Although there has recently been significant work published on the relationship between twentieth-century French (anti-)philosopher Georges Bataille's theories of religion and violence, and the sound and politics of black metal, little has been done to address Bataille's and black metal's shared concern with the problem of ‘authenticity’. Their concern, determined by their complicity with ‘evil’, is centred on a critique of modernity. I will read, with a specific focus on the second wave of Norwegian black metal, black metal's connivance with evil through Bataille's notion of authentic literature. Although two very different mediums – literature and music – Bataille's concept is applicable to a reading of black metal because of his invocation of evil and the Luciferian in his interpretation of authenticity. Bataille argues that authentic literature is necessarily diabolical because of the Nietzschean form of sovereignty that the author momentarily attains at the conception of the modern world – that is, in the wake of the death of God. The authenticity that Bataille and black metal seek is therefore bound up both with godlessness and the satanic.

In this paper I attempt first to identify some of the ways in which the growth of Welsh-language popular music and of more assertive and confident ideas of identity among young Welsh speakers were closely linked in the period 1960–85. Secondly, I briefly examine some elements of a period of diversification and crisis that occurred in the 1990s, and finally I attempt to identify three positions from which different musicians and audiences that I have been involved with seem to be currently rehearsing, negotiating and constructing contrasting roles and stances.

Taking inspiration from a press article comparing doom metal and New Age music, I explore individualism and magic in these musical cultures, reflecting on the ‘dirty, soothing secret’ suggested in that article's title. I trace the loosely defined characteristics of New Age music in the limited academic research on the topic, before situating the music in the wider New Age milieu which centres around the epistemological authority of the seeking self among diverse spiritual resources. Then, I examine the claims made about metal in the news article, drawing out themes which also relate to individualism and magic. Finally, I return to the concepts of the dirty, the soothing and the secret, arguing that these are not merely incidental aspects of the mainstream reception of New Age and metal music, but in fact can be understood as contributing to the magical potential of such music for listeners.

The legal history of pop singer-songwriter Kesha Sebert has brought to light serious problems of gender and power in the US recording industry: it remains male dominated to its core. These contemporary problems have specific historical origins. Contextualising the 2008–2014 lawsuit between two rival producers over the exclusive right to Kesha's labour power suggests that elements of Victorian gender relations and class war were baked into the doctrine on which that 21st century case turned. Drawing empirically on court documents, and analytically on perspectives from history and sociology as well as feminist legal scholarship, this paper explains the persistent vitality of a ‘gendered erotic triangle’ in music production. By contextualising Kesha's gendered legal triangulation, and analysing a seemingly technical quibble about the interpretation of a statute of (temporal) limitation, this paper frames the commodification of singers’ labour power as central to a gendered project of class domination.

Billy Joel's song ‘It's Still Rock and Roll to Me’, which rose to the top of Billboard magazine's ‘Hot 100’ chart in July of 1980, was intended as entertainment, not criticism. But it makes a more accurate statement about the present state of rock music in the USA than have the writings of certain journalists and critics over the past decade. Against a stripped-down instrumental accompaniment, parodying the ‘minimalism’ of much new wave music, Joel sings,

Everybody's talking about the new sound; funny, But it's still rock and roll to me.

‘All good things are born of wonder’, remarked Aristotle. Today, as ever, listening to good music one cannot cease wondering at the mysterious spell of sound combinations. The phenomenon becomes even more mystifying when one deals with a simple and popular tune.

During the last two or maybe three years, people in the Netherlands have witnessed a big boom in popular songs in their own language: tear-jerkers, evergreens, easy listening and rock songs performed in Dutch have made a conspicuous conquest of the hit charts, usually dominated by Anglo-American songs. Most striking is the breakthrough of Dutch language rock groups, reflected in higher audience figures for specialised radio programmes, an expanding live performance circuit and high record sales (see Table 1).

On a common-sense or proto-sociological level, this phenomenon has been explained by referring to the end of so-called American ‘cultural imperialism’ – the native rock tradition has finally grown mature, as is the case in other countries on the European continent; or by alluding to the crisis of the modern welfare capitalist state – manifested in a range of aspects, from the economic crisis in the record industry to the cultural-ideological problem of modern people longing for a comprehensible world view in an abstract society. In this article I shall not touch upon these matters, but I shall discuss the reception of Dutch rock as such and try to unveil (some aspects of) the social meaning of this type of music.

