Some of the best ideas emerge, not in moments of deep contemplation or studious silence, but in more convivial and relaxed circumstances. That was true of the idea for this special issue. It emerged in the course of a long lunch, and was the result of a suggestion by Dave Laing. He drew attention to the many ways in which music and literature were connected and the interesting questions and issues that their relationship raised. It would be a good theme, he said, for a special issue. He was right. The call for papers that we published produced a wealth of fascinating proposals. Sadly, there were too many to include here, and it was a difficult task to select the few that are published in the following pages.

a couple of years ago, jane music editor jeff johnson began soliciting and compiling what he called ‘sad song scenarios’, a celebration, if you could call it that, of moments when music undoubtedly made a grim day worse. ideally, the whole project unfolds in a powerpoint of strained saccharine and swift kicks in the imagination. but here's one example, courtesy of the novelist sam lipsyte:

Hip-hoppers in Istanbul, Turkey, spend much discursive energy talking and rapping about how the Turkish hip-hop movement is underground, putting a particularly local spin on their uses of a global cultural form. This spatial metaphor has thus become central to local constructions of hip-hop in Istanbul. This paper explores the different meanings the underground concept has for Turkish hip-hoppers through a combination of ethnographic research and readings of locally produced hip-hop texts. Through discourses on and around the underground metaphor, Turkish hip-hoppers use the globally circulating music genre of rap and the associated arts of hip-hop to construct a specifically local identity, re-emplacing rap and hip-hop within the landscape of Istanbul. The paper uses this case study to explore how people can use mediated music in constructing new imaginaries and identities and more specifically how people can use mediated music as a vehicle for the imagining of place.

This paper explores the similarities between industrial music and ‘cyberpunk’ science fiction literature. Besides the obvious instances where there are direct references to each other, there are further connections between music and literature that are explored here. Situating the two forms within the tradition of twentieth-century Western dystopias, the focus of the paper is on the similarity of themes (relationship to technology, control by a totalitarian elite, apocalyptic worlds, resistance groups), techniques (in language or structure), moods (the tones and attitudes), and imagery (through language or music) used to illustrate and enhance these themes.

This article argues that controversial hip-hopper Eminem is more properly termed a genderphobe than a homophobe. Eminem consistently uses homophobic language to critique gender behaviour, not sexual orientation. Focusing on genderphobic lyrics more accurately reveals hip-hop culture's emphasis on gender behaviour rather than the emphasis on sexual object-choice that homophobia implies. The focus on genderphobia also highlights a discriminatory practice aimed toward external behaviour that is related to homophobia but operates differently in certain cultural realms. I ground my discussion by focusing on the centrality of authenticity in hip-hop and gender propriety's centrality in comprising hip-hop notions of authenticity. Additionally, I emphasise how all pop stars rely on personae to convey convincing images to the public. I conclude by analysing the Pet Shop Boys and Mariah Carey's ‘answer songs’, which directly address Eminem's genderphobia and authenticity.

this paper examines key moments from three pop songs – carole king's ‘a road to nowhere’ (1966), eminem's ‘stan’ (2000), and smokey robinson's ‘cruisin” (1979) – and considers the kinds of meanings and ‘un-meanings’ such brief musical snatches might contain or imply. the first is posited as a turning point in carole king's life and career, one bridging her early song-writing achievements and later solo persona; the second as a throwback in disguise, contemporary in voice and attitude but nonetheless invoking the unlikely example of the shangri-las; and the last as an instance of ‘un-meaning’, art which achieves itself not through articulation but through implication, which sensually ‘moves’ rather than intellectually ‘places’ its auditor. throughout the paper, the often radically subjective writings of walter pater are employed as a model of criticism which is open to the imaginative possibilities of intense artistic moments.

forgotten recordings – such as ‘have a little talk with jesus’, the 1952 sister rosetta tharpe–red foley duet documented in this essay – may reveal a more complex account of popular music history than that which can be compiled from recordings that are remembered and passed on. released as the b-side of a red foley and the sunshine boys 45, ‘have a little talk’ is the product of a then-unprecedented collaboration in nashville of a black woman and a white man, people who couldn't have broken bread in a restaurant in that city at the time. yet ‘have a little talk’ is neither a transcendent record nor the record of a transcendent moment. rather, it attests to the multifaceted story-beneath-the-story of the links between country and gospel artists at a time when the former was consolidating its racial identity as ‘white’ and when major labels like decca faced increasing threats from independents putting out rhythm-and-blues. this essay attests to the challenges of writing the ‘b-side of history’ in the absence of a traditional (i.e. written or published) archive. through self-conscious storytelling based largely on oral histories, it attempts to reconstruct the foley-tharpe collaboration as a ‘magical moment’ in us popular music.

