airplay. This means that the increase cannot only be due to the massive drop in sales of international repertoire caused by file sharing on the Internet.

Musicals, like all popular texts and forms of art have an explicitly reflexive relationship with the societies from which they stem. As well as reflecting the historical and cultural character of society they voice society's own sense of its life and values. They are properly analysed, therefore, in terms of what Geertz (1975) has termed the ‘thick description’ of culture, whereby their organisation, construction and meaning is treated in terms of how they are lodged in, and lodge within themselves, the cultural and social structures of the society of which they are a social expression and with which they are reflexively engaged.

‘Radio’ records have always been with us. And breakfast show records, as the first two golden oldies above testify, have formed a major subset of these. Cynics will know why. Radio's peak audience has always been breakfast time, so airplay then can ‘break’ your record, leading to the obvious course of action, flatter the breakfast dj's self-importance by singing about him. But in Britain in 1989 things have changed. Nowadays it seems the best way to get breakfast airplay for a new record is to slag off radio djs ruthlessly. There have always been ‘anti-radio’ records. But few can have enjoyed the recent chart and airplay success of both The Reynolds Girls and The Beatmasters. Both records are riddled with contradictions. Both were written by men in their thirties, yet address a disgruntled teenage audience: The Reynolds Girls appearing to speak for twelve-year-old Yazz fans; The Beatmasters apparently voicing the protest of excluded hip-hop fans. Yet, despite articulating distinct objections to airplay policy, both records were almost certainly bought, in large numbers, by radio listeners. They turn up on the same radio shows. Why not? A hit is a hit.

L’Orchestra, a cooperative established in 1974/75, based in Milan, Italy, was a unique organisation, involving musicians, sound and lighting engineers, music critics and teachers, and concert managers. It was started as a kind of artists’ union, a federation of folk, rock, political song, jazz, avant-garde groups, but in a few months it became a concert agency and a record company; it held music courses for amateurs and published music tutorials; it helped managing the first multipurpose art/social centre in Milan. L’Orchestra promoted studies along various disciplinary perspectives (sociology, music education, ideological criticism, semiotics) that in some respects embody and in others help explain the development of popular music studies and of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) in Italy.

When New Zealand’s ‘third-way’ Labour government came to power in 1999 it placed a greater policy and funding emphasis on the arts and culture. Like other ‘promotional states’ (Cloonan 1999) the Labour government sought to support the domestic popular music industry through a voluntary radio quota. Drawing on qualitative research, this article describes the ways in which the state, through New Zealand on Air, negotiates and leverages domestic popular music artists onto commercial radio. In this process, state agents mobilise social networks to ‘join-up’ commercially appropriate artists to radio programmers. The success of this programme is based upon state agents developing an institutional isomorphism with existing music industry practices. Even so, popular music makers contest New Zealand on Air’s sympathetic policy settings by citing forms of institutional exclusion.

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.

Popular music, like all manifestations of popular culture, lives on in spite of recurring criticisms that cast it as somehow inauthentic. In fact, defences against this discounting are built into popular music (for example, the Rolling Stones' classic: ‘It's only rock 'n' roll but I like it’) and built in, as well, to the identities of those who make the music a part of their lives, be they players, producers, consumers or critics. On the other hand, so-called classical music, not unlike other manifestations of Western European art culture, lives on in spite of popular music and provides the touchstone of authenticity that creates the defensive popular response. The ideas I am advancing here are intended to allow the players in this authenticity contest to be recognised as evidence of unique historical circumstances: recognised, that is, not only as stock dramatists of ethnocentrism, but as indicators of long-term changes in music cultures in all parts of the world.

This special issue of Popular Music honours the contribution of a distinguished musicologist to the study of popular music. It was Wilfrid Mellers who, together with Charles Hamm, pioneered the study of popular music as a respectable undertaking within musicology before popular music studies itself began to become a continuing and critical intellectual tradition in the late 1970s. As with Charles Hamm, Wilfrid Mellers' contribution to the study of popular music has not been restricted to scholarship alone. As founding Chair of the Department of Music at the University of York, Wilfrid Mellers created an intellectual and institutional environment within which it was possible for undergraduate and graduate students alike to undertake the serious academic study of popular music. Without this environment it is possible that the careers both of Richard Middleton and myself would have turned out differently.

On the surface, a study of the evolution of a particular regional Afro-American folk-music style does not appear to be directly connected with the development of popular music. Yet, in one way or another since the 1930s, Son House, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, aspects of whose music I discuss here, have all influenced both the development of black blues and, in a much wider context, American and European popular music in general. Johnson and then House became cult figures of the 1960s American folk-music ‘revival’; Waters's Chicago rhythm and blues, which he developed in the late 1940s, have sustained him with black and, subsequently, white audiences since that time, his early commercial recordings being absorbed and sometimes emulated by groups such as the Rolling Stones.

The Beastie Boys are usually described as the white hip hop group who helped break rap to a broad-based white audience. Rarely is it acknowledged that the Beasties all came from Jewish backgrounds. This article examines the implications of the Beastie Boys’ Jewishness. The Beasties can be placed in a long history of Jewish entertainers reworking black music for white American audiences. By the 1980s, Jews in the United States had been assimilated into whiteness, yet it is clear that the memory of discrimination lived on. The members of the Beasties played with whiteness – performed in whiteface – while being very aware of their own Jewishness and the implications of this. With the advice and mentoring of African American Russell Simmons and the Jewish Rick Rubin, the group gained respect in the black community as legitimate rappers and then set out to perform as uncivil rock performers for white audiences. This article argues that the Beasties’ Jewishness was central to their success as the group that brought rap to a mainstream white American audience.

