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.

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.

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.

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.

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.