In South Africa, the prospects for social integration were auspicious after the first democratic elections in 1994. As the popular music of the time shows, it was not only blacks who exulted in the new ‘rainbow’ euphoria: many whites did so too. But for millions of black and white citizens, this moment was short lived. The government's adoption of neo-liberal policies had severe social consequences – which it and the new elite sought to conceal behind populist calls to ‘race’ solidarity, a new racial typecasting and slurs aimed at whites in general. ‘White’ popular music has responded to these reversals in a variety of ways – including direct criticism, sharp satire, humour and the expression of ‘fugitive’ identities. Perhaps more remarkably, white musicians have stressed the need for self-reinvention in music that is ironic, unpredictable, transgressive. These songs play with malleable identities; tokens of a disdain for fixed or essential identities, they are hopeful signposts towards a more integrated future.

As a woman who performs rock music in an unabashedly ‘masculine’ fashion, Suzi Quatro is often criticised for trying to be ‘one of the boys’. Through close examinations of Quatro's performance strategies, including her repertoire, physical performance and vocal presence, I hope to show that Quatro's performances of gender and sexual identity on sound recordings and video belie such an uncomplicated characterisation. Focusing particularly on Quatro's ability to construct multiple subject positions that are ambiguous or mutually contradictory with respect to gender and sexuality, I shall argue that the role of female cock-rocker, as she performs it, is a paradoxical one that destabilises the gender codings from which it is constructed and celebrates the polymorphousness and performativity of identity.

In 1963, Amiri Imamu Baraka, a.k.a. LeRoi Jones, launched an Afrocentrist attack on the American white establishment that has been sustained, with variations, for forty years. He made a powerful case that the white commodity industry had systematically exploited and then debased authentic African-American music. In the meantime, a new kind of Afrocentrism has appeared, associated with the meteoric rise of Wynton Marsalis at New York's Lincoln Center. With the help of rhetoric similar to Baraka's, Marsalis has showcased and expanded the kind of black jazz he regards as authentic. However, the two men represent overlapping but also divergent points of view on the cultural politics of African-American music. This study compares these perspectives in detail, suggesting that behind the revealing differences between the two, both suffer from a formally similar outmoded essentialism.

A suppressed note is one that is consistently left out of the collection of pitch classes (different musical notes) in a musical piece and later appears with considerable emphasis. The Beatles frequently use the technique of suppressed notes, due to their tendency to compose pentatonic melodies, which leave ‘holes’ in the diatonic scale. These holes are usually filled in later in the song, when the pentatonicism is broken. The suppressed note then attracts special attention, both because it is a new note that the melody had previously avoided and because it appears at a peak moment, which is shaped by other parameters as well (e.g. as a melodic peak in a metrically accented position) and is connected to a textual turning point. The paper peeks at the Beatles' repertoire through the keyhole of the suppressed note.

This essay aims to expand on existing narratives of medieval music performance by exploring recent interpretations of the troubadours. Recent advances in the field of ethnomusicology, popular music and medieval music reception suggest the need to view medieval music performance in ways other than the conventional narrative of early music performance. This article focuses on the troubadours, originally song-makers in the late medieval Midi, or South of France. Based on my interviews with recent ‘living troubadours’ in the United States and France, I present evidence for multifarious musical interpretations of the art de trobar, or medieval troubadour art. Living troubadours under consideration here include Eco-Troubadour Stan Slaughter from Missouri and Occitan rap group Massilia Sound System from Marseille. The latter claim a special distinction as living descendants of the original troubadours; the former views himself as more remotely related to medieval music. And while all the different musicians considered here offer widely contrasting interpretations of the medieval art de trobar, they do have in common certain recent musical influences, along with a view of folk music as an open-ended, and musically flexible category. All of these artists are also united in their belief that the essence of folk song is an urgent message which, though it may range from recycling to anti-centralist politics, consistently controls the musical medium. What the groups considered here have in common with traditional early music groups is their creative use of contemporary influences to evoke for their audience the Middle Ages.

