This article deals with one of the darkest chapters in the history of popular music: the way in which it was pressed into the service of the cynical and ultra-reactionary goals of German fascism between the years 1933 and 1945. The aim, however, is not simply to fill a gap in historical accounts, which hitherto have always ignored this period. The subject is far from being merely of historical interest: it concerns the mechanisms whereby popular music can be socially and politically misused – mechanisms to which it can more easily fall victim, the more professionally it is produced. It is a fatal error to assume, for example, that popular music serving reactionary interests unmasks itself self-evidently as such. Rather, at no time has the lack of political responsibility on the part of performing musicians and composers been so clear, and had such disastrous eventual consequences, as was the case in Germany between 1933 and 1945. And this is what makes the subject as topical today, forty years after the ending of fascist tyranny in Germany, as it was then. ‘Continuity and change’ requires that the bitter experience of the past be combined with the urgent call to learn lessons from it now, after so long. The next time could be the last time!

The Duke Ellington orchestra's 1971 visit to the Soviet Union (USSR) marked their most important and publicised State Department tour, following acclaimed 1960s State tours they made to the Middle East, Near East, Asia and Africa. The Soviet tour occurred during the efforts of President Richard Nixon to establish détente at the height of the Cold War between the United States, the Soviet Union and China. Ellington found not just acceptance in Communist and satellite countries, but rabid enthusiasm that belied official Soviet government disdain or censorship of American jazz. While he was magnanimous as usual to Soviet fans and engaged in no political grandstanding, Ellington wanted his performances and presence to embody the differences between what he viewed as the freedom and democracy of his home country, and the current situation in the Soviet Union. Ellington's multi-layered vision of freedom, and the various struggles that he, the band, and State Department officials encountered during the tour provided a sharp contrast to the domineering official Soviet presence. The tour exposed the limits of what the closed society of the Soviet government could shield from their own people. Ellington made a strong impact, the strongest that any American artist had yet made in the Soviet Union.

This article explores the meaning of ‘message’ in rap made in Israel. I suggest that since Israeli rappers perceive rap not just as music but as an instrument for the articulation of one's true self, they invest heavily in the notion of truth, rendering the making-of-a-message a message in its own right. I draw on two different analytical methods to explore the meaning of truth in this context: text analysis, based on a ‘word-system approach’, and ethnography of performance. The analysis of speech strategies exposes the different aspects attached to the idea of truth, and this is complemented by my fieldwork experiences, which illustrate how these aspects and perceptions are being practised during performance. I argue that for Israeli rappers the ideals of message making and ‘keeping things real’ draw simultaneously on the global stylistic capital of hip-hop and on local traditions of straightforward verbal expression.

In post-apartheid popular culture, there is a tension between the persistence of ‘race’ as a structural category of difference, and its transformation in the lives of young South Africans. In this paper, through the examination of case-studies, I explore how popular music may allow for the mediation of this tension. Drawing on Heidegger's notion of an ‘equipmental whole’ to conceptualise ‘race’, I discuss the specific ways in which individuals may come to an awareness of the potential fluidity of racial identities, and the role of music-listening practices in this process. I argue that reflecting on articulations between music and racial categories allowed listeners to critique understandings of ‘race’ underpinning post-apartheid political discourse. Such a critique enabled listeners either instrumentally to affirm a reconfigured understanding of a racial identity, or to reject ‘race’ as a meaningful category of difference altogether.

This article investigates the relationship between biography and authenticity within the aesthetics of grunge musician Kurt Cobain, using the 2002 Riverhead Press volume of his journals as a primary source. Focusing on Cobain's fascination with the human form and with bodily fluids, I argue that his idea of the ‘sick body’ functioned as a central metaphor that shaped his approach to various media (prose, lyrics, drawing and singing) such that there was a homology between these different forms. I draw on excerpts from the Journals to show the meanings that he associated with the ‘sick body’, including the ways in which it indexed his own biography of physical pain and social marginalisation. Using the Nirvana song ‘Hairspray Queen’ as a case study, I then show the interactions between musical and linguistic signs of the sick body and how these interactions reveal Cobain's ideas on music's meaning. Ultimately, I argue that in song lyrics and performance, Cobain prized scatological imagery, eviscerating vocals and unintelligible lyrics as a means to signal the ‘authenticity’ of his art.

Popular music plays important roles in two related films portraying Brazilian slum life. Based on a 1953 play by Vinícius de Morais, Marcel Camus's 1959 film Orfeu Negro, and a 1999 feature by Brazilian director Carlos Diegues titled Orfeu, augment traditional samba styles with bossa nova and rap, respectively. Interpreting musical style as allegorical texts within fictive landscapes, this paper examines conflation and conflict among musical meanings, Brazilian social histories, and discursive identities marking the twentieth century. Broad aspects of Brazilian political and socio-cultural development are implicated, such as authoritarianism, the politics and sociology of race, technological advances, mass media, and modes of modernisation. Here, bossa nova and rap engage society through reflexive and generative interpretations within a narrative designed to illustrate connections between processes of innovative, trans-national cultural production, myths of national identity, social change, and the powerful role of popular music in film.

