The singular style of rhythm & blues (R&B) that emerged from New Orleans in the years after World War II played an important role in the development of funk. In a related development, the underlying rhythms of American popular music underwent a basic, yet generally unacknowledged transition from triplet or shuffle feel (12/8) to even or straight eighth notes (8/8). Many jazz historians have shown interest in the process whereby jazz musicians learned to swing (for example, the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra through Louis Armstrong's 1924 arrival in New York), but there has been little analysis of the reverse development – the change back to ‘straighter’ rhythms. The earliest forms of rock 'n' roll, such as the R&B songs that first acquired this label and styles like rockabilly that soon followed, continued to be predominantly in shuffle rhythms. By the 1960s, division of the beat into equal halves had become common practice in the new driving style of rock, and the occurrence of 12/8 metre relatively scarce. Although the move from triplets to even eighths might be seen as a simplification of metre, this shift supported further subdivision to sixteenth-note rhythms that were exploited in New Orleans R&B and funk.

Despite the debates surrounding media audiences, it seems that little work within popular music studies has engaged directly with those who consume, listen to and use popular music as part of their everyday lives. The purpose of this paper is therefore to examine issues relating to popular music audiences through an analysis of my own research which has involved conducting unstructured group discussions with teenagers at a comprehensive school in East Sussex, South England, during the Summer term of 1999. These young people articulated the significance of popular music in their lives in terms of its usefulness within the context of their daily routines, rather than as a meaningful source for identity investment.

But there isn't Al. If Al were there he would be giving a private performance to Chris Roberts as patron: an odd conception in the present-day world. In fact Al Green sings in a domain that is public although the musical commodity of the disc or tape turns it into a potentially solitary experience. In his comment Roberts has been captured by the Romantic understanding of the song: that its essence is (artistic) interiority made exterior. He is not alone in his fantasy of access to the pop singer. It constitutes the prevailing, if unformulated, view – a considerable irony in the postmodern world of late capitalism. The past few decades have witnessed the development of a global light-entertainment industry whose cultural objects partake in an increasingly closed circle of signification through pop videos, television advertising, soap operas and the tabloids. This (hyper)reality coexists today with the pursuit of the ever more soulful vocal, as if in a doomed attempt to crack open the reified commodity, by dint of the singer's passion to force something human across the gulf between exchange value and use value.

This article examines the expansion of the US children's music industry in the last decade. It considers the sanitising of Top 40 pop for child audiences in the Kidz Bop compilations, the entrance of Disney into the popular music market and the meteoric rise of tween music products such as High School Musical, Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers and Justin Bieber. It shows that, as children increasingly consume mainstream musical products, in the converse dynamic children's artists themselves play an increasingly prominent role in popular culture and in many ways have taken the lead both in commercial success and in stylistic innovations. Examining public expressions of age-based solidarity among celebrity musicians associated with children, this article argues that children's music is increasingly articulated through tropes of identity politics, and represents the early stages of a childhood counterpublic.

Musical borrowings, or samples, have long been a means of creating lineage between hip-hop and older genres of African-American music such as funk, soul, and rhythm and blues. DJs who sample from this so-called ‘Old School’ attempt to link hip-hop to older, venerable traditions of black popular music. This article investigates the importance of 1970s pop and culture to hip-hop music. This era is depicted as a time in which African-American identity coalesced, and a new political consciousness was born. The primary source for images of the 1970s was and continues to be blaxploitation film, a genre of low-budget, black-oriented crime and suspense cinema. This article will detail how blaxploitation distilled certain societal concerns of the 1970s, and how in turn hip-hop feeds off blaxploitation both dramatically and musically, reusing its story lines and sampling its soundtracks.

A conviction that rock is the central manifestation of the post-War mass culture and the most common form of mass cultural activity, seems undoubted for rock analysts. The question as to whether rock music is able to play any significant role in a process of political change evokes, however, scepticism rather than endorsement (Rosselson 1979; Hibbard and Kaleialoha 1983; Orman 1984; Pattison 1987; Grossberg 1991).

Boy bands embody contradictory representations of their own individuality and authenticity and the corporate nature of their genesis and presentation. Boy band members, the impresarios and entrepreneurs behind them, and the producers of television shows about them must contend in their work and relationships with the social and symbolic conventions of their historical moment. In this article I analyse representations of boy bands on the American TV shows The Monkees (1966-8) and Making the Band (2000-) in order to highlight shifts in the ways the performers and production personnel have been represented and have sought to represent themselves. The internal push for legitimacy and autonomy of the young stars of these shows, acting from within a perceived but unstable gap between ‘musician’ and ‘employee’, exists in tension with the external push of TV and music producers, network, record label and marketing departments for rational, predictable products and behaviours that fit within an overall business plan. While the rock ideology of authenticity has lost much of the force it had in the 1960s and change in representational conventions seem to indicate a general acceptance of the overt commercialism of chart-busting pop, this article shows that even within the mainstream flows a strong current of concern over issues of authenticity, legitimacy and autonomy.

