The vast majority of all music ever made is played by ear. To make music by ear means to create, perform, remember and teach music without the use of written notation. This is a type of music-making that has been little observed by musicology, which has mainly been devoted to notated music. Even in the research on folk and popular music, which has expanded in the last twenty or thirty years, questions of musical practice when you play by ear are rarely treated: how do you learn to play an instrument, how do you make songs, how do you teach and learn songs and how do you conceive of music theory?

Since 1993, popular music magazines in the USA such as Rolling Stone have reported the outbreak of an alternative music ‘revolution’, as bands such as Green Day (who trace their musical roots to late-1970s punk groups such as the Sex Pistols) achieve large-scale popular success. In September 1994 the Boston Globe newspaper devoted significant coverage to the free Green Day concert in Boston that was cancelled midway through as the crowd of 70,000 (comprised mostly of teenagers) threatened to overwhelm the security guards. The news media have focused their attention on the dancing known as ‘slamdancing’, or ‘moshing’, which is associated with this newly popular music. Slamdancing and moshing are two different, albeit similar, styles of dance in which participants (mostly men) violently hurl their bodies at one another in a dance area called a ‘pit’. The media attention paid to this music and its associated violent audience-behaviour paint them as emerging threats to public safety. On 10 September 1994, the Globe reported that ‘there have been severe injuries in mosh pits, where fans act out the hostile lyrics of groups such as Green Day’.

Since their beginnings, popular music studies have conducted an implicit (sometimes explicit) dialogue with musicology. To be sure, the musicological side of this conversation has more often than not been marked by insult, incomprehension or silence; and popular music scholars for their part have tended to concentrate on musicology's deficiencies. But musicology is changing (more about this later); at the same time, recent work on popular music suggests a new confidence, manifesting itself in part in a willingness to engage with and adapt mainstream methods. I believe each needs the other.

The cultural identity of the Indian subcontinent has survived countless onslaughts and displacements often by simply absorbing and Indianising alien elements. The many hybrids in lifestyle, language, food and religion spawned of Britain and India's long, love-hate relationship are a testament to this. And now the process is repeating itself in the new generation of South Asians born and educated in Britain. It is a unique generation, its acceptance or rejection of and by white British society will probably set the pattern for generations to come, and the musical fusion which voices their cultural duality tends towards mutual acceptance.

This essay explores the political significance of Balinese death/thrash fandom. In the early 1990s, the emergence of a death/thrash scene in Bali paralleled growing criticism of accelerated tourism development on the island. Specifically, locals protested the increasing ubiquity of Jakarta, ‘the centre’, cast as threatening to an authentically ‘low’, peripheral Balinese culture. Similarly, death/thrash enthusiasts also gravitated toward certain fringes, although they rejected dominant notions of Balinese-ness by gesturing elsewhere, toward a global scene. The essay explores the ways in which death/thrash enthusiasts engaged with local discourses by coveting their marginality, and aims to demonstrate how their articulations of ‘alien-ness’ contributed in important ways to a broader regionalism.

Hip-hoppers in Istanbul, Turkey, spend much discursive energy talking and rapping about how the Turkish hip-hop movement is underground, putting a particularly local spin on their uses of a global cultural form. This spatial metaphor has thus become central to local constructions of hip-hop in Istanbul. This paper explores the different meanings the underground concept has for Turkish hip-hoppers through a combination of ethnographic research and readings of locally produced hip-hop texts. Through discourses on and around the underground metaphor, Turkish hip-hoppers use the globally circulating music genre of rap and the associated arts of hip-hop to construct a specifically local identity, re-emplacing rap and hip-hop within the landscape of Istanbul. The paper uses this case study to explore how people can use mediated music in constructing new imaginaries and identities and more specifically how people can use mediated music as a vehicle for the imagining of place.