In this essay, I explore the use of rap and hip-hop conventions as they have developed within the self-consciously contemporary American Jewish ‘hipster’ scene between c. 1986 and 2006, framed particularly around the way these genres have addressed the discourses of masculinity within Jewish culture. By exploring the works and actions of such artists as Matisyahu and the Hip Hop Hoodíos within the context of both American Jewish masculinity discussions and the historical relationship of Jews with commercial hip-hop performance, I attempt to explore how a population’s attempts at musical ‘change’ act as a crucial part of the religious and ethnic transmission and preservation process. Although outwardly seen as based on mimesis and even novelty, ‘Jewish’ hip hop, I suggest, instils a deep sense of identity into a population often characterised as iconoclastic, dynamic, politically inclusive and culturally mutable. Masculinity therefore serves largely as a vessel for young Jews to fashion a sense of self into a conversation from which they had previously been largely absent: one of several strategies used both to unmoor and to redefine what it means to be a ‘new’ Jew.

For Australian men, the very act of appearing on stage has for much of the twentieth century aroused suspicion about their gender status and their sexuality. To aspire to the stage often implied homosexuality culturally in Australia. This has been evident in the evolving aesthetic of white Australian masculinity in pop music from the 1970s onwards. For most of that period, Anglo-Australian males who presented themselves in a rigid, almost asexual way dominated the aesthetic. The reality of urban Australia was ignored in their images, which were essentially confined to outback or coastal Australian settings. This paper examines that development as part of a continuum of twentieth century Australian male music performance that has variously been informed by the bush legend; a mythologised late nineteenth-century Australian masculine image, popularised in The Bulletin under the editorship of Archibald, that saw the urban as the feminine and the rural as the masculine. The paper considers how the combination of sexual anxiety surrounding male gender identity in Australian performance, and this rigid bush aesthetic, have encouraged the development of unstable male gender representations in Australian music that for the most part have come across as either caricatured male, sexless or anti-pop. The exception is the late Michael Hutchence whose performances were a clear departure from this in that on stage and in music videos he conveyed a star persona that was sexually charged and often ambiguous about its sexuality. It is for that reason alone that Michael Hutchence has been referred to as Australia's only international rock star (Carney 1997).

The record and tape sales figures of the Japanese record industry have exceeded those of the industries of all other capitalist nations, except the USA, since the mid-seventies. In 1980, Japan's share amounted to 13.9 per cent of all sales in the capitalist sphere according to surveys by Billboard. The USA had 35.8 per cent, West Germany 11.6 per cent, the UK 11.6 per cent and France 7.3 per cent (Kawabata 1977, p. 22; 1982, pp. 91, 199). The output of foreign records, recorded and pressed by Japanese companies, to foreign records, pressed by Japanese companies from masters recorded by foreign companies primarily for their own consumers, has been about three to two. A good many of these foreign records are of American and European popular music, and in this field one can perceive a new and interesting tendency to promote and succeed with artists who are or were less successful in their own country. The tendency, whose background I am going to discuss here, started in the mid-seventies; one of the early examples is provided by Kiss, a New York group, which was shrewdly promoted and achieved wide popularity in Japan before succeeding nationwide in America.

In discussing humanly organised sound in How Musical is Man?, John Blacking points out that musical ability is not only the prerogative of those who make music. Without the capacity of an audience for structured listening, he says, there would be no music and no musical communication (Blacking 1973, p. 9). The construction of a sound-ideal, that is the acceptance or rejection of patterns of sound as music or non-music, is part of the musical process. When Merriam constructed his model for ethnomusicological research in The Anthropology of Music, he recognised that those listening to the sounds produced by musicians played an active role (Merriam 1964, pp. 32ff). He also realised the importance of what he called ‘conceptualisation about music’ to the process. Figure 1 illustrates simply the three analytical stages of his model and the feedback system involving the acceptance or rejection of sound. The weakness of the model lies in the assumption that those listening will react uniformly to the sounds produced. As I shall show, such a consensus on the classifications of sound is not to be found in large differentiated societies.