This article explores the German band Corvus Corax and their reinterpretion of the Middle Ages as a creative answer to Germany's problematic history of nationalism. Invoking the community ideals and ideological values of the 1960s and 1970s, which, in the context of the GDR took on even more significance, Corvus Corax borrowed ‘authentic’ medieval texts and melodies, rendering them in acoustic arrangements inspired by medieval performance practices. In short, German ‘folk’ bands invented ‘medieval’ rock to sidestep Nazi connotations with the word ‘folk’. Besides invoking the semantic shift from ‘folk’ to ‘medieval’, I argue that the band adopts the figure of the medieval minstrel and asserts that his multilingual texts, ‘foreign’ instruments and colourful performance practices speak to an inclusive, diverse and cosmopolitan community. Paradoxically, they do so by first positioning the medieval minstrel as a punked-up, marginalised ‘outcast’. The cultural capital of this outcast status helps medieval rock bands like Corvus Corax carve out a space for marginalised voices who, in their new privileged positions, offer a form of retribution for politics of exclusion, racism and authoritarianism.

Musical performances on the bass guitar, able to be felt bodily beyond the ear, connect into the many layers of affect that music excites; but they are particularly potent as a means of communicating embodied masculinity for one young man with a hearing disability. Masculinity as a social code enacted within practices of the everyday involves both the affect and the effect of difference. The bass guitar, the instrument which drives a band's sound and rhythm, is part of the performativity of masculinity within popular music – visually, and at the level of sound, as auricular materiality – an embodied sensation where the ‘feel’ of sound through the body constitutes a language in which ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ modes of masculinity become appropriated and defined.

Displays of musical prowess on the bass guitar open a space for becoming ‘unfixed’ from the identity and abject status of the hearing-disabled Other. This ‘Othering’ occurs primarily in everyday spoken encounters where difficulties with hearing and speech limit opportunities for occupying a viable masculine positioning. By contrast, the capacity to ‘fit’ the sensory and sensual prompts that trigger recognition of masculinity within popular music enables the re-assembling of an embodied masculine identity for a hearing-disabled young man. Masculinity and disability are rendered reversible and exchangeable – performative productions that are excessive and transgressive, contingent on the sensory perceptions of self and others.

This emphasis on embodied communicative practice through the play of bass guitar provides an important counterweight to representational forms of embodied gendered subjectivity that continue to predominate in some modes of disability and gender theorising. It constitutes a forceful assertion of how everyday embodied interactions are irrevocably coupled with mobile and transient masculine and disabled aesthetic identifications.

Thanks to the generous support of the Municipality of Bogota, the Academia Superior de Artes of Bogota and the Colombian Ministry of Culture, IASPM held its Third Latin American Conference under excellent technical and organisational conditions. Almost seventy papers and plenaries were presented and debated in the Luis Angel Arango Library in Bogota between 23 and 27 August 2000. Scholars took part from Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Canada, the US, the UK, Switzerland and Spain.

the phrase ‘this magic moment’ recurs throughout elvis costello's ‘it’s time' (1996). an allusion to pop history – the drifter's ‘this magic moment’ (1960) – is thus used in the service of a fatalistic narrative that manages to evoke both the ‘revenge and guilt’ famously associated with costello's early career and the early 1960's romanticism of brill building pop. the musical ‘magic moment’ of the song arrives in a ringing e major chord at the end of the chorus, played in open position on the electric guitar. the use of this e major chord references another line of pop music history, one that stretches back to the formation of ‘folk-rock’ in the mid-1960s. this paper serves as an example of how one song creates a series of magic moments that resonate densely with simultaneous histories.

this paper examines key moments from three pop songs – carole king's ‘a road to nowhere’ (1966), eminem's ‘stan’ (2000), and smokey robinson's ‘cruisin” (1979) – and considers the kinds of meanings and ‘un-meanings’ such brief musical snatches might contain or imply. the first is posited as a turning point in carole king's life and career, one bridging her early song-writing achievements and later solo persona; the second as a throwback in disguise, contemporary in voice and attitude but nonetheless invoking the unlikely example of the shangri-las; and the last as an instance of ‘un-meaning’, art which achieves itself not through articulation but through implication, which sensually ‘moves’ rather than intellectually ‘places’ its auditor. throughout the paper, the often radically subjective writings of walter pater are employed as a model of criticism which is open to the imaginative possibilities of intense artistic moments.

