This article was triggered by a conversation with Jan Fairley, some years back, when she first put to me her idea for a special Middle East issue of Popular Music. My natural enthusiasm was tempered with some quite fundamental reservations. Was there such a phenomenon as ‘popular music’, in any generally accepted sense of the word, in Middle Eastern society? And if so, how were we to identify its repertoires, musicians and contexts? Could a useful distinction be made between ‘popular’ and ‘non-popular’ (or specifically, ‘art’ music) genres? And who, among my Middle Eastern music colleagues, would consider themselves scholars of ‘popular music’? As we discussed these and other such questions, Jan homed in on the truism that, for me, drawing from my experiences in Tunisian music, hit the nub of the problem: ‘of course, “popular” is different from “traditional”’.

On 12 July 1989, the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) announced that the Greater London FM licence would go to London Jazz Radio (LJR). This franchise was allocated as part of the expansion of commercial radio in Britain. As in most other countries, the British state owns the electromagnetic spectrum. This allows the government to choose who can broadcast over the airwaves. However, unlike most industrialised countries, the British state chooses not to use all the frequencies made available for broadcasting under international treaties. Instead, there has been a ‘duopoly’ between the radio stations of the state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and commercial stations authorised by the IBA. This limitation on the number of radio stations makes the British broadcasting system seem backward compared not only with the USA, but also the rest of the European Community. However, this oligopoly is now slowly collapsing. The licencing of LJR was a first stage of a period of rapid growth in commercial radio in Britain.

The East of Germany, the Bundesländer of the former GDR, is an important centre of Goth activity. The Goth scene is remarkably large in this part of Germany, and one of the most important yearly Goth festivals, the Wave-Gotik-Treffen, takes place in Leipzig. This article investigates the specific characteristics and internal dynamics of East German Goth subcultures after German reunification. Combining subcultural theory and Gothic criticism with Derrida's notions of spectrality and hauntology, the potentials of Gothic as a form of cultural criticism are explored in an investigation of the psycho-social wasteland of the undead GDR. It will be argued that post-Cold War unification has not only led to a new political order, but has also given rise to a new type of Gothicism, as East German Goth subculture is haunted by ‘spectres of Marx’ that provide a critical engagement with globalised capital and media. As a specifically German version of the worldwide Goth scene, moreover, it marks the local boundedness of globalised subcultures.

Television is one of the earliest ways that children gain access to popular music. The child's early experience of both music and television does not necessarily separate out ‘music alone’ from his or her evolving musical appreciation. The co-operation of television and popular music encourage particular modes of attention and expression for the child as both viewer and listener. Movement, gesture, and the response of the body to the visual and aural cues of music-television may be seen to inform this appreciation. The child learns, feels and demonstrates that they have done so. This is guided and inspired by what they hear and see.

This paper examines the genre of tracks centred around the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s which include aural representations of female sexual pleasure. The two most important tracks, and the ones on which this paper focuses, are Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’ and Donna Summer ‘Love To Love You Baby’. The paper argues that this new audibility of female sexual pleasure related to the transformation in the understanding of female orgasm associated with Alfred Kinsey and with William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the American sexologists who radically changed Western understandings of sexual behaviour in the 1950s and 1960s. More broadly, the paper argues for a link between the so-called sexual revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s and the popularity of tracks in which sounds identified as female sexual pleasure were upfront in the musical mix.

Hip-hop studies have historically centred on issues of the ‘street’ or virtuosic lyricism and flow, foregrounded as evidence of the ‘seriousness’ of the genre. While these have undoubtedly been valuable theoretical approaches, the prominence of social networking in the 2010s (with its vast implications for communication and identity politics) has sculpted a generation of rappers whose vocal style and self-representation disintegrate prior assumptions about hip-hop identity. These artists, who have flourished in tandem with the rise of streaming services, have been disparagingly dubbed ‘mumble rap’ by traditionalists owing to the apparent indecipherability of their vocals and a lack of emphasis on observational or poetic lyricism. In this article I argue that this myopic label undervalues the groundbreakingly post-verbal nature of the music being created by these rappers, and highlights the innovations of mumble rap, exploring the centrality of social media, memes and streaming to its existence while critically examining its protagonists’ unconventionally stylised vocals. After analysing the impact of streaming, information overload and audience participation (through social media hype and memes) on contemporary hip-hop, I survey the growth of melodic Auto-Tuned vocals and repetitive lyricism in the work of pioneering mumble rappers such as Future, before turning to an extended examination of Atlanta's Young Thug, whose controversially malleable vocal style, which prioritises experimentation with vocal textures while confounding the rules of hip-hop flow, is mirrored by his impulsive exploitation of social media and androgynous fashion sense, establishing him as the most revolutionary archetype of so-called mumble rap.

