In the autumn of 1954, the triumphal tour of a young white singer started in the south of the United States. Although many objected to his music and his way of performing, the rise of this artist – by the name of Elvis Presley – in states like Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana was not to be stopped (Goldman 1981, p. 124; Gillett 1970, p. 21).

If you are a movie fan (and who isn't) you may sit in a movie theatre three times a week listening to the symphonic background scores which Hollywood composers concoct. What happens? Your musical tastes become moulded by these scores, heard without knowing it. You see love, and you hear it. Simultaneously. It makes sense. Music suddenly becomes a language for you, without your knowing it. (Thomas 1973, p. 171).

Anyone who can remember anything at all about pirate radio in the 1960s can usually remember two names: Radio Caroline and Radio London are synonymous with the offshore era. Between them they accounted for the majority of the audience who listened to the pirates, and the majority of the sponsors who advertised on them. But although they basically shared the same market rationale Caroline and London approached their task completely differently. London sought respect, prestige and accommodation. Its every move was geared towards being incorporated into the existing system of broadcasting, and its main purpose for existing seemed to be to bring about a legal commercial radio system in Great Britain. Radio Caroline had a very different rulebook and a very different guiding ethos. By a series of acts which culminated in a highly symbolic stand against what it saw as repressive legislation Caroline made explicit an underlying set of contradictions which anticipated in microcosm the wider philosophical and political contradictions of the 1960s counter-culture. For Radio London respect would eventually be won and the station's influence and programming legacy would endure in the shape of its replacement – BBC Radio One. For Radio Caroline there would be nothing like the same degree of influence. This contrast of approaches and outcomes between the two major pirate stations is at the very epicentre of the story of offshore radio.

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?

Houston Baker locates the blues at the crossroads of lack and desire, at the place where the hurts of history encounter determined resistance from people who know they are entitled to something better (Baker 1984, pp. 7, 150). Like the blues singers from whom he learned so much, Hank Williams (1923 to 1953) spent a lot of time at that particular intersection. There he met others whose own struggles informed and shaped his music. Williams's voice expressed the contradictions of his historical moment – post Second World War America – a time when diverse currents of resistance to class, race and gender oppressions flowed together to form a contradictory, but nonetheless real, unity of opposites. Standing at a crossroads in history, at a fundamental turning point for relationships between men and women, whites and blacks, capital and labour, Williams's songs about heartbreak and failed personal relations indentified the body and the psyche as crucial terrains of political struggle in the post-war era.

Since Thailand's Copyright Act became law in 1979 an indigenous music industry has emerged. In the past, the small recording business was concentrated on two aspects: the sale of imported records and the manufacture of popular, mainly Lukkroong music, and classical records. However, the organisation of the Association of Music Traders – an immediate reaction to the enforcement of the Copyright law – coupled with the advent of cassette technology, has transformed the faltering gramophone trade. Today, middle-class youngsters appreciate Thai popular music in contrast to the previous generation who grew up with western pop and rock. Young people in the countryside have begun to acquire a taste for the same music as well as enjoy a wider range of Pleng Luktoong, the country music with which they identify. How did this change which has resulted in the creation of a new pleasure industry come about? And what are some of the consequences of this transformation.

In the early- and mid-1960s, as mainstream popular music began to reach and exploit the growing youth market, the country music genre was going through a number of important transformations (see Malone 1985; Hemphill 1970). During this period the country music industry, including record companies, recording studios, managing and booking agents, music publishers and musicians, was becoming more fully consolidated in Nashville. In addition, a different kind of dominant sound was beginning to coalesce, based on a more ‘uptown’ feel and intended for a more cosmopolitan audience accustomed to mainstream, adult pop music. The beat and whine of the honky-tonk song, as epitomised by the rural twang in the music of Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell and Webb Pierce, was being replaced as the dominant country music sound by the smooth and urbane ballad styles of Eddy Arnold, Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline. This shift was both caused by and helped to foster the development of a steady set of studio musicians who would appear on thousands of country recordings per year. The musical style that coalesced in Nashville studios through the regular collaboration of these musicians and the record label producers who loosely arranged them became known as the ‘Nashville Sound’, a marketable and identifiable name for a particular set of musical conventions. This sound, nearly as similar to Rosemary Clooney as it was to Hank Williams, called into question the generic boundaries between ‘country’ music and mainstream ‘pop’ music.

Radio is commonly referred to as a ‘secondary medium’ in the broadcasting industry. The phrase conveys the industry's pragmatic view that no one cares whether you listen to radio so long as you do not turn it off. Since it has been displaced by television, radio is expected to accommodate itself technologically and discursively to every situation. Are you brushing your teeth, turning the corner, buying or selling jeans or entering inventory into the computer? So much the better. Your broadcaster respects the fact that these important activities must come first. Radio is humble and friendly, it follows you everywhere. In any event, television makes more money.

