Kind of Blue has been misrepresented by its promoters. The roots in the blues of the best-selling jazz album have repeatedly been obscured in favour of modal features whose associations are less problematic for those coping with the realities of racial injustice. The case that the blues underpins the modal language of the album is made through reconsideration of the claims made for compositional features of individual tracks. Recognition of the transformed blues language that lies at the heart of the album places questions of its significance on a new footing, opening up the mix of musical languages on the album to interpretation within the context of integrationist ideals of the late 1950s. A critical reading of the album against this backdrop leads to the suggestion that the ongoing commercial success of the album can be partly attributed to a retention of integrationist ideals that masks the reality of persistent inequalities in race relations.

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).

Linguistic diversity poses a significant but not insuperable obstacle to transnational flows of popular music in East Asia. This paper reviews strategies that are used to overcome language barriers, especially the use of English by mainstream artists. Although this strategy has met with some success, it can be problematic in that it involves the negotiation of new artist identities with audiences. This negotiation of identities is illustrated by an analysis of YouTube comments on two English-language music videos by established Asian-language singers – Tata Young's ‘Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy’ and Utada Hikaru's ‘Easy Breezy’, which indicates that language, ethnic and gender identities are all problematised when these singers choose to sing in English.

The article begins with a short history of German gangsta rap, followed by an overview of central theories and key concepts in hip-hop studies. It then focuses on a case study of a German gangsta rapper called Kollegah, who became one of Germany's most commercially successful artists of the past few years. The case study is divided into three parts: the first involves a deconstruction of both his artistic persona and his strategies of appropriating hip-hop cultures. This is followed by a closer look at two Kollegah productions, focusing on his rhyming and signifying skills. By adding a cursory qualitative media analysis of both Internet fan forums and print and television artefacts about Kollegah, very contradictory reactions can be depicted. The article is finally able to illustrate that this artist makes great use of a (typically German?) flavour of virtuosity and that he can draw from a very unique set of capital. Kollegah is viewed as representing a successful strategy of cultural appropriation and the use of different types of capital within the network of music business in its post-digital era.

In an article entitled ‘Sexist Pulp ads attacked’, the Independent on Sunday (IoS) reported public reaction to the posters advertising Pulp's new album This is Hardcore (posters had been defaced with the words ‘this is sexist’), and described the advertisements as part of a turn away from political correctness towards a new ‘anything goes’ realism (Kelly and Clay 1998). The poster shows the naked upper torso of a woman face down on a red leather cushion, in an awkward and ambivalent posture, with lipsticked, half-open mouth. Emblazoned across the centre of the image (which is a reproduction of the album cover) are the words ‘This is Hardcore’ in pink capitals. A leader in the paper on the same day, under the heading ‘This is violent. This is offensive’, interprets the image as a demeaning, sexist and violent representation of women and as an offence to the record-buying public. The leader asserts that ‘Just to sell a few songs, it shows a woman violated’, and concludes with the words: ‘To ban it [the poster] now would only generate more publicity for Pulp. So the only advice we have is for anyone thinking of buying the album. Don't bother.’ (IoS Leader, 1998, p. 4)

by focusing on brief examples from four writers – journalists anthony decurtis and lester bangs, academics sheila whiteley and susan mcclary – this piece is designed to inspire and/or shame readers into paying closer attention to how they use language when they describe or analyse music. an effort was made to keep the tone of the critiques informal and conversational, thus approximating the mood of the kind of session the author has found effective in more than thirty years of editing at the village voice, and many years of teaching writing to ambitious undergraduates as well as a class full of journalism grad students. in such sessions, the intention is always to better enable the writer to say what he or she wants to say as convincingly as possible. if ideas are called into question, that is because the editor believes them to be overly familiar, inconsistent, or already discarded by the writer's audience. what is at issue is the writing, not the writer. this is not to deny, unfortunately, that sometimes hurt feelings ensue.

it should be added that the references to magic initially addressed the conference theme ‘this magic moment’. given the essay's nuts-and-bolts attitude, however, they retain a more general relevance.

We trace the history of Indonesian Islamic metal bands, including Purgatory, Tengkorak and Kodusa, and the One Finger Movement that revolved around these bands (centred mainly on Jakarta). We look at the differences in symbols, heroes, rituals and values between One Finger Movement bands and the Bandung (Indonesia) secular Death Metal scene. We also study Bandung Death Metal band Saffar, which was known for its Islamic lyrics on its debut album but which has been for a few years in something of a limbo owing to the departure of vocalist and lyricist Parjo. We also look at Saffar's positioning of itself as a ‘secular’ band with Islamic and Anti-Zionist lyrical themes rather than as an Islamic band per se. This dichotomy can be best explained by the phrase ‘a band of Muslims rather than a Muslim band’. The secular Bandung scene context is a significant explanatory factor here.

