In recent times there has been an encouraging increase in the musicological study of Western popular music by members of the academy. Both Richard Middleton and Alan Moore have published important books that are emphatic about the need for such study (Middleton 1990; Moore 1993). Also there have been a number of articles in a variety of journals over the past several years that have either addressed the need for, suggested various approaches to, or actually taken a musicological approach to one or another aspect of popular music (Foret 1991; Brackett 1992; Hawkins 1992; Moore 1992; Taylor 1992; Walser 1992; Middleton 1993). Despite this flurry of activity, as far as this author is aware, there has been no academic musicological work, other than Robert Walser's recent study of heavy metal (Walser 1993), that has attempted to ferret out the component parts of a given genre through an analysis of a sizable body of repertoire. There is an acute need for such work if popular music scholars are going to begin to understand in concrete terms what is meant by terms such as rock, soul, funk, Merseybeat and so on. This essay is an attempt to begin such a study for the genre of southern soul music as it was manifested by Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee.

Hardcore Dance has spent years underground evolving from the still-current stereotype of frenzied thudding bass lines coupled to samples of the tunes of children's programmes, of a music for E-head ravers whose drug-induced dummy sucking became a potent symbol for a subculture stigmatised as infantile and stupid. That evolution has reached the point of ‘Jungle’, and now Hardcore Dance and Jungle are often used interchangeably as terms of description. It is this musical form which is analysed here as part of the evolution of modern dance music. Too often subcultural study has tended to give the impression that music is one element of a subcultural style and that it is style that drives the subculture. Instead, it is argued that music drives subcultural style, and that the evolution of Hardcore Dance serves as an especially salient example because it is a musical form which persistently resists reduction to typical codes for understanding music, both academic and those in the public sphere.

In his article ‘Rock music and politics in Italy’, Umberto Fiori deploys the example of an open-air concert by Genesis in Tirrenia in the province of Pisa, promoted in the summer of 1982 by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) as part of its annual Feste dell'Unita, as a summary example of de-politicisation of the consumption and production of rock music in Italy, and the institutionalisation of the oppositional, dissenting aspects of rock music that had previously been so potent there throughout the 1970s. To Fiori, the Genesis concert represented

an unmistakeable step forward in the slow process of the ‘normalisation’ of the relationship between rock and politics in Italy. Explosive material until a few years before, rock music in the 1980s seems to have returned to being a commodity like any other, even in Italy. The songs are once again simply songs, the public is the public. The musicians are only interested in their work, and the organisers make their expected profits. If they happen to be a political party, so much the better: they can also profit in terms of public image and perhaps even votes. … Italy now learnt how to institutionalise deviation and transgression. An ‘acceptable’ gap was re-established between fiction and reality, desire and action, and music and political practice. (Fiori 1984, pp. 261–2)

In Britain the term ‘obscenity’ has enjoyed a chequered career. Obscene libel first became an offence in 1727 when an erotic book called Venus in the Cloister was found to contravene common law by tending to ‘weaken the bonds of civil society, virtue and morality’ (Robertson 1991, p. 180). Despite this, erotic literature remained freely available throughout the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century Britain got its first Obscene Publications Act. This came in 1857 and gave the police power to take books before local Justices who could order their forfeiture and destruction.