There is an apocryphal legend that when Louis Armstrong was asked whether he considered his music to be folk music he replied: ‘Wal, yeah, I guess so: leastways, I never heard of no horse making it.’ If and when we talk of Bob Dylan as a folk singer, we do so partly of course in this fundamental sense: his music is of, about and for people. But we also mean — as Satchmo's interviewer must have done — that Dylan calls on resources and techniques that pertain to oral cultures rather than ostensibly to our own. Unlike ‘real’ folk song, Dylan's words and music are written down; yet what is notated is no more than an approximation to the sounds heard, which are created empirically for each performance, from verbal inflection and from the body's gestures. Dylan is a ‘folk’ artist in that his sources are absorbed at a more or less pre-conscious level: from the monody and banjo-picking of ‘poor white’ Americans and the traditions of white British folk music behind them; from the black blues and the African heritage it stemmed from; and from some more sophisticated, or at least literate, sources such as white hymn, march and parlour ballad. To these musical roots there are literary parallels: Dylan's verses have been deeply influenced by rural folk ballads, by the poetry of the blues, by the Bible, by Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (scarcely less pervasive in the Bible belts than the Good Book itself), by Hymns Ancient and Modern, by children's rhymes and by runic verse of all kinds, including Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, which are close to the core of Dylan's experience and which, although literary, were sung by the poet himself to improvised, presumably folk-like, tunes. In his early days Dylan operated with his voice — untrained, ‘natural’, veering between speech and song — and his acoustic guitar.

The contemporary popular music audience in Japan is exposed to a large variety of music, both domestic and imported; tastes are well defined. In particular, such factors as: the singer's ‘image’, what I call maintaining a standard formula, ambiguity and sentimentalism can be pinpointed as important to the music's appeal. In spite of this, the similarities of Japanese popular music to Western musical styles can suggest that a conventional musical analysis will be sufficient for understanding this music. Thus, many critics who evaluate Japanese popular music usually consider it merely a parody of the ‘correct’ styles that they are accustomed to hearing. Concentrating merely on the musical analysis, however, underestimates the cultural factors that give Japanese popular music distinctive characteristics which are highly valued in Japan. To offset the shortcomings of such analysis, this article is an attempt to examine Japanese popular music in terms of those cultural factors most important to popular music genres. The first section is a general review of current trends in popular music in Japan, paying particular attention to the characteristics that make the music uniquely ‘Japanese’.

This article explores how the use of mobile phones has changed the contemporary Finnish soundscape. The change manifests itself firstly via telephone conversations which have spread from private premises to public places and secondly via interchangeable ringing tones. Drawing on research carried out among cellular phone users, the article argues that the ringing tones are selected on the basis of musical taste, so they can no longer be regarded as impersonal telephone signals. They can be used as a means of distinction and identity like any music. Even if the quality of ringing tones is inferior to the original interpretation of the tune, they can still be considered to be music, because of their personal and collective associations.

The Finnish government has historically been active in regulating the practices of popular music. At the same time, the music industry, rock media and musicians have traditionally insisted on markets free from state intervention. This article focuses on the history of the interrelationship between cultural policy and popular music, especially rock exports, in Finland. It argues that the high level of organised forms of culture and the lure of internationalism form the historical basis for the nation-state–popular music relationship in Finland. Following the demands for ‘competitive society’ in the 1990s and the international breakthroughs of Finnish pop and rock music performers after 2000, this relationship has intensified. Contemporary policy is in many ways healthier than in the past, yet it also raises crucial questions about hierarchies and identity relationships in popular music and society.

Popular music policy making incorporates the art and rationality of ‘governmentality’. In doing so it seeks to move beyond benign policy making efforts and some of the prevailing approaches to cultural policy studies – primarily arts policy – to apply interventionary strategies into the space dominated by global recording companies. Major recording companies and the business-as-usual approach of Return on Investment dominates local and national popular music through the macro-level perspective of global trade regimes, thereby avoiding the micro-level activities needed by citizens locally. Critical approaches to the potential loss of localised music production in the face of globalisation are drawn from the heterodox, interdisciplinary schools of institutional economics which, in this case, uses instrumentalism to create a model that insists on research-based popular music making policies that respond to citizen needs. Using examples from the Australian experience, the Instrumental Policy Behaviour Process (IPBP) is proposed as a model for generating localised, resource-allocating approaches to popular music policy making.

The globalisation of reggae continues to engender a wide range of highly poignant re-inscriptions and re-interpretations of reggae's sound and of Rastafarian thought. One of the most compelling of these has been the negotiation of Rastafarian and Christian ideologies within the context of Protestant reggae bands and artists. The application of Rastafarian thought, dress and language to the evangelical concerns of Protestants – at times paradoxical, at others ingenious – signals an important moment of inter-religious contact that opens a window onto the complexities and multiple meanings that attach to music and to religious systems as they travel between the local and the global. This essay considers music by Christafari (United States), Sherwin Gardner (Trinidad and Tobago), and Stitchie (Jamaica), and considers questions related to the parallel globalisation of reggae and Rastafari. It does this by interrogating the extent to which authenticity, positionality, and religious context inform the use of and interpretation of Rastafari symbols within gospel reggae. In so doing, I introduce a concept that I call the negotiation of proximity, and offer some reflections on the ways that the Rastafari elements within gospel reggae might be understood in new, global (and newly localised) contexts.

