African American gospel music is a unique and distinctive idiom that has had a pervasive influence upon the development of contemporary popular music. While there are now many sources available on African American gospel music, the focus of the vast majority of these studies is on the sociological, historical and stylistic aspects of the genre, rather than on identifying and codifying specific musical characteristics and performance practices. This paper extends the discussion of gospel singing techniques in Andrew Legg's 2010 article ‘A taxonomy of musical gesture in African American gospel music’ (Popular Music, 29/1) by examining some of the key performance practices associated with rhythm and lyric treatment in African American gospel music, as well as common structures in gospel music improvisation and accompaniment. Through analysis of selected recordings, this research proposes a codified frame of reference for the definition and discussion of terminologies and performance practice techniques inherent within African American gospel music.

‘Old Town Road’, a genre-defying song fuelled by proliferating remixes, is a key site to unravel the position of remixes in contemporary popular music and culture. In this article, I examine mainstream press discourse about ‘Old Town Road’, finding that Lil Nas X's use of remixes to boost the song's popularity was generally seen as smart, while the racial politics of genre were contested but still powerful. Ultimately, the popular conversation around the song showed a sense that one key possibility of remixes is to resist the ways that genres normatively operate as straight lines of descent from musical forebears, instead engaging in a queer kind of reproduction, a joyful excess of proliferating versions.

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.

In 1974 Time magazine placed Van Morrison fifth in a curious little league table of ‘Greatest Living Songwriters’ behind Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Leonard Cohen. This in itself has little value and probably less meaning but serves to illustrate a point; one could in all probability fill this room with books and critical articles which have been written about Bob Dylan, and while the scholars have not spent so much energy upon Lennon and McCartney, popular approval of their work is perhaps greater than that for Dylan – we all ‘know the story’ of The Beatles. Leonard Cohen, the most ‘cultish’ among Time magazine's Gang of Four is perhaps closest to Morrison in terms of reputation, but is known also as a literary figure with some record albums and volumes of poetry issued under the same title. Some might argue that this is just a glorification of a lyric sheet; this observation may be made flippantly but does actually lead to a problematical but fascinating relation between what is written and what is sung – to which we shall turn later. My point is that in comparison to this quartet and on these terms, Van Morrison is almost invisible. There have been only two published studies of Morrison, both long out of print. The first was a piece of well-intentioned but now rather dated hagiography, Into the Music by Ritchie Yorke (1975). However, this book has the great advantage of being written with the co-operation of its subject. The second was produced by Johnny Rogan, a professional biographer of rock musicians.

Paul McCartney's Give my Regards to Broad Street opened in New York City (and in 319 cinemas across the USA) on 26 October 1984, following the most intense publicity campaign that the McCartneys and 20th-Century Fox could mount. Apart from a wave of magazine interviews with Linda and Paul, a new video, No More Lonely Nights gave a cute synopsis, and the song itself was released as a single; a soundtrack album was produced and McCartney's own company, MPL Communications, put out a songbook including music and pictures from the film plus a forty-eight page screenplay (McCartney 1984). Despite all this, and an $8,000,000 investment by Fox the movie quickly sank like a stone and was withdrawn from distribution after a couple of weeks. Most people have never seen Give my Regards to Broad Street.

In the field of scientific research on popular music there are a number of studies of the reception of rock music and various sociological analyses of the music industry, but there are few studies of rock musicians themselves. The empirical musician studies that do exist tend to use qualitative data analysis and to pursue limited research interests. There is thus work on the formation of rock bands (Jones and Harvey 1980; Schäffer 1996), on cover bands (Groce 1989), on group processes and structures (Groce and Dowell 1988; Tennstedt 1979), on female musicians (Groce and Cooper 1990) and on amateur musicians (Clemens 1983). Studies with standardised questionnaire and quantitative data analysis are rarer (but see Wills and Cooper 1988; and in Germany, Dollase, Rüsenberg and Stollenwerk 1974; Ebbecke and Lüschper 1987; Niketta 1986; Niketta, Niepel and Nonninger 1983; Weber 1990). The problem of these studies is their narrow database, and so I want to report here on a research project designed to provide empirically well-founded but broad-based evidence of the situation of rock musicians in West Germany. The research was undertaken in order to inform strategies for promoting rock music making in Germany (see Zickenheiner 1988). It was financed by the Federal Ministry for Education and Science and the Secretariat for Common Cultural Activities, in co-operation with the Centre for Music and Communication Technology, Wuppertal. The original project report was published in 1993 (Niketta and Volke 1993).

