The cross-pollination between popular music and performance that Philip Auslander has coined as ‘musical persona’ is a concept that is continuously renegotiated against ongoing developments on the intersection of music, performance, technology and new media. Zooming in on the entanglement of character, persona and real person in contemporary popular music culture, this article examines how the identity performance of indie musician Connan Mockasin stages the interlacement of fictional characters and other forms of self-presentation. The fictional music teacher character Mr Bostyn that Mockasin has introduced with the Jassbusters album exists in an intriguing interplay with his broader eccentric identity performance, as demonstrated by the artist's self-presentation with an album collaboration with his father, It's Just Wind. Through the prism of the fictional band frame and music documentary practices I argue that Mockasin's self-presentation across various media formats turns the interplay between theatrical play and performative display into a fundamental aspect of his persona.

This article explores the relationships between utopianism, activism and networks in the early career of the Hungarian musicologist János Maróthy (1925–2001). A prolific author of pioneering work on the social history of European peasant and urban folk songs from the antiquity to the modern era, Maróthy is noteworthy for establishing academic research of popular music in Hungary, both preceding and contributing to the emergence of new musicology and popular music studies in European and Anglo-American academia at the turn of the 1980s. Maróthy mediated between various grassroots movements and the party state's institutions and was a participant observer of various off-the-mainstream music-related scenes formed in Romani workers’ hostels and jazz clubs. His Department of Music Sociology (at the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) conducted and commissioned research on the local history of workers’ songs, urban folklore, empirical studies of musical taste, and the social life and institutions of youth music. This article offers a critical overview of Maróthy's career from its onset in 1948 up to the mid-1960s. This turbulent period witnessed the most repressive years of Stalinism, the anti-Soviet revolution of 1956, its defeat, and the gradual consolidation of a more liberal Kádár-led regime. It examines how changing political and intellectual trends, ideologies and national and supranational realignments within the Soviet Bloc (and beyond) shaped the forms and meanings of Maróthy's multi-faceted activism, along with his shifting ideas about the relationships between music, political movements and entertainment.

The story of East German singer-songwriter Gerhard Gundermann provides a vibrant illustration of a much-neglected area of protest song history. Gundermann, who died prematurely in 1998 at the age of 43, was an excavator driver in an open cast mine for most of his adult life. A stalwart of the singing club and Liedertheater (song theatre) movements in the GDR, he emerged after 1990 as a musical and poetic mouthpiece for the culturally and economically marginalised ‘losers’ of German unification. This article will examine Gundermann's utopian aesthetic: how he creatively transformed a socialist realist ideal of the heroic into a new narrative persona that addressed the democratic deficits of the GDR and later the growing environmental threat. It will also link his utopianism to his deep entanglement with the state, as reflected in his role as a Stasi informer in his early career. While Gundermann's case is symptomatic of the GDR's heavily state-monitored music scene, this article will also set his work within the wider context of international protest and environmental song.

The study of popular music in the Soviet-controlled East-Central European region has yet to receive the attention it merits. The objective of this study was to fill this gap by investigating the genealogy of popular music research in East Central Europe prior to 1989. It provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of popular music research in socialist East-Central Europe, with a particular focus on Czechoslovakia, Hungary and East Germany. It delineates the challenges encountered by researchers in reconciling their work with the complex cultural and political conditions of the era. Furthermore, it considers the influence of Marxist ideology on musicology and sociology, and how this may have shaped research. It offers new perspectives on the history of popular music studies in this domain, which has been lightly explored until now. It seeks to shed light on the intricate relationship between music, politics and ideology behind the Iron Curtain.

Like any form of artistic production in the Soviet 1970s (Brezhnev's ‘Stagnation’ era), films had to tread a fine line between being acceptable to official organs, yet managing to appeal to the average citizen. Music – and specifically popular music or estrada – was an important factor contributing to how filmmakers could express themselves and connect with audiences despite official restraint. This article will explore the soundscapes of two iconic movies embodying that tension: The Twelve Chairs (Двеннадцать стульев, 1971, dir. Leonid Gaidai) and The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! (Ирония судьбы, или с легким паром!, 1975, dir. El'dar Riazanov). A close reading of musical scenes from these Stagnation-era artefacts will expose several key tactics that emerge in the complicated nexus between composer, director and text, demonstrating how popular music fits into a complex and multi-faceted relationship of minor liberties and major limits.

