This article is a study of the musical style of Randy Newman, one of the most intriguing singer–songwriters in the United States today. Since Newman's is hardly a household name, let me begin with a biographical note. Born in New Orleans in 1943, Randy Newman moved to Southern California at the age of five and has lived there ever since. While still a teenager he became staff songwriter for a small publishing company, and in 1966 achieved his first commercial success with a song recorded by Judy Collins, ‘I Think It's Going To Rain Today’. He began recording for Warner Brothers/Reprise in 1968, and has released an album every two or three years since then. Except for one hit, ‘Short People’ (1977), his music has appealed to a relatively small but devoted following. Unlike many contemporary songwriters, Newman is classically trained, and is a skilled orchestrator who writes his own arrangements, as well as arrangements for other artists and occasional film scores.

‘Budding ethno-musicologists, step this way. If you ever wanted a bit of everything on a record, this is it,’ wrote a reviewer in the Melody Maker for 18 April 1981. The record that covered ‘a baffling amount of ground’ was Revenge of the Mozabites by the Suns of Arqa on Rocksteady Records MICKLO1. Other reviewers were as puzzled, and in some cases, stimulated by the issue. To Johnny Black writing in London Trax they

sound as if they lost their front door key back in 1969 and have been trapped in the living room of 8 Higher Road, Urmston ever since, with only albums by the Incredible String Band, the Bauls of Bengal and Hapshash for company. From time to time they hear the John Peel prog, and have thus gleaned a passable understanding of dub. Towards the end of 1980 they were set free, had a shave and a haircut and trundled their acoustic guitars, castanets, tablas, fiddles and harmoniums to a portable recording studio in the back of a Morris 1000 Traveller where they recorded this album.

Writing on music video has had two distinctive moments in its brief history. The first wave of treatments tended to come from the culture surrounding rock music and from those who were primarily interested in music video as something which produced effects on that music. Here, two claims were most common, and generally expressed in the terms and the contexts of rock journalism:

(1) that music video had made ‘image’ more important than the experience of music itself, with effects which were to be feared (for example, the potential difficulties for artists with poor ‘images’, the risk that theatricality and spectacle would take precedence over intrinsically ‘musical’ values, etc.);

(2) that music video would result in a diminishing of the interpretative liberty of the individual music listener, who would now have visual or narrative interpretations of song lyrics imposed on him/her, in what would amount to a semantic and affective impoverishment of the popular music experience.

Using pictures to sell music is hardly a new concept. Examples of pictures being set to pre-recorded music with the aim of producing a piece of audio-visual entertainment can be found as early as the first decade of this century. At the Paris World Fair in 1900, stars of the theatre appeared in short film sketches with synchronised gramophone sound (Olsson 1986). From 1905 through to about 1914 in Sweden, a number of commercially available music recordings were used as the basis of short films which were shown in cinemas with various types of mechanical inventions and much human ingenuity being applied to ensure, though not always achieving, synchronisation. Those portrayed in the films were often actors who mimed the songs (Furhammar 1985, 1988).

Naturally, in appealing to so many consumers, pop music admits of little formal complexity. Whatever a song's concern, it occurs stringently within the demotic constraints of verse, chorus, middle eight and their like. So often is the familiar blast of Bob Dylan's harmonica an end in itself that he is able to contradict this expectation by withholding the true final verse. Describing Handel's practice within the formal convention of recitative and aria in eighteenth-century opera seria, Winton Dean observed: ‘His care for dramatic values led him to modify the formal scheme to express not only states of mind but character in action; and here most of all the stiffness of the convention enabled him to bring off all manner of surprises’ (Dean 1969, p. 171).

About a thousand years ago in northeastern India a group of spiritual adepts known as siddhācāryas sang poems about the discipline required of the individual who seeks ultimate release. These carýāpadas, as the poems are called, were eventually compiled and recorded in a manuscript found about a century ago in the Nepali Court Library by a Bengali scholar (Sastri), since when concordances have been recognised in the Tibetan scriptures and numerous articles have been written about them by a variety of learned scholars. The carýāpadas have aroused considerable interest, among other reasons, because of their language, which is considered the earliest record of the Bengali tongue (Chatterji 1970, pp. 90–116), and because of their religious precepts, which are based upon tantra (Bagchi 1933, 1956A, B). Tantra teaches the individual to pursue his own release from phenomenal existence through direct, empirical means, through the manipulation of his own physical and psychical constitution, and these means are learned viva voce from a preceptor who also demonstrates the necessary techniques.

While engaged in research on the long-necked lute called Herati dutār in 1974, I was frequently told about a virtuoso dutāri (dutār player) who had died a few years earlier after a fight with a gang of ‘thugs’ in the city of Kandahar. His name was Amin-e Diwaneh. The Persian word diwāneh means ‘crazy’, and was applied to people who (in terms of Western psychiatry) might be classed as ‘insane’, though the cause of insanity was usually attributed to spirit possession. Diwāneh was also a description for individuals who were particularly erratic in their behaviour, and was often used affectionately. Amin the dutāri was such a person.

In order to take advantage of the promotional potential of the music video, the country music industry was forced to adapt a medium with conventions and aesthetic elements established by other musical genres – by pop and rock. And to reach its distinct market country music video also had to incorporate country's own established iconographic elements. This iconography is constructed and understood in two ways: through the traditional concerns of country music lyrics; and through the history of visual media based on and developed around the genre. Country music has, in fact, been associated with the screen since movies could first talk, from Jimmie Rodgers' 1929 movie short The Singing Brakeman through thousands of singing cowboy movies to the national television exposure that culminated in Hee Haw.

