This special issue is the first collection of articles specifically devoted to Middle Eastern popular musics to be published anywhere. When we began work on this issue, we were not operating in a void, however. Popular Music has already published a number of articles on Middle Eastern topics and the ‘great names’ associated with mass distributed musics and films in the earlier part of this century – in particular the Egyptian stars Umm Kulthūm and Muhammed 'Abd al-Wahhāb – have already been the subject of excellent studies published elsewhere. This issue has, however, provided us with an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which Middle Eastern musics have conventionally been studied and represented, and on the contribution that several decades of popular music studies might make to this field. The contributors have responded to these opportunities in a variety of ways and the result, we feel, is a distinctly fresh picture of the Middle East.

‘The Girl from Ipanema’ – or, in Portuguese, ‘Garota de Ipanema’ – is without doubt the song that turned bossa nova into a household term the world over. It was written by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes one afternoon in 1962, as they sat in the Veloso bar – now renamed ‘Garota de Ipanema’ – on Montenegro Street, where they had watched the young Helô Pinheiro walk past them on her way to Ipanema Beach. The song was first recorded in 1963 by Peri Ribeiro (Odeon) (Machado 1971), and since then over 300 other recordings have appeared on the market, both in Brazil and abroad (Cabral n.d.c, p. 10). When it was first launched in America on the ‘Getz/Gilberto’ album (Verve), interpreted by Astrud and João Gilberto in 1964, ‘The Girl from Ipanema' posed a serious challenge to the Beatles’ hegemony over the charts, rapidly moving to second place. With 4.2 million registered performances, it was only in the last four years that its ratings began to fall, but it is still among the world's most widely aired popular songs (Anon 1994c, pp. 124–5).

The town of Skagen is situated on the northernmost tip of Jutland (i.e., mainland Denmark). This is a remote and crisis-stricken area by Danish standards: the capital, Copenhagen, is eight hours away by train, the County of Northern Jutland has the highest unemployment rates in Denmark, and in recent years the region has been the target of several development projects financed by European Union funds. However, geographically, Skagen's position is quite central in Scandinavia. Ferry routes connect the nearby port of Frederikshavn (40 kilometres/25 miles away) with such relatively large Scandinavian cities as Oslo (9 hours away by ferry) and Gothenburg (3½ hours away). The town can also be reached from the south of Norway via the ferry route between Kristiansand and Hirtshals (also 40 kilometres/25 miles from Skagen). By these and other routes, tourists from Norway and Sweden, as well as from other parts of Denmark, regularly invade the town, in the summer season roughly doubling its 15,000 population.

This is the space age. Not just for sputniks and moonshots but also for hi-fi. We have ‘space’ conveyed through stereo sound – if we can find space for that extra stereo speaker. The theory that space is limited is nothing new to the average housewife. (HiFi Review, April 1959, p. 49)

On 29 September 1994, Cheb Hasni, the most renowned Rai singer living in Algeria, was gunned down outside his family's house in Gambetta, a quarter of the city of Waharan (Oran). He was one of many public figures (and some 50,000 others) who have been killed since the main opposition political party, the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) was prevented from assuming power by the annulment of elections that they would have won in 1991. Like the most notable of Algeria's victims of violence, which include journalists, lawyers, doctors, television presenters and top policemen, Hasni represented a version of Algerian identity that some people clearly could not tolerate. Responsibility for his assassination has not been claimed, but the manner of his death was identical to others carried out by the armed faction of the fundamentalist Islamic movement, the GIA (Armed Islamic Group). His death has possibly marked the demise of a genre of North African popular music known as Rai as it was produced in Algeria. Rai has been a particularly problematic idiom for Islamists and secularists alike. Both groups nurture distinct views of the place of Algeria, and Algerians in the world, and the role of Islam and liberal secularism in Algeria. Rai music constructs its own distinct trajectories linking local and global, ‘East’ and ‘West’, and, in this way, constitutes a distinct problem for Algerians, and indeed other North Africans today.