Acculturation is the adaptation of a group or individual to a foreign culture with which they are in contact. In the case of immigrants, however, not only contact is involved. There is a state of immersion in the host culture which, if not total, is at least partial.

‘Radio’ records have always been with us. And breakfast show records, as the first two golden oldies above testify, have formed a major subset of these. Cynics will know why. Radio's peak audience has always been breakfast time, so airplay then can ‘break’ your record, leading to the obvious course of action, flatter the breakfast dj's self-importance by singing about him. But in Britain in 1989 things have changed. Nowadays it seems the best way to get breakfast airplay for a new record is to slag off radio djs ruthlessly. There have always been ‘anti-radio’ records. But few can have enjoyed the recent chart and airplay success of both The Reynolds Girls and The Beatmasters. Both records are riddled with contradictions. Both were written by men in their thirties, yet address a disgruntled teenage audience: The Reynolds Girls appearing to speak for twelve-year-old Yazz fans; The Beatmasters apparently voicing the protest of excluded hip-hop fans. Yet, despite articulating distinct objections to airplay policy, both records were almost certainly bought, in large numbers, by radio listeners. They turn up on the same radio shows. Why not? A hit is a hit.

What is moving in rock and pop? This question concerns both what levels change in the popular music arena, and how music can initiate changes inside and outside itself. Revolution in popular music can mean radical transformations of music itself, as well as the way in which social and psychic changes express themselves in music. Musical forms can go through revolutionary changes, and musical content can thematise revolutions.

On 12 July 1989, the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) announced that the Greater London FM licence would go to London Jazz Radio (LJR). This franchise was allocated as part of the expansion of commercial radio in Britain. As in most other countries, the British state owns the electromagnetic spectrum. This allows the government to choose who can broadcast over the airwaves. However, unlike most industrialised countries, the British state chooses not to use all the frequencies made available for broadcasting under international treaties. Instead, there has been a ‘duopoly’ between the radio stations of the state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and commercial stations authorised by the IBA. This limitation on the number of radio stations makes the British broadcasting system seem backward compared not only with the USA, but also the rest of the European Community. However, this oligopoly is now slowly collapsing. The licencing of LJR was a first stage of a period of rapid growth in commercial radio in Britain.

This article deals with one of the first Eurorock waves: Indorock. This style was created in Holland by people who for political reasons migrated from Indonesia to Holland during the 1950s. They warmed Holland up to the sounds of rock and roll. Unhappy with their prospects in the Dutch entertainment industry, they went east to make a living as professional musicians in Germany. There Indorock was the trend, until British Merseybeat swept it away.

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.

At the time, 1929, 1939, 1945 and 1968 all seemed important turning points in the track of our civilisation. By contrast, as anyone alive at the time will attest, 1955 seemed like an unexceptional year in the United States at least. Right in the middle of the ‘middle-of-the-road’ years of the Eisenhower presidency, 1955 hardly seemed like the year for a major aesthetic revolution. Yet it was in the brief span between 1954 and 1956 that the rock aesthetic displaced the jazz-based aesthetic in American popular music. Frank Sinatra, Tommy Dorsey, Patty Page, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, Kay Starr, Les Paul, Eddie Fisher, Jo Stafford, Frankie Lane, Johnnie Ray and Doris Day gave way on the popular music charts to Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, The Platters, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Carl Perkins and the growing legion of rockers.

During the 1960s bossa nova was the trademark of Brazilian popular music. In the 1980s a second wave of Brazilian popular artists, such as Milton Nascimento, Djavan, Ivan Lins and Caetano Veloso, has emerged on to the international popular music scene. These artists have been issuing and distributing their records through international labels, and have also had their music recorded by other artists and groups like Pat Metheny and Manhattan Transfer (recipient of a Grammy for their album Brasil). Milton Nascimento, who since 1968 has been playing in concerts around the world with jazz musicians such as saxophonist Wayne Shorter, also receives good reviews in Europe. The Observer describes Milton Nascimento as ‘one of the top musicians in the world’, whose poetry ‘… fuses emotion, feeling, experience, dreams, [and] hopes’ with ‘a burnished voice … tempered with a taut edge at times’, and ‘beautiful melodies which are deceptively intense and powerful even when surrounded by funky keyboards or lush strings’. For the reviewer: ‘His songs have summed up the collective feelings of a nation’. And for Brazilians what is the meaning of Milton Nascimento's music?