One of the things that distinguishes music from other forms of popular culture is that its consumption is accompanied by so much comment. Neither TV nor film, for instance, has accrued the volume, diversity or specialisation of the books and magazines devoted to music and read by people without a professional investment. This literature poses particular problems for historians of rock'n'roll, rock and pop. What are its main methods of ordering the popular past? Which musics and events does it privilege? How should scholars read the music press as sources? How can the pop histories contained in New Musical Express, Billboard or The Face be interpreted for histories of pop? This article is derived from work-in-progress concerning the history of discotheques and club cultures from the late 1950s until the present day. As such, it offers no tidy solutions or complete narratives, but rehearses a few dilemmas relevant to writing about popular culture.

It is inevitable that the first issue of this yearbook will raise questions about the use of the term ‘popular music’. I do not believe that this question is going to be easy to answer and, as a precaution, I think we should regard quick and seemingly clearcut solutions with suspicion. In fact, we may eventually have to operate with intuitive, poorly defined and rather elastic definitions of popular music. Before we resort to that expedient, however, the problem of definition must be considered and discussed from various points of view.

Ever since its sovereignty reverted to China, Hong Kong has been torn between its national (in terms of China and its ‘soft’ power) and global status (as ‘Asia's World City’). In this special context, Hong Kong's singular, ambiguous but prolific existence ceased. This paper endeavours to map ‘Cantopop’ (Chinese popular songs) on the new media landscape and examine its decline in the context of the rise and fall of cover versions. Cantopop was once very popular, not only in Hong Kong but also in its neighbouring regions. Its rise in the 1970s was a result of its typical hybridity, an important aspect of which was influenced by the use of cover versions that changed its soundscape. In the mid-1990s, the Cantopop market started to shrink significantly. A radio campaign for localisation advocated the release of original songs aimed at enhancing the development of Cantopop, but in the end proved to have the opposite effect. In the new millennium, ‘Mandapop’ (Mandarin popular songs) has taken on the role as the trend setter of the Chinese popular music industry. We argue in this paper that Cantopop's decline is the result of Hong Kong's loss of hybridity.

This article applies the processes of canon formation suggested by Philip V. Bohlman in The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World to the historiography of popular music. Bohlman distinguishes between at least three different types of folk music canon: a small group canon, a mediated canon and an imagined canon. Adjusting Bohlman's ideas to the case of popular music, a reformulation is proposed in the form of an alternative canon, a mainstream canon, and a prescribed canon. The unstable power relations implied by the juxtaposition of different canons are considered, as well as the cumulative aspect of canon formation. The article also looks for each type of canon in the media through which historical knowledge is transmitted, and considers the tendency to narrate the historiography of marginal musics with more ephemeral media than the printed word.

The academic literature on mash-ups has been dominated by discussions about issues relating to their illegal nature and infringement of copyright. We aim to appraise this musical style with a socio-musicological approach to focus on its aesthetics. We argue that mash-ups are characterised by two underlying principles, namely contextual incongruity of recognisable samples and musical congruity between the mashed tracks. Through our close analyses of The Evolution Control Committee's ‘The Whipped Cream Mixes’ and Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, we describe how contextual incongruity often creates a humorous effect, which explains why many listeners react with smiles and laughter when hearing a new mash-up. In successful mash-ups, the combination of musical congruity and contextual incongruity results in the paradoxical response: ‘these two songs should definitely not work together … but they do!’

This paper examines issues surrounding the production of a Carnival music video VCD in the home studio of the Bolivian indigenous (originario) musician and cultural activist Gregorio Mamani. On the one hand, continuities with rural productive practices suggest a model for the ‘home studio’ more resembling a ‘cottage industry’ than the kind of ‘isolated’ activity separate from family life that Paul Théberge has described for the case of North America (1997). On the other hand, the urban isolation, entrepreneurial motivations, and concern with promoting the individual that characterise Gregorio Mamani's home studio suggest the very antithesis of indigenous community values. Notwithstanding difficult relations with his community of origin and his use of technological artifice to construct (or even ‘fake’) an audiovisual impression of the communitas of Carnival, Mamani presents this work as a means to ‘strengthen culture’. Despite these contradictions, this low budget production – targeted at rural peasants and urban migrants – is shown to engage deeply with indigenous concepts of creativity and oral tradition, as well as potentially contributing to the construction of broader circuits of culture and ‘imagined communities’. Mamani's individualistic, yet influential, approach and his insistence that only one or two individuals are the composers in an indigenous community, challenges us to question the relationship between creativity and community.

