Nandi Bushell (b. 2010) is a British-Zulu drummer and multi-instrumentalist whose early career has garnered much attention from audiences and the international music press. In this article, we investigate the case of Bushell as a point of entry for understanding children's participation in mainstream popular music culture and the broader public sphere. We explore Bushell's social media presence, creative output and public reception in relation to three interrelated themes: (1) the functioning of social media and the music press as arenas for the (re)negotiation of ideas about child prodigy; (2) child musicians’ political activism; and (3) the role of adult ‘mentor-fans’ in sponsoring girls’ participation in rock culture. In grappling with the complexities of these themes, we place a particular emphasis on querying how dominant conceptions of girlhood inform the press coverage of Bushell's music and social media output, as well as on examining her highly visible relationships with established male rock artists serving as mentors, fans and industry brokers. Ultimately, the article sheds new light on how notions of girlhood as a cultural identity are negotiated by young artists and their (often adult) audiences in relation to musical genre boundaries.

This article discusses musicking in the Church of Scientology, and how it can be used to understand the organisation and its relationship to society. The article begins by discussing the essential place of listening in Scientological practice, noting that it is one of several ‘technologies’ that institutionalise the charisma of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. It next demonstrates how Hubbard's hagiography influences how the church produces music today. This leads to a consideration of the ‘whole track sound’ of Scientology and uses the album Hymn of Asia (2000) to discuss how Scientological concepts are embedded sonically and lyrically into the church's recorded music outputs. The final section discusses the importance of communication in Scientology's musical thought, using interviews drawn from my fieldwork in Los Angeles to highlight the benefits and limits of music as a medium of (religious) communication.

In this article, I explore the processes of cultural dialogue through which European and Caribbean dances such as the waltz, the pasillo, the polka, and the danzón became tributaries of Panamanian típico. These genres, particularly the thriving danzón culture in Panama, contributed in various degrees to the shaping of típico as local performers adopted, adapted and reinterpreted rhythms and melodic material from the context of existing musical traditions. Expanding on recent research, I show how this cultural dialogue developed into a platform for innovation from which típico emerges as a distinct genre in the mid 20th century, a reinterpretation of the dance repertoire known as danzón–cumbia by composers which I collectively call the Azuero School. I examine how this repertoire and its performance practice became channels for discontinuous cultural dialogue, experimentation and reinterpretation of multiple influences in a context of political and social change in Panama.