Highlife is one of the myriad varieties of acculturated popular dance-music styles that have been emerging from Africa this century and which fuse African with Western (i.e. European and American) and islamic influences. Besides highlife, other examples include kwela, township jive and mbaqanga from South Africa, chimurenga from Zimbabwe, the benga beat from Kenya, taraab music from the East African coast, Congo jazz (soukous) from Central Africa, rai music from North Africa, juju and apala music from western Nigeria, makossa from the Cameroons and mbalax from Senegal.

In the two or so years since Cher's ‘Believe’ rather unexpectedly became the number one selling British single of 1998, the vocoder effect – which arguably snagged the track such widespread popularity – grew into one of the safest, maybe laziest, means of guaranteeing chart success. Since then, vocoder-wielding tracks such as Eiffel 65's ‘Blue (Da Ba Dee)’ and Sonique's ‘It Feels So Good’ have held fast at the slippery British number one spot for longer than the now-standard one week, despite their artists' relative obscurity. Even chart mainstays such as Madonna (‘Music’), Victoria Beckham (with the help of True Steppers and Dane Bowers) (‘Out of Your Mind’), Steps (‘Summer of Love’) and Kylie Minogue (the back-ups in ‘Spinning Around’) turned to this strange, automated-sounding gimmick which also proved to be a favourite with the poppier UK garage outfits (you can hear it on hits such as Lonyo/Comme Ci Comme Ca's ‘Summer of Love’, for example).

This article explores political, cultural and musical issues surrounding the dispute between Palestinians and Israelis, particularly over Jerusalem, which each party uses to symbolise and promote their own perception of the conflict. Specifically, I examine selected popular musical landmarks that capture the essence of the struggle from the ultra-nationalistic tones of the 1960s and 1970s to the more reconciliatory ones in the 1990s advocating peace. Special attention is given to musical cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian singers who played a strong role in the promotion of peace within a utopian dream of coexistence between Arabs and Jews.

In an article discussing hip-hop in Germany, one would expect an outline of how hip-hop emerged in the two German states or an analysis of the differences and similarities of the hip-hop scene in the two parts of the country or a report on how this youth culture has been affected by the process of political unification. However, an immediate analysis of the situation shows that although the hip-hop scene was organised in similar ways in both German states, and had similar role models, all the better known acts came from the west.

The sky is the limit

We rising, we rising, we woman rising,

(Easlyn Orr, cited in Ottley 1992, p. 154)

In February 1999, two women of Afro-Caribbean ancestry won their respective societies' highest musical honours. On 14 February, Singing Sandra was crowned Trinidad-Tobago's Calypso Monarch 1999 – the second woman ever to win this coveted title, a full twenty-one years after the country's first woman calypso monarch, Calypso Rose. Two weeks later in the USA, Lauryn Hill received five Grammy awards, the most in any single year for a female performer or a hip-hop artist. This trend continues in Great Britain, where ‘rude girl’ DJ Patra has a growing posse of fans, and in West Africa where the pop music stylings of Benin's Angelique Kidjo and Mali's Oumou Sangaré enjoy mass followings.

Given the existing capitalist determinants on the structure of the popular music industry, the record companies, because of their economic importance, not only represent one moment in a system where the music moves from artist to audience, but also generate both the artist, as producer for the industry, and the audience, as consumer for the industry's products — and both as living facets of an ideology best described as Romantic. Romanticism, whilst lived as being in opposition to capitalist concerns founded on rationality and standardisation, in fact supports capitalism by providing both an enabling rationale for invention and a sustaining emphasis on the individual which allows cultural products to be viewed as something other than simply more commodities. The Otherness of culture in capitalist society may be viewed as the manifestation of the necessary but repressed ‘irrational’ qualities which bring into existence and sustain the rational, ordered structure of capitalist practice. In the record business, both the rational aspects of capitalism and the Romanticism of its Other are highlighted by virtue of the highly developed capitalist nature of the culture industry.

A new struggle has emerged within popular music. This struggle is about technology and access to music through computer-mediated technology. Somewhat typical of the state of cultural things being more complex in their multiple articulations, this struggle runs in tandem with the historical struggle by youth for ‘their music’ against that of previous generations. The multiple characteristics of the struggle over cultural production, ownership and circulation represents a change from earlier days when pop music was articulated to youth culture and social movements, offering relatively direct relationships from one to another. (For example, ‘The Sixties’ became the shorthand reference for these cultural formations.) That relationship still exists, albeit in a self-conscious historical sense that requires continuous examination as it changes with the new generations of youth and the available technologies.

