The radio networks of North America and Britain provide one of the most important promotional outlets for recorded music, setting programming agendas at radio stations and influencing the talent acquisition policies of record labels throughout the world. For many years there have been sharp contrasts in the way in which music radio has operated and been organised in these two countries. The promotion of records in Britain has mainly been directed towards one national non-commercial station, Radio 1, which plays an eclectic mixture of musical styles. In the United States radio promotion has been aimed across a complex of commercial stations which broadcast ‘narrowcast’ music very clearly defined according to various ‘formats’. However, the recent re-regulation of the broadcasting system in Britain has resulted in a proliferation of regional commercial stations that are responding to increasing competition by introducing narrowcasting policies similar to those of North America. With Radio 1's share of listeners declining and the prospect of national commercial stations being granted licences and further challenging Radio 1's dominance of pop broadcasting, it seems particularly pertinent to contrast the practices of record companies and radio stations in Britain and North America and highlight how they directly effect the production and consumption of pop music.

This article studies the ways that Post-Internet ideas inform much contemporary musical production. Drawing on interviews conducted with musicians/artists self-consciously highlighting Post-Internet themes in their work, including Arca, Ryan Trecartin, 18+, Holly Herndon and ADR, the paper emphasises the significance of the term ‘Post-Internet’ for contemporary identity politics. It outlines the Post-Internet ideas of Karen Archey, Robin Peckham and Nathan Jurgenson, illuminating their indebtedness to posthuman discourses through a study of the music of Holly Herndon. It then introduces the notion of ‘digital queering’, a trend located in the work of many Post-Internet musicians. Mykki Blanco, 18+, Arca and Ryan Trecartin fuse the posthumanism of Post-Internet identity with the fluid gender deconstructions of queer theory. This is inspired by the ability to perform multiple ‘selves’ online as well as the intimate relationship with digital networks that is a consequence of Post-Internet ideas.

During the last decades in most Western countries music education on all levels has undergone significant changes. In response to changes in the musical field in society at large, various popular music styles, previously almost totally neglected in institutional forms of music teaching based on Western art music, have been given increasing significance in the curricula of music education. This development has not, however, taken place without controversies. In most popular music genres the theoretical framework, learning principles and aims of musical practices differ in significant respects from those of the regulated activities of traditional institutions of music education, and the successful integration of popular genres into such institutions requires that these differences be acknowledged and resolved rather than ignored.

From their release in the 1960s, the LPs of the Beatles have dominated the various selections and lists which routinely purport to identify the most popular/most influential/best albums of the popular music era. Throughout each subsequent decade, the verdicts expressed in audience polls, in critics' choices and in the comments of other musicians have served to effectively maintain and enhance the group's reputation.

There is, however, an additional way - often alluded to, but rarely investigated - in which the albums of the Beatles are celebrated. Almost without exception, the album covers themselves have been seen as groundbreaking in their visual and aesthetic properties, have been congratulated for their innovative and imaginative designs, have been credited with providing an early impetus for the expansion of the graphic design industry into the imagery of popular music, and have been seen as largely responsible for allowing the connections between art and pop to be made explicit.

This paper focuses on Shibuya-kei, a style of independent popular music that emerged in Japan in the late 1980s and which has been influential in the popularisation of J-pop worldwide. Although usually treated as a uniquely Japanese musical genre, Shibuya-kei was from its inception defined by an ostentatious internationalism, fusing jazz, easy listening and bossa nova with British, American and French retro-pop styles. Tracing the international itineraries of Shibuya-kei musicians and the role of Western musicians and labels in promoting it outside Japan, this paper characterises Shibuya-kei not as just another J-pop genre but as a transnational soundscape, a collaborative project produced by a network of musicians circulating between Japan and the UK, the US, France, Germany, Spain and Brazil. As such, the paper suggests, it requires us to rethink the place of the national in relation to popular music.

The first law of love is subjective: subjectively, jealousy is deeper than love, it contains love's truth. This is because jealousy goes further in the apprehension and interpretation of signs. It is the designation of love, its finality. Indeed, it is inevitable that the signs of a loved person, once we ‘explicate’ them, should be revealed as deceptive: addressed to us, they nonetheless express worlds which exclude us and which the beloved will not and cannot make us know … Love's signs … are deceptive signs which can be addressed to us only by concealing what they express: the origin of unknown worlds, of unknown actions and thoughts which give them a meaning. They do not excite superficial, nervous exaltation, but the suffering of a deeper exploration. The beloved's lies are the hieroglyphics of love. The interpreter of love's signs is necessarily the interpreter of lies. His fate is expressed in the motto: to love without being loved. (Deleuze 1973)

‘Emo’, an abbreviation of the word ‘emotional’, is a term both used to describe music which places public emphasis on introspective displays of emotion and a pejorative phrase applied to fans of a diverse range of music. It is overwhelmingly male-dominated in terms of production and it has been suggested that the development of emo can be explained with reference to a ‘crisis in masculinity’. This implies that explicit, male emotional expression is historically incompatible with the performance of Western ‘masculinity’. This article first briefly explores how emo emerged and how it has been linked to the idea of a crisis. It then moves on to conduct a lyrical, discursive analysis around three themes: emotional expression and relationships; overt chauvinism; and ‘beta male misogyny’. Through these concepts I suggest that, rather than indicating a crisis or ‘softening’ of masculinity, there are actually a number of historical continuities with masculinities as a means of sustaining gendered inequalities.

