In recent years popular music scholars have paid increasing attention to musical sound. From Robert Walser's landmark work on heavy metal (1993), to Alan Moore's important analysis of rock style periods (1993), to a number of shorter studies (Whiteley 1990; Josephson 1992; Bowman 1995; Ford 1995; Hawkins 1996; Edström 1996), more and more scholars have recognised that all levels of scholarly focus must be pursued if we are to gain purchase on the phenomena of popular music. With no exceptions of which I am aware, all the popular music scholars concerned specifically with musical sound seek to explore the connections between sound and its social contexts. My goal here is to show how attention to musical perception can forward this project and to argue that perception is best understood as a kind of social practice. The act of perception constitutes musical forms and musical meanings in experience. The act of perception is where the rubber of sound meets the road of social life, and by treating perception as a practice we can draw more intimate connections between songs and subjects, sound and society, than would be possible if we were to start from musical structures and then search for linkages to social context. None of this, of course, is to deny the value of studies focused on musical structures, performance events, broad social contexts or large-scale social history, but to argue that the constitution of musical perception by musicians and listeners deserves greater attention and to suggest how this kind of scrutiny might serve the larger aims of popular music studies.

In South Africa of the 1950s, night-clubs frequented by blacks were dangerous places. Fights, shootings and stabbings were commonplace, and some shows even ended in riots. Gangsters were an important catalyst for such events: they terrorised musicians and patrons alike. Miriam Makeba, whose singing career began in the 1950s, remembers what it was like:

[T]hese men come in, sit in front, and pull out their bottles. They put these before them on the table. Then they take out their guns and put these in front of them on the table, too. We are all supposed to look, and we can't help ourselves: We do. They are like actors, these gangsters, although they do not play. In South Africa, movies are taken very seriously, and there is a movie in the cinemas now in which Richard Widmark plays a hoodlum. They call him Styles, and he dresses up in a hat, a belted jacket, and those Florsheim shoes. The black gangsters go out and dress just like him. In the movie, Richard Widmark eats an apple after each of his crimes. So, all the African hoodlums have gone and gotten apples, too. I see them right there on the tables between the bottles and the guns. (Makeba 1988, p. 49)

In his Moeurs et Coutumes des Tziganes (1936), the French ethnologist Martin Block notices that

when a Hungarian or Romanian feels sad, or when, on the contrary, he wants to celebrate, he needs Gypsy music to exteriorize the state of his soul. (Block 1936, p. 136)

Block's conclusion that Gypsy musicians are in the business of articulating other people's ‘soul’ confronts us with an intriguing conundrum. Given the fact that in eastern Europe, group boundaries between Gypsies and non-Gypsies are strictly defined and zealously kept up, one wonders how Gypsies would be able to articulate musically an intimate knowledge about their non-Gypsy customers. And why would Hungarians, Romanians – and, as I will argue in this paper, Serbs as well – need Gypsy musicians to ‘exteriorize their state of soul’?

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.

While study of the social and cultural aspects of popular music has been flourishing for some time, it is only in the last few years that serious efforts have been made to analyse the music itself: what Allan Moore has called ‘the primary text’ (1993, p. 1). These efforts include general studies of styles and genres (Moore, 1993; Bowman, 1995); studies of specific aspects of popular styles such as harmony and improvisation (Winkler 1978; Moore 1992, 1995; Walser 1992), as well as more intensive analyses of individual songs (Tagg 1982; Hawkins 1992). In this paper I will investigate syncopation, a phenomenon of great importance in many genres of popular music and particularly in rock.

Anyone visiting Brazil today in search of an idealised ‘Brazilian Sound’ might, at first, be disappointed with the popular music scene. The visitor will soon realise that established musical styles such as bossa nova and MPB (Música Popular Brazileira (Brazilian Popular Music)), with their well-defined roles within the Brazilian social and political scene of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, have lost their immediate appeal with some contemporary audiences, and especially with Brazilian urban youth. In the 1990s, Brazilian radio and TV are saturated with a variety of new local genres that borrow heavily from international musical styles of all kinds and use state-of-the-art electronic apparatus. Hybrid terms such as samba-rock, samba-reggae, mangue-beat, afro-beat, for-rock (a contraction of forró and rock), sertaneja-country, samba-rap, and pop-nejo (a contraction of pop and sertanejo), are just a few examples of the marketing labels which are loosely applied to the current infusion of international music in the local musical scene.

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.

Recent years have seen two noticeable trends in Popular Music Studies. These have been on the one hand a series of works which have tried to document the ‘local’ music scene and, on the other, accounts of processes of globalisation. While not uninterested in the intermediate Nation-State level, both trends have tended to regard it as an area of increasingly less importance. To state the matter more boldly, both trends have underplayed the continually important role of the Nation-State.

Until recently, the world of the British barbershop singer was a self-enclosed community whose existence went largely unrecognised both by musicians involved in other genres and by the public at large. In the last few years this has started to change, chiefly due to the participation of barbershop choruses in the televised competition ‘Sainsbury's Choir of the Year’. Encouraged by the success of Shannon Express in 1994, many other choruses entered the 1996 competition, four of them reaching the televised semi-finals, and two the finals. During this increased exposure, it became apparent that television commentators had little idea of what to make of barbershoppers, indeed regarded them as a peculiar, and perhaps rather trivial, breed of performer. This bafflement is not surprising given the genre's relative paucity of exposure either in the mass media or in the musical and musicological press; the plentiful articles written by barbershoppers about their activity and its meanings are almost exclusively addressed to each other, to sustain the community rather than integrate it into wider musical life. The purpose of this paper, however, is not to follow the theme of these intra-community articles in arguing that barbershop harmony should actually be regarded as a serious and worthy art, or to explain to a bewildered world what this genre is actually about; rather, it aims to explore the way that barbershop singers theorise themselves and their activity to provide a case study in the relationship between social and musical values. That is, I am not writing as an apologist for a hitherto distinctly insular practice, but exploiting that very insularity as a means to pursue a potentially very broad question within a self-limited field of enquiry.