This article focuses on the issue of meanings in ‘world music’ practices. The main questions addressed are how such musical cultures take on meanings, and what meanings are constructed by such cultures. As Deborah Pacini has indicated, the term ‘world music’ in this case does not refer to a musical genre. It is used, rather, ‘[as] a marketing term describing the products of musical cross-fertilisation between the north – the US and Western Europe – and south – primarily Africa and the Caribbean Basin, which began appearing on the popular music landscape in the early 1980s’ (1993, p. 48). From 1985, the expanding ‘world music’ umbrella has come to include practically any musics of cultures of non-European origin.

My purpose in this paper is to recount the history of the Parents' Music Resource Center, an American organisation founded in 1985 whose main concern has been to denounce the obscenity and violence of rock music on the grounds that it is partly responsible for the numerous ills that plague the United States. The PMRC claimed that it only wished to inform the public but my suggestion here is that the actions of the organisation resulted in a de facto censorship of popular music. I shall accordingly describe the various steps of the process that led from information to censorship as well as probe the deeper reasons that may have motivated the action of the Center.

The fact is, if you want to make a difference in music, you have to change the machine. (Christie 1998)

In my book Rock Formation I borrowed from Walter Ong and Jacques Attali when I noted that, ‘The ability to record sound is power over sound.’ (Jones 1992, p. 51) I continue to believe that statement to be true. Arguments that I then made about the increasing role computers would play in the production of music have been borne out. They were not hard forecasts to make: one only had to imagine that the processing power of computer chips would continue to increase according to Moore's Law and then extrapolate the possibilities such increases would create for sound recording and reproduction. Even comments I made, vaguely tongue-in-cheek, expecting that we would have, in addition to the ability to record high-quality digital audio in the home, the ability to press CDs at home, and print colour inserts for CD jewel boxes, thus creating not only home studios but home pressing plants, have become a reality. However, with but a few years' hindsight, I want to append to these an argument that recording sound matters less and less, and distributing it matters more and more, or, in other words, the ability to record and transport sound is power over sound. Consequently, technology is an even more important element to which popular music scholars must attend.

Introduction

In 1996 a small independent record company, Oh Boy Records, set up a ‘chat page’ on its web site where fans of its major artist, John Prine, could exchange typed messages in close to real time. The page became a place where fans could ‘virtually’ meet to get information or exchange experiences and opinions relating to Prine. Through the chat page a fan community was established, in that the chat page became a meeting place that could not exist within real-world boundaries. John Prine has had some recent commercial and critical success, but Prine fans are still a minority in most geographic communities, and are, to some extent, isolated by the lifestyle of their 35-plus age group. It could be said that the one and only place where Prine fans could regularly gather was online through the chat page provided by the record company. The Oh Boy Record's homepage became a symbolic anchor – a recognition of shared experience and a sign of community. While music communities are usually associated with ‘local’ places, ‘the notion of “communities” or localities as bounded geographic entities increasingly has been seen as problematic to the study of music in urban settings’ (Gay 1995, p. 123). Communities exist through dialogue; through an exchange of past social history and current social interaction. Developments in communication technology have contributed to a ‘deterritorialization of space within a global cultural economy’ (Fenster 1995, p. 85), to a point where ‘local’ is no longer disconnected from ‘global’ and the identity of a specific place is located both in ‘demarcated physical space’ and in ‘clusters of interaction’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, p. 8). In the absence of a communal physical space, the Oh Boy home page became the site of a ‘local’ Prine community.

Popular music in Hong Kong is the production of a multi-faceted dynamic of international and local factors. Although there has been much attention to its growth from different perspectives, there has been no single study that systematically addresses the complicated interplay of the two interrelated processes of globalisation and localisation that lie behind its development. The main aim of this paper is to explore how social circumstances mediate musical communication among Hong Kong popular artists and audiences, and contribute to its growing sense of cultural identity – how locality emerges in the context of a global culture and how global facts take local form. Firstly, I propose a conceptual framework for understanding the cultural dynamics of popular music in terms of the discourse of globalisation and localisation. Secondly, I consider local practices of musical consumption and production. Thirdly, this paper discusses the impact of the global entertainment business on local popular music. I conclude with a summary of the effects of the interaction between globalisation and localisation on Hong Kong popular music.