Examining ways in which gender is marked in the press coverage of self-produced, folk-rock artist and record label owner Ani DiFranco, this paper explores how language employed in rock criticism frequently functions to devalue and marginalise women artists' musicianship, influence on fans, and contribution to the rock canon. Investigating how the readerships of different publications may influence the ways in which journalists mark gender in rock criticism, this study utilises a corpus of 100 articles on Ani DiFranco published between 1993 and 2003 from print and online magazines and newspapers in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Focusing on the use of inter- and intra-gender artist comparisons, adjectival gender markers and ‘metaphorical gender’ markers in artist background information, lyrical and musical analyses and descriptions of fans, this analysis maps the discursive conventions that music critics and theorists continue to rely on in reviews and profiles of women artists.

Scholars in the field of literary theory have defined clearly the role of signifying in African-American literature. This article identifies one aspect of the signifying tradition and its influence on the early blues tradition. Since the Signifying Monkey is the ultimate trickster in the African-American narrative tradition, this article presents evidence for considering the blues singer as a trickster figure at several different levels. First, the singer identifies with the trickster's character traits through pseudo-autobiographical content in song narratives, particularly in expressing socially aggressive or unacceptable exploits. Second, the trickster figure can be perceived as the singer's alter ego, as in songs about the boll weevil and similar folk characters. Third, the topics or tropes associated with crossroads and railways, used frequently in blues texts, relate to the liminal nature of Esu-Elegbara (the African ancestor of the Signifying Monkey), who embodies the boundary between the word and its (mis)interpretation.

perhaps the first digital sample to become well known within popular music was actually a piece of western art music, the fragment of stravinsky's firebird captured within the fairlight computer musical instrument, the first digital ‘sampler’, as ‘orch5’. this loud orchestral attack was made famous by bronx dj afrika bambaataa, who incorporated the sound into his seminal 1982 dance track, ‘planet rock’. analysis of kraftwerk's ‘trans europe express’, also sampled for ‘planet rock’, provides an interpretive context for bambaataa's use of orch5, as well as the hundreds of songs that deliberately sought to copy its sound. kraftwerk's concerns about the decadence of european culture and art music were not fully shared by users of orch5 in new york city; its sound first became part of an ongoing afro-futurist musical project, and by 1985 was fully naturalised within the hip-hop world, no more ‘classical’ than the sound of scratching vinyl. to trace the early popular history of orch5's distinctive effect, so crucial for early hip-hop, electro, and detroit techno, is to begin to tell the post-canonic story of western art music.

Music and literature have long-standing links. Music has drawn on literature, and vice versa. The advent of the phonograph transformed the condition of music in myriad ways. It made music more accessible and more portable. It also created a new industry of music makers: record producers and engineers, recording artists and record journalists. In this paper I examine the literary responses to the phonograph, and argue that novelists such as Jules Verne, Sinclair Lewis, Bram Stoker and Thomas Mann were among the first to respond to the phonograph, helping to demystify many of the fears that accompanied a machine that was able to preserve sound. I suggest that novelists and short stories, well in advance of phonographic historians and analysts, identified the ways in which records and recordings were incorporated into the day-to-day lives of individuals.

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’.

This article is about the role of García Márquez and particularly macondismo as an ideology in establishing the canonic validity of vallenato as a folk genre from the Colombian Caribbean. García Marquez' chronicles of the early 1950s are seen as foundational texts on the aesthetics and value of vallenato; texts which influence subsequent writings on the topic. One of the main topics explored is how these texts acquire canonic validity through the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is then that macondismo – the Latin Americanist celebration of magical realism – becomes an interpretive metaphor for Colombia and vallenato music becomes the sonorous emblem of this metaphor. This occurs through García Marquez' writings, his multiple interventions in Colombian vallenato festivals, and the way vallenato is subsequently taken by a journalistic elite of the country as representing a macondian sonorous paradigm. The article explores how these different elements coalesce in constructing a genealogy of aurality for vallenato, setting the parameters of its interpretive significance through multiple processes of folklorisation of the genre.

