As a woman who performs rock music in an unabashedly ‘masculine’ fashion, Suzi Quatro is often criticised for trying to be ‘one of the boys’. Through close examinations of Quatro's performance strategies, including her repertoire, physical performance and vocal presence, I hope to show that Quatro's performances of gender and sexual identity on sound recordings and video belie such an uncomplicated characterisation. Focusing particularly on Quatro's ability to construct multiple subject positions that are ambiguous or mutually contradictory with respect to gender and sexuality, I shall argue that the role of female cock-rocker, as she performs it, is a paradoxical one that destabilises the gender codings from which it is constructed and celebrates the polymorphousness and performativity of identity.

In this article I examine Lennox's earliest performance strategies, and her reasons for employing them, as well as some of the reactions to her adoption of transvestism as a sartorial style. I discuss three videos from Lennox's 1988 LP Savage, which, in my view, marked a radical shift in her approach to depicting gender through performance. I argue that Lennox may be more productively viewed by keeping in mind performance ideals of music hall and other popular musical theatre styles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally I discuss Lennox's challenge to late twentieth-century gender construction using Judith Butler's theories of the performative nature of gender and of the subversive reiteration of gender, outlined in her books Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, and suggesting ways in which Lennox's performance embodies these theories, while extending them to include a broader range of sexualities.

With the dramatically improving fidelity of electric sound recording in the 1920s, aural spatiality – traces of room ambience and reverberation – became a factor in record production. Drawing on prior radio broadcast practice, a split occurred whereby ‘fine’ orchestral musics were recorded with relatively high levels of ambient or atmospheric sound while dance music, popular songs, humorous recitations and other ‘low’ forms were generally recorded with little or no reverberation. Through the 1930s and 1940s, popular recording occasionally, though increasingly, made use of mechanically fabricated echo and reverb to present a kind of sonic pictorialism, especially on singing cowboy and popular ‘Hawaiian’ recordings. Hollywood film sound practice in this period employed similar sonic space-making devices to denote states of terror, mystical revelation and supernatural transformations. The coming of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, with its characteristic big echo and reverb production sounds, may be seen as the radical recombining of these contradictory antecedents, effected in such a way as to allow (and promote) disordered, non-pictorial sound spatialities.

This article explores how the use of mobile phones has changed the contemporary Finnish soundscape. The change manifests itself firstly via telephone conversations which have spread from private premises to public places and secondly via interchangeable ringing tones. Drawing on research carried out among cellular phone users, the article argues that the ringing tones are selected on the basis of musical taste, so they can no longer be regarded as impersonal telephone signals. They can be used as a means of distinction and identity like any music. Even if the quality of ringing tones is inferior to the original interpretation of the tune, they can still be considered to be music, because of their personal and collective associations.

The United States Supreme Court characterised the trend toward the convergence of the communication, music and computer worlds as ‘a promising new medium that could empower citizens and promote democracy in the next millennium’. Yet inquiry into United States vs Microsoft, the case that may determine whether ‘the free and open nature of … computer-assisted communication’ will remain ‘free and open’ has been lacking. This study focuses on the antitrust and First Amendment implications of Microsoft's disputed strategy of marrying its Web browser to its operating system (OS) software.

The study argues that rulings on the legality of this strategy have ramifications for Microsoft's subsequent move to suture its streaming audio and video software to its OS product. Implications of this case – and the European Commission's similar inquiry into such suturing – for popular music as an industry, as an industrialised technology, and as a form of communication are discussed. Scholars, practitioners, and fans must be ever mindful that when one firm dominates a human enterprise as central to contemporary life as personal computing, the opportunity for abuse exists.

A new struggle has emerged within popular music. This struggle is about technology and access to music through computer-mediated technology. Somewhat typical of the state of cultural things being more complex in their multiple articulations, this struggle runs in tandem with the historical struggle by youth for ‘their music’ against that of previous generations. The multiple characteristics of the struggle over cultural production, ownership and circulation represents a change from earlier days when pop music was articulated to youth culture and social movements, offering relatively direct relationships from one to another. (For example, ‘The Sixties’ became the shorthand reference for these cultural formations.) That relationship still exists, albeit in a self-conscious historical sense that requires continuous examination as it changes with the new generations of youth and the available technologies.