In South Africa, the prospects for social integration were auspicious after the first democratic elections in 1994. As the popular music of the time shows, it was not only blacks who exulted in the new ‘rainbow’ euphoria: many whites did so too. But for millions of black and white citizens, this moment was short lived. The government's adoption of neo-liberal policies had severe social consequences – which it and the new elite sought to conceal behind populist calls to ‘race’ solidarity, a new racial typecasting and slurs aimed at whites in general. ‘White’ popular music has responded to these reversals in a variety of ways – including direct criticism, sharp satire, humour and the expression of ‘fugitive’ identities. Perhaps more remarkably, white musicians have stressed the need for self-reinvention in music that is ironic, unpredictable, transgressive. These songs play with malleable identities; tokens of a disdain for fixed or essential identities, they are hopeful signposts towards a more integrated future.

Expressive forms of culture offer a look into changing social phenomena that have not yet crystallised into clear patterns or accepted categories. Accepting the view that music is embedded in the wider culture system, we use a particular form of it – popular music – as a means of investigating class and ethnicity in Israeli society. At the same time we attempt to deepen the understanding of the place music plays in society, and of societal influences on music.

The cultural turn in sociology and related fields of study has brought with it new understandings of the various ways social identities are formed. In a post-structural landscape, social identities must increasingly be regarded as reflexively derived ‘performative assemblages’ that incorporate elements of the local vernacular and global popular cultures. Building on the above reinterpretation of social identity, this paper takes as its central premise the notion that, in addition to its well-mapped cultural importance for youth, popular music retains a critical currency for the ageing audience as a key cultural resource of post-youth identification, lifestyle and associated cultural practices. In its examination of the relationship between popular music, ageing and identity, this paper uses illustrative examples drawn from ethnographic data collected by the authors between 2002 and 2009 in Australia and the UK.

Discussion of the 1960s generally identifies progressive rock as the prime organ of communication within the counter-culture. At the same time, musical analysis of the genre is an underdeveloped field of study, including only an identification of musical characteristics (Willis 1978), Mellers' analysis of the Beatles (1973) and Middleton and Muncie's analysis of five representative songs in the Open University's course, Popular Culture (1981). As a particularly heterogeneous genre (compared with, for example, rock 'n' roll and r&b), definitions of progressive rock equally raise problems: to what extent does the variety of styles reflect the variety of radical movements contained within the overall term counter-culture; alternatively, given the variety of styles, can progressive rock be considered a single phenomenon and, if so, to what extent does it have musical codes in common?

In this article I focus on the genre of ‘vaporwave’, using the artist 18 Carat Affair as a case study, to explore the way the genre works as a project that produces, and takes pleasure in, a kind of ‘memory play’. As a genre, vaporwave is a style of music collaged together from a wide variety of largely background musics such as muzak®, 1980s elevator music and new age ambience. Vaporwave's ‘memory play’ is a project that takes remembering as its audio-visual aesthetic. The pleasure of vaporwave is therefore understood as a pleasure of remembering for the sake of the act of remembering itself. To explore this theme, I examine vaporwave's memory play using the terms of Chris Healy's ‘compensatory nostalgia’, as well as the idea of ‘ersatz nostalgia’ as discussed by Arjun Appadurai and Svetlana Boym.

The first decade of the 21st century has seen a concurrent rise of pop-rock screen productions in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, particularly feature films, documentaries and TV series informed by the guitar and/or band culture. This paper probes the popularisation of pop-rock in the region and asks what gender and sexual expressions have been mobilised in such productions and representations. The paper juxtaposes dominant gender tropes, such as the failing male rocker in search of rebirth (Korea), romantic youth pursuing authenticity (Japan), dazzling but also bedazzled rocker-girl on stage (Japan), indie music goddess in control of subdued femininity (Korea) and peripheral girl-with-acoustic-guitar who chronicles boys' sorrow (Taiwan). Responding to the familiar myth of rebellion in pop-rock discourses, our inter-referential analysis suggests that East Asian pop-rock screen is about the making of heterotopias rather than utopias.

The following comments appeared on the front page of the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post on 19 January 1989, in a story about a performance in the Chinese city of Guangzhou (Canton) by Hong Kong singer Anita Mui YimFong .

By applying Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's systems model of creativity, evidence can be presented to claim that despite ‘Yesterday’s promotion as a Romantic piece of creative activity, perpetuating the myth of the mystically inspired freely expressive artist, the creation of ‘Yesterday’ can be seen as a more considered and rational process than otherwise mythologised. The definition of creativity assumes an activity whereby products, processes and ideas are generated from antecedent conditions by the agency of someone, whose knowledge to do so comes from somewhere and the resultant novel variation is seen as a valued addition to the store of human knowledge. As an example of a system at work, the song's creation satisfies more closely the characteristics ascribed to the rationalist approach to creativity. From the evidence, it can be argued that creativity is a dynamic system that works on a larger scale than that of the sole individual posited by the Romantic conception and concomitant understandings. It, instead, incorporates the actions of the person, in this case Paul McCartney, within the systemic relationships of the field and domain. These three components, person, domain and field, comprise a system with circular causality where the individual, the social organisation they create within, and the symbol system they use are all equally important and interdependent in producing creative products. ‘Yesterday’ is but one creative product of this system at work.