Johnny Rotten / John Lydon was and remains the first voice of British punk and yet consistently refuses to identify with punk as a subculture. In revisiting his observations on his career with the Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd (PiL) in the 1976–1980 period, this article considers how ‘narratives of self’ enable us to gain insights into individual subjectivity and the (trans) formation of identity. Through this material we can investigate the role of Lydon's idiosyncratic cultural capital in his creative process. It is suggested that this investigation requires us to consider ideas of cultural continuity and flow in relation to Lydon, the creative contexts within which he operated and the relationship between progressive music, punk and post-punk in the 1970s.

Time shifts increase our sensitivity to birth and death, to the rise and fall of cultural epochs, by drawing attention to all sorts of changes. When years, decades or centuries turn, there need not necessarily be any corresponding great shift in society and culture. What does ‘real’ history care about dates and years? But our way of measuring time produces a sort of numerical magic that sometimes makes us extra sensitive to collective cultural mobility. In aesthetical production and cultural debate, each time turn induces a wish to reflect upon where we stand and what is happening. This sharpened time consciousness may accelerate or consolidate certain changes, if sufficiently many and strong social forces engage in the reflection to transform prophecies into effective mechanisms of change, by the material power of self-definitions.

The terms underground, alternative and commercial are widely used in discussions of popular music scenes in Havana and around the world. In Cuba, the words alternative and underground are often used interchangeably, in critical as well as popular discourse. I propose a working definition of, and a distinction between, these terms in Havana, since to render them synonymous reduces their usefulness. The distinction between underground and commercial, in contrast, is widely seen as self-evident, by critics as well as by fans. However, a simplistic dichotomy glosses over the interpenetration of these terms, which are of limited use as analytical categories. This discussion of terminology is grounded in an analysis of the politics of style in Havana hip hop.

After a decade of relative stability a flurry of closures and launches has changed the face of the British popular music press (see Table 1). This article examines the new structure and its development in three interlocking areas: in music industry organisation, rock and pop genres, and the process of discursive formation in the press itself. On the first of these, I argue that the function of the music press as an ‘institutional regulator’ (Hirsch 1990, p. 132) of music industry output has been subverted, during the 1980s, by a fluctuating record market and the growth of music programming on television and radio. A uni-directional model of cultural production is now problematic. Media, including the press, may be sponsors or initiators of music texts rather than mere filters. Secondly the New Pop, and more recently rave, has threatened the straightforward alignment of taste and cultural capital which underpinned rock hegemony. In the patchwork world of contemporary youth music the para-pedagogic work of the rock press in both guiding and excluding communities of taste has an extra urgency. My third point concerns critical method. Just because the rock/pop field has become decentred, the drive to fix meaning tends to generate crisis as successive critical solutions break down, revealed as monstrously excessive, as ‘more than’ the music. Journalists usually anticipate failure. But this only serves to speed up change and the movement towards the next untenable position.

That we identify with those around us, whether in novels, movies, poetry, songs, the news or on the street, is natural. To a certain extent we mirror what we perceive, but we also perceive it in our own ways and make it fit, to a certain extent, our concept of the world. However, we, and the things we communicate, are also moulders. How much we mould and how much we mirror is difficult to discern, and of course problematic in something like objective news reporting.

The relationship between ideology and popular culture has largely been discussed in the context of developed industrial societies, in which the ideologies that might be considered to have most bearing on society in general and popular culture in particular are capitalism and socialism in the context of specific nationalisms. On the Muslim peripheries of Europe, however, the situation may be different. The appearance of ‘Islamic’ motifs in Turkish popular music and the ambiguous but conspicuous attempts by a populist government in Turkey to control and co-opt this music over the last eight years suggests that Islam has also played a powerful role in shaping the experience of popular music in Turkey. The extent to which Islam constitutes an ideology distinct and separable from capitalism and socialism has been debated at length within and outside the Muslim world. It is clear that Islam has proved less of an obstacle to the development of capitalist economies than that of socialist economies (Rodinson 1977; Gellner 1981). It is also true that the collapse of world markets in the 1970s resulted in crises which reverberated throughout the Muslim world, in which a pristine and ‘traditional’ Islam has become a focus, in various ways, for resentment at the cultural and economic dependency of the Muslim upon the non-Muslim world. Islam projects itself now as a rival and ultimately superior alternative to the nationalist ideologies within which capitalist or socialist formations have been articulated. In Turkey, the dominant and competing discourses of nationalist Turkism on the one hand and Islam on the other have framed the terms in which Turkish social and political history has been seen in and outside Turkey. The popular music known as arabesk apparently defies both of these ideologies and provides a useful case-study of the way in which they operate ‘on the ground’, shaping the identities and strategies around which people organise their social existence.

