Until recently, the world of the British barbershop singer was a self-enclosed community whose existence went largely unrecognised both by musicians involved in other genres and by the public at large. In the last few years this has started to change, chiefly due to the participation of barbershop choruses in the televised competition ‘Sainsbury's Choir of the Year’. Encouraged by the success of Shannon Express in 1994, many other choruses entered the 1996 competition, four of them reaching the televised semi-finals, and two the finals. During this increased exposure, it became apparent that television commentators had little idea of what to make of barbershoppers, indeed regarded them as a peculiar, and perhaps rather trivial, breed of performer. This bafflement is not surprising given the genre's relative paucity of exposure either in the mass media or in the musical and musicological press; the plentiful articles written by barbershoppers about their activity and its meanings are almost exclusively addressed to each other, to sustain the community rather than integrate it into wider musical life. The purpose of this paper, however, is not to follow the theme of these intra-community articles in arguing that barbershop harmony should actually be regarded as a serious and worthy art, or to explain to a bewildered world what this genre is actually about; rather, it aims to explore the way that barbershop singers theorise themselves and their activity to provide a case study in the relationship between social and musical values. That is, I am not writing as an apologist for a hitherto distinctly insular practice, but exploiting that very insularity as a means to pursue a potentially very broad question within a self-limited field of enquiry.

Years ago (no prizes for guessing how many years ago), when my friends and I were teenagers who literally lived on ‘She Loves You’ or ‘A Hard Day's Night’, I never thought that one day these songs would be more than my favourite music or that they would even inspire my attempts at academic research. Back in the 1960s, the very thought of studying rock music never crossed my mind – reflections on such a pleasant subject seemed too dry and dull. If I were a boy, I am sure I would have joined a group (apparently I was aware even then that rock was a boy's world. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why I never tried to touch the guitar) …

‘And this, after all, we do know with certainty: that in the 1880s in and around New Orleans and in other parts of the South, they were beginning to play the music we call jazz.’ So wrote Barry Ulanov who was convinced that jazz ‘reached back to the twelve bar form of the folk tune … and evolved that most durable and most thoroughly adaptable of jazz forms, the blues’. Picked out by ‘men and women in the backwoods and the front parlors making the delicate little changes, insisting upon the famous “blue notes”’, it took shape ‘long before the famous early names of jazz – before Buddy Bolden and Freddie Keppard and Papa Laine’ (Ulanov 1958a, p. 17). Ulanov was writing in 1957, more than thirty years closer to the origins of jazz, when a number of the veteran musicians of the first and second generations were still living. His ‘certainty’ implied that the blues was the wellspring of jazz from which it drew its inspiration and its improvisation.

Dysnomia is a 2013 recording by the jazz trio Dawn of Midi scored for acoustic piano, bass and drums. Eschewing jazz chords, improvisation, swing rhythms and theme and variations, the music is instead organised around repeating rhythmic loops and interlocking melo-harmonic fragments, as one groove assemblage segues into the next like an evolving DJ set. The music sounds equal parts minimal process, electronically sequenced and traditional African. This article engages the musical and philosophical concepts at play in Dysnomia to think through writing about music via three paths of speculative inquiry. The first part of the article considers works by Kodwo Eshun, Paul Morley and David Sudnow, idiosyncratic thinkers outside of the mainstream of academic music discourse who vividly approach writing about music through defamiliarising language and inventing concepts, generating associations based on comparative listening and describing the dynamics of musical process. In the second part of the article I draw on these writing techniques to direct my repeated listening encounters with Dysnomia and construct a prose interpretation modelled on the polyrhythms of the music. I conclude with a brief discussion of the phenomenological perspective on musical essences and suggest that music is a model for thinking through writing about music.