This paper offers an introduction to a distinct group of musical consumers: bootleg collectors and tape traders. It begins by defining the types of recording under discussion before outlining some of the discourse surrounding the collection of unauthorised recordings. Bootleg collectors and tape traders exist in a relationship of mutual distrust with the legitimate music industry: collectors view the industry as a barrier to musical experience while the industry views these collectors as at best a nuisance and at worst as having a detrimental impact upon official sales. The paper argues, however, that the relationship is in fact more complex. It shows that through an intensification of discourses of authenticity, collectors of unauthorised recordings actually provide ideological support for the recording industry, helping valorise musical commodities and thus maintain a dialectical relationship between collectors and the legitimate industry.

The power ballad has become a mainstay of popular music since the 1970s. This article offers a history of the songs and discusses their place in the larger field of popular music genres. The songs are defined by the use of both a musical formula based on constant escalation and an expressive formula that combines the euphoric uplift created by rousing music with sentimental themes and ploys. Contrary to views that power ballads first appeared in 1980s rock and are primarily rock numbers, the songs emerged in the 1970s pop recordings of Barry Manilow and others, and from early on crossed genre lines, including pop, rock and R&B. These crossings result in an exchange between the fervour of the power ballad and the distinct expressive qualities of the other genres. This article also places the power ballad in the larger history of the ballad. The songs are part of a shift toward more effusive and demonstrative styles of ballads underway since the 1960s. In addition, the emotional excesses of the power ballad fit into a larger change in the expressive tone of works across different popular culture media. With those works, emotions are to be large, ecstatic and immediate.

In the last few years, in Britain, one of pop's cycles has turned again and folk has come back into fashion. It can be seen in the success of the Pogues, in the reformation of Fairport Convention, in the revamping of the magazine Folk Roots, in the content of Andy Kershaw's Radio One show, and perhaps most dramatically in the celebration of ‘world music’. The revival of folk entails more than a revival of old names and sounds, it also contains a redefinition of the idea of ‘folk’ itself. This shift takes its clearest form in Folk Roots where the editor, Ian Anderson, displays equal enthusiasm for examples of almost every musical genre, from country to pop to ‘world music’ to traditional folk to soul to ‘roots rock’ (Ry Cooder, The Bhundu Boys, Kathryn Tickell, Paul Simon and the Voix Bulgares are all included). Folk no longer means ‘beards and Fair Isle jumpers’; it includes punk-influenced groups like the Mekons who see folk as an approach in which ‘the ineptitude of the playing becomes stylised and eventually becomes part of the music’ (Hurst 1986, p. 17). The musical eclecticism is linked by an underlying theory of the way good music is identified.

Veteran Egyptian shaabi singer Shaaban Abd al-Rahim recently attained superstar status as the ‘interpreter of the pulse of the Egyptian-Arab street’ due to a pop hit proclaiming his hatred for Israel. Shaaban’s notoriety has been further enhanced by his abortive sponsorship of an ‘indigenous’ sandwich marketed in Egypt by McDonald's. Contracted by the fast food giant precisely because of his popularity, the singer was soon after dismissed in the wake of political pressure outside Egypt regarding the song that had made him a star. The deliberate turn to a singer like Shaaban for product sponsorship, especially for a commercial to be broadcast by state-run media, underscores weakening boundaries between what is ‘classically’ approved and what is still considered to be ‘vulgar’ or ‘low-class’ music, however popular it is among wide sectors of the population. For the moment, at least, Shaaban has become a figure with whom even a scornful intelligentsia must contend.