Cyborgs, fembots and posthumans: electronic dance music and the biopolitics of fucking machines

In the technophilic West, netizens, infomorphs and the audio digerati triumphantly-if-precociously herald this as the dawn of disembodiment. These reality hackers dream in binary code. They yearn to manufacture human-alien hybrids, ethical androids and genetically programmed clones. They already engineer digital soul divas, aural cyborgs, Nintendo's voluptuously overdrawn robo-bimbos, and the supernaturally and surgically perfect bodies purchased at Lasers R' US. They share the meat-hating philosophies of the cyber-protagonists of Neuromancer, Snow Crash and Software. They willingly computerise their passions via text sex, MUD-based gender masquerades, naughty newsgroups, techno-fetishistic video games, virtual reality-based erotic escapades, and pornosonic digital samples. Nonetheless, it seems that for the rest of us to join these intrepid cybernauts in their Age of immaterial Information, our too-solid bodies must first be anaesthetised with utopian visions and sounds of an incorporeal future. So electronic dance music, popular culture and modern science inject the flesh with fantasies of immortality, limitless pleasures, and unadulterated agency. With their tax-funded market research and their potent techno-imaginings, entertainment systems, netters, digital dance music producers, and radically hopeful scientists prepare human matter to be dematerialised and devoured byte by agonising byte. In other words, they passionately fabricate the human-machine hybrid also known as the cyborg, the fembot and the posthuman. These techno-organic entities traverse the space between desire and dread; their indeterminate forms simultaneously destabilise and reconfigure the dualistic limits of liberal humanist subjectivity. Each incarnation plots the feared consequences and perplexing possibilities of boundary transgressions between the human and the machine quite differently.

On 1 July 1992 over 100,000 people assembled in various locations across Canada to see their favourite bands play live at the Great Canadian Party. Broadcast on television and radio, this Canada Day spectacle celebrated the country's 125th birthday, but rather than being organised by the state or a non-profit making citizen's movement, it was facilitated by more than $100,000 of corporate sponsorship. Drawing on fieldwork in Vancouver, I will argue that external funding initially helped Canadian musicians but soon allowed outside sponsors to control the live music industry. These sponsors could then co-opt anxieties about national unity in a selective celebration designed purely for their own ends. By addressing the Great Canadian Party's emergence and historic moment the following discussion will explore what it meant for Canada to be represented through a giant commercial, a commercial drawing on shared national identity in order to sell the products of a global industry. The Party revealed how judiciously agents of commerce could use popular culture to negotiate between geographic scales. Despite that success, however, the resistance of participating bands suggests that the Party could not secure full hegemony for its sponsor's project.

In February 2003, a woman’s body became the focal point for public debates about religious authority, freedom of expression, women’s rights, and the future of Indonesia’s political leadership. At the centre of these debates was Inul Daratista, a twenty-four-year-old popular music singer/dancer from East Java, whose dancing was described as ‘pornographic’ and therefore haram, forbidden by Islam. In this essay, I describe how and why Inul’s dancing body became a central symbol in debates about religion, culture and politics in the years following the fall of Indonesian ex-president Suharto in 1998. In the highly mediated sphere of popular culture, ‘Inulmania’ contributed to a new dialogic space where conflicting ideological positions could be expressed and debated. Inul’s body became a stage for a variety of cultural actors to try out or ‘rehearse’ an emergent democracy in post-Suharto Indonesia. A case study of popular performer Inul Daratista illuminates contemporary ‘body politics’, in which human bodies invested with diverse meanings and values have powerful implications for discourses about Islam, pornography, women’s bodies, state/civil relations in Indonesia, and changing forms of media.

The radio networks of North America and Britain provide one of the most important promotional outlets for recorded music, setting programming agendas at radio stations and influencing the talent acquisition policies of record labels throughout the world. For many years there have been sharp contrasts in the way in which music radio has operated and been organised in these two countries. The promotion of records in Britain has mainly been directed towards one national non-commercial station, Radio 1, which plays an eclectic mixture of musical styles. In the United States radio promotion has been aimed across a complex of commercial stations which broadcast ‘narrowcast’ music very clearly defined according to various ‘formats’. However, the recent re-regulation of the broadcasting system in Britain has resulted in a proliferation of regional commercial stations that are responding to increasing competition by introducing narrowcasting policies similar to those of North America. With Radio 1's share of listeners declining and the prospect of national commercial stations being granted licences and further challenging Radio 1's dominance of pop broadcasting, it seems particularly pertinent to contrast the practices of record companies and radio stations in Britain and North America and highlight how they directly effect the production and consumption of pop music.

In terms of circulation and sales of albums, the most popular pop music found in mainland China today is the Mandopop imported from Taiwan. The pop music that is genuinely locally produced in China by mainland producers and artists, and which is most notable to the outside world is probably the Chinese rock music and the wave of ‘northwest wind’ pop music produced locally in China in the late 1980s. However, after 2005, there emerged a new kind of Chinese pop that is commercially successful and a product of the national Pop Idol-like singing contest. This paper describes and explicates the broad popularity of this new wave of Chinese pop. Putting aside the overly discussed topic of democracy that comes out of such politicised Supergirl contests, this paper focuses on the nature of the melody and lyrics of pop idol winner Chris Li's songs and how their unique formulation evolves into an important ‘short wave’ of Chinese pop.