This article will discuss how two major contributing factors, functional staging and perceived authenticity, have had and continue to have a powerful influence on the sound of record production across geographical boundaries and throughout history. Functional staging is a concept building on the idea of phonographic staging developed by William Moylan and Serge Lacasse and related to Allan Moore's ‘sound-box’. The staging of sounds in the record production process is considered to be functional if the reason for their particular placement or treatment is related to the practicalities of audience reception rather than to aesthetics. It is not a question of whether the music has a function or not but whether that function has influenced the staging of the recorded music. Thus the divergence of staging techniques used in dance music and rock music that began in the 1970s can be seen as resulting from the different functions the music was put to by the different audiences. Music that is played back through large speakers in a club for the purpose of dancing needs to maintain the clarity of the rhythmic elements and so the ‘drier’ techniques of drum and percussive instrument mixing that characterise dance music developed. Rock, however, was more frequently played back in the smaller, less ambient, home environment and so reverberation was added to simulate the atmosphere of the large-scale venue. At the same time, a variety of culturally constructed notions of authenticity have developed within different musical audiences. Why is it that Queen felt the need to inscribe ‘no synthesisers were used in the making of this album’ on their early records and yet Brian May felt entirely comfortable constructing multiple layered performance ‘patchworks’ of guitar tracks? Why might the use of one type of technological mediation be considered more or less authentic than another? Using examples taken from recordings from all around the world and from ‘art’ and ‘popular’ forms of music, this article will explore how audience-led cultural trends in recording and production practice have resulted in the particular ‘sounds’ of different recorded music genres.

Juju music, popular in Nigeria, first emerged in the island city of Lagos during the third decade of this century. Since its beginning, however, the music has undergone changes in both concept and practice as might be expected of any dynamic musical style. These changes have arisen not only through cultural contact and creative musical innovations, but also through the musical consequences of social, political, economic and other changes in contemporary Nigerian society and culture. This article seeks to identify and evaluate the change in juju music from two vantage points: (1) that of style which identifies it and provides a foundation against which continuity or stability through time can be measured; and (2) that of innovation whose creation and diffusion are examined diachronically against the contexts of society and culture.

Since 1945 the musical scene in East Africa has been characterised by a series of important developments which ran parallel to an extensive political–cultural change of consciousness. All the musical forms which arose in this connection were ‘popular’ in the sense that they were appreciated by broad sections of society.

Lo-fi music is commonly associated with a recording aesthetic marked by an avoidance of state-of-the-art technologies and an inclusion of technical flaws, such as tape hiss and static. However, I argue that lo-fi music is not defined merely by the presence of such imperfections, but by a discourse which deliberately draws attention to them. Album liner notes play an important role in this discourse, as they can function as curatorial practices, through which lo-fi artists give an appropriate frame of reference to their recordings. By highlighting the ‘honest’ character of the recordings, the intimate recording spaces, the materiality of the equipment and its ambiguous character as machine/instrument/performer, they invite listeners to adopt a genre-adequate mode of listening. Rather than listening past hiss and other recording artefacts as undesirable qualities, listeners are asked to listen for these qualities as an essential element of not just the recordings, but the music itself.

The vision of a dynamic and intelligent Celestial Jukebox, in which any cultural artifact is available to dedicated appliances or home computers via wired or wireless channels, animates many predictions for the future of media delivery. The chief proponents of this vision are transnational media firms selling hardware, software and content. Despite a prolonged downturn in the global economy for media and software, the technical and legal design of the Celestial Jukebox nears completion. We examine the development and implications of the Jukebox as it is manifested in several online music services available to US consumers (which we term Music Service Providers, or MSPs), in which the ‘Big Five’ record companies (Universal, Sony, Warner, BMG and EMI) provide content and/or hold equity stakes. First, we identify and describe the Celestial Jukebox's key technical components – Customer Relationship Management (‘eCRM’ or ‘CRM’) and Digital Rights Management (‘DRM’) software – and their intermeshing characteristics. We then discuss the implementation of CRM/DRM in MSPs and list the primary stakeholders in the leading MSP systems. We conclude with a discussion of the MSPs' role in advancing what Vincent Mosco terms a ‘pay-per’ society, in which cultural goods are purchased on a transitory, rather than permanent, basis.

The Musical Renaissance of the late Victorian era incurred both rediscovery and reappraisal of the English musical heritage. The isolated endeavours of a handful of pioneering collectors from the oral tradition stimulated the institution of a Folk-Song Society with the aim of gathering what remained of a rapidly disappearing national resource. This article examines competing interpretations of the nature and potential application of folk-song. Cecil Sharp, who quickly assumed leadership of the folk-song movement, adopted and refined the notion that communal origin and transmission imbued folk-song with the national character and spirit. Its strategic use in the education system would, he believed, promote not just musical revival but a general national revival as well. In counterpoint to Sharp's folk-song construct, the hiterto marginalised contribution of musical antiquarian Frank Kidson is reassessed. From an ever-diminishing position of authority, Kidson continued to dismiss Sharp's new orthodoxy by insisting that most of what passed for ‘folk’ was nothing more than the remnants of old popular song. The article concludes by seeking to explain why Sharp's construct endured.

