The process of becoming a rock musician strongly relates to the organisational form of the band (Bennett 1980; Green 2002; Behr 2010). At all levels of ambition and success, membership of a band provides the musician with a natural entry point for performing to an audience and forging a potential career (Smith 2013a). The ‘micro-organisational’ (Bennett 2001) development of a band, therefore, is an important career prerequisite for rock musicians (Behr 2015). However, the social and practical challenges of musicianship seem to be continuously underemphasised within the field of popular music studies (Cohen 1993; Kirschner 1998; Lashua 2017; Weston 2017; Kielich 2018). Therefore, in this article I will focus on an aspiring rock band's informal learning processes in becoming a small business together. The study provides insights into the educational and organisational aspects of band practices and contributes to the fields of popular music, education and organisation studies – fields that are converging in the emerging interdisciplinary research area of ‘organising music-making’ (Beech and Gilmore 2015).

Although tremendously popular, Great Britain’s long-term icon Cliff Richard has been widely neglected by popular music studies. This article aims to correct this omission by introducing an argument that claims that Cliff Richard portrays himself to a considerable degree as a saviour figure. Evidence for this thesis will be drawn from three meaningful dimensions in popular music: song lyrics, pictorial self-representations, and image components. These three areas can be shown to be semantically concordant in presenting Cliff Richard as a redeemer. While the promise of redemption by the singer persona is a recurring motif in his song lyrics, this assurance gets repeated in pictorial representations that make allusions to Jesus Christ (through posture, lighting, and elevation) and is further reinforced by a number of components of Richard’s image such as the (apparently) incorruptible body, the asexuality, and the demonstrative benevolence towards the sick and poor. The combination of these sign-complexes creates a meaningful pattern around the singer that sets him apart as a surrogate saviour.

Historically, the field of ethnomusicology has tended to neglect the lives and work of individual musicians in favour of a view of music as culture, a disciplinary perspective that has assumed the homogeneity of the world's cultures. Contesting this erasure of the musical subject, biographical micro-histories situate the individual at the centre of music studies. Accordingly, the subject of this article is a self-identified ‘local’ jazz musician, whose narrative elucidates the exigencies of his musical and social life. One of the music's ‘lesser lives’, ‘LC’ is typical of those players who negotiate the contested terrain of jazz scenes peripheral to the jazz world's centre, New York City. The explication of his musical aesthetic and its influence upon his self-image as a jazz musician is directed toward a more representative view of jazz than that of institutionalised histories, which promulgate a ‘Great Man’ narrative. Incorporating contemporary discourse and critical race theories as alternatives to traditional modes of aesthetic inquiry, this study unpacks issues related to musical and social dialogism and signification, ‘voice’ and identity, and race and masculinity as a means of illuminating those criteria deemed crucial by a particular musician in his search for existential meaning and a jazz truth.

This article explores popular-musical invocations of the Northern Ireland conflict (1968–1998), focussing specifically on the period between the IRA hunger strike of 1981 and the British Government's Broadcasting Act in 1988. Whilst most songs addressed to the ‘Troubles’ were marked by (lyrical) abstraction and (political) non-alignment, this period witnessed a series of efforts that issued upfront and partisan views. The article explores two such instances – by That Petrol Emotion and Easterhouse – addressing each band's respective views as well as the specific performance strategies that they deployed in staging their interventions. Drawing on original interviews that the author has conducted with the musicians – alongside extensive archival research of print and audio/visual media – the article explores the bands’ songs in conjunction with salient ancillary media (such as record sleeves, videos and interviews), yielding a more nuanced account of popular music's engagement with the ‘Troubles’ than has been offered in existing work (which often assumes the form of broad surveys).

Jeff Buckley seemingly resisted entrapment by the ‘Oedipal’ myths of family, corporate rock, and the cult of dead celebrities, as well as the branding of his image and identity, but his rebellious, self-mythologising anti-narrative simulated the phantom narrative he opposed. In a postmodern context, Buckley's impossible search for absolute artistic authenticity, integrity and originality, given his ambivalence about his ethereal voice – the signature of his father – found expression in hybridised ambiance, modernist collage, and postmodern pastiche.

