This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the course of one year in London and Bristol to examine the performance of rap in English youth centres. Youth centres play a significant role in supporting and shaping rap culture. However, historically dominant narratives within hip-hop studies and hip-hop culture depict rap as a vernacular cultural form that emerges from ‘the street’, and which derives its authenticity through its relation to ‘the street’. We seek to move beyond such discourses and towards a recognition of the institutional processes, structures and networks that shape and sustain rap culture. Our focus on the institutional life of rap leads to an analysis of the various possibilities, limitations and tensions that arise in the coming together of public funding, and social policy priorities, local organisations and black vernacular culture.

The music that was produced in Dunedin, New Zealand, during the 1980's occupies a unique place in the global indie music canon. In writing about this supposed ‘Dunedin sound,' critics and scholars alike have fixated on the city's remoteness: it is believed to be distant from metropolitan centres of music industry power and influence, and consequently supported a subversive and democratised local music scene. This article explores the implications of the ongoing historicisation of Dunedin's popular music scene along these lines, and highlights the ways in which the valorisation of the city’s musical heritage obstructs problematic power dynamics that impact the way young musicians in the city express place and musical identity. Our research applies an embedded participatory ethnography to unpack the ideological positions occupied by contemporary local musicians, and to critique factions within the contemporary musical scene in the city.

Hip-hop studies have historically centred on issues of the ‘street’ or virtuosic lyricism and flow, foregrounded as evidence of the ‘seriousness’ of the genre. While these have undoubtedly been valuable theoretical approaches, the prominence of social networking in the 2010s (with its vast implications for communication and identity politics) has sculpted a generation of rappers whose vocal style and self-representation disintegrate prior assumptions about hip-hop identity. These artists, who have flourished in tandem with the rise of streaming services, have been disparagingly dubbed ‘mumble rap’ by traditionalists owing to the apparent indecipherability of their vocals and a lack of emphasis on observational or poetic lyricism. In this article I argue that this myopic label undervalues the groundbreakingly post-verbal nature of the music being created by these rappers, and highlights the innovations of mumble rap, exploring the centrality of social media, memes and streaming to its existence while critically examining its protagonists’ unconventionally stylised vocals. After analysing the impact of streaming, information overload and audience participation (through social media hype and memes) on contemporary hip-hop, I survey the growth of melodic Auto-Tuned vocals and repetitive lyricism in the work of pioneering mumble rappers such as Future, before turning to an extended examination of Atlanta's Young Thug, whose controversially malleable vocal style, which prioritises experimentation with vocal textures while confounding the rules of hip-hop flow, is mirrored by his impulsive exploitation of social media and androgynous fashion sense, establishing him as the most revolutionary archetype of so-called mumble rap.

This article explores popular-musical invocations of the Northern Ireland conflict (1968–1998), focussing specifically on the period between the IRA hunger strike of 1981 and the British Government's Broadcasting Act in 1988. Whilst most songs addressed to the ‘Troubles’ were marked by (lyrical) abstraction and (political) non-alignment, this period witnessed a series of efforts that issued upfront and partisan views. The article explores two such instances – by That Petrol Emotion and Easterhouse – addressing each band's respective views as well as the specific performance strategies that they deployed in staging their interventions. Drawing on original interviews that the author has conducted with the musicians – alongside extensive archival research of print and audio/visual media – the article explores the bands’ songs in conjunction with salient ancillary media (such as record sleeves, videos and interviews), yielding a more nuanced account of popular music's engagement with the ‘Troubles’ than has been offered in existing work (which often assumes the form of broad surveys).