Between 1976 and 1983 Argentina witnessed the full development of a phenomenon which has come to be known as rock nacional (‘national rock’). At first sight it might appear no more than a matter of musical consumption, fashioning its participants simply as ‘artists’ on one side and ‘public’ on the other. But it has proved an original form within which the young create and inhabit a space of their own, relatively protected from the assaults of the military dictatorship (which had made them its principal victims), and has come to constitute, with the passing of the years, a counter-culture and a social movement.

While the rock'n'roll era, dance bands, country and the blues have been the subject of detailed and analytical histories, the 1890s, those formative years of music-recording, still await adequate and rigorous scrutiny. The standard (and only) history of the recording process remains Roland Gelatt's The Fabulous Phonograph, whose first edition appeared in 1955. But while Gelatt's foreword promisingly notes that ‘the history of the phonograph is at once the history of an invention, an industry and a musical instrument’, his book seldom rises above a journalistic narrative. It is also marred by an ill-concealed bias towards the classical repertoire and against popular musics.

This article offers a sociological account of the labour of jazz musicians. The first part is concerned with elaborating a theory of jazz work based on Alasdair MacIntyre's notion of social practices. Applying this theory to recent empirical work with British jazz musicians, the article reveals how the virtuous pursuit of specific ‘internal goods’ is judged to be particularly prominent in jazz, suggesting that it might constitute an ethical practice in MacIntyrean terms. While MacIntyre's theory is argued to offer a congenial framework for an analysis of jazz, it is then compared and contrasted with more established readings of jazz practice – based on the work of Pierre Bourdieu – which suggest more objective and instrumental motivations for working in jazz. The article concludes by evaluating the relative merits of each approach.

This article addresses a gap in the historical study of music on television by revisiting North American popular music in conjunction with the broadcast medium's early stage of development. Central to its analysis is the fact that music has always been deemed essential to the character and success of television. Emphasising the circulating discourses of ‘opportunity’, the article isolates the ways in which some musicians and others in various sectors of the music industry regarded the new medium as a positive influence at its inception. Among key considerations at the time were issues of musical performance style and aesthetics, repertoire, promotional capabilities, career enhancement, and additional leisure options for audiences.

‘No modern communications medium is more intrusive in modern Indian life than recorded and electronically amplified sound’ (Babb 1995, p. 10). In South Asia, even the most exclusive student of unmediated music-making cannot avoid a mediated public soundscape that may well transmit the music being studied over loudspeakers, radios, televisions, and cassette players. This is certainly the case for qawwali, a musical genre which is firmly embedded in Sufi practice, but is also widely recorded and media-disseminated for as long as the life of the Indian record industry itself. Acknowledging this musical reality after years of live study has prompted me first to situate the study of recorded qawwali vis-à-vis my own scholarly conventions and vis-à-vis the pioneering work on sound recording done in the very region of my own study. The aim is to address the problematic of an ethnographic approach to recorded qawwali, and to present preliminary findings, including some culturally meaningful examples from the repertoire.

Difficulty is most often associated, not with popular music, but with the avant-garde. How do popular music listeners listen to albums that present compositional, performance or conceptual elements from the avant-garde? This paper explores where difficulty lies for listeners when they listen to, situate and evaluate albums that sit on the intersection between the popular and the avant-garde. The paper focuses on the online collaborative discourse of readers of a British music magazine (The Word), to explore how, while ‘difficult albums’ might be considered sui generis and dislocated from the norms of popular music, the aesthetic discourse of The Word's readers shows that to engage with difficult albums is to explore how they are able to be connected with a range of musical histories and practices, as well as to multiple personal experiences of popular music.

This article is part of a larger attempt to map the movement of jazz within its cultural field, and as such is less concerned with its musicological properties than with the means of its production, consumption and the associated technology and rhetoric. It is the last of these that I am most interested in just here: the question of finding appropriate ways of talking about jazz. I want to suggest that certain kinds of commentary ostensibly dedicated to conferring artistic legitimacy on the music in effect reshape it so that it can be more easily fitted into a political economy.

