Popular music studies generally celebrate the power of music to empower the construction of individual and social identities, a site of positive self-realisation. But such an approach risks overlooking a significant element in the musical transaction. How, for example, did the inhabitants of Jericho feel? Or President Noriega when musically besieged by US troops in Panama City? Or street kids in Wollongong, New South Wales, driven out of shopping malls by the strategic broadcasting of Frank Sinatra recordings? Every time we applaud the deployment of music as a way of articulating physical, cognitive and cultural territory, we are also applauding the potential or actual displacement or even destruction of other identities. On occasions that displacement may well be conducted as an act of extreme violence: music as pain. This negative side of the territorialism of music, however, receives little attention in popular music studies, even though it is potentially the dark side of any musical transaction. In attempting to redress the balance, this article is a ‘trailer’ for a joint investigation into the use of popular music as a weapon. It represents our initial attempts to think through some of the issues surrounding popular music and its use as a tool of repression and the deliberate inflicting of pain.

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.

When a stereophonic track is heard through headphones or over loudspeakers, the image of a virtual performance is created in the mind. This virtual performance, which exists exclusively on the record, can be conceptualised in terms of the ‘sound-box’ (Moore 1993), a four-dimensional virtual space within which sounds can be located through: lateral placement within the stereo field; foreground and background placement due to volume and distortion; height according to sound vibration frequency; and time. From the mid-1960s, the increasing shift from mono to stereo meant that producers and engineers had to contend with the notion and potential of a song's sonic arrangement or mix, resulting in a disparity of sonic placement and a diverse range of sound-box configurations. By 1972, a normative positioning of sound sources within the sound-box was established, which we term the ‘diagonal mix’. This article focuses on the consolidation of this norm by means of a ‘taxonomy of mixes’ and the utilisation of visual representations which detail the sound-box configurations of a variety of pop/rock, easy listening and psychedelic tracks from 1966 to 1972.

In descriptions of the scale of the Japanese record industry, the most used source is the production data published by the Japan Phonograph Record Association (JPRA). Twenty-five major record companies in Japan are affiliated with this association (as of July 1990). Every month, each affiliated record company reports to the JPRA their production figures (total number of all records produced) and the wholesale revenues for themselves and the non-affiliated record companies who entrusted them with their production. These non-affiliated companies are called ‘outsiders’.

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.

Serious students of popular music and song are rightly curious about the workings of the music business; but when we try to find out about how the industry works, even in terms of economics, we find that virtually all the empirical data comes from internal sources, from the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI), or from affiliates such as the British Phonographic Industries (BPI) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). In other words, we get only those statistics and ‘facts’ which this most secretive of industries wishes us to have; so we will look in vain for detailed production figures, or for sales of individual recordings (unless they are outstandingly successful), or for hard numbers relating to what IFPI calls ‘piracy’ (let alone the information on which the published numbers and projections are based). Similarly, from the individual company accounts of Sony, EMI or BMG, we may find numbers relating to pension and investment funds, but we will never find the real profits or losses of any company, let alone the rate of exploitation of any artist (or manufacturing or distributive worker); and in any case it is well-known that the published ‘bottom-line’ on a balance sheet is, at best, an informed opinion.

When we become engaged with a music video, what draws us in? What constitutes craft or artistry in the genre? Theorists of music video have usually addressed these questions from the perspective of sociology, film theory or popular cultural studies. Film theory, in particular, has had a tremendous influence on the analysis of music video, because of the two genres' apparently similar structuring of sound and image. But by the criteria of film, music videos tend to come off as failed narratives; the genre's effectiveness eludes explanation.

As a particular type of gatekeeper, rock critics play a significant role in shaping the representations of artists for an admittedly small, but influential, population, as well as establishing an artist's place in music history. In Sound Effects, Simon Frith (1983) maintains that rock critics are ‘opinion leaders’ and are the ‘ideological gatekeepers’ of the community for which they write. Additionally, I argue that rock critics function as Gramscian ‘organic intellectuals’ who articulate the ideas held by the population of which they are a part (Gramsci 1971, pp. 5-14). The community that rock critics represent and speak for is made up of an overlapping network that comprises those connected with college radio, record collectors, local music scene participants, musicians and various record company employees, among others. Frith (1996, p. 18) argues in Performing Rites that if ‘social relations are constituted in cultural practice, then our sense of identity and difference is established in the process of discrimination’. By understanding the ways in which evaluations are made within the communities that rock critics are a part of, we can gain a better understanding of the communities themselves. Because there are no sustained scholarly writings that examine rock criticism in North America from a historical, sociological or communicative perspective, it is important to begin examining the profession of the rock critic, as well as the discourse generated by rock criticism.