Jimi Hendrix was often characterised by his exotic appearance and extravagant performance, but underneath these trappings was an extraordinary guitarist who managed to transform some of the key elements of blues and rhythm-and-blues traditions. An important feature of Hendrix’s music is his characteristic use of the seventh chord with a sharp ninth, or the augmented ninth chord, now often referred to as the ‘Hendrix chord’. This paper examines some ways in which Hendrix used this chord by surveying and drawing comparisons between various instances. It is not necessarily the fully voiced version of the chord that Hendrix used, but interval combinations drawn from or related to it, with particular timbres and articulations. Together these define what might be called a ‘sharp ninth sound’. Through register placement, timbre, articulation, and chordal function, it is intimately tied to the blues idiom, adding a blues tonal element. This is one aspect of Hendrix’s music, then, that shows his deep roots in the blues.

In this article I hope to take on some questions of meaning in a rock vocal performance, examining Patti Smith's reworked version of Van Morrison's garage band standard ‘Gloria’. By looking particularly at Smith's textual accretions and timbral manipulation, I will demonstrate some of the ways that her performance can be thought of as an intertextual, critical recasting of Morrison's tale of male sexual conquest. Smith's ‘Gloria’ differs from Morrison's not only in its altered lyric text, but also in a number of musical details which include harmonic structure, melodic range and form. In this article, though, I devote the most attention to Smith's timbral manipulation, especially the ways that she alters her pronunciation of words for expressive ends. In order to examine this in detail, I have developed a system of notation that tracks Smith's sung vowel sounds alongside her use of pitch. Some of the sonic details so revealed will be used to construct a meta-narrative of Smith's ‘Gloria’ performance.

The sociologist Simon Frith identifies rock and roll as a hybrid music, which emerged in the American South of the mid-1950s as a grafting of puritanical ‘white’ country and western lyrics on to sexually explicit ‘black’ blues rhythms. While acknowledging cross-fertilisation between black and white music ‘since at least the middle of the nineteenth century’, he states that since the Second World War,

It is as dance music that black music has developed its meanings for white users. The most obvious feature of dancing as an activity is its sexuality.… Whereas Western dance forms control sexuality with formal rhythms… black music celebrates sex with a directly physical beat and an intense, emotional sound. It makes obvious the potential anarchy of sexual feeling.

(Frith 1978, p. 180)

Frith appeals to an age-old metaphor: black nature is seen as fundamentally threatening to white culture. In modern popular music, this conflict is played out in terms of the liberation or the repression of sexuality.*

The town of Skagen is situated on the northernmost tip of Jutland (i.e., mainland Denmark). This is a remote and crisis-stricken area by Danish standards: the capital, Copenhagen, is eight hours away by train, the County of Northern Jutland has the highest unemployment rates in Denmark, and in recent years the region has been the target of several development projects financed by European Union funds. However, geographically, Skagen's position is quite central in Scandinavia. Ferry routes connect the nearby port of Frederikshavn (40 kilometres/25 miles away) with such relatively large Scandinavian cities as Oslo (9 hours away by ferry) and Gothenburg (3½ hours away). The town can also be reached from the south of Norway via the ferry route between Kristiansand and Hirtshals (also 40 kilometres/25 miles from Skagen). By these and other routes, tourists from Norway and Sweden, as well as from other parts of Denmark, regularly invade the town, in the summer season roughly doubling its 15,000 population.

This article deals with one of the first Eurorock waves: Indorock. This style was created in Holland by people who for political reasons migrated from Indonesia to Holland during the 1950s. They warmed Holland up to the sounds of rock and roll. Unhappy with their prospects in the Dutch entertainment industry, they went east to make a living as professional musicians in Germany. There Indorock was the trend, until British Merseybeat swept it away.

What do Michel Rivard's ‘Un trou dans les nuages’ and Marjo's ‘Les chats sauvages’ have in common? Both songs were released in 1987 by two well-known French-speaking Québécois artists; they sold over 500,000 copies each and remained on the Top-Ten chart of Radio-Activité for over seventy weeks. These songs were played repeatedly on AM and FM radio stations in Quebec. However, unlike most other hits, Rivard's middle of the road (MOR) ballad was even heard on dance-music radios and Marjo's slow-beat rock appeared on the regular playlist of stations devoted primarily to easy-listening music! In fact, these songs are two examples of ‘transformat’ radio music, that is songs that get airplay on various stations which according to their respective operating license, should specialise in different musical genres and display contrasting programming styles. Using examples drawn from an exploratory study of radio music in private (commercial) FM stations in the Eastern Townships (Québec), this article will address some of the issues raised by transformat music. After a brief analytical portrait of Canada's radio policies and format regulations, I shall examine contrasting explanations of this phenomenon which focus on genre/style, state policy and business/industry. In the closing section, I shall present outlines of an alternative approach which rests upon the acknowledgement of the specific contribution of radio to the social production of popular music and addresses transformats as the outcome of creative repetition broadcasting devices.

