In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the articulation of politics and sound became explicitly marked during the civil rights transition to embryonic types of racial nationalism, black power and the novel forms of ‘citizenship’ implied therein. Music mediated and registered these critical shifts in political outlook, structural change and black collectivity. Yet, despite the power of black soundings to communicate or gesture toward a particular political sensibility, black popular music in particular remained elusive to those political workers most invested in identifying the articulations of popular sound aesthetics and the masses. Popular music, and soul culture more generally, frustrated nationalist efforts at enlisting the black masses, a failure that paradoxically reflected black nationalism’s inability to appeal to and enlist the political potential of the mass black public that it so valorised. %This article explores the political-aesthetic interface particularly as it played out in the relationship between cultural nationalism and black popular music. This relationship offers a powerful index of the correspondence and dissonance between the political intentions of nationalist political workers and the political desires of the urban masses. It is argued that both the formal attempts at producing revolutionary cultural products and the broader influence and reception that black nationalist politics had within the field of black popular culture were in significant ways less communicative of collective political will and desire than emergent popular musical formations.

In February 2003, a woman’s body became the focal point for public debates about religious authority, freedom of expression, women’s rights, and the future of Indonesia’s political leadership. At the centre of these debates was Inul Daratista, a twenty-four-year-old popular music singer/dancer from East Java, whose dancing was described as ‘pornographic’ and therefore haram, forbidden by Islam. In this essay, I describe how and why Inul’s dancing body became a central symbol in debates about religion, culture and politics in the years following the fall of Indonesian ex-president Suharto in 1998. In the highly mediated sphere of popular culture, ‘Inulmania’ contributed to a new dialogic space where conflicting ideological positions could be expressed and debated. Inul’s body became a stage for a variety of cultural actors to try out or ‘rehearse’ an emergent democracy in post-Suharto Indonesia. A case study of popular performer Inul Daratista illuminates contemporary ‘body politics’, in which human bodies invested with diverse meanings and values have powerful implications for discourses about Islam, pornography, women’s bodies, state/civil relations in Indonesia, and changing forms of media.

In Hindi cinema, love songs comprise the vast majority in an industry in which almost every film contains song and dance numbers. Often incorrectly characterised as narrative interruptions, these celluloid creations contain indigenous aesthetics and self-identifying cultural values, and employ contemporary cinematic techniques which impact film song content and context. How do these cinematic techniques intensify the viewing experience and allow traditional aesthetic ideals to coexist with contemporary codes relevant to a burgeoning Indian middle class and diaspora?

Beginning with an examination of traditional sources and contemporary values regarding music and emotion, I address the particularly important notion of displaying heart, often the centrepiece of thematic and dramatic tension as well as the love song soundtrack. As the primary emotional genre, I analyse the use of heart in romantic films and suggest a general typology of romantic film songs and their aesthetics, including commonly used musical motifs and codes.

Finally, I compare musical, cinematic and narrative components of the Indian romantic genre with those aspects of the American film musical, particularly in relation to cultural values and ideological differences. The iconic use of a couple-centric narrative is examined in relation to Indian displays of emotion, and love song duets are contextualised through description of several pervasive cinematic techniques used to heighten the emotional impact of songs on the audience. I conclude with a focus on the relationship between the song sequence and the narrative structure, particularly how this serves to intensify the narrative flow rather than interrupt it.

The Beastie Boys are usually described as the white hip hop group who helped break rap to a broad-based white audience. Rarely is it acknowledged that the Beasties all came from Jewish backgrounds. This article examines the implications of the Beastie Boys’ Jewishness. The Beasties can be placed in a long history of Jewish entertainers reworking black music for white American audiences. By the 1980s, Jews in the United States had been assimilated into whiteness, yet it is clear that the memory of discrimination lived on. The members of the Beasties played with whiteness – performed in whiteface – while being very aware of their own Jewishness and the implications of this. With the advice and mentoring of African American Russell Simmons and the Jewish Rick Rubin, the group gained respect in the black community as legitimate rappers and then set out to perform as uncivil rock performers for white audiences. This article argues that the Beasties’ Jewishness was central to their success as the group that brought rap to a mainstream white American audience.

Progressive rock of the early 1970s has been demonised as a nadir in the history of rock primarily because of the ambitions of progressive rock musicians. Critics have interpreted these ambitions as attempts to elevate rock music to the level of high art in order to gain cultural accreditation from an unspecified cultural elite. This interpretation is further compounded by the common notion that progressive rock’s subject matter is dominated more by individualistic quests for spirituality than by socio-political critique, resulting in a stereotype of progressive rock as apolitical, pretentious and conventionally upwardly mobile. Critics who have propagated this stereotype – including some musicologists – have misunderstood the countercultural politics of young musicians during this era and have overlooked the highly developed musical poetics of progressive rock that were in fact highly politicised. This paper examines four of the leading progressive rock bands of the early 1970s – Emerson, Lake and Palmer, King Crimson, Genesis and Yes – and reveals the nasty side of progressive rock: a scathing criticism of rampant militarism and social conformity that runs counter to the prevailing narrative in which the genre is dismissed as an escapist fantasy with an elitist agenda.

In this article, I discuss aspects of national identity in the performance style of the German rock band Rammstein from the perspectives of imagery, vocal style and the textual content of their songs. Investigation into Rammstein’s music reveals transformations of signifiers from earlier German performance styles and earlier textual themes that the band use as a means of relocating notions of German identity into their own performances. The adoption of national German signifiers enables Rammstein to establish connections between the band and the growth of national awareness among German youth who follow them. In this way, marketing and promotion of notions of a new national German identity to generations unaware of the origins of neo-romantic, national German signifiers in Rammstein’s music supports a successful commercial enterprise that, I argue, runs close to boundaries existing between national and nationalist.

Technological change has had a significant effect on market structure and management strategy in the content industry. This paper presents a survey of changes in firm organisation and marketing strategy in the Japanese music industry from a historical perspective. The market structure has changed from vertical integration within a closed system to vertical separation within an open system due to an increase in distribution channels. In addition, developments in the media have led to changes in the marketing strategies of record companies, and this has accelerated the rate of turnover of hit music. Record companies thus need to revise their marketing approach to match the change in sales pattern.