Since when do Catalans speak Catalan and who are they anyway? Perhaps the 1992 Olympic Games have shed some light on Catalan identity for outsiders, but I believe the idea deserves development with a focus on the recent phenomenon of ‘rock en català’. By focusing on language and Catalan nationalism, by no means driven by a homogeneous ideology, I hope to clarify these questions about Catalan identity and its role in popular culture. In 1985 what would inspire four youths from Spain's north-eastern coastal region to pick up instruments they had never played before, with the exception of the drummer, and start a punk-rock band provocatively named Condons Adulterats (Spoiled Condoms)? What was the impetus behind their first hit ‘Estic penjat’ (I'm Stoned)? Fame? Money? Politics? Sex? I believe with the latter we are getting warmer, but as an original member of the band that sprang from this seedling, I can attest to the fact that we just wanted to have some fun. It was a challenge to have our efforts taken seriously and, while they often were not, our local following grew. If commercial success had been the goal of the band we would have agreed to sing in Spanish with the dream of conquering the Spanish peninsula. But the project began locally in the highly industrialised province of Tarragona where the most natural thing to do was to sing in Catalan.

In Britain the term ‘obscenity’ has enjoyed a chequered career. Obscene libel first became an offence in 1727 when an erotic book called Venus in the Cloister was found to contravene common law by tending to ‘weaken the bonds of civil society, virtue and morality’ (Robertson 1991, p. 180). Despite this, erotic literature remained freely available throughout the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century Britain got its first Obscene Publications Act. This came in 1857 and gave the police power to take books before local Justices who could order their forfeiture and destruction.

On 12 November 2017, the Philippine celebrity musician Pilita Corrales was singing the popular song ‘Ikaw’ (‘You’) at a gala event in Manila, attended by some of the world's most powerful politicians at the time, US President Donald Trump and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Suddenly, she noticed a male voice singing along with her, its intonation off, its volume increasing. Aware that the event was being recorded, Corrales at first tried to disregard the intruding voice. Eventually however, she could no longer ignore it and, shielding her eyes from the lights with one hand, she tried to spot the uninvited singer in the audience. ‘Where are you, sir’? she asked. Realising that the singer was on one of the balconies, it dawned on her that he was none other than Duterte himself. After giving Duterte room to sing a section by himself, she then joined the president in the song's finale (BBC News 2017; Guardian News 2017; Rappler 2017).

This article examines the relationship between music and sponsorship by drinks companies. Glasgow Jazz Festival has taken place annually since 1987 and is the city's longest running music festival. In its early years, the Festival enjoyed both cash and in-kind sponsorship from a wide range of organisations, including breweries and distilleries along with companies specialising in non-alcoholic drinks. In 2015 sponsorship was more difficult to secure, with cash sponsorship proving to be particularly elusive. The article focuses on cash sponsorship from drinks companies from 1987 to 2001, arguing that the decline in this form of sponsorship is a result of a shifting commercial and cultural landscape. Changes in Glasgow's festival calendar have resulted in a crowded marketplace which not only makes it harder for arts organisations to secure funds, but also makes relationships with sponsors more challenging to manage. Meanwhile, legislative and social changes have meant that the role of alcohol in the city's cultural life has been subject to adjustment throughout the Festival's history.

To a considerable extent, the mythology of rock and roll rebellion is predicated upon a similarly mythologised male sexual potency that Simon Frith and Angeld McRobbie have characterised as ‘aggressive, dominating, and boastful, … [constantly seeking] to remind the audience of [its] prowess, [its] control’ (Frith and McRobbie 1990, p. 319). In this article, I look to Roy Orbison – a musician who was a key figure in the genesis of rock and roll, but who nevertheless subverts this phallocentric meta-narrative. Focusing on the 1987 concert film, Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night, I argue that Orbison's staid performance style, unusual voice and unconventional songwriting as evidenced (and amplified) by that film trouble the purportedly monolithic rock and roll masculinity, and the concomitant mythology of rebellion. At the same time, however, I propose that even as normative masculinity appears to be destabilised, a close reading of the film reveals that the performance situates Orbison within a different masculinist discourse: the 19th-century Romantic discourse of masculine genius that continues to inflect 21st century notions about artists and art music. Thus, in Black and White Night, normative and non-normative masculinities are thoroughly imbricated, each simultaneously destabilising and reaffirming the other.

In recent years, rap music has been growing rapidly within the Greek cultural landscape. This paper places emphasis on a particular politicised current within the genre, examining closely two recent examples from the Greek context. Although such performances have already been broadly discussed as ‘populist’ within public debate, this paper aims at rigorously assessing this claim. To do so, it first turns to contemporary populism research in order to articulate a consistent and operational approach that can be utilised in the analysis of rap performances. Against the background of a minimal definitional consensus highlighting populism's people-centrism and anti-elitism, this contribution will then focus on (a) the performative dimension of populism and its occasional extra-political conditioning and (b) populist performances within popular music, namely rap. Could one designate rap music as a locus of populist performance(s)? How could such a hypothesis be substantiated through the analysis of concrete examples from the contemporary Greek scene?

Music sharing on social media increasingly involves ‘imagined listening’, a form of sociality based on how we think that others listen to music (as well as on our own imagining of sounds) and typically mediated by the exchange of visual prompts, such as the thumbnail images associated with a particular streaming link or recording. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted online and offline with Spanish migrants in London, I show how practices of music sharing based on imagined listening articulate specific moral economies. In these economies, users imbue the sharing of music with positive value, as something that contributes to human flourishing and balances the negative aspects of social media and the world. I also consider how users reckon with the algorithmic manipulations of social media platforms and the fleeting forms of user engagement characteristic of an online world in which there is more music than could ever be heard.