The term ‘world music’ usually conjures up images of musics from ‘remote’ corners of the world. However, that remoteness is not always geographical and can, for example, be chronological. Tôgi Hideki, a former musician from the Imperial court in Japan, has sought to introduce court music - gagaku - to a wider audience through the reworking of traditional gagaku pieces and new compositions for gagaku instruments. Gagaku boasts a history of over 1,200 years and its esoteric nature inhibits popular interest. Tôgi Hideki’s popularised gagaku, on the other hand, has found a new audience for gagaku, and his music serves as a bridge introducing Japanese back to a remote part of Japanese musical culture.

Despite huge popularity and lasting cultural impact, reality television shows such as The X Factor, a British music competition that started screening in 2004, are seen by many as a cultural nadir. However, in this article I argue that, while reading reality TV as an index of an increasingly superficial, market-based culture makes a great deal of sense, it doesn't tell the whole story. Using the particular music-based dramas of The X Factor as a case study, I explore ways in which this show and populist reality television in general might be seen to embody both the predicaments and potential pressure points of contemporary neoliberal culture.

According to the schemata normally used by critics, jazz ceased to be ‘popular music’ with the arrival of bebop in the mid-1940s. While this statement has some truth to it, it also requires a good deal of qualification. Like blues, jazz remained economically viable in black neighbourhoods until driven out by the slicker pop sounds of the late 1960s. That jazz (with the exception of the ‘cool’ style played by Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, etc.) had a primarily black audience is confirmed by Joe Fields, currently with Muse Records and formerly employed by Prestige and Columbia:

Our records sold to some white college kids, but our sales (at Prestige) were overwhelmingly to blacks – not just tenor and organ stuff but hard bop too. That's why what we sold in Boston was nothing compared to Chicago, Detroit, St Louis, Cleveland … Our sales in Los Angeles were much better than in San Francisco.

This article addresses the linguistic policing of grime and UK drill music. Existing studies often focus on the immediacy of the penal system. This article will instead explore the extent to which institutional bodies uphold and maintain a programme of racialised censorship across radio broadcasts, seeking to understand how these value judgements impact upon creative practice. It presents an ethnographic study of three radio shows that aired on BBC 1Xtra, demonstrating through interviews and analysis how the broadcaster's censorship practice unfairly renders Black artists as dangerous with criminal associations. Lyrical assertions of musical skill are misread as direct threats, while evocations of the quotidian are seen to cause violence rather than reflect artists’ surroundings. Importantly, it will show how artists’ work and words are adversely discriminated against owing to a legacy of racialised public morality that imposes greater sanctions and restrictions on artistic output: radio personalities must strike a balance between presenting voyeuristic excitement about a genre, and the need to meet (racialised) editorial standards; producers assiduously monitor new slang to make sure that it is censored; and artists are encouraged to self-censor and alter their musical output, to protect themselves from unwanted ramifications.

This article presents the concept of virtual liveness and demonstrates its relevance in an analysis of ‘Vane’, one of John Oswald's plunderphonic pieces. It argues that even when encountering a piece of music that lacks a physically co-present audience, lacks largely unmediated acoustic sound and lacks a live performer, the term ‘performance’ may still be usefully applied. In these cases, however, the sense of liveness that invokes this idea of performance is often more virtual than actual. ‘Vane’ sounds not just like a combination of Oswald's two source recordings (Carly Simon's and Faster Pussycat's versions of ‘You're So Vain’), but like a new technological entity: Oswald's manipulations of his source material result in sounds that are decidedly ‘of the machine’, even as they invite us to sing along with Carly Simon's and Faster Pussycat's performances. We enter into a complex network of references between the performances represented in the original recordings and this new, virtual performance – the performance, ultimately, of a sounding cyborg.

In his song ‘Asili ya Muziki’ (‘The Roots of Music’) Remmy Ongala, one of the most prolific singers/composers in Tanzanian music, discusses the complex and ambiguous position of music and musicians. In Tanzania musicians are commonly considered to be wahuni, i.e. vagabonds, drunkards, drugtakers, while their music, is enjoyed by the same people who call them these names.

Several patterns emerge in bachata's discussions of love, sex and relationships with women. There is little sense of place in the songs – rarely is a specific place name mentioned or invoked, in marked contrast to other Caribbean musical genres associated with listeners of rural origins, in which place names are constantly invoked for affective purposes. The people in bachata songs do not seem to exist anywhere – except the bar, which, I suggest, is a metaphor for the urban shantytown itself. Neither is there a sense of movement, of going anywhere. There is no imagery of journey, or travel, unlike other musics, such as Brazilian popular music or US country music, in which the road and trucks figure prominently. People are neither being pulled or pushed anywhere – out of home, into home, out of work, into work.