Progressive rock of the early 1970s has been demonised as a nadir in the history of rock primarily because of the ambitions of progressive rock musicians. Critics have interpreted these ambitions as attempts to elevate rock music to the level of high art in order to gain cultural accreditation from an unspecified cultural elite. This interpretation is further compounded by the common notion that progressive rock’s subject matter is dominated more by individualistic quests for spirituality than by socio-political critique, resulting in a stereotype of progressive rock as apolitical, pretentious and conventionally upwardly mobile. Critics who have propagated this stereotype – including some musicologists – have misunderstood the countercultural politics of young musicians during this era and have overlooked the highly developed musical poetics of progressive rock that were in fact highly politicised. This paper examines four of the leading progressive rock bands of the early 1970s – Emerson, Lake and Palmer, King Crimson, Genesis and Yes – and reveals the nasty side of progressive rock: a scathing criticism of rampant militarism and social conformity that runs counter to the prevailing narrative in which the genre is dismissed as an escapist fantasy with an elitist agenda.

This essay reconsiders the constituencies of fans and detractors present at prime and bursting 1970s dicsos. It argues for a more gender-inclusive conception of discos multiracial ‘gay’ revellers and for a particular convoluted conception of ‘homophobia’ as this applies to the Middle-American youths who raged against disco in midsummer 1979. Their historic eruption at Chicago’s Comiskey Park came just weeks after the chart reign of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’, today a classic emblem of gay culture in the post-Stonewall and AIDS eras and arguably disco’s greatest anthem. Disco inspired lovers and haters, too, among music critics. Critical adulation and vitriol are conjoined in the present reading of musical rhetoric, which explores disco’s celebrated power to induce rapture in devotees at the social margins while granting anti-disco critics’ charge of inexpressivity in its vocals. In ‘Survive’ musical expressivity is relocated in the high-production instrumentals, where troping of learned and vernacular, European and Pan-American, sacred and profane timbres and idioms defines a euphoric space of difference and transcendence. The use of minor mode for triumphant purposes is also a striking marker of difference in ‘Survive’ and is among the factors at work in the song’s prodigious afterlife.

Disability culture is a site within which social and positional identities are struggled for and dominant discourses rejected; in which mainstream representations of people with impairments – as victims of personal tragedy – are held to the light and revealed as hegemonic constructions within a disabling society. Drawing upon styles that range from jazz, blues and folk to reggae, performance poetry and punk, disabled singers and bands in the Disability Arts Movement in Britain have been central to the development of an affirmative disability discourse rooted in ideas of pride, anger and strength. Examining lyrics by Johnny Crescendo, Ian Stanton and the Fugertivs – performers emerging as part of this movement in the 1980s and 1990s – this article considers the dark humour which runs through much of this work. It is suggested that these lyrics' observational reflections on everyday experiences of being oppressed as disabled people have been overlooked within critical disability studies to date, but are important in developing an understanding of positive disability identity as a tool available to disabled people in order to make sense of, and express themselves within, the world in which they find themselves.

In South Africa of the 1950s, night-clubs frequented by blacks were dangerous places. Fights, shootings and stabbings were commonplace, and some shows even ended in riots. Gangsters were an important catalyst for such events: they terrorised musicians and patrons alike. Miriam Makeba, whose singing career began in the 1950s, remembers what it was like:

[T]hese men come in, sit in front, and pull out their bottles. They put these before them on the table. Then they take out their guns and put these in front of them on the table, too. We are all supposed to look, and we can't help ourselves: We do. They are like actors, these gangsters, although they do not play. In South Africa, movies are taken very seriously, and there is a movie in the cinemas now in which Richard Widmark plays a hoodlum. They call him Styles, and he dresses up in a hat, a belted jacket, and those Florsheim shoes. The black gangsters go out and dress just like him. In the movie, Richard Widmark eats an apple after each of his crimes. So, all the African hoodlums have gone and gotten apples, too. I see them right there on the tables between the bottles and the guns. (Makeba 1988, p. 49)

Overland travel in Senegal and Gambia is the best introduction to local music. Blaring out from every market stall, taxi radio-cassette and record shop in every town along the trans-Gambian highway, is the music of Youssou N'Dour, Baaba Maal, Ismael Lo, Super Diamono, Toure Kunda or some kora player. The smells of perfumed incense and smoked fish mingle with the rich inflections of Youssou's voice. You stop to buy a piece of tie-dye cloth, or maybe you are waiting at Farafenni to catch the ferry across the river. ‘I like his music too much,’ says a Gambian standing next to you, listening to Youssou's latest cassette, Kocc Barma. ‘I like the tama (drum) with keyboards, it makes me want to dance.’ ‘That's deep Wolof,’ says another; ‘He's singing for Alla Seck who died, Ndyesan (alas).’ The nearby stall-owner disagrees. ‘I prefer his old tapes, like Tabaski,’ he says. ‘That was sayisayi (rascal) music, that was real Wolof music, now he's too toubab (European). Now I listen to Baaba Maal.’ A fourth person joins in. ‘Baaba only sings for his own people, the Tukulor: he doesn't care about anyone else.’