Chicha, a fermented maize beer, traditional in the Andes and brewed by Andean migrants in the shanty towns of Peru's cities, has given its name to a musical movement, which first emerged in the migrant squatter settlements of Lima in the 1960s. By the mid-1980s chicha was the most well-known and wide-spread form of urban popular music in Peru (Romero 1990; Rowe & Schelling 1991, pp. 121–2), widely played, sung and danced in impromptu chichodromos, set up in walled-in vacant lots or back yards.

In the autumn of 1954, the triumphal tour of a young white singer started in the south of the United States. Although many objected to his music and his way of performing, the rise of this artist – by the name of Elvis Presley – in states like Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana was not to be stopped (Goldman 1981, p. 124; Gillett 1970, p. 21).

MCs (rappers) such as Cardi B, Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Big Sean and Young Thug use triplet rhythms in their rapping, a practice that is known as triplet flow. This paper argues that the prevalence of triplet flow is one of the most aurally salient features of contemporary hip hop, and exemplifies the popularity and influence of the Atlanta-centred genre of trap music through its sparse, slow beats. Three types of triplet flow are defined – mixed, phrasal and total – and are used to explore how various songs and artists active in the late 1980s and early 1990s provided the stylistic blueprint for triplet flow's recent explosion in popularity. With the aid of a 50 song mini-corpus, the paper concludes with a general survey of stylistic characteristics common in many songs featuring triplet flow, and further analysis of two of these songs in order to illuminate the creative, rhetorical and virtuosic potential that underpins this ostensibly simple style of rapping.

Jimi Hendrix once claimed ‘I'm working on music to be completely, utterly a magic science’ (Henderson 1981, p. 337). It is a description that fits not just the best of Hendrix's own music, but the best of all that late twentieth-century music in which the ability to capture and control sounds (on tape or disc) has become a means of extending old musical forms and traditions, and establishing new possibilities for them. Throughout his career, Hendrix drew nourishment from his musical roots in black traditions, but it was not until the summer of 1967 that he plugged himself fully into the new possibilities opened up by the technology of sound recording. Hendrix had already proved himself something of a musical ‘magician’ in the ancient sense in that he attempted, through music, to mediate between order and disorder, using his guitar as an expressive extension of himself to flirt with the danger and power of musical disintegration (for the parallel with non-Western musical practice see Shepherd 1977, p. 72; Mellers 1973, pp. 24–6; Clarke 1982, pp. 227–9).

Recent years have seen an increase in pop music on television, replacing its more traditional incidental music. It is now dominant as stock music on television, filling expanding continuity and advertising spaces. The licensing of pop music for screen use is increasingly important for the music industry, spawning a new form of ‘multipurpose music’ which, as well as being music in its own right, can also be resold as stock music for television. While in the 1980s there was a rush to tie-in pop music with films, in the 1990s, it increasingly was to tie pop music with television. This article documents and explores this transition.

Autobiographies: the contemporary catalogue is huge and bookstore shelves are heavy with the weight of life-stories. Ex-Presidents, actors, cooks, criminals, Nobel prize winners, preachers, poets and CEOs all write them. Rock stars write them, too – ‘marquee names’ like Tina Turner, Melissa Etheridge, Grace Slick, and Meatloaf, but also minor figures such as Dallas Taylor, the former drummer for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. And plenty of others, including – to name just a handful – Chuck Berry, Ronnie Spector, Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, both Ray and Dave Davies, Dee Dee Ramone, Martha Reeves, Eric Burdon, and John Cale.

This article looks at the popular music industry in Singapore and argues that there exists a ‘cultural cringe’ for domestic English-language music, which is considered as inferior to English-language music from Western countries. Singaporean consumers of popular music use the English language as a signifier of authenticity and consequently quality of musicians. Local musicians are deemed ‘inauthentic’ because consumers perceive the local variant of English spoken in Singapore is inferior to other variants of English spoken in Western countries. There is thus an underlying sub-text of an inferiority complex coming out of the post-colonial experience that effectively diminishes the possibility of success as English-language musicians. Yet, such a phenomenon is not observed in the vernacular Malay and Chinese-language music industries. In the final analysis, this article suggests that modernisation and modernity for Singapore is neither completely localised nor completely imposed: there exists a negotiation in the popular cultural sphere based on historical (colonial) baggage.