Rock music has not only provided the soundtrack of our lives, but a large part of the image repertoire as well. Neither the conjunction of popular music and other media (including television and film) nor the inseparable relation between rock and roll and visual iconographies, styles and attitudes is new. Nevertheless, it is clear that the force of these conjunctures in our cultural lives is rapidly spreading, viral-like, across media, genres, contexts, interests and generations. This is neither surprising nor necessarily bad; as rock and roll generations have grown up and asserted their plurality and influence, it is their music which is taken for granted, offered as capitalist entertainment and sometimes exploited for marketing purposes. This reconfiguration, often described as rock ‘moving into the mainstream of contemporary culture’ has been enabled and even engendered by technological, social and economic conditions. But it is the speed with which this is being accomplished, the particular ways it is inserted into broader contexts, and the effects it is having that interest me. The topography of popular culture is obviously changing; how rock and roll has come to define the dominant forms of cultural enjoyment and even legitimacy, offers us an opportunity to map out some of the cultural changes of contemporary life, and their relations to ideological and political struggles.

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to analyse shifting themes in the meanings of Hong Kong popular songs relating to ideological and political changes in Hong Kong since the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident (TSI). In particular, the paper examines the relationship between Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China (PRC) concerning the transmission of Hong Kong popular music, and argues that Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese popular musics articulate fluctuating political meanings. Attention will be focused predominantly on the lyrics, but some aspects of the music are also invoked. After highlighting the political and cultural relations between Hong Kong and the PRC, I discuss the social transformations and the struggles for democracy delineated in Chinese popular music during the 1989 TSI. This is followed by an examination of the intensification of the conflict between the PRC and Hong Kong over the dissemination of popular songs carrying democratic messages in Hong Kong. Finally, the paper considers the rise of patriotism and/or nationalism through lyrics rooted in the notion of educating Hong Kong Chinese people into accepting the cultural and political identity of mainland China, and the promotion of popular songs in the official language of the PRC, Putonghua, since the late transitional period.

Our time has come Tio/ I'm Basque and I'm proud/ That's enough Tio, say it loud/I'm Basque and I'm proud! (Negu Gorriak, 1989)

The relationship between popular music and social movements does not in itself constitute an exceptional phenomenon. However, Basque Radical Rock (as Basque punk has come to be called) has emerged as a peculiar phenomenon of the history of political mobilisation in Euskadi (the Basque name for Basque country). This peculiarity is due to the fusion of an eminently anti-establishment music of anglo-saxon origin with a nationalist patriotic movement. The ‘alliance’ between these two such diverse spheres is the theme of this article. Such an alliance is of interest because it reveals how the discursive and organisational linkages which formed Basque radical rock defined a common struggle shared by punks and nationalist activists.

This essay explores connections between the notion of ‘hook’ and several recurring accent patterns found in rock music from the 1980s. It begins by identifying seven syncopated accent patterns and presents a list of over 150 songs from the 1980s that use one or more of these patterns. It then presents three main ways that the accent patterns help create ‘hooks’. First, several songs use one of the patterns to create a strong title hook, as in Rick Springfield's hit, ‘I’ve Done Everything for You', the title of which is set with a syncopated and distinct rhythmic pattern. A second type of ‘hook’ comes in the form of a ‘significant gesture’ that usually precedes the chorus. The pre-chorus ‘My-my-my-my, ah, woo!’ gesture from The Knack's ‘My Sharona’ is an excellent example. Finally, a third type of ‘hook’ involves the combination of a repeated accent pattern with a recurring pitch pattern, as in the guitar introduction to AC/DC's ‘For Those About to Rock’. By realising that these three examples all use the same accent pattern in significant, but different, ways, we acknowledge the prominence of this and other patterns while furthering the discourse on the notion of the ‘hook’.

We show how the Grammy award ceremony played a central role in influencing the US popular music industry through two important inter-organisational processes. The ceremony served as the vehicle through which the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) interlinked with commercial interests in the field: the distributors, wholesalers and retailers who are represented by the National Association of Record Merchandisers (NARM). As music became a more visual medium and television coverage of the ceremony became prominent, merchandisers came to rely on the Grammy awards as their sales cue, and began to aggressively promote nominees and winners. As a result of the retailers' selective attention, Grammy award-winners began enjoying greater popular appeal through increased album sales. Second, attempts made by various constituents of NARAS to influence award decisions resulted in the surfacing of, challenges to and, finally, the resolution of occupational conflicts and normative concerns about the legitimacy of genres in the popular music industry. In the process, NARAS succeeded in championing the Grammy awards as the hallmark of peer recognition. We contend that the unique ability of the Grammy awards to mingle both peer and popular recognition makes them a significant arbiter of canon formation in the popular music industry.