This article focuses on three recent manifestations of cumbia in Buenos Aires, Argentina: digital cumbia released by ZZK Records; retro cumbia orchestras; and a newer strand of digital cumbia, música turra. The first two are identified with the middle class, whereas the third emerged from the clases populares (‘popular classes’). Música turra is underpinned by government policies towards digital inclusion, while middle-class incursions into the traditionally working-class sphere of cumbia, too, suggest increasing social cohesion. However, the digital fascination of música turra contrasts with an embrace of the analogue and acoustic in middle-class cumbia. These developments point to the emergence of a post-digital ethos and a shift from a digital to a post-digital divide, also running along class lines, analysed here through a Bourdieusian lens of taste and distinction. While transnational in nature, the post-digital ethos appears in Buenos Aires in a distinctive local form, articulated to growing Latin Americanism and post-neoliberalism on the part of the middle class.

This paper considers the nightclub shows of the Rat Pack, focussing particularly on The Summit performances at the Sands Hotel, Las Vegas, in 1960. Featuring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop, these shows encompassed musical, comic and dance routines, drawing on the experiences each member had in live vaudeville performance. The discussion outlines these individual histories, and draws attention to a shared fascination with impersonation, which forms an explicit and implicit part of the act, as the performers’ stage personas are already emulatory. In addition to the influence of vaudeville, the construction of the Rat Pack also draws on the structures of blackface minstrelsy, with the interactions of the five members being patterned on a fluid variant of the interlocutor–endmen relationships. The interweaving of these influences and performance styles underpins a dominant concern of the troupe, as the comic material frequently negotiates the racial, national and religious identities of the individual performers. In particular, this deals with their shared status of having immigrant ancestry, a status which I term as being ‘hyphenated-American’, suspended between historical, public and aspirational identities.

This article is about what recordings are made of, and about what happens to those recordings when they are disposed of. It inscribes a history of recorded music in three main materials: shellac, plastic and data. These materials constitute the five most prevalent recording formats since 1900: 78s, LPs, cassettes, CDs and MP3s. The goal is to forge a political ecology of the evolving relationship between popular music and sound technology, which accounts not only for human production and consumption but also material manufacture and disposal. Such an orientation is useful for developing an analytical framework that is adequate to the complexities of the global material–cultural flows in which the recorded music commodity is constituted and deconstituted. It also strives towards a more responsible way of thinking about the relationship between popular music's cultural and economic value, on the one hand, and its environmental cost, on the other.

The device known as, among other terms, truck-driver modulation, arranger's modulation and pump-up modulation is an important procedure for popular music, and one that merits a place in the harmony textbook. Emerging from a discussion of nomenclature, this paper proposes the terms of its title, which distinguishes between modulation as part of the overall form of a track, and modulation as a technical device. Four models are presented for the modulation, with a final discussion of different models used in the one track.

African American gospel music is a unique and distinctive idiom that has had a pervasive influence upon the development of contemporary popular music. While there are now many sources available on African American gospel music, the focus of the vast majority of these studies is on the sociological, historical and stylistic aspects of the genre, rather than on identifying and codifying specific musical characteristics and performance practices. This paper extends the discussion of gospel singing techniques in Andrew Legg's 2010 article ‘A taxonomy of musical gesture in African American gospel music’ (Popular Music, 29/1) by examining some of the key performance practices associated with rhythm and lyric treatment in African American gospel music, as well as common structures in gospel music improvisation and accompaniment. Through analysis of selected recordings, this research proposes a codified frame of reference for the definition and discussion of terminologies and performance practice techniques inherent within African American gospel music.

This article explores the ways in which anger may travel across different musical and extra-musical contexts, looking in particular at the rap metal band Rage Against The Machine (RATM). Focusing on this band's appropriation of expressions of anger found in a documentary film about the Zapatistas in Mexico, it suggests that RATM can be read as a politico-emotional project, channelling anger towards political resistance which is then performed through, and upon, the body. Just as performances of anger need discourse to be sustainable, so music can simultaneously entrain the listener into a certain modality of feeling and expressing, and embed this modality in a discursive rationale. However, anger is a deeply ambiguous emotion, and cannot be easily focused; it may transcend the constraints some seek to place on it, and travel quickly between discursive contexts. Such slippages mark the limits of anger, as well as its power.

