The scholarly literature on popular music has rarely addressed music awards shows and the role of the state with regard to popular music. In an effort to deepen what is known about both sets of issues, this article utilises the concept of a promotional state to examine Canada's Juno Awards. A promotional state employs state intervention to support domestic popular music, and the promotional state in Canada has been connected to the Junos in three ways (through Canadian content regulations, public broadcasting and government funding). The historical, political economic analysis in the article considers how the role of the promotional state has undergone changes with regard to the Juno Awards. There has been some ‘hollowing out’ of the promotional state's role since the Junos began in 1971, but the article contends that (in the interests of private capital) the role of this state has continued and even increased in some respects.

As music increasingly links the global and the local and vice versa, fusions of diverse musical genres and styles burgeon. Globalisation theory (specifically Appadurai) has spurred explorations of musical hybridity and cross-fertilisation among scholars from different academic fields focusing on music. In this essay, I argue for the necessity of understanding global cultural interactions and musical appropriations or exchanges in the context of the ambivalences of the globalised mass diffusion and the power asymmetries involved. The purpose of this paper is to contextualise contemporary theoretical considerations by describing the Yoremensamble project – a government-sponsored cultural project in which a group of urban mestizo musicians from northwestern Mexico appropriated local indigenous musical expressions to produce an album titled ‘Hombre digno’ (‘Dignified man’). The album is just one of many projects around the globe in which artists self-consciously re-localize global popular music styles. The resulting sonic fusions point to the need for a critical cultural analysis of such translocal and global phenomena which is rooted in ethnography.

Joni Mitchell's ‘Woodstock’ is one of the most recognisable songs about the 1969 festival, yet Mitchell did not attend Woodstock and instead wrote her song in a New York City hotel room. The song ‘Woodstock’, then, represents the event not as it literally happened, but as it could have been, as an idealised depiction of nostalgia for the festival and the era's utopian potential. I analyse Mitchell's song as a utopian text and investigate the political efficacy of ‘Woodstock's musical and lyrical content for Mitchell, for other artists who cover the song, and for audiences who may recognise it as the festival's ‘theme’. As her career continues, Mitchell abandons the folk-based style of her early albums, but keeps ‘Woodstock’ an active part of her performance repertoire. I trace three later versions to show that the utopianism of the original disappears as Mitchell re-imagines the song, the event and its ideological legacy.

Any study of punk rock in Russia will in some way come into contact with the massive influence of Egor Letov, his band Grazhdanskaia Oborona, and their extensive output during the late 1980s. Academia has thus far been reluctant to study the band because of its leader's involvement with dubious right-wing movements and his many tasteless and provocative media stunts during the 1990s. By taking its point of departure in Letov's songs from four stages of his band's development, this article seeks to shed light on Grazhdanskaia Oborona's contribution to the development of punk in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. When it comes to Letov's extremist views in the latter half of his career it attempts to venture beyond reductionist notions of fascism, into the complex landscape of the paradoxical and often confusing mixture of extreme ideologies that sprang out of the Soviet collapse. It will argue that Letov's work – his songs – come over as a lot less contradictory and ideologically extreme than their author's political stunts would suggest. Their aesthetics and ideology are first and foremost punk.

Juan Garcia Esquivel's compositions and band arrangements of the late 1950s and early 1960s – his so-called ‘space-age bachelor pad music’ – feature exotic and futuristic instruments, dazzling stereo effects, textless vocalisations, and an array of colourful harmonic resources. This paper situates Esquivel's music within the venerable tradition of the Pastoral mode, a specialised narrative mode met in certain literary and musical works. I begin with an account of the musical pastoral, illustrated with reference to Renaissance madrigals, opera libretti, and especially French concert music from the turn of the twentieth century. In the music of ‘impressionist’ composers, pastoral conventions include a preponderance of ‘slithery’ sounds such as tremolo, trills, glissandi, gauzy timbres, colouristic harmonies and, especially, an over-abundance of motivic material. The steady parade of new themes, with little repetition, and rapidly changing orchestral colours impart a hedonistic atmosphere, consistent with the ‘fantasy of plenitude’ associated with the literary Pastoral. Esquivel's music, I claim, represents a transposition of this bucolic style, in which the ephemeral sounds of the flute and harp are transformed into their space-age counterparts: theremin, vibraphone, buzzimba, and the ‘zu-zu-zu’ of the Randy Van Horne Singers. Esquivel's music, I argue, reconstitutes the particular erotic configurations of classic pastoral: in place of fauns and nymphs are suave bachelors and their dates. The paper concludes with a discussion of representations of the ‘leisurely bachelor’ in other contemporaneous media.