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the articulation of politics and sound became explicitly marked during the civil rights transition to embryonic types of racial nationalism, black power and the novel forms of ‘citizenship’ implied therein. Music mediated and registered these critical shifts in political outlook, structural change and black collectivity. Yet, despite the power of black soundings to communicate or gesture toward a particular political sensibility, black popular music in particular remained elusive to those political workers most invested in identifying the articulations of popular sound aesthetics and the masses. Popular music, and soul culture more generally, frustrated nationalist efforts at enlisting the black masses, a failure that paradoxically reflected black nationalism’s inability to appeal to and enlist the political potential of the mass black public that it so valorised. %This article explores the political-aesthetic interface particularly as it played out in the relationship between cultural nationalism and black popular music. This relationship offers a powerful index of the correspondence and dissonance between the political intentions of nationalist political workers and the political desires of the urban masses. It is argued that both the formal attempts at producing revolutionary cultural products and the broader influence and reception that black nationalist politics had within the field of black popular culture were in significant ways less communicative of collective political will and desire than emergent popular musical formations.

The examination of ‘subcultures’ and their concomitant musical practices has produced a large and varied body of work, a recent (and notable) portion of which has been concerned with what might be referred to generally as ‘dance music’ scenes (Thornton 1996; Reynolds 1998; Fikentscher 2000). Concurrent with this focus (and sometimes enmeshed with it) has been a burgeoning interest in gender/sexuality and music (Ortega 1994; Whiteley 1997, 2000; Barkin and Hamessly 1999). While recent reassessments of ‘subcultural’ formations situated within the postmodern era have suggested inherent complexities, contradictions and a fluidity of self-definition (Lipsitz 1994; Manuel 1995; Young and Craig 1997; Bennett 1999), thus problematising a strict conflation of ‘subcultural’ with ‘subversive’ (or ‘refusal’; cf. Hebdige 1979), this second term often appears as a de facto correlate when discussing ‘subcultures’ defined by homosexuality. This may be due, in part, either to the unfortunate collapsing of the terms ‘queer’, ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’ – the first of which, despite its rather protean status, may indeed count ‘subversiveness’ as a sedimented component of its meaning – into one, undifferentiated pool of generic descriptives, and/or to the role of the researcher (the ethnographer, for example) in constructing the ‘object of study’ as somehow ‘other’ (Fabian 1983; Abu-Lughod 1991).

On the basis of observational studies in a number of rock music festivals during the period 2004–2012, I ask the following question in this paper: how does the music festival community arise and how is it maintained? With the help of perspectives from interactionist sociology and organisational studies I develop an analysis of how rock music festival ‘skills’ are collectively produced. A communally acknowledged competence is negotiated and made explicit by means, among other things, of the synchronisation of a daily rhythm that becomes common to many festivals. The present analysis will employ a close description of this rhythm's phases, and how transitions between them are interactively negotiated. While rock music festivals certainly celebrate fandom, this paper draws attention to processes that build strong senses of community between participants while joining together in the camping site, outside stage areas. The social rhythm, as it is interactively and artfully produced between participants, makes the festival recognisable as a festival, and attractive as a social event. A profound sense of connectedness between participants is to be found between the tents in the festival camp.

This paper examines the ways in which hip-hop has taken root in Korean popular culture. The processes that began in the early 1990s include appropriation, adaptation and ‘cultural reterritorialisation’. By looking at recent Korean hip-hop outputs and their associated contexts, this paper explores the ways in which Korean hip-hop has gained its local specificities. This was achieved by combining and recontextualising Afro-American and Korean popular musical elements and aesthetics in its performance and identification in the context of the consumption and commodification of Korean hip-hop as a ‘national(ised) cultural product’.