Punk is usually thought of as a radical reaction to local circumstances. This article argues that, while this may be the case, punk's celebration of nihilism should also be understood as an expression of the acknowledgement of the cultural trauma that was, in the late 1970s, becoming known as the Holocaust. This article identifies the disproportionate number of Jews who helped in the development of the American punk phenomenon through the late 1960s and 1970s. However, the effects of the impact of the cultural trauma of the Holocaust were not confined to Jews. The shock that apparently civilised Europeans could engage in genocidal acts against groups of people wholly or partially thought of by most Europeans as European undermined the certainties of post-Enlightenment modernity and contributed fundamentally to the sense of unsettlement of morals and ethics which characterises the experience of postmodernity. Punk marks a critical cultural moment in that transformation. In this article the focus is on punk in the United States.

the phrase ‘this magic moment’ recurs throughout elvis costello's ‘it’s time' (1996). an allusion to pop history – the drifter's ‘this magic moment’ (1960) – is thus used in the service of a fatalistic narrative that manages to evoke both the ‘revenge and guilt’ famously associated with costello's early career and the early 1960's romanticism of brill building pop. the musical ‘magic moment’ of the song arrives in a ringing e major chord at the end of the chorus, played in open position on the electric guitar. the use of this e major chord references another line of pop music history, one that stretches back to the formation of ‘folk-rock’ in the mid-1960s. this paper serves as an example of how one song creates a series of magic moments that resonate densely with simultaneous histories.

In the 1930s and 1940s, musicians and artists from different cultures and varied backgrounds joined and made the golden age of Shanghai popular songs which suggests the beginnings of Chinese popular music in modern times. The present article gives a historical description of the rise of Shanghai popular songs and examines their generic features according to Franco Fabbri's five groups of genre rules. Through gramophone recordings, radio broadcasts and films these musical products enjoyed great popularity despite severe criticisms from certain sectors of society. The diversity of musical elements, lyrical contents and forms of performance of these popular songs reflects a collective style of the participating artists and institutions and past audience tastes in a metropolis different from other major cities in the world at that time.

Harold Bloom's theory of poetic influence has been applied to studies of Western art music, but rarely to studies of popular music. This article investigates the applicability of his theory to the music of British progressive rock keyboardist Keith Emerson. It will be argued that, while Emerson's overtly intertextual music for The Nice cannot be well illuminated with this theory, Bloom can help us explore and interpret some delicate aesthetic aspects of the important style change from The Nice to Emerson, Lake and Palmer (ELP). Emerson felt the anxiety of The Nice's influence upon ELP, changed his style because of it, and led the new group to prog rock superstardom. Bloom's six revisionary ratios can indeed shed light on those subtle qualities which were necessary for a progressive rock ideology to be ‘mainstreamed’ and sold as commodity – qualities that resulted from a process of ‘misreading’.

there has been no greater tension within the tradition of black pop music than that associated with the performance of ‘black’ styles by white musicians and performers. in the past, it has been all too easy to identify many of these white artists under the rubric of ‘blue-eyed soul’ – a term that is as much a social construction of raced identities as it is a marketing ploy. using paul c. taylor's essay ‘funky white boys and honorary soul sisters’ as a reference, i'd like to argue that there are artists who transcend, to varying degrees, the kinds of ‘affective obstacles’ that make it difficult for some audiences to derive pleasures from so-called ‘white’ performances of black musical idioms.

To celebrate Charles Hamm's eightieth birthday, Popular Music is pleased to offer four tributes to a great pioneering scholar (and one of its founding editors).

The functions and meanings of the global discourse of American and British rock in national literatures have hardly been studied so far. This article focuses on the very interesting case of Spanish literature after Franco. The central question is: How has rock functioned in the literature of the new Spain, both as intertext and as cultural memory? To be more specific, the main purpose of this contribution is to study the presence, functions and meanings of rock in the narratives of two leading authors of two generations of post-Franco novelists: Antonio Muñoz Molina (1956) and Ray Loriga (1967). Particular attention will be paid to the complicated processes of memory and oblivion articulated by explicit and implicit references to rock in the pivotal novels El jinete polaco (Muñoz Molina 1991) and Héroes (Loriga 1993), and to their functions and meanings in the historical-cultural process of memory and trauma in post-Franco Spain.