In this article I examine Lennox's earliest performance strategies, and her reasons for employing them, as well as some of the reactions to her adoption of transvestism as a sartorial style. I discuss three videos from Lennox's 1988 LP Savage, which, in my view, marked a radical shift in her approach to depicting gender through performance. I argue that Lennox may be more productively viewed by keeping in mind performance ideals of music hall and other popular musical theatre styles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally I discuss Lennox's challenge to late twentieth-century gender construction using Judith Butler's theories of the performative nature of gender and of the subversive reiteration of gender, outlined in her books Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, and suggesting ways in which Lennox's performance embodies these theories, while extending them to include a broader range of sexualities.

Historically, the field of ethnomusicology has tended to neglect the lives and work of individual musicians in favour of a view of music as culture, a disciplinary perspective that has assumed the homogeneity of the world's cultures. Contesting this erasure of the musical subject, biographical micro-histories situate the individual at the centre of music studies. Accordingly, the subject of this article is a self-identified ‘local’ jazz musician, whose narrative elucidates the exigencies of his musical and social life. One of the music's ‘lesser lives’, ‘LC’ is typical of those players who negotiate the contested terrain of jazz scenes peripheral to the jazz world's centre, New York City. The explication of his musical aesthetic and its influence upon his self-image as a jazz musician is directed toward a more representative view of jazz than that of institutionalised histories, which promulgate a ‘Great Man’ narrative. Incorporating contemporary discourse and critical race theories as alternatives to traditional modes of aesthetic inquiry, this study unpacks issues related to musical and social dialogism and signification, ‘voice’ and identity, and race and masculinity as a means of illuminating those criteria deemed crucial by a particular musician in his search for existential meaning and a jazz truth.

With the dramatically improving fidelity of electric sound recording in the 1920s, aural spatiality – traces of room ambience and reverberation – became a factor in record production. Drawing on prior radio broadcast practice, a split occurred whereby ‘fine’ orchestral musics were recorded with relatively high levels of ambient or atmospheric sound while dance music, popular songs, humorous recitations and other ‘low’ forms were generally recorded with little or no reverberation. Through the 1930s and 1940s, popular recording occasionally, though increasingly, made use of mechanically fabricated echo and reverb to present a kind of sonic pictorialism, especially on singing cowboy and popular ‘Hawaiian’ recordings. Hollywood film sound practice in this period employed similar sonic space-making devices to denote states of terror, mystical revelation and supernatural transformations. The coming of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, with its characteristic big echo and reverb production sounds, may be seen as the radical recombining of these contradictory antecedents, effected in such a way as to allow (and promote) disordered, non-pictorial sound spatialities.

The scholarly literature on popular music has rarely addressed music awards shows and the role of the state with regard to popular music. In an effort to deepen what is known about both sets of issues, this article utilises the concept of a promotional state to examine Canada's Juno Awards. A promotional state employs state intervention to support domestic popular music, and the promotional state in Canada has been connected to the Junos in three ways (through Canadian content regulations, public broadcasting and government funding). The historical, political economic analysis in the article considers how the role of the promotional state has undergone changes with regard to the Juno Awards. There has been some ‘hollowing out’ of the promotional state's role since the Junos began in 1971, but the article contends that (in the interests of private capital) the role of this state has continued and even increased in some respects.

This article explores how the use of mobile phones has changed the contemporary Finnish soundscape. The change manifests itself firstly via telephone conversations which have spread from private premises to public places and secondly via interchangeable ringing tones. Drawing on research carried out among cellular phone users, the article argues that the ringing tones are selected on the basis of musical taste, so they can no longer be regarded as impersonal telephone signals. They can be used as a means of distinction and identity like any music. Even if the quality of ringing tones is inferior to the original interpretation of the tune, they can still be considered to be music, because of their personal and collective associations.

For Australian men, the very act of appearing on stage has for much of the twentieth century aroused suspicion about their gender status and their sexuality. To aspire to the stage often implied homosexuality culturally in Australia. This has been evident in the evolving aesthetic of white Australian masculinity in pop music from the 1970s onwards. For most of that period, Anglo-Australian males who presented themselves in a rigid, almost asexual way dominated the aesthetic. The reality of urban Australia was ignored in their images, which were essentially confined to outback or coastal Australian settings. This paper examines that development as part of a continuum of twentieth century Australian male music performance that has variously been informed by the bush legend; a mythologised late nineteenth-century Australian masculine image, popularised in The Bulletin under the editorship of Archibald, that saw the urban as the feminine and the rural as the masculine. The paper considers how the combination of sexual anxiety surrounding male gender identity in Australian performance, and this rigid bush aesthetic, have encouraged the development of unstable male gender representations in Australian music that for the most part have come across as either caricatured male, sexless or anti-pop. The exception is the late Michael Hutchence whose performances were a clear departure from this in that on stage and in music videos he conveyed a star persona that was sexually charged and often ambiguous about its sexuality. It is for that reason alone that Michael Hutchence has been referred to as Australia's only international rock star (Carney 1997).