Using Swedish metal band Ghost as a primary case study, this article examines how anonymous bands mediate their identity through the use of masks. The isolation of the band members’ ‘real’ identities from their musical performance complicates traditional modes of ‘knowing’ the performer, but in turn enables the formation of a multitude of connectivities, as audiences utilise masked bodies as sites upon which to project their desires and fantasies. Such projections are integral to the ways in which masking allows performers to mobilise and sustain their connections to audiences, who themselves become complicit in the maintenance of anonymity. This article thus considers how masks might challenge established notions of popular music performance, celebrity and authenticity, particularly within heavy metal contexts, and investigates how masks, rather than de-identifying a performer, can invite intimate connections among musicians and audiences.

Despite the fact that drinking and music often share a space, the relationship between alcohol-related misbehaviour and live music has received little academic attention. Music has been demonstrated to influence drinking behaviour and entertainers have been observed influencing (‘soft-policing’) drunken misbehaviour by audiences. However, to date research has not given voice to those providing this musical entertainment. Are they aware of the effects they have on audiences' drinking behaviour and does this impact on performances? Our qualitative research fills this lacuna by drawing on the experiences of gigging entertainers to explore how they deal with intoxicated audiences. Interviews conducted as part of this research highlighted a lack of preparation on the part of performers for dealing with disorderly crowds and/or the unwanted attentions of drunken individuals; they usually have to learn appropriate responses ‘on the job’. Success as a gigging entertainer was felt to be only partly founded upon artistic merit, with an ability to engage the (often inebriated) public being equally important. Although none had received formal training in alcohol issues as musicians, some utilised people skills (e.g. conflict resolution techniques) acquired via other employment. The authors ask if there is a place for training in alcohol-related issues to be offered by or integrated into music curriculums.

Between 1978 and 1984 Buddy Esquire designed over 300 hip hop flyers. His career coincided with the first flourishing of the Bronx scene, when hip hop shifted from a community-based event to a full-blown commercial phenomenon. This paper analyses Buddy Esquire's flyer design style, supported by a discussion with the flyer artist. The analysis demonstrates that Esquire's ‘neo-deco’ style communicates the aspiration of live hip hop to classiness by suppressing overt graffiti elements, by alluding to the nightclub culture of disco and by using the Art Deco stylings of the Jazz Age as a signifier of sophistication. The paper then moves beyond an interpretation of the flyers, searching for reflections of Buddy Esquire's aesthetic in early hip hop culture. Finally, it proposes that Buddy Esquire's flyers challenge assumptions in current hip hop scholarship regarding early hip hop's aesthetic relationship to the past (particularly the early 20th century) and its self-documenting impulse.

In the intense disciplinary upheavals of the last fifteen years or so within music scholarship, music analysis has been one of the most contentious areas of debate The sense of conflict arises from a confluence of factors: all music scholars who wish to describe the details of musical style must employ some form of music analysis, yet the very strengths of music-analytical practice Ð its ability to describe musical events with precision, its ability to explain details of musical style and demonstrate structural interrelationships Ð are couched in a technical meta-language that seems resistant to socio-cultural analysis, an area of particular interest for those involved in the self-critique of the field. Concurrent with the apearance of what are probably the best-known denouncements of analysis as formalist and tautological by Joseph Kerman in the early to mid-1980s, musicologists who were sympathetic to aspects of KermanÕs critique explored ways to harmonise the description and analysis of musical details with methods of analysis derived from different aspects of cultural theory. Many of the scholars seeking new applications for music analysis also pursued the related project of understanding the socio-historical context for music analysis itself and of unpacking the aesthetic values couched within the apparently neutral practice of analysis.

The most recent of the informal Critical Musicology study days focused on the concept of authenticity in popular music. The day consisted of seven short papers on this subject and was followed by a group discussion of issues raised by these papers.