This article addresses notions of ‘Norwegianness’ in rap music. Based on comparative audiovisual analyses and close readings of two different versions of Norwegian rap group Karpe Diem's 2010 hit ‘Byduer i dur’, the author's main objective is to question how issues concerning ethnicity and cultural belonging are negotiated through audiovisual representations and in the self-fashioning of the artists. The analyses and readings rest upon two central issues. First, to uncover how Karpe Diem's spectacle of ‘otherness’ might be considered alongside aspects of ethnicity, cultural belonging and national identity within a Norwegian context. Secondly, to argue that identity is constructed as flexible and free-floating, which provides an opportunity to reconsider notions of ‘Norwegianness’ through musical performance. By proposing a decentred approach to analysing audiovisual texts, the author intends to shed light on how Karpe Diem's performances could be read as part of a discourse on nationhood in contemporary Norwegian society. Following this, the national trauma of 22 July 2011 should be considered a significant backdrop for the readings and critical discussions undertaken throughout this paper.

Yes's ‘Heart of the Sunrise’ addresses one of the primary concerns of the counterculture: the alienation of the individual from humanity by the dominant consumerist, ‘plastic’ culture, represented by the city. In their expression of the effects of alienation, Yes expanded the musical vocabulary of rock, for while the allusive imagery of the song's text relates the locus of the protagonist and his being ‘lost’ amid the population of the city, the arrangement of the song and the purely instrumental passages lay bare the frustration of an individual unable to establish intimate, human relationships. Contemporary commentary on hippie perceptions of, and reactions to, mainstream culture provides a background to an analysis that demonstrates the descriptive power of the instrumental passages in this 1971 work.

This article argues for understanding popular songs and songwriting through the metaphor of architecture, an idea we draw from vernacular terms used by songwriters when comprehending and explaining their own creative practice, and which we deploy in response to those who have called for writing about music to use a non-technical vocabulary and make greater use of metaphor. By architecture we mean those recognisable characteristics of songs that exist as enduring qualities regardless of a specific performance, recording or sheet music score. We use this analogy not as a systematic model, but as a device for exploring the intricate ways in which words and music are combined and pointing to similarities in the composition of poetry and the writing of song lyrics. The art of repetition and play with ambiguity are integral to popular song architectures that endure regardless of the modifications introduced by performers who temporarily inhabit a particular song.

The blues is a complex and subtle musical language that warrants careful analysis and sustained debate. There are legitimate concerns with the application of music-theoretical paradigms to blues music, but we should not allow such concerns to undermine all attempts to address the blues as a serious and coherently structured music. This paper explores the notions of ladder, level and chromatic cycle as an insightful set of theoretical tools in analysing the music of Robert Johnson. Key sources in developing this analytical approach are the scholarship of Gerhard Kubik and the spatially oriented analytical methods of neo-Riemannian theory. The notions of ladder, level and chromatic cycle are explored with close reference to Johnson's ‘Kindhearted Woman’ and through a more general consideration of the scale-degree content of his vocal parts.

Middlewood Sessions produced a kind of popular music that infuses the timbral aesthetics of jazz and orchestral music with the driving rhythms of dance music. This studio project, lasting for almost eight years, provided a rich resource for gaining insight into the increasingly prevalent context of the domestic project studio via a longitudinal case study approach. At the heart of this research is the desire to understand how people collaborate as part of a studio project, how people use technologies to make music and how all of this unfolds over time. To tackle the question of how to understand the shattered, scattered nature of creative practices, and in extending existing creativity research, I propose three ways of thinking about time: nests, arcs and cycles. While explicating this theoretical framework, something of the specific and idiographic nature of the case study, as an example of contemporary music production, is recounted.

The hip-hop activism of Pittsburgh's 1Hood Media has been a key element of the success of several contemporary social justice campaigns, such as the 2010 Justice For Jordan Miles police brutality case. After offering some background on 1Hood Media and a discussion of constitutive rhetoric, this study offers a close reading of 1Hood's rhetorical appeal, focusing on the ways in which the audience is constituted as both collective and individual subjects whose participation in the narrative is essential to its closure. 1Hood Media's texts focus on a diverse range of victims of injustice who suffer at the hands of police brutality and murder, and other forms of systemic oppression. The villains in these narratives are institutional forces, such as racist police forces, or corrupt Wall Street banks. By focusing on music, lyrical and visual features of 1Hood's cultural products, this study contributes to studies of popular music, hip-hop, rhetoric and cultural politics.