Popular music plays important roles in two related films portraying Brazilian slum life. Based on a 1953 play by Vinícius de Morais, Marcel Camus's 1959 film Orfeu Negro, and a 1999 feature by Brazilian director Carlos Diegues titled Orfeu, augment traditional samba styles with bossa nova and rap, respectively. Interpreting musical style as allegorical texts within fictive landscapes, this paper examines conflation and conflict among musical meanings, Brazilian social histories, and discursive identities marking the twentieth century. Broad aspects of Brazilian political and socio-cultural development are implicated, such as authoritarianism, the politics and sociology of race, technological advances, mass media, and modes of modernisation. Here, bossa nova and rap engage society through reflexive and generative interpretations within a narrative designed to illustrate connections between processes of innovative, trans-national cultural production, myths of national identity, social change, and the powerful role of popular music in film.

The popular image of record collectors is of obsessive males, whose ‘train spotting’ passion for collecting is often a substitute for ‘real’ social relationships. This image can draw on some support from academic discussions of collectors and collecting, but it represents only a partial account of record collectors. This paper draws on interviews with sixty-seven self-identified record collectors to show how they demonstrate a complex mix of characteristics: a love of music; obsessive-compulsive behaviour, accumulation and completism, selectivity and discrimination; and self-education and scholarship. As a social practice, record collecting presents itself as a core component of individual social identity and a central part of the life cycle.

The United States Supreme Court characterised the trend toward the convergence of the communication, music and computer worlds as ‘a promising new medium that could empower citizens and promote democracy in the next millennium’. Yet inquiry into United States vs Microsoft, the case that may determine whether ‘the free and open nature of … computer-assisted communication’ will remain ‘free and open’ has been lacking. This study focuses on the antitrust and First Amendment implications of Microsoft's disputed strategy of marrying its Web browser to its operating system (OS) software.

The study argues that rulings on the legality of this strategy have ramifications for Microsoft's subsequent move to suture its streaming audio and video software to its OS product. Implications of this case – and the European Commission's similar inquiry into such suturing – for popular music as an industry, as an industrialised technology, and as a form of communication are discussed. Scholars, practitioners, and fans must be ever mindful that when one firm dominates a human enterprise as central to contemporary life as personal computing, the opportunity for abuse exists.

IASPM conferences are always enjoyable. There is plenty of enthusiasm for music, as well as much skilful delineation of its form and cultural context. IASPM conferences also have a pretty flat structure and, although there is never enough, a relatively high degree of interaction between people from different countries, ethnicities, disciplines, sexualities. Certainly, the academic star system is in evidence, but its worst manifestations are suppressed because most people want their conference to be democratic, to represent an alternative kind of academic culture.

Jeff Buckley seemingly resisted entrapment by the ‘Oedipal’ myths of family, corporate rock, and the cult of dead celebrities, as well as the branding of his image and identity, but his rebellious, self-mythologising anti-narrative simulated the phantom narrative he opposed. In a postmodern context, Buckley's impossible search for absolute artistic authenticity, integrity and originality, given his ambivalence about his ethereal voice – the signature of his father – found expression in hybridised ambiance, modernist collage, and postmodern pastiche.

A new struggle has emerged within popular music. This struggle is about technology and access to music through computer-mediated technology. Somewhat typical of the state of cultural things being more complex in their multiple articulations, this struggle runs in tandem with the historical struggle by youth for ‘their music’ against that of previous generations. The multiple characteristics of the struggle over cultural production, ownership and circulation represents a change from earlier days when pop music was articulated to youth culture and social movements, offering relatively direct relationships from one to another. (For example, ‘The Sixties’ became the shorthand reference for these cultural formations.) That relationship still exists, albeit in a self-conscious historical sense that requires continuous examination as it changes with the new generations of youth and the available technologies.