The Beatles’ film Yellow Submarine (1968) reflects conflicts between conventional society, represented by classical music, and rebellious youth culture, represented by other musical types, such as folk and pop (subsumed under the term ‘vernacular’). Taking their inspiration from the song ‘Yellow Submarine’ (Revolver, 1966), the filmmakers created a narrative for a psychedelic ‘hero’s journey’ from existing Beatles songs. This article discusses how the musical codes that symbolise different groups are used to mediate between divergent elements in both the film and contemporary society, by referring to such elements beyond the film as the Beatles’ comprehensive body of songs (which in itself forms a kind of mythology) and cultural events of the time. In Yellow Submarine, the Blue Meanies imprison Pepperland by immobilising all producers of music, whether ‘classical’ (the string quartet led by the elderly Lord Mayor) or ‘vernacular’ (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band). The Beatles are able to free Pepperland by manipulating and ultimately uniting the musical codes – an idealistic message for the ‘real world’ to heed.

This article describes a specific history of technological mediation in the circulation of popular music by examining local practices of listening to recordings in Japanese kissaten (often shortened to kissa and meaning, loosely, ‘coffeehouse’). In postwar music kissaten, Japanese listeners were socialised to recordings of foreign music through new modes of hyper-attentive listening. While jazz kissa (though famous as crucibles for radical pro-democracy politics and the explosion of modern urban cool in post-war Japanese cities) encouraged local listeners to develop musical appreciation through the stylistic classification of distant recorded sources, later experimental music kissa helped forge unique local performance scenes by disturbing received modes of generic classification in favour of ‘Noise’. I recount the emergence of a genre called ‘Noise’ in the story of a 1970s Kyoto ‘free’ kissa Drugstore, whose countercultural clientele came to represent ‘Noise’ as a new musical style in its transnational circulation during the 1990s. This ethnographic history presents the music kissa as a complicated translocal site that articulates the cultural marginality of Japanese popular music reception in an uneven global production; but which also helps to develop virtuosic experimental practices of listening through which imported recordings are recontextualised, renamed and recreated.

Most of the existing literature on metal approaches the subject from a sociological, anthropological or historical perspective, dedicating more attention to the surrounding musical (sub)cultures and their transformations than to the songs and music itself. This essay addresses this gap in recent metal scholarship by examining issues of sound, text and identity in one of the most influential and popular metal bands of the post-grunge era, Korn. I interpret possible meanings within ‘Hey Daddy’, a track from Issues (1999), based on the relationships among the music, both as pitch and sound/timbre, and the text. In addition, I explore different processes of identification, offering an assessment of identification in the genre of metal and challenges in respect to listener identity in ‘Hey Daddy’.

In this essay, I examine how aspects of rhythm and metre play a fundamental role in shaping and defining Led Zeppelin’s musical style. At the same time, I will show how Led Zeppelin was able to modify, manipulate, and develop pre-existing musical models and forms through various rhythmic and metric strategies. Comparative analyses will be used in an effort to show how Led Zeppelin’s flexible conception of rhythm and metre enabled the band to put their own stylistic ‘stamp’ on (i) specific musical genres (‘The Crunge’ and the song’s relation to James Brown-style funk), (ii) their riff constructions (‘Black Dog’ in relation to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Oh Well’), and (iii) their cover versions (‘Dazed and Confused’). Drawing upon my analytical points, I re-visit the complex issues that persist regarding the possibility that Led Zeppelin even has an ‘original’ or ‘unique’ style given their often overt reliance upon earlier musical models and forms. Therefore, in my conclusion, I argue that the development of any artist or group’s individual style necessarily involves the ability to assimilate and transform pre-existing musical features – features such as rhythm and metre – in novel ways and where issues relating to musical style intersect with influence.

Although tremendously popular, Great Britain’s long-term icon Cliff Richard has been widely neglected by popular music studies. This article aims to correct this omission by introducing an argument that claims that Cliff Richard portrays himself to a considerable degree as a saviour figure. Evidence for this thesis will be drawn from three meaningful dimensions in popular music: song lyrics, pictorial self-representations, and image components. These three areas can be shown to be semantically concordant in presenting Cliff Richard as a redeemer. While the promise of redemption by the singer persona is a recurring motif in his song lyrics, this assurance gets repeated in pictorial representations that make allusions to Jesus Christ (through posture, lighting, and elevation) and is further reinforced by a number of components of Richard’s image such as the (apparently) incorruptible body, the asexuality, and the demonstrative benevolence towards the sick and poor. The combination of these sign-complexes creates a meaningful pattern around the singer that sets him apart as a surrogate saviour.

Popular music studies has rarely exhibited the kinds of disciplinary coherence found in closely related disciplines mostly due to the field’s adoption and adaptation of methodological and theoretical innovations from a variety of disciplines, notably sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, media studies and musicology. However, many commentators continue to seek disciplinary coherence without making any critical aesthetic distinctions between the medium and materials of popular music. Distinctions and interrelationships between the literal or material aspects of popular music and the social or cultural processes of making meaning from popular music are central to the definition of a particular but not exclusive field of analysis. Through such distinctions, the very category ‘popular music’ can be understood as a more flexible and supple distinction based on an understanding of methods of construction, production and mediation in specific relation to the technical, contextual and sociological aspects of music. I use different performances of ‘Hound Dog’, the practices of ‘turntablism’, and the exigencies of Muzak as examples for analysis offering ways in which the aesthetic, material and contextual aspects of popular music can be understood in order to incorporate the actual sound of music into the analysis of its social, cultural and musical construction.

The community singing movement was a distinctive feature of English popular musical life in the mid-1920s. Although initiated by individuals who saw it as essentially educational, it was rapidly appropriated by sections of the press, and especially the Daily Express, as an instrument in the circulation wars of the period. It was typified by a restricted range of music comprising ‘national’ songs, hymns (with the performance of ‘Abide with Me’ at the FA Cup Final singing particularly important), and songs of the First World War. This mixture and the concomitant neglect of modern popular song reflects the rather nostalgic thrust behind activities, with calls for community singing to recreate a ‘Merrie England’ that would heal the deep social divisions of the 1920s. Whether the singers were fully aware of these various musical and socio-political agendas is unclear, but community singing undoubtedly enjoyed a period of considerable popularity, with the music appreciated for allowing displays of individual and collective emotion.

As Matthew Bannister has recently suggested in these pages (see Popular Music, 25/1), The Smiths stand at the head of a 1980s Indie canon based on its rejection of a commodification associated with contemporary black US musics. This article argues that this racial understanding has also bled into the band’s critical reception, encouraging many to assume that Morrissey and Marr drew on exclusively white influences. Specifically, I argue that the white camp icons from the 1950s and 1960s who famously adorn the band’s record sleeves together form a kind of smokescreen, or ‘beard’, which stokes interest in Morrissey’s sexual predilections and orients it away from his and Marr’s Black Atlantic sources. The pre-immigrant Britain summoned up by these icons, I argue, helps prevent fans and critics alike from grasping that Morrissey’s lyrical attempts to find humour and succour by remembering pain is profoundly inspired by the African-American form of the Blues.

The International Association for the Study of Popular Music’s biennial international conference took place in July this year in Mexico City. The facilities in the Universidad Iberoamericana, a modern private Jesuit University in the city’s business quarter, were excellent, with video projection and a good sound system in all the air-conditioned rooms. The plenary sessions were translated to and from Spanish and also video recorded and streamed onto the Internet, with a blog where watchers could leave comments.