Scholars of popular music in the 1990s are increasingly aware that traditional musicology has failed to recognise commercial pop music as a legitimate academic area of study. Intransigence on the part of many Western music institutions towards recognising the field of popular music study is attributable to issues that have been heatedly debated and discussed in most disciplines of popular music study. Even withstanding the expansion of critical approaches in the 1970s, which paved the way forward to the emergence of new musicological discourses by the late 1980s, musicologists engaged in popular music research have continued to feel some sense of isolation from the mainstream for obvious reasons. The implications of consumerism, commercialism, trend and hype, with the vigorous endorsement of modernist ideologies, have repeatedly curtailed any serious opportunity for studying popular music in Western music institutions. To start accommodating this area of music within any musicological discourse, scholars active within the field of popular music have had to branch out into new interdisciplinary directions to locate and interpret the ideological strands of meaning that bind pop music to its political, cultural and social context. Musical codes and idiolects are in the first instance culturally derived, with communication processes constructing the cultural norms that determine our cognition and emotional responses to musical sound (Ruud 1986). Any proposal of popular music analysis therefore needs to seek the junctures at which a range of texts interlock with musicology. Similarly, the point at which consumer demand and musical authenticity fuse requires careful consideration; it is the commodification of pop music that continues to problematise the process of its aesthetic evaluation within our Western culture.

Hip hop culture originated during the mid-1970s as an integrated series of live community-based practices. It remained a function of live practice and congregation for a number of years, exclusive to those who gathered together along NYC blocks, in parks, and in select clubs such as the now famous Harlem World or T-Connection. Early MCs (or ‘rappers’) and DJs, graffiti artists and breakdancers, forged a ‘scene’ entirely dependent upon face-to-face social contact and interaction. Indeed, the event itself, as an amalgam of dance, dress, art and music, was intrinsic to hip hop culture during these years. As one might expect, the art's earliest years went largely unrecorded and undocumented. However, in 1979, Sugarhill Records, a small label in New Jersey, released a single entitled ‘Rapper's Delight’. It was an unexpected event for many of hip hop's original proponents, those pioneers immersed in the art's early live scene. Grandmaster Flash comments:

I was approached in '77. A gentleman walked up to me and said, ‘We can put what you're doing on record.’ I would have to admit that I was blind. I didn't think that somebody else would want to hear a record re-recorded onto another record with talking on it. I didn't think it would reach the masses like that. I didn't see it. I knew of all the crews that had any sort of juice and power, or that was drawing crowds. So here it is two years later, and I hear ‘To the hip-hop, to the bang to the boogie’, and it's not Bam, Herc, Breakout, AJ. Who is this? (quoted in George 1993, p. 49)

For many, art is a product: the painting to be observed and contemplated, the concert to be heard and enjoyed. There is, however, another conception of art – art as activity – and it is in this context that Howard Becker (1984) develops his concept of art worlds. Art worlds, Becker argues, include more than the artists who create the work which the public commonly defines as art. Any given art world will consist of the network of people whose co-operative activity produces that art world's certain type of artistic product (Becker 1984, p. x). Organised according to their knowledge of the art world's goals and conventions for achieving those goals, the art world includes five basic categories of people: the artists who actually create and produce the art; the producers who provide the funds and support for the production of the art; the distributors who bring the art to the audience; the audience who purchases and collects the art; and finally, the critics, aestheticians and philosophers who create and maintain the rationales according to which all these other activities make sense and have value. These rationales, however, are not merely descriptive but prescriptive. For despite the efforts of those who would keep an art world static in its products and function, art worlds are dynamic. Changes in the art world are often made in response to changes in the rationales - i.e., the philosophical justifications for an art world's art - which identify the art world's product as ‘good’ art and explain how that art fills a particular need for people and society (Becker 1984, p. 4).

It has become an annual ritual on Israeli television that, near Independence Day, several intellectuals are gathered in the studio in order to discuss the question whether there is an authentic Israeli culture and what exactly is its nature. Soon enough, popular music turns up as a major subject. It seems that popular music has become one of the few areas in Israel in which a vivid scene of cultural activity takes place, without public funding, and which plays a role in shaping a sense of identity for various groups.

