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.

This article explores the ways in which anger may travel across different musical and extra-musical contexts, looking in particular at the rap metal band Rage Against The Machine (RATM). Focusing on this band's appropriation of expressions of anger found in a documentary film about the Zapatistas in Mexico, it suggests that RATM can be read as a politico-emotional project, channelling anger towards political resistance which is then performed through, and upon, the body. Just as performances of anger need discourse to be sustainable, so music can simultaneously entrain the listener into a certain modality of feeling and expressing, and embed this modality in a discursive rationale. However, anger is a deeply ambiguous emotion, and cannot be easily focused; it may transcend the constraints some seek to place on it, and travel quickly between discursive contexts. Such slippages mark the limits of anger, as well as its power.

Joni Mitchell has recently been critically received and marketed as a ‘classic’ songwriter. Yet the existing literature has hardly begun to explore the sophistication of her technical achievement. One of her most distinctive contributions is in the realm of harmonic innovation. Through a comprehensive survey of her work, I have found that Mitchell's songs fall under five categories of harmonic organisation: modal, polymodal, chromatic, polytonal, and pedal point. I examine these categories in detail, choosing a variety of examples from the early years of her career (1966–1972). My analyses are intended to contribute to a more knowledgeable appreciation of Mitchell's intellectual stature as a composer. While many songwriters have been inventive within traditional tonal harmony, Mitchell's work is impressive for its extended exploration of alternatives to single key structures and the major/minor system.

a couple of years ago, jane music editor jeff johnson began soliciting and compiling what he called ‘sad song scenarios’, a celebration, if you could call it that, of moments when music undoubtedly made a grim day worse. ideally, the whole project unfolds in a powerpoint of strained saccharine and swift kicks in the imagination. but here's one example, courtesy of the novelist sam lipsyte:

In this article I shall attempt to demonstrate the application of an ideology-critical framework designed to give a comprehensive and differentiated account of textual ‘contradictions’ and ‘tensions’ in symbolic forms. Based on Johann Visagie's figurative semiotics of ideological discourse, this theoretical schema is demonstrated via an extensive analysis of the gospel rap video wrapped up by the African-American group Dawkins & Dawkins. As a metaphorically mediated enactment of contemporary-religious meaning, this instance of gospel rap is analysed as a forthright yet complex example of structural ambiguity. Allowing for a detailed reading of the semiotic layering surrounding and infiltrating all dimensions of this text, my interpretation problematises its reading as an uncomplicated, commercialised excursion into the pleasures of an embodied, danced religion. In both ‘highlighting’ and ‘hiding’ the layers of cultural meaning built into the metaphor of danced religion, wrapped up celebrates black religious identity without distancing it from underlying ideological formations associated with collective suffering and social injustice.

In recent years, a surprising void has opened in discussions of the evolution of twentieth-century British popular music. Directly and indirectly, much attention has been given to the influence of the United States. Little, however, has been written on the development of Britain's own popular vocal and dance forms, especially in the key years between the two World Wars; neither have other cultural inter-relationships, such as British acceptance of ‘Latin American’ rhythms received the attention they deserve.

In the years between 1910 and 1930 there occurred a number of changes in the forms of popular music enjoyed in Britain, in the ways this music was produced and disseminated, and in its use for pleasure and profit. In this article I am concerned with mapping together themes which have hitherto been investigated in isolation; I focus on the relation of musical forms to their users, bandleaders, musicians, dancers, ‘jazz fans’, record companies, etc., rather than on any single aspect of popular music. I investigate the way in which the importation of new forms of music and dance from the USA, the social disruptions of the First World War and the more general trends in British society and its economy coalesce to re-orientate musical pleasures during the 1920s. I begin by examining changes in music and dance immediately before and during the First World War.

Most instruction in electric guitar, bass guitar, drums and electronic keyboards is conducted on a one-to-one basis by uncertified, independent teachers. The lessons are face-to-face, and based on the student's imitation of the teacher's example. Popular music education is a ‘little tradition’ (in comparison to school music departments) and largely an oral one, thus meeting the usual criteria of folk cultures.

The literature on female sexuality in the Middle East has tended to treat sexuality as the product of a homogenous discourse, examining dominant discourses that focus on religious identities, and treating women more as symbols rather than reflecting their actual behaviour or experience. Sexuality is usually essentialised, treated as inherent and fixed, as if it correlates to gender divisions, and is easily separable from them. Following Cornwall and Lindisfarne (1994), sexuality may be understood better as a fluid category that can be manipulated and interpreted according to changing social forms and differing perspectives, whether of men or women, dancer or audience, elite or popular. While marriage ceremonials can be seen as key markers of social status and sexual identities, divergent expectations and values associated with gender and sexual relations are also central (Tapper 1991, p. 15). A form of ‘popular’ music and dance, marked by the complex term baladi (see below), is central to the exploration of sexuality at Cairo weddings. Through looking at the ambiguous role of professional dancers (figures who orchestrate, conduct and ‘embody’ baladi musical forms), I have explored the way sexuality is created through performance: the body of the dancer can be seen as the site of multiple discourses on gendered identity, sexuality and power (see also Lorius 1996).

If you are a movie fan (and who isn't) you may sit in a movie theatre three times a week listening to the symphonic background scores which Hollywood composers concoct. What happens? Your musical tastes become moulded by these scores, heard without knowing it. You see love, and you hear it. Simultaneously. It makes sense. Music suddenly becomes a language for you, without your knowing it. (Thomas 1973, p. 171).

This paper examines the performances of Taiwanese American Jack Hsu and his New Jersey-based progressive erhu-rock band The Hsu-nami, in transnational contexts fraught by ethnonationalism and race. Through an ethnographic approach, this paper highlights the band's depoliticising practice to deflect the geopolitics across the Taiwan Strait. It also discusses how Hsu adapts the musical and gender ideologies in rock music culture to diffuse racial ideologies surrounding his ethnicity and instrument. Finally, an analysis of the band's deployment of cultural diplomacy discusses pragmatic multiculturalism, a mode that reflects the tension between rock music's ostensibly counter-cultural front and its commercial foundation.

Recording studios are shrouded in mystery. Some have become sites of pilgrimage; other studios have been converted into heritage museums. These practices are driven by city authorities, commercial heritage institutions or music fans. This interview study gives a voice to an understudied group: record producers and studio owners as the people in charge of popular music creation. Three German rock and metal producers expressed their opinion on the usefulness of studio museums and explained their own heritage practices. Their insights demystify the ‘magical aura’ associated with recording studios, picturing these spaces as places of pressure and anxiety. Hardly convinced of the technologically deterministic ‘magical contamination’ of technical equipment, the producers see little sense in studios as museums. For them, the released record is what counts. To stay in touch with the community and to keep the memory of their work alive, they prefer to use social media.