In Rock Formation, Steve Jones notes that ‘popular music is, at every critical juncture of its history, determined by the technology musicians use to realize their ideas’ (Jones 1992, p. 1). As far as sound treatment is concerned, the importance of that technology (or more precisely, the importance of the possibilities it offers at a certain time) is rather obvious – had he not possessed reel-to-reel tape recorders, Sam Phillips would have never been able to achieve the slap echo which was so characteristic of his productions in the 1950s.

‘No modern communications medium is more intrusive in modern Indian life than recorded and electronically amplified sound’ (Babb 1995, p. 10). In South Asia, even the most exclusive student of unmediated music-making cannot avoid a mediated public soundscape that may well transmit the music being studied over loudspeakers, radios, televisions, and cassette players. This is certainly the case for qawwali, a musical genre which is firmly embedded in Sufi practice, but is also widely recorded and media-disseminated for as long as the life of the Indian record industry itself. Acknowledging this musical reality after years of live study has prompted me first to situate the study of recorded qawwali vis-à-vis my own scholarly conventions and vis-à-vis the pioneering work on sound recording done in the very region of my own study. The aim is to address the problematic of an ethnographic approach to recorded qawwali, and to present preliminary findings, including some culturally meaningful examples from the repertoire.

In a recent issue of Popular Music devoted to the music of the Middle East, Martin Stokes and Ruth Davis note that ‘the movement of Middle Eastern sounds into Western cultural spaces … has largely been ignored’ (1996, p. 255) and that ‘Middle Eastern popular musics will probably continue to mark an unassimilable and unwelcome “otherness” for most Europeans and Americans’ (ibid, p. 257). In this paper, written partly in response to these remarks, I examine the movement of contemporary Middle Eastern sounds into Greek cultural space and Greek musical culture, a musical culture that has an affinity with ‘Eastern’ musics but also a strong sense of its own identity. Middle Eastern music can indeed take on the form of an ‘unwelcome “otherness”’ in Greece and I shall provide examples of this from my own fieldwork on the Greek island of Crete. Greece and the Greek islands are outposts, on the European periphery, on the frontier between ‘the East’ and ‘the West’, where a history of confrontations, invasions and forced exchanges in political, economic and demographic terms with the Middle East has ensued for millenia. Greece and Turkey still remain in dispute over territory from the Thracian borderlands to the smaller islands of the Eastern Aegean Sea.

Claudia Gorbman, in her afterword to Unheard Melodies, looks forward to the ‘new’ phenomenon of the increased use of recorded popular music in the movies. She questions whether the contemporary use of popular music is essentially different from its use in the traditional Hollywood musical, wherein conventional practice permits a musical number to disrupt the narrative flow, and answers that ‘a hybrid is emerging, unlike diegetic music which is normally not listened to, and also not as focused as musical numbers issuing from the magic world of the musical’ (Gorbman 1987, p.162). Certainly, the music video, as Gorbman admits, in its ‘kaleidoscope of forms’ (ibid.) is changing the relationship between visuals and music, so that there is no longer a habitual hierarchy of sound supporting image, or vice versa. It is this shifting relationship and the way in which pop music specifically operates upon the narrative structure of cinema that I wish to explore here.

Curiosity value quite possibly accounted for the success of Kate Bush's first single in 1978. Those who have continued to admire her more particularly for her later musical achievements, which have surely consolidated her position as one of the most individual and innovative artists of the 1980s and 1990s, do so possibly in spite of (rather than because of) the impact of ‘Wuthering Heights’. No other song of hers has had the same public appeal – it stayed in the British charts for seventy-five weeks (Rice 1991) – and perhaps the smaller group of admirers who remain loyal engage more with the intensely personal visions into which her lyrics have matured, as opposed to that first, more musically zany, original hit.

In the autumn of 1994, a Rolling Stone special issue on ‘Women in Rock’ proclaimed that ‘A change has come to rock & roll’. This pronouncement – which acknowledged women's traditional under-representation in rock music while consigning it to history – was hardly a new one. The ‘discovery’ that ‘an unprecedented number of female performers were now carving out a substantial place for themselves in the rock world’ has been a recurring staple of music journalism for at least two decades (Garr 1992, p. xi). Yet women's participation in the rock music world continues to be noteworthy, defined by their status as numerical minority and symbolic anomaly. ‘In rock as in life, what is male continues to be perceived as known, normal and natural, whereas what is female is taken to be a mystery in need of explication’ (Udovich 1994, p. 50).

The following comments appeared on the front page of the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post on 19 January 1989, in a story about a performance in the Chinese city of Guangzhou (Canton) by Hong Kong singer Anita Mui YimFong .

Musicals, like all popular texts and forms of art have an explicitly reflexive relationship with the societies from which they stem. As well as reflecting the historical and cultural character of society they voice society's own sense of its life and values. They are properly analysed, therefore, in terms of what Geertz (1975) has termed the ‘thick description’ of culture, whereby their organisation, construction and meaning is treated in terms of how they are lodged in, and lodge within themselves, the cultural and social structures of the society of which they are a social expression and with which they are reflexively engaged.