This article concerns the regional city of Tamworth, New South Wales, Australia, a place that prides itself on its reputation as Australia's home of country music. We consider the ongoing memorialisation of country music in Tamworth, and how the processes associated with the project of articulating country music's past work to create and maintain something that can be recognised (and experienced) as a dominant narrative or an Australian country music ‘canon’. Outlining a number of instances in which the canon is produced and experienced (including in performances, rolls of honour and monuments built around the city), the article explores the ways in which this narrativisation of Australia's country music history contributes to a certain kind of memory of the genre's past.

Popular music occupies a dominant position in the musical landscape of contemporary Africa, yet academic study of popular music is still in its infancy in most parts of Africa. This may be due in part to the absence of theoretical frameworks that stimulate popular music discourses from the African perspective. This paper is an attempt to fill this lacuna. Based on a critical and qualitative analysis of data gathered from field situations, participant observation, interviews and published literary materials on the subject matter, the paper theorises that the creation of African popular music is characterised by two significant processes: indigenisation and syncretisation. The paper further states that African popular music is a socially responsive phenomenon, sustained through the interplay of cross-cultural and trans-national social dynamics. The paper therefore proposes ‘social reconstructionism’ as a new theoretical paradigm for the analysis of African popular music. The paper also suggests that the term ‘African pop’ should be adopted as a generic name for all popular music forms in Africa.

This article examines Googoosh, the reigning diva of Persian popular music, through an evaluation of diasporic Iranian discourse and artistic productions linking the vocalist to a feminized nation, its ‘victimisation’ in the revolution, and an attendant ‘nostalgia for the modern’ (Özyürek 2006) of pre-revolutionary Iran. Following analyses of diasporic media that project national drama and desire onto her persona, I then demonstrate how, since her departure from Iran in 2000, Googoosh has embraced her national metaphorization and produced new works that build on historical tropes linking nation, the erotic, and motherhood while capitalising on the nostalgia that surrounds her.

In this article we examine the relatively new use of disability as a marketing device in pop music. Our analysis makes specific reference to how the career of Ian Curtis and Joy Division has become overshadowed by his epilepsy, depression and subsequent suicide, with comparison between early press and promotional materials from 1979–1980 and more recent materials created to promote reissues and films about Curtis. It also references other relevant individuals from the pop music sphere and marketing campaigns created around them that ignore or highlight issues of disability.

Using these examples, we examine the ways in which messages about disability are packaged and presented within pop marketing discourses and discuss the issue of ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ disability identities in pop, which have been created through a largely marketing-driven discourse. Finally, we briefly explore how the deployment of ‘disabled’ identities impacts on the musicians so identified, as opposed to on the sales of products.

Examining ways in which gender is marked in the press coverage of self-produced, folk-rock artist and record label owner Ani DiFranco, this paper explores how language employed in rock criticism frequently functions to devalue and marginalise women artists' musicianship, influence on fans, and contribution to the rock canon. Investigating how the readerships of different publications may influence the ways in which journalists mark gender in rock criticism, this study utilises a corpus of 100 articles on Ani DiFranco published between 1993 and 2003 from print and online magazines and newspapers in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Focusing on the use of inter- and intra-gender artist comparisons, adjectival gender markers and ‘metaphorical gender’ markers in artist background information, lyrical and musical analyses and descriptions of fans, this analysis maps the discursive conventions that music critics and theorists continue to rely on in reviews and profiles of women artists.

This article discusses the role of music performance in football matches, highlighting the importance of the belief in its sonic powers as a trigger for causal relations between events. Music functions as a communicational axis linking the physical realm to mystical or intangible dimensions. By performing music and sounds on terraces, fans believe that they can change the course of the match, interfering in the mood, the bodies and, eventually, the result. Magic is a shared belief among fans, players and journalists, one that is activated through sounds and rituals. In football, the idea of magic is often perceived and referred to as a causal explanation for achievements and defeats that could hardly be understood or explained through rational and scientific knowledge. Music is a key feature in this process.

In September 1974 a group of musicians came together in Paris to perform at meetings to mark the first anniversary of the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. The group took the name ¡Karaxú! which is variously translated in performance as ‘to go forward’ or as ‘a war cry’. In fact ¡Karaxú! is a Quechuasied version of the spanish carajo which colloquially can be loosely translated as ‘bugger off’ but in fact means grito de couraje y de rebeldía (a cry of courage and rebellion). This analysis focuses specifically on a set of performances by ¡Karaxú! which took place in the United Kingdom some five years later during 1978 and 1979. It differs from other studies of the music of Chilean exiles and indeed other approaches to modern urban musical concerts by focusing on the concert performance as a whole entity. I analyse the music in performance, providing an analytical framework abstracted from participant observation work with the musicians, and focusing on the negotiation of meaning through the organisation of repertoire into a performance structure.