In a recent interview, Bob Dylan said that he has learned never to ‘give one hundred per cent’ – a person, particularly a public artist, should always hold something in reserve. Somewhat taken aback, the interviewer pressed for a follow-up to this puzzling statement. Wasn't Dylan giving 100 per cent on those great albums of the 1960s. Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on blonde? All right, Dylan finally admitted, maybe he was. The reporter dropped the question and went on to other subjects, leaving the readers, like Mr Jones, wondering just what is going on here. Most people who have followed Dylan's work throughout his career would agree that, in his work of the 1980s, he seems to be holding something back. There are flashes of brilliance, of the old verbal acuity, the ability to come up with the startlingly perfect phrase to fit his needs in a song. There have been truly great songs, like ‘Jokerman’, ‘Dark Eyes’ and ‘Brownsville Girl’. But there have also been embarrassingly awful songs, like ‘Never Gonna Be the Same Again’, lacklustre singing and woefully inconsistent production values on his records. We know what he is capable of – he knows what he is capable of – yet he doesn't give us his best. Why? In our view the answer, like most aspects of Bob Dylan, is not simple but may well involve a complex combination of factors all pertaining to the attempt to balance the dialectical forces pulling upon him from both the public and private areas of his life.

According to the schemata normally used by critics, jazz ceased to be ‘popular music’ with the arrival of bebop in the mid-1940s. While this statement has some truth to it, it also requires a good deal of qualification. Like blues, jazz remained economically viable in black neighbourhoods until driven out by the slicker pop sounds of the late 1960s. That jazz (with the exception of the ‘cool’ style played by Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, etc.) had a primarily black audience is confirmed by Joe Fields, currently with Muse Records and formerly employed by Prestige and Columbia:

Our records sold to some white college kids, but our sales (at Prestige) were overwhelmingly to blacks – not just tenor and organ stuff but hard bop too. That's why what we sold in Boston was nothing compared to Chicago, Detroit, St Louis, Cleveland … Our sales in Los Angeles were much better than in San Francisco.

Though gramophones were imported in India before the beginning of the century, this was done privately by a few persons who were very rich and affluent. During their visits to Europe and other Western countries they would buy a gramophone machine for use at home because it was an attractive novelty and a handy medium of entertainment. In 1900 and for quite some time thereafter a gramophone was considered to be a show piece and a status symbol, as only the wealthy elite of the society could afford to possess it. Phonographs were commercially exploited in India only after the establishment of the office of the Mutoscope Biograph Company in Calcutta, on 7 July 1901, by one Mr J. Watson Harrod.

Almost since their inception film and television have employed music as background accompaniment. Despite this obvious fact, the significance of such musical accompaniment has been underestimated by most researchers (see Tagg 1979). The contemporary conjunction of video technology, communication satellites and cable-TV has created a media environment in which television featuring music videos has thrived, and in which media researchers are no longer able to ignore the synchronisation of aural and visual content. While the idea of synchronising musical and visual presentation is itself not new (see Aufderheide 1986), its realisation in the modern music video presents those seeking to describe and explain media behaviour with a new set of problems and tasks.

The dramatic development of popular music in India illustrates some of the complex and varied ways that South Asians have used art and entertainment as a means of adapting and relating to the social transitions accompanying modernisation. Indian popular music, nevertheless, has been all but ignored in scholarly literature, whether musicological or sociological; this article endeavours to provide a basis for future inquiries by providing a descriptive outline of the development of modern Indian commercial music in the twentieth century.

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.

For the music industry the age of manufacture is now over. Companies (and company profits) are no longer organised around making things but depend on the creation of rights. In the industry's own jargon, each piece of music represents ‘a basket of rights’; the company task is to exploit as many of these rights as possible, not just those realised when it is sold in recorded form to the public, but also those realised when it is broadcast on radio or television, used on a film, commercial or video soundtrack, and so on. Musical rights (copyrights, performing rights) are the basic pop commodity and to understand the music business in the 1980s we have to understand how these rights work. In this article, then, I begin and end with record companies' uses of copyright law and ideology to defend themselves against current technological and political threats to income, but I also want to ask questions about how the law itself defines music and determines the possibilities of musical ‘exploitation’. And this means putting contemporary arguments (for and against the blank tape levy, for example) in historical perspective.

Uruguay is a country of immigrants. By the middle of the last century little remained of its original inhabitants or their culture. To Spanish influences were added others, mainly of European origin, which together formed the hybrid culture which is twentieth-century Uruguay.

The ubiquitous songs in India's commercial feature films play a dual role in Indian society: they serve as both film songs and pop songs for India's 800 million people. India is the largest film-producing country in the world and one fifth of its current annual production of approximately 750 films is made in Hindi, each film having an average of five to six songs (Dharap 1985). As the major form of mass entertainment available on a national scale, rivalled only by the government-run television network, Hindi cinema plays a prominent and influential role in Indian society. Yet its songs, which represent India's most popular music in the twentieth century, are relatively little known to non-Indians, either to scholars or to the general public. Musicologists and anthropologists have for the most part focused their attention on Indian classical and folk traditions to the neglect of film song. To counteract this imbalance I propose here to examine one important aspect of Hindi film song – its peculiarly eclectic nature – which plays a major role in the nationwide appeal of this popular music. I look at some of the ways in which these film songs are eclectic and possible reasons why they are so. Such a study provides insights into the role of this popular music in Indian society and culture and can thereby contribute to an understanding of the role of popular music generally in non-Western and developing countries.