About a thousand years ago in northeastern India a group of spiritual adepts known as siddhācāryas sang poems about the discipline required of the individual who seeks ultimate release. These carýāpadas, as the poems are called, were eventually compiled and recorded in a manuscript found about a century ago in the Nepali Court Library by a Bengali scholar (Sastri), since when concordances have been recognised in the Tibetan scriptures and numerous articles have been written about them by a variety of learned scholars. The carýāpadas have aroused considerable interest, among other reasons, because of their language, which is considered the earliest record of the Bengali tongue (Chatterji 1970, pp. 90–116), and because of their religious precepts, which are based upon tantra (Bagchi 1933, 1956A, B). Tantra teaches the individual to pursue his own release from phenomenal existence through direct, empirical means, through the manipulation of his own physical and psychical constitution, and these means are learned viva voce from a preceptor who also demonstrates the necessary techniques.

The explosive development of a jazz-band tradition in South African cities from the 1920s – closely allied to the equally rapid maturation of a vaudeville tradition which has been in existence at least since the First World War – is one of the most astonishing features of urban-black culture in that country in the first half of the century. Surrounded by myriad other musics – styles forged by migrant workers; traditional styles transplanted from the countryside to the mines; petty bourgeois choral song; music of the church and of western-classical provenance – jazz and vaudeville quickly established themselves as the music which represented and articulated the hopes and aspirations of the most deeply urbanised sectors of the African working class.

Tanya Tagaq's work is political, often tackling themes of environmentalism and Indigenous rights. The Inuk throat singer uses live performance and audiovisual media to engage themes of climate change and give voice to environmental violence. Her work diversifies the discourse of environmentalism to include the voices and environmental trauma experienced by marginalised peoples, specifically North American Indigenous-centred sounds and perspectives. Songs such as ‘Fracking’ from Animism (2014) and ‘Nacreous’ from Retribution (2016) are simultaneously expressions of ecological protest and healing, as Tagaq listens with urgency and uses embodied musical practice to explore the aurality of pipeline politics and other forms of ecological imbalance and harm. I analyse how Tagaq's work, both her songs and their accompanying music videos and multimedia, gravitates towards the ecological, considering what healthy and unhealthy relationships between humans and the non-human world – plants, animals, water, natural resources – sound like.

Shaping events at the microlevel of rhythm is an important aspect of many groove-based musics. In the present study, we explore the interconnectedness of musical parameters such as timing, attack shape, timbre and relative intensity in creating groove through investigating musicians and producers’ discourse in five genres (jazz, samba, electronic dance music, hip-hop and traditional Scandinavian fiddle music). Through semi-structured interviews, we found both genre-specific accounts of how such musical features interact at the microlevel of rhythm and a cross-generic focus on inducing movement by shaping sound and generating rhythmic friction. The study empirically substantiates the multiparameter nature of musical performance and experience, and that particular genre-typical configurations of temporal and sonic features are needed to create the experience of groove. It thereby adds to the scholarly discourse on groove, which has often taken a more general and time-oriented view of rhythm.

This article profiles the music of three politically motivated hip hop emcees. It combines textual and musicological analysis with ethnographic data to examine the ways in which these women use music to empower themselves and to contribute to meaningful, positive change in post-industrial, post-bankruptcy Detroit. These narratives are significant because they combat the dominant, hegemonic two-dimensional representations of African American women that are epitomised in commercial hip hop and popular culture at large. Further, in a context where art and activism are connected, their work challenges the current controlling images and sexual scripts that dominate both commercial music industry representations and scholarship on women in hip hop. The artists we profile exemplify a new kind of musical movement where women are agents and creative solutionaries. At times, they are explicitly critical of the narrow range of black womanhood presented in popular culture and in other instances, they focus on issues such as the environment, race relations, racialized bodies, poverty and abuse, all the while challenging the hip hop industry and popular culture norms that communicate who black women are and who they should be.

The last 20 years have seen extensive scholarship on changing audiovisual aesthetics and the blurring boundaries between all screen media. This article draws on this scholarship and engages with critical debates around the musical genre to examine contemporary song-based screen media. While song and singing have a long history across film, television and video, the digital convergence era has engendered new types of song performance and song-based screen formats. To understand the complex connections and exchanges between different forms of singing on screen, this article develops a new evaluative and conceptual framework. I propose the term screensong to refer to audiovisual representations of singing performance across screen-based media. This article understands screensong as both a broad category of song-based screen texts, genres and formats and as a particular type of song-driven, highly commodified, audiovisual and narrative unit – the screensong – prevalent in contemporary American popular screen media.

ROY BREWER

Introduction

From the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, Memphis, Tennessee was home of one of the most successful recording industries in the USA and its popular recorded releases began to rival those of Nashville, Los Angeles, New York and Detroit. Solo artists, song writers, session musicians and arrangers became overnight successes and a rebellious and influential upstart recording industry emerged. But the growth was too fast and, fuelled by zealous egos and competition, an infrastructure was never formed resulting in a musical and financial cataclysm from which the Memphis music community has yet to recover. This article is about those classically trained string musicians who were hired to play in the studios of Memphis during that era.