This article explores the relationship between musicians and the music press from the musicians' point of view, based on a collection of recent interviews with musicians working in the pop and jazz fields. It will expose some of the concrete effects of the music press using examples from the everyday experiences of musicians, which include the influence of the press in record retail, genre labelling, and creating industry buzz. But while musicians may have a pragmatic understanding of the role of music criticism, their perspectives are emotionally heated in direct proportion to the influence the press holds over their own livelihoods. The interests of the working music critic often conflict with the interests of the working musician, and this article will conclude with a discussion of how the practical conflict of interests between musicians and critics is reflected in ideological differences between the two groups.

The ‘temp track’, a temporary mock-up of a film's soundtrack, is assembled from pre-existing music prior to the real, commissioned score being composed. An integral element of the post-production process of American feature films, it survives only in its role for audience previews. Constructed by a music editor, in most cases, it is a blueprint of a film's soundtrack – a musical topography of score, songs, culture and codes in which a balance must obtain between the director's vision, the music's function, underlying requirements of genre, and the spectator's perception. This article demonstrates that the temp track informs compositional practices and the final score, and makes the argument that textual analysis would benefit from the recognition of the role of production practices. Drawing on published sources and interviews with practitioners, this article provides historical context and musical detail, and shows how productive analysis can be when it draws on practitioners' insights as well as textual analysis. Film score analysis must not begin and end with the finished film score but must utilise a more eclectic methodology which takes into account the production process. Film score analysis should reflect the constitutive nature of film and film music.

Introduction

The concern of this article is with a particular set of harmonic practices that rock musicians, particularly those who participate in the domain of guitar-oriented ‘alternative’ rock, have been using with noticeable frequency in the last ten years. I am also interested in discussing the concept of the power chord (a term I shall explicate more clearly below) as a device in rock that has facilitated the above-mentioned set of harmonic practices

The observations made in this paper come out of a previous research inquiry of mine into the devices which alternative musicians use to differentiate their music from other styles of mainstream rock. Also, the pursuit of this topic is partly a response to Allan Moore's admonition that ‘there is as yet very little concern for theorizing analytical method in rock music’, and his call for a ‘mapping-out of those harmonic practices that serve to distinguish rock styles . . . from those of common-practice tonality . . . and jazz’ (Moore 1995, p. 185).

There has been some rather pointed criticism recently of musicological analyses of popular music (see Shepherd 1993; Frith 1990) on the charge that analysing music's purely sonic dimensions (i.e. melody, harmony, rhythm, structure, etc.) does not really help us understand musical communication. Speaking as a songwriter, however, I would argue that many musicians in rock are indeed concerned with harmonic progression (or ‘the changes’, to use the vernacular term) as an important device or jumping-off point in the process of songwriting. It also seems reasonable to suggest that harmonic progression is a contributing factor in the affective power of a song, although its importance here is likely to be variable and quite open to debate.

This article examines the way in which music has featured in documentary films and programmes. The conventions of restrained use to cue mood and theme are explored, using examples and the recommendations of manuals. Across the varieties of documentary output, the article notes how the dominance of journalistic and observational formats has, for different reasons, tended to place music in the margins. Drawing on an example from the classic period of documentary film-making in Britain, it points towards a more expansive use of music in a complementary relationship with images. A number of general theoretical points about the specific properties of the documentary image and its relationship with music are raised and recent examples of successful innovation discussed. The article ends by suggesting that there is more scope for aesthetic development in music-image relations than has often been recognised and that some of the established inhibitions about mixing ‘fact’ with ‘emotion’ need to be reviewed.

There has been a marked resurgence of interest in progressive rock music both commercially and critically, with a number of articles and books now reassessing its styles, meanings, politics and appeal. Despite this, there has been a tendency to define progressive rock through a ‘symphonic orthodoxy’ which preferences a limited, albeit highly successful, number of British groups operating in a relatively narrow sonic landscape. This article questions that orthodoxy by drawing on the lay definitions and understandings of fans to extend the definitions and geographies of progressive rock, and to characterise it as a European meta-genre. It examines the meta-genre's formative years at the beginning of the 1970s, and argues that progressive rock was inspired by the explorations of a European youth counterculture whose music was influenced by local socio-political and economic contexts, as well as by the music and attitudes of the American counterculture and of European Romanticism.

The Raincoats were one of a handful of British, all-female punk bands successful enough to release records and tour internationally. Since the late 1970s, critics intrigued by the idea that music can enact gender, have heard their music as somehow embodying femininity. I explore the discursive origins of the Raincoats music as ‘feminine music’ before analysing their music to determine the specific nature of their work as female punk musicians. The Raincoats took advantage of punk's ideology of amateurism to shatter traditional (read: masculine) subjectivity in rock music. Analysing their music reveals the ways in which their music triggers listening that encourages an understanding of their music as feminine.