This essay reviews alternate mixes and edited versions produced for numerous purposes over the past half-century for stock singles, promotional singles, albums and reissues of all sorts, all evidencing a form of literary intertextuality of uniquely central importance to the record industry that has not previously been covered systematically. These multiple texts resulting from different manipulations of a single tape source exhibit what is termed intratextuality, leading to variations in composition, arranging and engineering. In addition, much of the essay's discussion will document for scholars as well as for fans a number of recordings whose continuing availability has been jeopardized by never having been reissued in CD format.

Léo Ferré exemplifies what is now widely regarded in France as the golden era of la chanson française during the 1950s and 1960s. This article examines how one singer-songwriter attempted to deal in his own, highly idiosyncratic way with the contraints of working within the record industry, and focuses on the development of his ambivalent relationship with the record label owner and producer, Eddie Barclay. Although sympathetic to Ferré's cause, Barclay also adopted a pragmatic approach, particularly where questions of censorship were concerned, as he attempted to balance commercial necessity, legal requirements as well as the creative demands of the artist. The discussion also explores how Ferré has contributed to contemporary intellectual debates relating to the significance of popular music within a French context. Ferré showed marked resistance to North American influence and middle-of-the-road pop music, particularly la chanson yéyé, but he was by no means not-influenced by the arrival of rock in France.

The two passages that follow appeared within a few weeks of each other in 1963. At a glance they have little to do with one another:

Between them The Beatles adopt a do-it-yourself approach from the very beginning. They write their own lyrics, design and eventually build their own instrumental backdrops and work out their own vocal arrangements. Their music is wild, pungent, hard-hitting, uninhibited…and personal. The do-it-yourself angle ensures complete originality at all stages of the production. (Barrow 1963)

Paul Oliver never described himself as an ethnomusicologist but much of his work is strongly ethnomusicological in approach. This article looks at his pioneering research in these terms, re-examines some of his ideas about African retentions in the blues as put forward in his book Savannah Syncopators, discusses critically the reliability of sonic evidence for establishing historical connections between different kinds of music, and concludes that such evidence is acceptable when supported by other kinds of data.

In this article I emphasise the deliberate and reflexive way that Bob Dylan has approached studio recording, sketching the features of a phonographic aesthetic, to highlight a neglected aspect of Dylan's creative practice and to counter the view of Dylan as primarily a ‘performing artist’, one who approaches the studio in a casual manner as a place to cut relatively spontaneous drafts of songs that are later developed on stage. Drawing on Evan Eisenberg's discussion of the ‘art of phonography’ and the way recording radically separates a performance from its contexts of ‘origin’ (allowing recordings to be taken into a private space and subjected to intense, repeated listening), I argue that studio practice, a recording aesthetic and the art of phonography are integral to Dylan's songwriting. The process and practice of songwriting is realised through the act of recording and informed by listening to songs and performances from recordings, regardless of how much time is actually spent in the studio. Exploring how Dylan's phonographic imagination has been shaped by folk, blues and pop sonorities, along with film music, I argue that recording should be integrated into discussions of Dylan's art, alongside the attention devoted to lyrics, performance and biography.

In Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, there have been a significant number of musical events in recent years that have been called ‘underground’. These have formed an underground scene that offered a cosmopolitan alternative to established ‘greenlandificated’ popular music. This paper accounts for the building of this underground scene by Nuuk youth, and asks why these young people valued musical change informed by a cosmopolitan outlook, while at the same time holding firmly to the conviction that their activities were a part of the dominant Greenlandic nation-building project. Social agents, which played key roles in building the Nuuk underground scene, described their activities as attempts to come to terms with a history in which Greenland has been perceived as a subaltern nation. This enquiry explains the nationalist logic behind a concern with performing similarity with Western nations in the Nuuk underground scene, as opposed to the more widespread romantic nationalist logic concerned with expressing a distinguishable national character. This further leads to an expansion of a position of cosmopolitan nationalism.

In his book, America, Jean Baudrillard characterised the United States as a nation created for the sole purpose of escaping history, a place that has purged itself of all negativity, and whose citizens live life in a perpetual present. Baudrillard's study of America provides an ideal framework with which to examine the ways that blues is both congenial and antithetical to postmodern America, and how the significations and meanings of blues have changed as the music has passed from modernity to postmodernity. Of particular interest is the question of whether African-American interpretations of blues can remain privileged. Examining blues music in the context of America provides clear cultural examples that support many of Baudrillard's often obscure metaphysical observations.

Because of their brevity, many pop songs of the last 50 years seemingly elude the application of narrative theory. But the deliberate lengthening of individual tracks during the early years of progressive rock exposes them to precisely that kind of examination. One such song is ‘Supper's Ready’, which closes the 1972 Genesis album Foxtrot. This allegorical 23-minute epic, abundant with references to the Book of Revelation, provides an intriguing model for the ‘concept song’, and confounds the listener's expectations – lyrical, musical, narrative, structural and temporal. In this article I explore the seven tableaux of ‘Supper's Ready’, paying particular attention to the treatment of the apocalyptic theme, apply formalist and narrative theories of interpretation, and consider ways in which the song's design demands that the listener engage with both its concept and its construction.