Expressive forms of culture offer a look into changing social phenomena that have not yet crystallised into clear patterns or accepted categories. Accepting the view that music is embedded in the wider culture system, we use a particular form of it – popular music – as a means of investigating class and ethnicity in Israeli society. At the same time we attempt to deepen the understanding of the place music plays in society, and of societal influences on music.

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.

The Americanisation of British popular culture has been the subject of intensive study and debate. Most of this, however, has had a national focus. It is the purpose of this article to examine aspects of a popular culture at a local level in order to discover the extent to which people were, or felt themselves to be, dominated by America. The history of popular culture is the history of the little people, how they passed their time and recreated themselves. Discoveries made here should cast illumination on the more global claims made by social historians.

The first law of love is subjective: subjectively, jealousy is deeper than love, it contains love's truth. This is because jealousy goes further in the apprehension and interpretation of signs. It is the designation of love, its finality. Indeed, it is inevitable that the signs of a loved person, once we ‘explicate’ them, should be revealed as deceptive: addressed to us, they nonetheless express worlds which exclude us and which the beloved will not and cannot make us know … Love's signs … are deceptive signs which can be addressed to us only by concealing what they express: the origin of unknown worlds, of unknown actions and thoughts which give them a meaning. They do not excite superficial, nervous exaltation, but the suffering of a deeper exploration. The beloved's lies are the hieroglyphics of love. The interpreter of love's signs is necessarily the interpreter of lies. His fate is expressed in the motto: to love without being loved. (Deleuze 1973)

Highlife is one of the myriad varieties of acculturated popular dance-music styles that have been emerging from Africa this century and which fuse African with Western (i.e. European and American) and islamic influences. Besides highlife, other examples include kwela, township jive and mbaqanga from South Africa, chimurenga from Zimbabwe, the benga beat from Kenya, taraab music from the East African coast, Congo jazz (soukous) from Central Africa, rai music from North Africa, juju and apala music from western Nigeria, makossa from the Cameroons and mbalax from Senegal.

In the late thirties, the syncopated rhythms of American jazz swept through Europe, an event encouraged by both the US record industry and Hollywood. In Germany, Fascist resistance to jazz culminated in the imposition of a ban by the Reich Chamber of Music on ‘jazzified, judified dance music’, a convenient way of dealing with American competition. Nevertheless Gene Krupa and Teddy Wilson were still entered in Brunswick's German catalogue for 1939, and German bands continued to swing (on radio and records) into the forties. It is not wholly surprising to read of Goebbels and Goering dancing, in uniform, to the swing music of Jack Hylton and his Orchestra at the Berlin Press Ball in 1937. Among the young, however, swing was already beginning to symbolise a resistance to authority and non-cooperation with the Third Reich. Even newspaper articles intended to demonstrate the demoralising and corruptive effects of jazz whetted the appetite. Thus, a Frankfurter Zeitung article on ‘The Jitterbug’ attacked the bandleader Harry James, but also explained the latest swing terms such as ‘jive’ and ‘hep-cat’.

When Joe S. James, a southern singing school teacher, brought out his edition of the long-lived shape-note hymnal The Sacred Harp in 1911, he stated rather forcefully that his readers would find ‘but few of the twisted rills and trills of the unnatural snaking of the voice’ which he had heard while in the company of those yet untutored in the art of singing by note – or ‘regular singing’, as it had been called (James 1911, p. iii). It was not the first time the ‘old way’ of singing and its ‘rills and trills’ had found a critic among champions of some form of the Western European music system, nor would it be the last. Indeed, the history of the quarrel has shown that if there is anything more intransigent than the old way of singing, it is the accompanying opprobrium spread by a musical élite convinced of the superiority of the diatonic system and all that is extrapolated from it.

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.

In his song ‘Asili ya Muziki’ (‘The Roots of Music’) Remmy Ongala, one of the most prolific singers/composers in Tanzanian music, discusses the complex and ambiguous position of music and musicians. In Tanzania musicians are commonly considered to be wahuni, i.e. vagabonds, drunkards, drugtakers, while their music, is enjoyed by the same people who call them these names.

In the last few years, in Britain, one of pop's cycles has turned again and folk has come back into fashion. It can be seen in the success of the Pogues, in the reformation of Fairport Convention, in the revamping of the magazine Folk Roots, in the content of Andy Kershaw's Radio One show, and perhaps most dramatically in the celebration of ‘world music’. The revival of folk entails more than a revival of old names and sounds, it also contains a redefinition of the idea of ‘folk’ itself. This shift takes its clearest form in Folk Roots where the editor, Ian Anderson, displays equal enthusiasm for examples of almost every musical genre, from country to pop to ‘world music’ to traditional folk to soul to ‘roots rock’ (Ry Cooder, The Bhundu Boys, Kathryn Tickell, Paul Simon and the Voix Bulgares are all included). Folk no longer means ‘beards and Fair Isle jumpers’; it includes punk-influenced groups like the Mekons who see folk as an approach in which ‘the ineptitude of the playing becomes stylised and eventually becomes part of the music’ (Hurst 1986, p. 17). The musical eclecticism is linked by an underlying theory of the way good music is identified.

That we identify with those around us, whether in novels, movies, poetry, songs, the news or on the street, is natural. To a certain extent we mirror what we perceive, but we also perceive it in our own ways and make it fit, to a certain extent, our concept of the world. However, we, and the things we communicate, are also moulders. How much we mould and how much we mirror is difficult to discern, and of course problematic in something like objective news reporting.

On a Saturday night of January 1930 several thousand African men clad in loin cloths and the calico uniforms of domestic servants thronged a concert in the Workers' Hall of the Durban branch of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU) in Prince Edward Street. To the pounding sounds of hundreds of sticks, successive teams of dancers, some of them trained by Union officials from the rural hinterland, rushed to the stage performing the virile, stamping ingoma dance. The Zulu term ingoma (lit. ‘song’) covers a broad range of male group dances like isikhuze, isicathulo, ukukomika, isiZulu, isiBhaca, umzansi and isishameni. The kinesic patterns of ingoma are inseparably linked to choral songs in call-and-response structure and, as such, constitute a complex statement of the unity of dance and song in Zulu performance culture. The peak of Zulu-speaking migrants' dance culture, ingoma evolved out of the profound transformation of traditional rural Zulu culture through impoverishment, dispossession and labour migration around the first World War. But on that night of January 1930, at the climax of the spectacle, the ingoma dancers struck a particularly defiant note:

Who has taken our country from us?

Who has taken it?

Come out! Let us fight!

The land was ours. Now it is taken.

We have no more freedom left in it.

Come out and fight!

The land is ours, now it is taken.

Fight! Fight!

Shame on the man who is burnt in his hut!

Come out and fight! (Perham 1974, p. 196