Adorno's critique of popular music is generally considered the least convincing aspect of his otherwise impressive analysis of the predicament of Western music in the twentieth century. The immediate reasons as to why his views on popular music are difficult to accept are obvious enough, and it must be admitted that the usual criticisms – that Adorno is prejidiced, arrogant and uniformed in this field contain more than a grain of truth. However, my intention here is not to add anything new in the way of invective, nor is it to attack Adorno's basic thesis regarding the dilemma facing twentieth-century culture as a whole. Instead, I propose to offer some suggestions as to how Adorno's writings on popular music may be approached so that the end result is something more than outright dismissal of his extreme and often dogmatic value judgements. It is an attempt to rescue the baby from the bath water, so to speak, as it seems to me that hidden in his theory there remains a potential which was never properly recognised by Adorno.

In the course of the last decade, the body of writing on music video has grown to sizeable proportions. The reason for the present addition to this bulk of literature, in spite of the subject seemingly approaching the state of exhaustion, is that musical semiotics are still rarely applied to the field. It is a fact that pop and rock music have always been heavily infused with socially determined meaning such that an autonomous musical aesthetics appears clearly insufficient to explain their significance; however, to what extent and how this significance is linked in with particular musical structures as such is still largely uninvestigated. In my view, music video may perhaps be less interesting as a phenomenon in itself than as source material for an ‘empirical semiotics’ of popular music, shedding light on signification processes of a more general applicability. Furthermore, the distinctive features of music video may arguably be better explained on the basis of an understanding of the syntactical characteristics of popular music than by prevalent theories of postmodernism; the latter appear problematic not only due to their speculative and unsubstantiated nature with regard to media reception processes (cf. Frith and Horne 1987, p. 11), but their explanatory value as regards syntactic features of music video also seems to be limited (cf. Frith 1988, p. 207).

Henry Pleasants has argued that the significant revolution in musical style to occur at the turn of the century was not that represented by the works of composers such as Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and their successors but that constituted through the advent of Afro-American and Afro-American influenced musics and the very substantial impact that these musics subsequently made, not only on main stream Western culture, but on world culture as a whole (Pleasants 1969). Yet despite the radical shift in musical and social aesthetic that has been maintained since the turn of the century through successive waves of so-called ‘popular’ music, remarkably little attention has been paid to popular music as a cultural form. As Jenny Taylor and Dave Laing have remarked, ‘popular music remains a poor relation in cultural theory, usually being tagged onto a list in which film or television takes pride of place’. A reason for this neglect, Taylor and Laing continue, ‘is its lack of status … which has the effect that rock is usually studied or taught in odd corners of the curriculum … In addition’, they conclude, ‘music as such poses great problems in the determination of meaning and signification’ (Taylor and Laing 1979, P. 43).

At the height of its success in the first half of the 1970s, progressive rock was perhaps a surprisingly popular genre; surprising since its exponents strove to fuse classical models of composition and arrangement with electric instruments and extend the form of rock music from the single song to the symphonic poem, even the multimovement suite. Album and concert sales were extremely high; even albums that were greeted with less than critical approval (itself a rare occurrence) such as Jethro Tull's A Passion Play and Yes's Tales from Topographic Oceans (both 1973) sold well (the latter reached number one in the UK Top 10 album charts upon its release). Today, the dominant critical characterisation of progressive rock is of overblown, pretentious musicians in ridiculous garb surrounded by banks of keyboards playing bombastic, overlong compositions in time signatures that you couldn't dance to: a music as far removed from ‘real’ rock ‘n’ roll as could be imagined; a music that failed both as rock music but also as classical music. (All these negative characteristics are to be found, for instance, in David Thomas's (1998) coverage of Yes's latest UK tour.) This characterisation is only partly unfair. It arose in the wake of punk, which sought to sweep away what its proponents saw as the empty virtuosity of rock dinosaurs. Punk sought to reclaim rock music for `ordinary' people to be played in intimate venues - not stadia - by people who didn't need to be conservatoire trained.

In this Middle Eight using ethnographic observation and interviews made in Cuba in May–July 2005 and March–April 2006 I problematise the new Latina/o dance music ‘reggaetón’ which in the USA is being heralded as ‘‘an expression of pan-Latino identity … the latest Latin musical style to sweep the world … the one with the most promise of finding a permanent, prominent place not just in US but in global popular culture …” (Marshall, 2006). Notably along with hip-hop with which it is now related in Cuban cultural politics, this is the first pan-Latin style of non-Cuban origin to have a strong presence in post-‘Special period’ 1990s revolutionary Cuba. I focus on the significance and possible history of the dance moves and the lyrics of two key songs, discussing possible political double meanings and implications within a Cuban context. While focusing particularly on issues of regeton in Cuba, I place regeton in Cuba in the larger context of reggaetón history in the Latin world and of Latin dance history and discuss it within the constant construction of an appropriate Cuban national identity. I pose open questions about gender, sexuality and generational attitudes. The overall theoretical context falls within the context of Järviluoma et al's work on ‘gender as cultural construction’ (2003). It builds on work on gender and dance which forms a small part of Fairley (2004).