In his opening paper, ‘ “We stripped it apart like a car and put it back together totally again”: music's authenticity-speak in the age of digital technology, c.1985’, Dai Griffiths (Oxford Brookes University) was keen to draw attention to the way that sampling technology had been interpreted, both in terms of practice and of discursive context, as a marker of identity. His historical framework made reference to earlier practices of cover and intertextual reference from the early 1960s onwards. Referring to A Tribe Called Quest and Beck, even with samples, it looked as though racial authenticity was still at issue. The role of sampling in the rendering of authenticity was also considered by Rupert Till (University College, Bretton Hall) in his paper ‘Club cultures and authenticity’. Making reference to hip-hop and dance music, he suggested that there are different authenticities for different kinds of popular music. Drawing on Sarah Thornton's (1995) study of club culture in which the underground is considered authentic and the commercial, inauthentic, Till gave examples of some of the alternative means by which it is considered possible to be financially successful and yet retain an aura of authenticity.

‘Back-Water Blues’, composed by Bessie Smith and recorded by her on 17 February 1927, has long been associated in the popular mind and even by some writers with the great flood of the lower Mississippi River and its tributaries that occurred that year. This is historically problematical because that flood began two months after Smith recorded her song. Through an examination of Smith's touring itinerary, the testimony of fellow entertainers who toured with her, newspaper reports, and other documents, it can be shown that the song was composed about a flood of the Cumberland River that struck Nashville, Tennessee, on Christmas morning, 1926. The lyrics of the song are interpreted with respect to the events of that flood.

This essay examines the work of singer-songwriter William Fitzsimmons as an example of how confessional performance is constructed within indie music. I contend that both audiences and artists participate in a discourse that draws on narratives of personal communication, intimacy and authenticity in order to create a distinctively confessional aesthetic. This aesthetic orientation is then reflected in performances that are framed as autobiographical and truth-telling. After surveying aspects of indie music that contribute to the formation of this aesthetic, I trace the implications of performed confession through an exploration of the sonic, visual and relational characteristics of Fitzsimmons's performances from his 2008 album The Sparrow and the Crow. By examining how artist and audience construct the confessional, I suggest a new perspective on how the confessional trope operates in indie music.

This article explores the relationship between the meaning of style in Idol-format TV shows, and the political style which many scholars consider central for understanding populism today. Inspired by Jacques Rancière's notion of aesthetic regimes, I theorise what I call ‘the regime of style’ as a set of aesthetic principles shared across these fields. I explore the case study of Miri Regev's term as Israel's Minister of Culture and Sports, showing how she implemented a long-term strategy combining deliberate scandals that pitted her against ‘the cultural elite’, and the endorsement of pop music styles associated with publics that traditionally support her party (Likud). What ties these complementary strategies together is that they perform a ‘flaunting of the low’ (Ostiguy 2017). In refocusing the conversation on contested hierarchies of taste, Regev's own appeal partakes in the aesthetic economy of Idol-format shows, where style is fetishised as a transparent performance of identity.

A seriously misleading error has crept into almost all the literature on the origins of New Orleans jazz. The error mistakenly attributes to the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s a significant role in the formation of the city's jazz tradition.

Jazz historians have done a reasonably good job of depicting the two black communities that existed in new Orleans from the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 until the twentieth century. One community comprised a French-speaking Catholic group who lived mostly in downtown New Orleans, i.e. the area of the city down-river from Canal Street. Before the Civil War this group, commonly called Creoles, or Black Creoles, but more accurately called Franco-Africans, comprised free people of colour as well as slaves, and after the war consisted of their descendants who perpetuated the group's language, religion and musical tradition, which combined French, African and Caribbean elements.

Members of the other black community were English-speaking Protestants who lived mostly in uptown new Orleans. That group, before the Civil War, was made up largely of slaves brought to New Orleans by Americans who flooded into Louisiana after the 1803 Purchase, though it also included some free people of colour. After the war, the descendants of these immigrants continued their language, religion and musical tradition, which came mostly from the rural South. There Anglo-Africans were generally less prosperous and less educated than the downtown Franco-African or Creole community.