Although much has been written about the changes wrought to art in the age of mechanical reproduction, these same changes as they have impacted on music through the phenomenon of the phonograph have not received equivalent attention or, if they have, then their discussion has been restricted to particular sectors of the music industry. This failure to address an important facet of contemporary music practice derives from a continuing tendency to abstract musical questions from their context and to obscure the material contributions that technology makes to such practice (Shepherd 1977, 1991; Scott 1990). With some musics this is more apparent than others. For instance, while there has been an extensive analysis of the degree to which the recording industry has influenced and been an integral element in the development of popular music, there has not been an equivalent analysis of its influence on classical music. This is because in the case of the former the links between the two have been somewhat more dramatic. The recording industry, particularly through its links with radio and television stations, has in large measure facilitated the spread of popular music across the world as a dominant element of a globalised culture, as one of its master codes.

Sampling has been criticised as ‘a mixture of time-travel and seance’, ‘the musical art of ghost co-ordination and ghost arrangement’, and a process that ‘doubles (recording's) inherent supernaturalism’ (Reynolds, S., 2012, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past, London, Faber and Faber, pp. 313–14). Yet out of all the sample-based music forms, hip-hop receives the lion's share of attention in popular music literature; critics are puzzled by its appeal, scholars identify a plethora of problems in its function, and practitioners and audiences alike are mesmerised by its effect. Rap producers attribute an inherent ‘magic’ to working with past phonographic samples and fans appear spellbound by the resulting ‘supernatural’ collage. The author examines the music's unique recipe of phonographic juxtaposition, exploring the conditions of this ascribed ‘magic’, investigating gaps in perception between emotional and intellectual effect and deciphering parallels in the practice and vocabulary mobilised against a range of genres in performance magic.

The paper introduces the concept of musicking assemblages to account for the agency of non-human actants in a project by contemporary artist, Wolfgang Buttress, that involved creating a musical soundscape together with bees. Collapsing distinctions between popular music, contemporary art and scientific research, the project exhibits musicking not as a result of human action but as emerging from intensive flows of matter-energy circulating between a multiplicity of actants, both human and non-human. Consequently, it presupposes a materialist ontology that breaks with anthropocentric hierarchies and encourages us to rethink popular music as always already involving ‘becoming with’ non-human others, in a way that overcomes the division between culture and nature, as well as its epistemological corollaries.

Middlewood Sessions produced a kind of popular music that infuses the timbral aesthetics of jazz and orchestral music with the driving rhythms of dance music. This studio project, lasting for almost eight years, provided a rich resource for gaining insight into the increasingly prevalent context of the domestic project studio via a longitudinal case study approach. At the heart of this research is the desire to understand how people collaborate as part of a studio project, how people use technologies to make music and how all of this unfolds over time. To tackle the question of how to understand the shattered, scattered nature of creative practices, and in extending existing creativity research, I propose three ways of thinking about time: nests, arcs and cycles. While explicating this theoretical framework, something of the specific and idiographic nature of the case study, as an example of contemporary music production, is recounted.

In the study of popular music, much attention is given to the cover version, a performance of a song filled with reference to and even commentary upon previous performances. Analysis of cover versions tends to reveal a lot about the performers and performances but very little about the work being performed. Because different versions of a song may vary widely, it is often difficult to determine what precisely is ‘the work’ in the first place, especially in the absence of a score. Using an original analytical apparatus, the pitch-prevalence contour, and using Jimmy Webb's ‘Didn't We’ as a case study, this essay attempts to quantify the ‘core components’ of a song, the parts of a song that are retained in most if not all of its versions. It is through the analysis of various performances, seeking similarities, that one is able to see the essence of the song revealed. What is more, isolating these components simultaneously brings the differences in the performances into greater relief. The methodology thus separates the singer and the song.