This article presents the historical transformation of Finnish commercial radio popular music policies from 1985 to 2005 and contemplates the role of terrestrial radio in contemporary digital age. It argues that a sender-centred paradigm of early commercial radio was replaced swiftly by receiver-centred paradigm, which has been applied since the early 1990s. The change of radio music cultures is described in detail by dividing it into three different eras: Block Radio, Format Radio and Media Convergence. The study draws on the research project consisting of case studies analysing the music content of various radio stations. The primary empirical data is composed of 32 interviews of radio personnel and the analysis of 4,500 individual songs broadcast by popular music radio stations with newspaper and journal articles supporting the primary data. Radio music culture is approached theoretically from the ethnomusicological perspective and thus defined as all practices that have an effect on broadcast music, including the processes of acquiring, selecting and governing music. The empirical results of the study show that the transformation of radio music cultures is affected by economic, technological, legal, organisational and cultural factors.

It has been a long time since Japan was first considered an economic power. Japanese automobile, electronic and computer companies have entered the world market and are now competing fiercely with each other. Their financial power and technologies are focused both domestically and overseas, and their launch into culture through advertising strategies is another facet of that power which has emerged since the 1980s (Un'no 1990).

This article investigates how the concrete sound of and recording process behind a pop tune relate to the possibilities and constraints of its electronic media. After a brief presentation of some theoretical issues related to the question of mediation and materiality, we address the claim that digitisation erases the material aspects of mediation through an investigation of contemporary popular music. Through a close analysis of the sound (and the silence) in Madonna's song ‘Don't Tell Me’, from the album Music (2000), as well as in a handful of related examples, we argue that one can indeed identify specific aural qualities associated with digital sound, and that these qualities may be used to achieve different aesthetic effects as well as to shed light on mediation and medium specificity as such.

The country singer Gram Parsons (1946-73) has in the last decade been increasingly cited as a seminal influence upon the development of contemporary alt.country and the roots/americana revivial. This article critiques Parsons and his music within the realm of contextual theology, using him as a bridge to examine the wider issue of what a theology of country music might entail. Both Parsons and Country Music in general are strongly religious in language, ethos and culture, yet the theology articulated both explicitly and implicitly is not evangelical as those outside the genre and culture might assume. Rather, the theology of country music involves a gospel of liminality, a theology of redemptive transgression that is expressed in ‘white spirituals’ where the song is a locus of grace. The article asks if Parsons was a locus of grace; are his songs those of liminal presence; does country music employ a theology of redemptive transgression?

In attempting to evaluate the subversive potential of popular culture generally, and rock music specifically, much recent Marxist theory has been caught in a dichotomy. At one pole has been a structuralist view of the subject as always already constructed (Althusser 1971): a notion leading to an analysis of popular culture as – yet another – agency of co-optation. At the opposite pole has been a view of popular culture as a set of subcultures, capable of expressing resistance to the dominant culture. Here, the subject is seen as pre-existing its construction through various modes of representation. Both sides of the dichotomy have therefore been implicated in a kind of holism that proves debilitating to cultural criticism: the one sees the (co-opted) subject as a coherent, albeit coherently written support for the system which has constructed it; the other sees the subject as a unitary resisting agent, unified through its class constitution and expressing its resistance in and through subcultural forms.

A growing tendency to study Australian popular musics as an aspect of Australian cultural studies has begun to bear fruit in the form of long overdue appraisal of the socio-cultural and musical significance of these musics. Yet in our justified enthusiasm for the exciting horizons made visible by this development, it is possible to forget that music research can serve more traditional but nevertheless important functions. In the study of popular musics, in particular, knowing how music was played can be more important than knowing what piece of repertoire was performed. For example, discovering what was ‘done’ to music in performance can tell us about the sound of unrecorded genres and can facilitate (for whatever reason) the reconstructed performance of these genres. Knowing that specific performance gestures (such as ‘flattened’ or ‘blues’ notes) were applied can of course increase our understanding of the social, cultural, and even the political nature of specific musics. In this article I am mostly concerned with applying this notion of ‘doing things’ to music to the retrieval of musical information about a specific ensemble. This more or less indigenous ensemble, which was promoted in 1918 as ‘Australia's First Jazz Band’, has captured the imagination of Australian jazz writers and is widely considered to represent the beginning of Australian jazz (Bissett 1979, p. 9).