When the Brazilian Antônio Carlos (Tom) Jobim died in December 1994, twentieth-century Western music lost one of its greatest popular songwriters. That may be a contentious assertion, and one open to endless debate, if his work is to be judged against that of the other major composers of the age on purely aesthetic grounds. It is indisputable, though, if the criteria are Jobim's role as a founder and leading songwriter of the bossa nova movement, given the influence of that tradition within Brazil and beyond, and as Latin America's most successful musical export (Treece 1992).

Música sertaneja could be considered the Brazilian counterpart to American ‘country’ music. What defines the genre is not its rhythmic patterns, which vary considerably, but a performance style involving duplas (duos) singing in parallel thirds to the accompaniment of a guitar and a viola. Having developed out of southeastern traditional genres, it is the popular musical style that most appeals to migrants from these regions now living in the industrial centres of Greater São Paulo. Although today música sertaneja is primarily an urban phenomenon, the style also reaches audiences throughout the rural areas of central and southeastern Brazil.

Despite the rampant popularity of space, alien and futuristic imagery in popular culture, little scholarship has recognised the impact of such themes on popular music. This article explores the complex relationship between the numerous uses of space, alien and techno futuristic themes in popular music and the construction of various marginalised identities. Arranged roughly chronologically from early 1950s rock and roll to late 1990s techno, I discuss how many artists, such as Bill Haley, David Bowie and George Clinton, have used such imagery to promote various nonconformist ideologies and identities ranging from African-American empowerment to Gay and Lesbian agendas. This article also relates developments in scientific space research and popular science fiction culture to corresponding uses of space and alien imagery in various forms of popular music. In general, popular music's use of futuristic space and alien themes denotes a related neo-Gnostic withdrawal and alienation from traditionally dominant cultural structures in an attempt to unite us with a common ‘other’ that transcends divisions of race, gender, sexual preference, religion or nationality.

Postmodern aesthetics has come to be recognised as a salient feature of much popular culture, including music. Urban subcultures, and especially migrant subcultures, may have inherent inclinations toward postmodern aesthetics, while at the same time retaining ties to modern and even pre-modern cultural discourses. The syncretic popular musics created by such subcultures may reflect these multiple cultural orientations by combining postmodern and more traditional characteristics. Thus, for example, punk rock and rap music can be seen to combine postmodern techniques of pastiche, bricolage and blank irony with modernist socio-political protest. Similar eclecticisms can also be found in the musics of some urban migrant subcultures, whose syncretic musics, like their senses of social identity, often self-consciously juxtapose or combine ancestral homeland traditions with the most contemporary cosmopolitan styles and attitudes. Interpretations of such musics may call for a particularly nuanced appreciation of the distinct aesthetic modes which may coexist in the same work.

Though gramophones were imported in India before the beginning of the century, this was done privately by a few persons who were very rich and affluent. During their visits to Europe and other Western countries they would buy a gramophone machine for use at home because it was an attractive novelty and a handy medium of entertainment. In 1900 and for quite some time thereafter a gramophone was considered to be a show piece and a status symbol, as only the wealthy elite of the society could afford to possess it. Phonographs were commercially exploited in India only after the establishment of the office of the Mutoscope Biograph Company in Calcutta, on 7 July 1901, by one Mr J. Watson Harrod.

