Why do bands keep audiences waiting? This question is one among several by which I aim to delimit the phenomenon of the public performance experience. I want to determine how far a concert is a sequence of rituals – rather than an encounter critically focused on the act of music-making – where it is the observance of each component that decides the success of the occasion. I ask this of all types of concerts, by the way, but – hey – this is a popular music journal.

This article examines the critical reception of Feist's 2017 album Pleasure, and interpretations by reviewers of the mysterious hiss that permeates most of the album's tracks. I firstly contextualise Pleasure in relation to the aesthetics of record production. I then examine interviews with Feist and her collaborators to identify the source of the hiss, and explain its presence on Pleasure. Lastly, I examine a corpus of 20 reviews, showcasing how critics (mis)identified and (mis)interpreted the sound, as well as the effect of this on their overall understanding of the album. To explain the relationship between the hiss and accompanying music, I assume a semiotic perspective. Following Poyatos, I regard these two kinds of sound as part of distinct yet related cosystems of signs, loosely analogous to the relationship between verbal utterances and nonverbal behaviours in face-to-face communication. Through this lens, I analyse how Pleasure's hiss was heard to modify, support, emphasise and undermine the meaning of the music by reviewers.

For the readers of Popular Music, the name of Toru Mitsui is associated with the ‘Booklist’, a column he was in charge of from 1989 to 2002. For many members of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the meeting he organised in Kanazawa in 1997 is unforgettable. For scholars and students interested in Japanese popular music, his numerous articles in English are the first references to be read. Last March (2005) Professor Mitsui retired from Kanazawa University, where he had taught since 1969. To commemorate his retirement, a Festschrift entitled Popular Music and Academia (2005b) was published in coordination with a symposium held at the University of Tokyo in May 2004. This is a good opportunity to look back over his prolific career in popular music studies.

Previous studies of indie music from the 1980s and 1990s have noted that it uses a number of stylistic markers – involving production values, singing style instrumentation and lyrical themes – to convey difference from a perceived mainstream. However, the ideal of difference also influences other aspects of songwriting. As a case study, this article examines early songs by the highly regarded indie band Pavement in which irregularity in phrasing and hypermeter supports a narrative of differentiation. Recurring strategies for creating irregularity include thwarting expected closure at the ends of phrases, using the sounds of words to project conflicting cues for grouping boundaries and creating highly irregular hypermetric lengths. These metric and phrasing devices, when heard in the context of songs, often have vivid narrative or expressive implications.

Back in 1982, Max Paddison suggested that Frank Zappa's 1960s' Mothers of Invention recordings deserved to be read in the context of Adorno's views on mass culture. Based on a ‘critical, self-reflective attitude’ (Paddison 1982, p. 216) towards their musical processes, as anticipated in Adorno's essay, ‘Music and technique’ of 1959, these records could be seen to mount an incisive critique of the ‘culture industry’. The title of a series of essays in Telos (Spring 1991), ‘Special Section on Musicology: popular music from Adorno to Zappa’, locates Zappa in a debate about Adorno's continuing relevance where theories of popular music are concerned. More recently, Ben Watson's Frank Zappa, The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (1994) uses a theoretical admixture of Marx and Freud in which Adorno looms large. (The dust jacket photograph of Watson mirrors the photograph of Adorno at Oxford in December 1935 which now adorns the 1997 paperback edition of Paddison's Adorno's Aesthetics of Music.) The influence of Adorno remains in Watson's later essay in The Frank Zappa Companion (1997), which takes Dada as a crucial point of reference. Central to all this remains the question of Zappa's identity and status as an avant-gardist, and it is this issue which concerns me here. I agree that the Mothers' albums, together with later work, can be made to represent a radical popular music. It's the word ‘represent’ that causes the problem.

Country music has a reputation for being the music of the American white working-class South and being closely aligned with conservative politics. However, country music has also been played by non-white minorities and has been a vivid way of expressing progressive political views. In the hands of the Indigenous peoples of Australia, country music has often given voice to a form of life-writing that critiques colonial power. The songs of Dougie Young, dating from the late 1950s, provide one of the earliest and most expressive examples of this use of country music. Young's songs were a type of social-realist satire and to be fully understood should be placed within the broader socio-political context of 1950s and 1960s Australia. Young's legacy was also important for Aboriginal musicians in the 1990s and the accompanying reassessment of Australia's colonial past. Country music has provided particular opportunities for minority and Indigenous groups seeking to use popular culture to tell their stories. This use of country music provides a new dimension to more conventional understandings of its political role.

In the early- and mid-1960s, as mainstream popular music began to reach and exploit the growing youth market, the country music genre was going through a number of important transformations (see Malone 1985; Hemphill 1970). During this period the country music industry, including record companies, recording studios, managing and booking agents, music publishers and musicians, was becoming more fully consolidated in Nashville. In addition, a different kind of dominant sound was beginning to coalesce, based on a more ‘uptown’ feel and intended for a more cosmopolitan audience accustomed to mainstream, adult pop music. The beat and whine of the honky-tonk song, as epitomised by the rural twang in the music of Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell and Webb Pierce, was being replaced as the dominant country music sound by the smooth and urbane ballad styles of Eddy Arnold, Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline. This shift was both caused by and helped to foster the development of a steady set of studio musicians who would appear on thousands of country recordings per year. The musical style that coalesced in Nashville studios through the regular collaboration of these musicians and the record label producers who loosely arranged them became known as the ‘Nashville Sound’, a marketable and identifiable name for a particular set of musical conventions. This sound, nearly as similar to Rosemary Clooney as it was to Hank Williams, called into question the generic boundaries between ‘country’ music and mainstream ‘pop’ music.