As an artist understood to be foregrounding in hip hop topics such as the emotional experience of private relationships, Drake has the opportunity to shape the conceptions of masculinity that are especially hardened in the context of male rappers. Recognised for his niceness in terms of rap skill and personal decentness, Drake has established himself as a genuine person making intimate connections with his fans. However, this image depends on his disregard, in his interviews and his albums, for the effects of the commercialised hip hop genre on his music and his message. Although he presents himself as a model for his generation, this discounting of context limits Drake's possibilities as a public figure.

The emergence of punk in Britain (1976–1978) is recalled and documented as a moment of rebellion, one in which youth culture was seen to challenge accepted values and forms of behaviour, and to set in motion a new kind of cultural politics. In this article we do two things. First, we ask how far punk's challenge extended. Did it penetrate those political, cultural and social elites against which it set itself? And second, we reflect on the problem of recovering the history and politics of moments such as punk, and on the value of archives to such exercises in recuperation. In pursuit of both tasks, we make use of a wide range of historical sources, relying on these rather than on retrospective oral or autobiographical accounts. We set our findings against the narratives offered by both subcultural and mainstream histories of punk. We show how punk's impact on elites can be detected in the rhetoric of the popular media, and in aspects of the practice of local government and the police. Its impact on other elites (e.g. central government or the monarchy) is much harder to discern. These insights are important both for enriching our understanding of the political significance of punk and for how we approach the historical record left by popular music.

We all know the foreigner who survives with a tearful face turned towards the lost homeland. Melancholy lover of a vanished space, he cannot, in face, get over his having abandoned a period of time. The lost paradise is a mirage of the past that he will never be able to recover. (Kristeva 1991, p. 9)

In recent years, historians have belatedly recognised the growth of the British brass band as one of the most remarkable developments in the sphere of popular music-making in the second half of the nineteenth century. Not only did ‘banding’ provide an absorbing pastime for tens of thousands of amateur musicians, but brass band performances also fulfilled an important cultural and educational role in introducing the standard classics of the bourgeois musical canon to mass audiences who never saw the inside of an opera house or a concert hall. In addition, satisfying the needs of these new-style bands for music, instruments, uniforms and other impedimenta led to the growth of a group of small, specialised and resourceful enterprises which successfully developed a mass market for their wares in Britain and the colonies. By the end of the 1890s, there could have been few towns or villages, whether in the remoter parts of the British Isles or even the most far flung corners of the white dominions, where some kind of brass band did not add its distinctive tones to the annual cycle of formal and informal events which made up their community's social calendar.

The phrase ‘big in Japan’ has become a popular cliché, used to describe acts which are meant to be enjoying Japanese success: anyone from Kylie Minogue to Primal Scream; from Dead or Alive to Blur. It seems that even the most unregarded artists can make it in Japan. Even Spinal Tap – the fictional, washed-up heavy metal band from Rob Reiner's film of the same name – were finally able to find success in Japan. The implication seems to be that the Japanese hunger for Western culture is so strong that even bands who have failed in their own countries can succeed in the Japanese market. Indeed, an expressed belief that Japanese listeners could not get enough of Western music was the usual reaction when I told acquaintances that I was studying the Japanese pop music market. This belief is perpetuated by music magazines, which regularly print stories detailing bizarre acts of devotion by Japanese fans.

Naturally, in appealing to so many consumers, pop music admits of little formal complexity. Whatever a song's concern, it occurs stringently within the demotic constraints of verse, chorus, middle eight and their like. So often is the familiar blast of Bob Dylan's harmonica an end in itself that he is able to contradict this expectation by withholding the true final verse. Describing Handel's practice within the formal convention of recitative and aria in eighteenth-century opera seria, Winton Dean observed: ‘His care for dramatic values led him to modify the formal scheme to express not only states of mind but character in action; and here most of all the stiffness of the convention enabled him to bring off all manner of surprises’ (Dean 1969, p. 171).