Over the course of the past several years the use of digital audio-sampling by composers, musicians, engineers and producers has increased to a point where the sampler is now as common in the recording studio as the microphone. Digital samplers allow one to encode a fragment of sound, from one to several seconds in duration, in a digitised binary form which can then be stored in computer memory. This stored sound may be played back through a keyboard, with its pitch and tonal qualities accurately reproduced or, as is often the case, manipulated through electronic editing. Because of its unsurpassed mimetic capabilities, one common use of the sampler has been to store in computer memory a note or set of notes played by an individual who has a unique playing style. When played back through a keyboard, one could construct an entire solo line which would potentially sound as if that person were playing it. Another common use of the sampler is to extract a fragment of sound from one context and place it in a new one, with no appreciable loss of sound quality over each generation of extraction and repositioning. These three capabilities of the sampler – the mimetic/reproductive, the manipulative and the extractive – are crucial to understanding both the sampler's popularity and its potential to disrupt the production process in the music industry.

Repetition, as a component of musical structure in popular songs, has long played an important part in ‘popular common-sense’ definitions, and criticisms, of the music. ‘It's monotonous’; ‘it's all the same’; ‘it's predictable’: such reactions have probably filtered down from the discussions of mass culture theorists. From this point of view, repetition (within a song) can be assimilated to the same category as what Adorno termed standardisation (as between songs). Of course, the significance of the role played by such techniques in the operations of the music industry – their efficacy in helping to define and hold markets, to channel types of consumption, to pre-form response and to make listening easy – can hardly be denied; it is, however, equally difficult to reduce the function of repetition simply to an analysis of the ‘political economy’ of popular music production and its ideological effects. Despite Adorno's critical assault (see Adorno 1941), despite later twists to the theory by, for instance, Fredric Jameson (1981), who argues that rather than being a negative quality of mass culture, repetition is simply a fundamental characteristic of all cultural production under contemporary capitalism, the question of repetition refuses to go away. Why do listeners find interest and pleasure in hearing the same thing over again? To be able to answer this question, which has troubled not only mass cultural theory but also traditional philosophical aesthetics, as well as more recent approaches such as psychoanalysis and information theory, would tell us more about the nature of popular music, and hence, mutatis mutandis, about music in general, than almost anything else. We must start by locating repetition within an overall theory of musical syntax.

For this article the authors analysed thirty-eight lists of ‘The 100 greatest albums of all time’ type. As the findings demonstrate, a canon of popular music has evolved which shows strong tendencies towards stability in featuring albums from the late 1960s (especially those by The Beatles), while only a few albums from the 1990s have gained ‘classic’ status. The canon's contents and exclusions are explained by the social dispositions of the participants, predominantly white males aged twenty to forty. Influenced by efforts of the cultural industries, these actors also evaluate certain albums for the purposes of distinguishing themselves from the ‘mainstream’. Furthermore, aesthetic and artistic criteria underlying the esteem of the ‘masterworks’ are identified by analysing reviews. The authors suggest that future research on canonisation should interlock sociological and aesthetic perspectives. Findings from such an approach might initiate reflection among music fans about their own exclusions, and result in an opening up of the meaning and significance of the canon.

Every text and every reading has a social and therefore political dimension, which is to be found partly in the structure of the text itself and partly in the social relations of the reader and the way they are brought to bear upon the text. (Fiske 1989b, pp. 97–8)

The position outlined in the quotation above suggests that meanings are the result of convergence between material properties of a text, and the particular social allegiances of the reader. Two approaches to music and meaning are embodied in this stance: the first theorises music as the material realisation of social forces which are structured into the text and into the reading subject, while the second promotes a view in which the text is rewritten in the act of recontextualisation within the practices of everyday life. Both approaches, the former represented by the critique of mass culture offered by the Frankfurt School, the latter by theories of popular culture, have their roots in the Marxist tradition which theorises the fundamental conflict in society as one between the dominant economic class and all those subordinated by it. Within this context, music is subject to a critique which reveals its stance as either affirming or opposing the ideology of the dominant economic order. The central question is therefore not whether music is ideological, but how ideology is made material and the extent to which listeners are free to produce meanings. In this paper these issues are examined in relation to ideologies of femininity in popular music.