This article focuses on three recent manifestations of cumbia in Buenos Aires, Argentina: digital cumbia released by ZZK Records; retro cumbia orchestras; and a newer strand of digital cumbia, música turra. The first two are identified with the middle class, whereas the third emerged from the clases populares (‘popular classes’). Música turra is underpinned by government policies towards digital inclusion, while middle-class incursions into the traditionally working-class sphere of cumbia, too, suggest increasing social cohesion. However, the digital fascination of música turra contrasts with an embrace of the analogue and acoustic in middle-class cumbia. These developments point to the emergence of a post-digital ethos and a shift from a digital to a post-digital divide, also running along class lines, analysed here through a Bourdieusian lens of taste and distinction. While transnational in nature, the post-digital ethos appears in Buenos Aires in a distinctive local form, articulated to growing Latin Americanism and post-neoliberalism on the part of the middle class.

African American gospel music is a unique and distinctive idiom that has had a pervasive influence upon the development of contemporary popular music. While there are now many sources available on African American gospel music, the focus of the vast majority of these studies is on the sociological, historical and stylistic aspects of the genre, rather than on identifying and codifying specific musical characteristics and performance practices. This paper extends the discussion of gospel singing techniques in Andrew Legg's 2010 article ‘A taxonomy of musical gesture in African American gospel music’ (Popular Music, 29/1) by examining some of the key performance practices associated with rhythm and lyric treatment in African American gospel music, as well as common structures in gospel music improvisation and accompaniment. Through analysis of selected recordings, this research proposes a codified frame of reference for the definition and discussion of terminologies and performance practice techniques inherent within African American gospel music.

This article argues for understanding popular songs and songwriting through the metaphor of architecture, an idea we draw from vernacular terms used by songwriters when comprehending and explaining their own creative practice, and which we deploy in response to those who have called for writing about music to use a non-technical vocabulary and make greater use of metaphor. By architecture we mean those recognisable characteristics of songs that exist as enduring qualities regardless of a specific performance, recording or sheet music score. We use this analogy not as a systematic model, but as a device for exploring the intricate ways in which words and music are combined and pointing to similarities in the composition of poetry and the writing of song lyrics. The art of repetition and play with ambiguity are integral to popular song architectures that endure regardless of the modifications introduced by performers who temporarily inhabit a particular song.

The blues is a complex and subtle musical language that warrants careful analysis and sustained debate. There are legitimate concerns with the application of music-theoretical paradigms to blues music, but we should not allow such concerns to undermine all attempts to address the blues as a serious and coherently structured music. This paper explores the notions of ladder, level and chromatic cycle as an insightful set of theoretical tools in analysing the music of Robert Johnson. Key sources in developing this analytical approach are the scholarship of Gerhard Kubik and the spatially oriented analytical methods of neo-Riemannian theory. The notions of ladder, level and chromatic cycle are explored with close reference to Johnson's ‘Kindhearted Woman’ and through a more general consideration of the scale-degree content of his vocal parts.

Since the late 1990s, a thriving scene of pop music has developed among the numerically very small and globally highly dispersed Tibetan exile community. This clearly connects it with globalisation and the spread of what is termed the neoliberal phase of capitalism to India and Nepal where most Tibetan exiles live, and the related spread of digital recording technology and facilities – commodities produced by often large, multinational corporations. Yet this micro industry is not profitable, and even though it is pop music and monetised, it is not ‘commercial’, and in fact is seen and structured more as ‘community work’. Exile Tibetan pop music thus cannot be located outside of capitalism, yet at the same time it is not in and of itself capitalist. In this paper, the author explores new ways in which we can locate music in capitalism, looking beyond the ideas of commercialism or commoditisation and takeover or resistance that have dominated theoretical approaches since Adorno and have fixed popular music especially with a still-enduring ‘capitalist’ image. The author draws in particular on the historian Fernand Braudel's model of capitalism as an ‘anti-market’ that lies ‘on top’ of other social and economic layers. Thus capitalism exerts global hegemony, yet there remain uneven spaces such as exile Tibetan pop music, which are in and of themselves not capitalist, existing within it and because of it.

The pregnant or maternal body is conspicuously absent within popular music. The dominant representation of female bodies – sonically, visually and spatially conceived – is that of a sexualised body, available to men and existing under the male gaze. The figure of the pregnant, maternal or motherly body is marked as Other – not desirable and therefore not marketable. Looking at the work of Tori Amos, I demonstrate how she makes the maternal body both audible and visible through a number of musical and extra-musical strategies. Theorising the maternal body in a series of overlapping stages – from the pregnant body to the maternal body, through liminal stages such as miscarriage and birthing – I highlight how Amos uses the figure of the maternal body not only to challenge dominant tropes of sexuality, but to create an embodied space where normative conceptions of ‘mother’ and ‘mothering’ can be troubled.