If there is a single narrative that captures the modern understanding of transformative crossroads magic it is the spurious fable of the selling of Robert Johnson's soul. When, in the palaeoanthropology of 20th century rock and roll music, the biographers of the short-lived blues legend claimed that he had been down to the Dockery Plantation crossroads at midnight to sell his soul to the Devil in exchange for guitar skills, they were perhaps unwitting witnesses to the deep history of myth and ritual that has long been associated with the transformative space of the crossroads. They were not lacking in foresight, however, about the way in which such a claim would enhance their subject's credibility. The value of such a sulphurous reputation for a musician is not merely a recent phenomenon but also has historical precedents. A hundred years before Johnson (who lived 1911–1938), the guitarist and violinist Niccolo Paganini (1782–1840) was considered such a suspiciously devilish virtuoso that his audiences were reputed to cross themselves before his concerts in hope of protection from subtle demonic influence. One audience member even fled a concert after reporting seeing the Devil himself aiding Paganini's performance. Going a little further back, Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) explained of his best-known sonata, The Devil's Trill (1713), that he had ‘written down the piece after waking from a particularly vivid dream of the Devil playing a violin with ferocious virtuosity’, and claimed that it was ‘but a shadow of what he had witnessed in the dream, for he was unable to capture on the page the Devil's full intensity’. His long career was certainly not harmed by this youthful excursion into Hell.

In the Soviet Union, song competitions had an important role in presenting new artists and songs. The Mikrofona aptauja contest of Latvian radio (1968–1994) was the main forum for new Latvian pop music. It had a reputation for expressing nationalist feelings within the limits of Soviet censorship. In 1988, with the rise of new political movements in the Soviet Union, the competition became a venue for the Latvian independence movement. The winning song of 1988 was a demand for ‘freedom to the fatherland’. The competition also played a part in the rehabilitation of pre-war popular music which had been forbidden in Soviet Latvia. The paper discusses the role of journalists, politicians and songwriters in this process. After the privatisation of the economy, the song competition was taken over by private entrepreneurs, as public interest in political songs waned.

This article analyses the main cultural and political factors that contributed to the emergence of local Anglophone music in Russia between 2008 and 2012. While Russian indie groups had extensively sung in English before (with scarce public recognition), a conjunction of circumstances encouraged the appearance of a conspicuous Russian Anglophone music scene in the Medvedev years. These were a perceived political relaxation, internally and in East–West relations; Russian economic growth and the subsequent renovation of Moscow; and the connectivity and expansion of the independent music community. The article also argues that the success of local Anglophone bands, as well as the appearance of an ‘indie’ sound and an ‘indie’ music scene (indi), was the result of a concerted effort by Russian music participants to bring and incorporate the Other – the West – into Russia's everyday life. The English language, correspondingly, functioned as a ‘tool’ for this operation.

This article argues that contemporary systems theory explanations are insufficient when accounting for ‘in the moment’ creative musical performance. The system model's focus on a domain-changing contribution from an individual fails to offer a satisfactory account of the construction and assessment of the more everyday distributed and collaborative creativity undertaken by many popular music instrumentalists. A cultural psychology perspective, in contrast, situates distributed creativity inbetween people and objects rather than within them. Glăveanu's ‘Five As framework’ has particular utility in capturing the ordinary creativity that does not seek to change the domain but nevertheless contributes to it. The model is applied here to four case studies of expert instrumentalists that draw upon a combination of primary evidence, lived experience and original research.

For more than two decades, a trend in popular music scholarship has been the publication every few years of an edited collection of analytical essays (e.g., Covach and Boone 1997; Moore 2003; Everett 2008). These multi-author volumes sometimes have a specific analytical concern, such as intertextuality (Burns and Lacasse 2018), but more typically they simply bring together a variety of essays written by a variety of authors using a variety of methods to analyse music from a variety of styles. Strategically, the editors of these volumes will pitch this lack of any strong unifying theme as an advantage, asserting that the broad range of approaches gives the reader a sense for the diversity of current perspectives (as in, for example, the preface to Spicer and Covach 2010 or the introduction to von Appen et al. 2015). To be fair, the exclusive focus on analysis, particularly close readings of the ‘text’ itself, makes the chapters of these collections hold together more than, say, the articles in any regular issue of Popular Music. However, with typically only a dozen or so contributions in each volume, these multi-author works often seem like scattershot glimpses into the vast universe of possible analytical approaches and musical styles.