This article focuses on the innovative developments of some emblematic rock bands in Bulgaria, observed during the late 1970s and 1980s in terms of their social, ideological and artistic maturity, as well as of their significant impact on local youth life-styles through the liberating experience of specific musical styles ranging from classic rock (Shturtsite) and progressive rock (FSB) to, say, new wave (Tangra) or punk (Rock Trio Milena). Why the 1980s? What were the dominant verbal and musical messages at that time? Did they stimulate and accommodate the democratic political changes in 1989? In trying to answer such questions, the article develops a thesis according to which the acculturation of transnational musical models as the ones in the field of rock music is not a form of any flat mimicry of modern trends; this process inevitably passes through the filter of specific local contexts and subjective experiences.

Femininity and metaphors of motherhood have always determined the perception of nature and environment. With the rise of the ecological movements, they have also accompanied political eco-activism and nature conservation regimes. In this context, ecofeminism emerged as an academic, intellectual and social movement to critically question environmental conflicts and their interrelatedness to gender norms and power constellations. To what extent is ecofeminism a topic of pop music? Showcasing selected pop music examples from Tracy Chapman, Björk, Marina, Anohni and others, this article identifies four major thematic strands of narrating ecofeminist positions through pop music: (1) violence and vulnerability, illustrating the contrast between female nature and male culture; (2) strength and togetherness, focusing on the ontological connection between female bodies and nature; (3) protest and empowerment, drawing an activist demarcation against patriarchy and binary thinking; and (4) transecology and gender-queerness, crossing both heteronormative boundaries of bodies and dualistic nature conceptions.

This article explores Auto-Tune's importance to the production, perception and reception of trap music, a sub-genre of hip hop. Central to this exploration is the observation that Auto-Tuned trap vocals are readily audible as such because the software's pitch correction function is applied unnaturally quickly to the vocal audio signal, a feature herein termed ‘zero-onset Auto-Tune’. First, I posit that although Auto-Tune is ostensibly a pitch-correction device, its impact on vocal timbre is not well documented or understood. Second, I argue that Auto-Tune's recent importance as a creative tool in trap recasts it as an instrument. Third, I suggest that understanding Auto-Tune's repurposing as an instrument begets its situation in a lineage of technologies repurposed, adapted and embraced by the hip-hop community, including the turntable, digital sampler, and analogue mixer. And fourth, I propose that this repurposing surfaces in Auto-Tune's ability to facilitate emotiveness in trap vocals.

This article examines writing about popular music which took place outside the academic sphere in the Czech nation after 1945. This is not just the usual magazine and book journalism. Owing to the censorship of all publishing entities by the state and the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia 1948–1989, alternative publishing platforms played a very important role in mediating the professional exchange of opinions and information on topics that were not preferred or even forbidden elsewhere. These included periodicals of various social organisations and interest institutions as well as privately produced and distributed printed matter and manuscripts. The article compares how these activities have evolved over time in the context of political change and reflects on the functions they have fulfilled in society.

This article focuses on the history of the Czechoslovak sociology of popular music, which formed at the beginning of the 1960s. The article first examines the origins of thinking about ‘mass music genres’ in the Czech lands in the interwar period. It further discusses considerations of mass music genres and their audiences after World War II in light of the communist takeover in 1948, Stalinism of the 1950s and liberalisation of the 1960s. Finally, the article presents the situation after the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968. Based on analysis of archival sources and original theoretical texts, hitherto unknown in the context of Anglophone scholarship, this article seeks to show how the specific political background of the Central European state behind the Iron Curtain determined the foundation, scholarly focus and social role of the sociology of popular music and how it differed from the situation in Western capitalist countries.

Since its emergence in the 1990s, K-pop has constantly gained popularity and reached a wider audience. K-pop has been described as a blend of different music genres, such as pop, hip-hop, R'n’B and electronic music. However, there was Korean popular music before the rise of K-pop and not all popular music in Korea is K-pop. Using data from Spotify at the track level and exploratory data analysis tools, the paper provides an empirical analysis of the characteristics of Korean popular music since the 1990s and compares K-pop and related genres with Anglo-American pop genres in terms of acousticness, danceability, energy, speechiness and valence. While K-pop is close to the dance pop genre through its danceability, it has on average more energy and cheerfulness than Anglo-American pop. There is also more diversity in Korean popular music than suggested by the K-pop phenomenon. Finally, as K-pop became more successful, it did not become more similar in its audio features to Anglo-American pop.