Blues music is relatively well recognised as a cultural phenomenon. In tracing its history, both as a reflection of one people's particular circumstances of oppression and as an ingredient taken into mainstream popular art, we accumulate reasons for thinking of it as important. But these are external reasons. It is possible to know that one's everyday milieu is heavily indebted to blues (in manners as well as in music), even to feel blues quality strongly, and yet not be able to articulate an understanding of the import of blues. In that case one is kept from thinking well about how the meaning of blues in, say, the life of an early twentieth-century black Mississippian relates to the meaning of blues in other sorts of life, including yours and mine today – which is precisely the inside of the cultural phenomenon of blues. To get over this hump we need to pay a kind of attention that blues rarely receives.

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.

This article draws from a wider research project undertaken in 2018 in Armidale, a small regional city in New South Wales (NSW) Australia, to explore the challenges commercial venues face in presenting and maintaining a regular live music programme. An analysis of the main themes suggests that the issues regional venues encounter are often qualitatively and/or quantitatively different from those facing their urban counterparts. This research found that regulatory issues, such as licensing, planning and noise, were not considered major impediments to regularly hosting live music. Rather, finding and accessing affordable quality bands in the numbers and styles needed to keep audiences coming to gigs, and getting audiences to regularly attend and spend money in the numbers needed to sustain the gigs, were identified as ongoing difficulties. Although venues in larger metropolitan cities are often confronted with similar problems, these are not the sort of issues that stand out in the research in this area. Rather the regulatory environment is emphasised. By drawing attention to the non-regulatory challenges regional venues face, important new avenues of research are opened up that will benefit live music scenes across Australia.

From 1923 to 1931, record companies based in the northern USA stocked their catalogues of Southern vernacular music, particularly African-American blues and white ‘old-time’ music, largely with ‘location recordings’ made in Southern cities such as Atlanta, Memphis and Dallas. These recording trips, which are sometimes characterised as speculative, were in fact partly planned, the uncertainty of discovering recordable new talent offset to some extent by the prior booking of artists with whom the companies had already had success. The evidence for this careful planning, however, has been somewhat obscured by the unscheduled discovery, in Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927, of Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family, whose commercial success and stylistic innovations would have enormous influence on country music.

This article analyses the main cultural and political factors that contributed to the emergence of local Anglophone music in Russia between 2008 and 2012. While Russian indie groups had extensively sung in English before (with scarce public recognition), a conjunction of circumstances encouraged the appearance of a conspicuous Russian Anglophone music scene in the Medvedev years. These were a perceived political relaxation, internally and in East–West relations; Russian economic growth and the subsequent renovation of Moscow; and the connectivity and expansion of the independent music community. The article also argues that the success of local Anglophone bands, as well as the appearance of an ‘indie’ sound and an ‘indie’ music scene (indi), was the result of a concerted effort by Russian music participants to bring and incorporate the Other – the West – into Russia's everyday life. The English language, correspondingly, functioned as a ‘tool’ for this operation.

Kadongo kamu is a Ugandan guitar-based genre recognisable by its dense storytelling lyrics in Luganda language. This article offers a close analysis of kadongo kamu musical style, focusing on the interface between speech rhythm and musical rhythm. The style's poetic-musical ‘flow’ to be structurally analysed is interpreted with reference to a historically evolved language ideology which construes Luganda to be exceptionally ‘rich’ and ‘deep’. I show how specific musical techniques are used to foreground aspects of Luganda that speakers prize as elegant and learned. This musical artistry enhances listeners’ impressions of the proverb-rich ‘deep Luganda’ poetry for which kadongo kamu singers are famous.

This article examines the intersections of music policy and citizenship in the Caribbean island of Barbados. The article focuses on the development of music policy from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. It is argued that it is possible to trace efforts made by Barbadian state managers to shape citizenship. However, these efforts at defining an ideal Barbadian citizen should not be understood exclusively in national terms. In fact, the article demonstrates that the ways in which national identities in Barbados are constituted through calypso and soca performances have their roots in global shifts in development policies. Therefore the article integrates a three-tiered focus. It considers national policy decisions, international policy decisions, and finally it examines the ways in which decisions taken at these levels shape and are shaped by what takes place within the calypso/soca music industry and within calypso/soca performance.

Chuck Berry recorded ‘Johnny B. Goode’ in December 1957 and it has since become one of his best-known songs. The reasons for its lasting popularity are varied, and one of the goals of this article is to elucidate and discuss them. But the main purpose is to raise ‘Johnny B. Goode’ as an example of the choices and problems Berry faced in his career as an African-American musician in the 1950s and 60s and the ways he dealt with them in this tune.