Recent research shows that the English folksong collectors, who were active before the First World War, systematically selected what they took down from rural working-class singers, basing their selection on what they considered to be worth preserving from such singers' repertories. Their work, then, can only give us a biased and highly mediated impression of popular singing traditions (see Harker 1972 and 1982; Gammon 1980). The purpose of this article is to see if it is possible to go beyond the work of the collectors, to try to grasp something of the wholeness of popular nineteenth-century singing traditions, and also to situate those traditions socially.

Increased market concentration of multinational record companies, greater integration of major labels with international multi-media and entertainment conglomerates, as well as long economic recession were among the most striking developments of the 1980s to impact upon music-related industries. In the French-speaking province of Quebec (Canada), these developments, combined with local socio-political turmoil, left popular music in the throes of crisis and further jeopardised an indigenous music industry still in the making. The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which a local industry, by coming to terms with the aforementioned international developments, overcame what could well have spelled its doom.

In his article ‘Rock music and politics in Italy’, Umberto Fiori deploys the example of an open-air concert by Genesis in Tirrenia in the province of Pisa, promoted in the summer of 1982 by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) as part of its annual Feste dell'Unita, as a summary example of de-politicisation of the consumption and production of rock music in Italy, and the institutionalisation of the oppositional, dissenting aspects of rock music that had previously been so potent there throughout the 1970s. To Fiori, the Genesis concert represented

an unmistakeable step forward in the slow process of the ‘normalisation’ of the relationship between rock and politics in Italy. Explosive material until a few years before, rock music in the 1980s seems to have returned to being a commodity like any other, even in Italy. The songs are once again simply songs, the public is the public. The musicians are only interested in their work, and the organisers make their expected profits. If they happen to be a political party, so much the better: they can also profit in terms of public image and perhaps even votes. … Italy now learnt how to institutionalise deviation and transgression. An ‘acceptable’ gap was re-established between fiction and reality, desire and action, and music and political practice. (Fiori 1984, pp. 261–2)

Scholars of popular music in the 1990s are increasingly aware that traditional musicology has failed to recognise commercial pop music as a legitimate academic area of study. Intransigence on the part of many Western music institutions towards recognising the field of popular music study is attributable to issues that have been heatedly debated and discussed in most disciplines of popular music study. Even withstanding the expansion of critical approaches in the 1970s, which paved the way forward to the emergence of new musicological discourses by the late 1980s, musicologists engaged in popular music research have continued to feel some sense of isolation from the mainstream for obvious reasons. The implications of consumerism, commercialism, trend and hype, with the vigorous endorsement of modernist ideologies, have repeatedly curtailed any serious opportunity for studying popular music in Western music institutions. To start accommodating this area of music within any musicological discourse, scholars active within the field of popular music have had to branch out into new interdisciplinary directions to locate and interpret the ideological strands of meaning that bind pop music to its political, cultural and social context. Musical codes and idiolects are in the first instance culturally derived, with communication processes constructing the cultural norms that determine our cognition and emotional responses to musical sound (Ruud 1986). Any proposal of popular music analysis therefore needs to seek the junctures at which a range of texts interlock with musicology. Similarly, the point at which consumer demand and musical authenticity fuse requires careful consideration; it is the commodification of pop music that continues to problematise the process of its aesthetic evaluation within our Western culture.

This article addresses the ideologies developed by Portuguese music journalists towards Portuguese music in the context of the global crisis in the record industry. Music journalists who were once seen as the good Samaritans in coverage of the national repertoire have to reconcile their duty to cover the national acts with the pressures of a global music industry represented by the multinational record companies. Gathering information from interviews conducted between 2001 and 2003, I trace the perceptions of music journalists on coverage of the national repertoire in a period in which a global crisis in the music sector became noticeable and low airplay of Portuguese music became a matter of concern for agents within the local industry. Two approaches emerge from such a context, one more proactive towards coverage of Portuguese music, the other less interested in allowing the influence of the origin filter to determine the journalists' agenda. I conclude that in these two approaches the traditional opposition between music journalists and the music industry needs to be revised.

This article responds to Frith and Cloonan's (2008) call for researchers considering the relationship between the state and popular music to analyse more closely the ideologies of governance that undergird music policy. Building on Cloonan's ‘promotional state’ and drawing on recent New Zealand experience, this paper shows how New Zealand's Labour government (1999–2008) developed policies to support the export of ‘Kiwi’ pop which requires a reconsideration of state music policy as interventions in the market. The work of the New Zealand Music Commission in generating and coordinating working partnerships with diverse music industry actors illustrates emerging forms of ‘after neo-liberal’ ideology and governance, wherein state-related actors and musicians each and together adapt to market arrangements through supply side, social inclusion and new institutional policy settings and modalities. This article offers points of comparison to types of ideological and governing/institutional formations we can expect to see emerging in promotional states elsewhere.

The idea I have in mind is to compare the situation on television today and thirty years ago of what persists in being known as classical music. I write as an academic, but this will not be a normal academic paper. For one thing, I shall not do any special research but base myself instead on memory and autobiographical experience, because thirty years ago, before becoming an academic, I began by writing music criticism and making documentaries on music for television. My intention is to say something as a participant observer about the alteration of the cultural context in which this thing called classical music operates, and about the part that television has played in this.