The vast majority of all music ever made is played by ear. To make music by ear means to create, perform, remember and teach music without the use of written notation. This is a type of music-making that has been little observed by musicology, which has mainly been devoted to notated music. Even in the research on folk and popular music, which has expanded in the last twenty or thirty years, questions of musical practice when you play by ear are rarely treated: how do you learn to play an instrument, how do you make songs, how do you teach and learn songs and how do you conceive of music theory?

Calypso is an art form that laughs at pain. That's the way we deal with our blues. We begin to heal ourselves immediately, through our culture and our music.' (David Rudder, Trinidad, New York Times, 31 March 1991)

When you see me laughin', I'm laughin' to keep from cryin', but the laughter of these songs, implicit or overt, as often as not absorbs the tears.' (Langston Hughes 1966, p. 97)

The literature on female sexuality in the Middle East has tended to treat sexuality as the product of a homogenous discourse, examining dominant discourses that focus on religious identities, and treating women more as symbols rather than reflecting their actual behaviour or experience. Sexuality is usually essentialised, treated as inherent and fixed, as if it correlates to gender divisions, and is easily separable from them. Following Cornwall and Lindisfarne (1994), sexuality may be understood better as a fluid category that can be manipulated and interpreted according to changing social forms and differing perspectives, whether of men or women, dancer or audience, elite or popular. While marriage ceremonials can be seen as key markers of social status and sexual identities, divergent expectations and values associated with gender and sexual relations are also central (Tapper 1991, p. 15). A form of ‘popular’ music and dance, marked by the complex term baladi (see below), is central to the exploration of sexuality at Cairo weddings. Through looking at the ambiguous role of professional dancers (figures who orchestrate, conduct and ‘embody’ baladi musical forms), I have explored the way sexuality is created through performance: the body of the dancer can be seen as the site of multiple discourses on gendered identity, sexuality and power (see also Lorius 1996).

In recent years, interest within popular music research in describing, analysing and discussing the music itself, the sounding object, has considerably increased. To the English speaking world, the most well known example perhaps is the work of Allan Moore (1993). At my department in Gothenburg, however, by the middle of the 1980s already several dissertations were being written taking the structure of popular music as their starting point to analyse the functions and meaning of popular music in society (Åhlen 1987, Björnberg 1987, Lilliestam 1988). The only problem with these dissertations, as well as with my book on the tin-pan alley tradition in Sweden (1989), is that they are all written in Swedish (although the dissertations have summaries in English or German).

‘Why buy all those?!’ a street vendor in Cairo asked as I picked out photographs of young singing stars he had for sale. ‘Take more of these,’ he suggested, proffering stills from the 1950s films of Abd al-Ḥalīm Hāfiẓ and photos of Muhammad Abd al-Wahhāb and Umm Kulthūm. ‘Those were really good days … the old singers were really good singers. There's nothing like that now. Umm Kulthūm, Abd al-Ḥalīm, they're all gone and the rest are kalām fāḍī [literally ‘empty talk’, indicating something nonsensical or of little value].’ The vendor's opinions resonate among Egyptians. When asked about music in Egypt now, listeners frequently respond by saying: ‘There are no good voices these days’; ‘The singers are all alike – you can't tell them apart’; ‘After Umm Kulthūm, Abd al-Ḥalīm, Farīd and Abd al-Wahhāb died, there was no one’.

This article was triggered by a conversation with Jan Fairley, some years back, when she first put to me her idea for a special Middle East issue of Popular Music. My natural enthusiasm was tempered with some quite fundamental reservations. Was there such a phenomenon as ‘popular music’, in any generally accepted sense of the word, in Middle Eastern society? And if so, how were we to identify its repertoires, musicians and contexts? Could a useful distinction be made between ‘popular’ and ‘non-popular’ (or specifically, ‘art’ music) genres? And who, among my Middle Eastern music colleagues, would consider themselves scholars of ‘popular music’? As we discussed these and other such questions, Jan homed in on the truism that, for me, drawing from my experiences in Tunisian music, hit the nub of the problem: ‘of course, “popular” is different from “traditional”’.