Life, as expressed in bachata songs, seems fragmentary and lacks coherence – and in that sense, these songs are thoroughly modern. The songs as texts are vignettes, brief snapshots – bites, to use contemporary jargon – that evoke salient parts of events or situations, rather than descriptive narratives that carefully develop a story over time and place. (The only exceptions are the double entendre songs, in which narrative is more a necessity as a framework for the word play than an end in itself.)

Bachata songs focus on the pain of losing a woman, but the difficulties of city life are implicitly to blame. Given that both men and women experience this pain, it seems odd that bachateros express no sense of solidarity with women, of shared social and economic trouble, as can sometimes be found in rock songs, for example, where singers invoke the power of love to overcome economic hardship or social prejudice. Bachata expresses a strong sense of vulnerability, betrayal, alienation and despair; yet the songs' anger is directed not at those above – the middle and upper classes – who have indeed betrayed and abandoned the poor as a class: instead, men's wrath is directed below, to a group of people – women – even more vulnerable to exploitation than men themselves. As we have seen, in bachata women are often portrayed as the aggressors and men as victims. Yet men certainly know that even if they can no longer control women as they once may have, in the modern world men clearly exercise more power over their lives than women. Men can, in fact, afford the luxury of expressing vulnerability to emotional pain. Women are the silent ones; their voices are not heard, although their presence can nevertheless be felt intensely. These unresolved tensions, between owner and property, aggressor and victim, voice and silence, freedom and control, order and chaos, are all symbolically explored in bachata.

Curiosity value quite possibly accounted for the success of Kate Bush's first single in 1978. Those who have continued to admire her more particularly for her later musical achievements, which have surely consolidated her position as one of the most individual and innovative artists of the 1980s and 1990s, do so possibly in spite of (rather than because of) the impact of ‘Wuthering Heights’. No other song of hers has had the same public appeal – it stayed in the British charts for seventy-five weeks (Rice 1991) – and perhaps the smaller group of admirers who remain loyal engage more with the intensely personal visions into which her lyrics have matured, as opposed to that first, more musically zany, original hit.

In seeking to respond to the environmental challenges of the Anthropocene era, our research team of five scholars, including faculty and advanced graduate students, along with each of their collaborators in their respective research sites, has come together to explore the possibilities of a methodology that we call Field to Media. Field to Media involves using video production to study and amplify ecomusical responses to climate change, pollution, deforestation, and other environmental challenges. This methodology is intended as a pragmatic process that blends participant observation with participatory action research and applied or activist engagement. Specific to this project, our efforts have involved the co-creation of five different music videos to address a range of pressing environment-related matters in USA/Canada, Tanzania, Bangladesh, China, and Haiti. In this article, we consider some of the potential successes and challenges that we have each experienced in the course of producing these music videos.

A suppressed note is one that is consistently left out of the collection of pitch classes (different musical notes) in a musical piece and later appears with considerable emphasis. The Beatles frequently use the technique of suppressed notes, due to their tendency to compose pentatonic melodies, which leave ‘holes’ in the diatonic scale. These holes are usually filled in later in the song, when the pentatonicism is broken. The suppressed note then attracts special attention, both because it is a new note that the melody had previously avoided and because it appears at a peak moment, which is shaped by other parameters as well (e.g. as a melodic peak in a metrically accented position) and is connected to a textual turning point. The paper peeks at the Beatles' repertoire through the keyhole of the suppressed note.

This paper introduces the subjunctive as a modality of engaging in musical life, in this instance the contemporary white folk music scene of boeremusiek in South Africa. The genre has repeatedly been portrayed as forever vanishing – a discourse that still characterises contemporary events put up by the largest boeremusiek organisation in South Africa, the Boeremusiekgilde (Boeremusiek Guild). The aim of the paper is to analyse the effects of discourses of nostalgia and salvage on participants' experiences of liveness in the present. It is shown how a deep dissatisfaction for live performance developed throughout the genre's 20th-century history. The repeated framing of present enjoyment in terms of past models of nationalist duty cast the actual actions of participants in the mode of subjunctive possibility, it is argued. As rituals of mourning, boeremusiek events bemoan personal histories fundamentally tainted by political transgression: the loss of intimate spaces of white innocence.