Highlife is one of the myriad varieties of acculturated popular dance-music styles that have been emerging from Africa this century and which fuse African with Western (i.e. European and American) and islamic influences. Besides highlife, other examples include kwela, township jive and mbaqanga from South Africa, chimurenga from Zimbabwe, the benga beat from Kenya, taraab music from the East African coast, Congo jazz (soukous) from Central Africa, rai music from North Africa, juju and apala music from western Nigeria, makossa from the Cameroons and mbalax from Senegal.

The cultural turn in sociology and related fields of study has brought with it new understandings of the various ways social identities are formed. In a post-structural landscape, social identities must increasingly be regarded as reflexively derived ‘performative assemblages’ that incorporate elements of the local vernacular and global popular cultures. Building on the above reinterpretation of social identity, this paper takes as its central premise the notion that, in addition to its well-mapped cultural importance for youth, popular music retains a critical currency for the ageing audience as a key cultural resource of post-youth identification, lifestyle and associated cultural practices. In its examination of the relationship between popular music, ageing and identity, this paper uses illustrative examples drawn from ethnographic data collected by the authors between 2002 and 2009 in Australia and the UK.

In light of the growing literature on DJ culture, this article explores how technological change is having a significant impact on specific areas of music production and distribution within contemporary electronic dance music culture. An ethnographic methodology is employed, based around research conducted in the Sydney dance music scene between 2002 and 2007. The aim of the article is to reveal some of the discourses and reactions in DJ practice that result from shifts in technology. With the increasing use of CDs, mp3s and computer programs such as Ableton Live, the notion that vinyl and turntables represent the authentic technology of DJ culture seems somewhat redundant. The physical movement required to mix vinyl records has meant that the associated skills of DJing have become bound up in notions of physical and visible manipulation of technology, and so the use of technology that does not require and afford such physical expression has raised questions around the fundamental skills of DJing. As such, it would seem that there needs to be a redefinition of the concept of DJing, and a reframing of the skills and abilities seen as being essential to DJ practice.

This is an age of jazz. This is an age of having long, tangled hair, and of [young men] wearing an earring, and of wearing caps backwards [with the visor in the back]. And it is also a period of rap. Some raps are known as bhattirap and some are known as party rap. And some are meaningless raps. But at this moment it is a time of deuseerap. Deuseerap!!

Opening rap in ‘Deusee rey extended mix’ by Brazesh Khanal

(translated from Nepali; underlined words are sung in English)

Throughout Asia, the English word ‘mix’ (or variant thereof) is being used today to characterise a new mode of musical borrowing and syncretism distinctive of several pop musics that have emerged in the 1990s. Earlier modes of pop music borrowing typically involve timbral, rhythmic and melodic adaptations of both indigenous and foreign materials, in which contrasts between different musical elements are smoothed over so that they can be integrated into unified musical expressions. In contrast, the new ‘mix’ music of India (Greene 2000, pp. 545–6), Nepal (Greene 1999A; Henderson 1999), Japan (Condry 1999), Indonesia (Wallach 1999) and South Asian diasporic communities (Manuel 1995) employs the latest sound studio technologies in order to reproduce more precisely than ever before the precise timbres, rhythms and tunings of sound bites of both foreign pop and indigenous music. Yet as these foreign and indigenous sounds are coming more sharply into focus in Asian soundscapes, their meanings and histories seem to be going out of focus. For one thing, a ‘mix’ commonly takes the form of a sonic montage: abruptly juxtaposed musical styles heard in rapid succession that project only a weak sense of overarching form. In this ‘mix’ configuration, foreign and indigenous sounds sometimes present themselves as inscrutable sound bites – snippets detached from their original musical and cultural contexts. Mixes typically celebrate sonic contrasts, rather than attempt to reach or move the listener within any single musical idiom. Moreover, foreign sounds travel to Asia so quickly through radio, music television, recordings and the Internet, that they are detached from their histories and original cultural contexts, and often present themselves as suggestive, intriguing, but underdetermined cultural indexes. This point is taken up below in an analysis of Nepali heavy metal, one of the elements in the mix. Both Western pop and indigenous sounds become perspectival constructs, taking on a range of meanings and affective forces in different listener experiences. Mix music embodies new, understudied and essentially postmodern musical aesthetics (in the sense of Manuel 1995) that have taken root in Asian and other world communities.

Popular notions of value in art – even popular definitions of art itself – are much indebted to the idealist narratives of late romanticism and its maximalised form, elite modernism. Since artistic value is normally imputed to one side of a dialectically related pair of oppositional terms, two principal strategies exist by which to ascribe value to the music you love, find interesting, or want to study: either show how it merits the positive term of the valorising pair (if necessary redefining the specific markers of that term), or attack the narrative underlying the binary itself. A typical postmodernist strategy is to do both these things simultaneously, so as to collapse notions of value into a win-win polysemy.

Recent years have seen two noticeable trends in Popular Music Studies. These have been on the one hand a series of works which have tried to document the ‘local’ music scene and, on the other, accounts of processes of globalisation. While not uninterested in the intermediate Nation-State level, both trends have tended to regard it as an area of increasingly less importance. To state the matter more boldly, both trends have underplayed the continually important role of the Nation-State.