As an artist understood to be foregrounding in hip hop topics such as the emotional experience of private relationships, Drake has the opportunity to shape the conceptions of masculinity that are especially hardened in the context of male rappers. Recognised for his niceness in terms of rap skill and personal decentness, Drake has established himself as a genuine person making intimate connections with his fans. However, this image depends on his disregard, in his interviews and his albums, for the effects of the commercialised hip hop genre on his music and his message. Although he presents himself as a model for his generation, this discounting of context limits Drake's possibilities as a public figure.

Since the late 1990s, a thriving scene of pop music has developed among the numerically very small and globally highly dispersed Tibetan exile community. This clearly connects it with globalisation and the spread of what is termed the neoliberal phase of capitalism to India and Nepal where most Tibetan exiles live, and the related spread of digital recording technology and facilities – commodities produced by often large, multinational corporations. Yet this micro industry is not profitable, and even though it is pop music and monetised, it is not ‘commercial’, and in fact is seen and structured more as ‘community work’. Exile Tibetan pop music thus cannot be located outside of capitalism, yet at the same time it is not in and of itself capitalist. In this paper, the author explores new ways in which we can locate music in capitalism, looking beyond the ideas of commercialism or commoditisation and takeover or resistance that have dominated theoretical approaches since Adorno and have fixed popular music especially with a still-enduring ‘capitalist’ image. The author draws in particular on the historian Fernand Braudel's model of capitalism as an ‘anti-market’ that lies ‘on top’ of other social and economic layers. Thus capitalism exerts global hegemony, yet there remain uneven spaces such as exile Tibetan pop music, which are in and of themselves not capitalist, existing within it and because of it.

This article explores the meaning of ‘message’ in rap made in Israel. I suggest that since Israeli rappers perceive rap not just as music but as an instrument for the articulation of one's true self, they invest heavily in the notion of truth, rendering the making-of-a-message a message in its own right. I draw on two different analytical methods to explore the meaning of truth in this context: text analysis, based on a ‘word-system approach’, and ethnography of performance. The analysis of speech strategies exposes the different aspects attached to the idea of truth, and this is complemented by my fieldwork experiences, which illustrate how these aspects and perceptions are being practised during performance. I argue that for Israeli rappers the ideals of message making and ‘keeping things real’ draw simultaneously on the global stylistic capital of hip-hop and on local traditions of straightforward verbal expression.

The following article addresses the question of the blackness and radicalism of James Brown's musical performances during what was arguably the peak of his career, between 1964 and 1971. Using analytical frameworks from the fields of black studies, performance studies and cultural theory, this article presents an argument for listening to Brown's music in terms of the modalities of rupture. The activity of rupture is tracked through the preface to his autobiography, the stage performance he developed in the early part of his career, and the experiments in rhythm he orchestrated with his band in 1964. The article culminates in a close listening of the 1971 record ‘Super Bad’ as the aesthetic height of a black radicalism Brown was producing through his music.

The pregnant or maternal body is conspicuously absent within popular music. The dominant representation of female bodies – sonically, visually and spatially conceived – is that of a sexualised body, available to men and existing under the male gaze. The figure of the pregnant, maternal or motherly body is marked as Other – not desirable and therefore not marketable. Looking at the work of Tori Amos, I demonstrate how she makes the maternal body both audible and visible through a number of musical and extra-musical strategies. Theorising the maternal body in a series of overlapping stages – from the pregnant body to the maternal body, through liminal stages such as miscarriage and birthing – I highlight how Amos uses the figure of the maternal body not only to challenge dominant tropes of sexuality, but to create an embodied space where normative conceptions of ‘mother’ and ‘mothering’ can be troubled.

In Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, there have been a significant number of musical events in recent years that have been called ‘underground’. These have formed an underground scene that offered a cosmopolitan alternative to established ‘greenlandificated’ popular music. This paper accounts for the building of this underground scene by Nuuk youth, and asks why these young people valued musical change informed by a cosmopolitan outlook, while at the same time holding firmly to the conviction that their activities were a part of the dominant Greenlandic nation-building project. Social agents, which played key roles in building the Nuuk underground scene, described their activities as attempts to come to terms with a history in which Greenland has been perceived as a subaltern nation. This enquiry explains the nationalist logic behind a concern with performing similarity with Western nations in the Nuuk underground scene, as opposed to the more widespread romantic nationalist logic concerned with expressing a distinguishable national character. This further leads to an expansion of a position of cosmopolitan nationalism.