Since the late 1990s, a thriving scene of pop music has developed among the numerically very small and globally highly dispersed Tibetan exile community. This clearly connects it with globalisation and the spread of what is termed the neoliberal phase of capitalism to India and Nepal where most Tibetan exiles live, and the related spread of digital recording technology and facilities – commodities produced by often large, multinational corporations. Yet this micro industry is not profitable, and even though it is pop music and monetised, it is not ‘commercial’, and in fact is seen and structured more as ‘community work’. Exile Tibetan pop music thus cannot be located outside of capitalism, yet at the same time it is not in and of itself capitalist. In this paper, the author explores new ways in which we can locate music in capitalism, looking beyond the ideas of commercialism or commoditisation and takeover or resistance that have dominated theoretical approaches since Adorno and have fixed popular music especially with a still-enduring ‘capitalist’ image. The author draws in particular on the historian Fernand Braudel's model of capitalism as an ‘anti-market’ that lies ‘on top’ of other social and economic layers. Thus capitalism exerts global hegemony, yet there remain uneven spaces such as exile Tibetan pop music, which are in and of themselves not capitalist, existing within it and because of it.

Punk is an extreme manifestation of the rock project, meaning that it depends on an association of raw and authentic expression with blackness, musically represented by particular approaches to the blues, combined with processes of white appropriation, transformation and obfuscation of those blues resources. Punk's powerful affect largely derives from the tension between punk's blues foundations and strategies that obscure its roots. Punk treatments and transformations of the blues include: (1) moving from multi-part, three-chord harmonic schemes to riffs and one- and two-chord vamps; (2) taking a new approach to vocal performance styles; and (3) retaining certain melodic approaches, such as the use of pentatonic scales and monophonic textures. Punk's complex relationship to the blues, including the history of negation and erasure, continues to be a central part of the punk aesthetic.

Almost since their inception film and television have employed music as background accompaniment. Despite this obvious fact, the significance of such musical accompaniment has been underestimated by most researchers (see Tagg 1979). The contemporary conjunction of video technology, communication satellites and cable-TV has created a media environment in which television featuring music videos has thrived, and in which media researchers are no longer able to ignore the synchronisation of aural and visual content. While the idea of synchronising musical and visual presentation is itself not new (see Aufderheide 1986), its realisation in the modern music video presents those seeking to describe and explain media behaviour with a new set of problems and tasks.

Scholars in the field of literary theory have defined clearly the role of signifying in African-American literature. This article identifies one aspect of the signifying tradition and its influence on the early blues tradition. Since the Signifying Monkey is the ultimate trickster in the African-American narrative tradition, this article presents evidence for considering the blues singer as a trickster figure at several different levels. First, the singer identifies with the trickster's character traits through pseudo-autobiographical content in song narratives, particularly in expressing socially aggressive or unacceptable exploits. Second, the trickster figure can be perceived as the singer's alter ego, as in songs about the boll weevil and similar folk characters. Third, the topics or tropes associated with crossroads and railways, used frequently in blues texts, relate to the liminal nature of Esu-Elegbara (the African ancestor of the Signifying Monkey), who embodies the boundary between the word and its (mis)interpretation.

The use of computers is continuously changing the sound of records but also increasingly challenging established forms of live concert aesthetics. So what becomes of creativity and expressivity in the live performance? In this study, we present an artist-oriented approach to this question through interviews with artists invested in performing studio works on stage, as well as improvising musicians using studio technology in their concerts. We find that challenges to creative authorship and expressive agency are constantly negotiated through evolving practices of up- and down-scaling particular aspects of studio works on stage, as well as designing technological setups tailored to individual forms of improvisation. While these practices challenge deep-rooted notions of the ‘right’ or appropriate bond between musician and music, the appropriation of studio technology in live performance has clearly become an integral part of many artists’ continual exploration of their musical agency.

Although a wheelchair-user and permanently disabled through polio, the southern American singer Connie Boswell was one of radio and vaudeville's biggest stars in the 1930s. She and her sisters were a compelling force in American popular entertainment for the first half of the decade; and when the group split in 1936, Connie carried on a solo career in radio, recording, film and television for another twenty-five years. Connie's unique position as the only visibly disabled ‘A-list’ female popular entertainer for most of the twentieth century – and one whose voice, both physical and musical, shaped the sound of jazz and popular music – makes her an obvious focus for any study that links popular music and disability. This essay is concerned with how disability may have operated as a discourse about and within Connie's chosen medium, jazz; and how disability studies can illuminate why the ways in which difference is figured in her work, initially a source of anxiety, could have also been a significant reason for her success.