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The Musicians’ Syndicate and the contradictions of state control over music in Egypt Popular Music Pub Date : 2024-04-02 Sophie Frankford
Based on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo with musicians who perform a musical style known as shaʿbi, this article unravels the complex role that the state-affiliated Musicians’ Syndicate plays in musicians’ working lives in order to investigate the contradictions of state control over music in Egypt. Focusing on moments of encounter between musicians and Syndicate officials, I consider
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Unknown Pleasure: interpretations of the mystery hiss in Feist's 2017 album Popular Music Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Joseph Coughlan-Allen
This article examines the critical reception of Feist's 2017 album Pleasure, and interpretations by reviewers of the mysterious hiss that permeates most of the album's tracks. I firstly contextualise Pleasure in relation to the aesthetics of record production. I then examine interviews with Feist and her collaborators to identify the source of the hiss, and explain its presence on Pleasure. Lastly
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Not your ordinary drone: odes to the Bayraktar in the Russia–Ukraine war Popular Music Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Anastassiya Andrianova
‘Bayraktar’, a pop/rap song written by a Ukrainian soldier following Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, went viral, spawning various covers, from electronic dance music to hardcore punk. I analyse this digital archive of 19 ‘Bayraktar’ songs, including five that share only the title with Taras Borovok's paradigmatic song, and contextualise it within the broader historical and decolonial
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‘The practice of the twanged instruments’. Evaluating the amateur fretted instrument orchestra in British popular musical life, c.1890–c.1960 Popular Music Pub Date : 2024-03-01 Dave Russell
The British amateur fretted instrument orchestra was a product of the late Victorian and Edwardian banjo and mandolin ‘crazes’. Lacking deep community roots, early organisations were numerous but mainly short-lived. However, reconstituted as more broadly based clubs, they enjoyed a substantial revival from the later 1920s and played a major role in the preservation of fretted instrumental culture at
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The ‘Anchoring vi Schema’ and its relation to phrase rhythm in popular music Popular Music Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Stanley Ralph Fink
In order to reveal normative prototypes undergirding various formal sections, this article introduces the ‘Anchoring vi Schema’: a medium length major-mode passage (typically eight or 16 bars) that initiates on an unambiguous hypermetric downbeat (for example, the beginning of a verse or chorus). The Anchoring vi Schema must begin with tonic harmony and deploy submediant harmony at its midpoint – the
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Songwriters vs. the recording industry: the use and abuse of statistics in UK streaming debates Popular Music Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Richard Osborne
In Britain, the Select Committee of the government department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has investigated the economics of streaming and recommended that the share of revenues for record companies should decrease so that songwriters can earn more. This article addresses lobbying activity that has resulted from this recommendation. To support their causes, songwriter representatives and record
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‘With all praise to your exalted frequencies, consider me your friend’: listening, technology and musicking in the Church of Scientology Popular Music Pub Date : 2023-09-14 Tom Wagner
This article discusses musicking in the Church of Scientology, and how it can be used to understand the organisation and its relationship to society. The article begins by discussing the essential place of listening in Scientological practice, noting that it is one of several ‘technologies’ that institutionalise the charisma of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. It next demonstrates how Hubbard's hagiography
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Los sentimientos del alma: cultural dialogue and the multiple origins of Panamanian típico Popular Music Pub Date : 2023-09-08 Samuel Robles
In this article, I explore the processes of cultural dialogue through which European and Caribbean dances such as the waltz, the pasillo, the polka, and the danzón became tributaries of Panamanian típico. These genres, particularly the thriving danzón culture in Panama, contributed in various degrees to the shaping of típico as local performers adopted, adapted and reinterpreted rhythms and melodic
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Negotiating girlhood in rock music: Nandi Bushell, prodigy discourse and adult mentor-fans Popular Music Pub Date : 2023-07-28 Kai Arne Hansen, Tyler Bickford
Nandi Bushell (b. 2010) is a British-Zulu drummer and multi-instrumentalist whose early career has garnered much attention from audiences and the international music press. In this article, we investigate the case of Bushell as a point of entry for understanding children's participation in mainstream popular music culture and the broader public sphere. We explore Bushell's social media presence, creative
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Hip-hop sampling aesthetics and the legacy of Grand Upright v. Warner Popular Music Pub Date : 2023-05-29 Claire E.A. Mcleish
In 1991, Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie for sampling without permission: this lawsuit, Grand Upright v. Warner, became a landmark case for music copyright, and for some scholars, represented a symbolic end to hip hop's golden age. This paper uses the lawsuit as a point of entry into debates about hip hop during a time of aesthetic transformation. Specifically, I present a corpus study spanning
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Musicking assemblages and non-human becomings: Mapping morphogenetic processes and distributed agencies in Wolfgang Buttress’ the Hive Popular Music Pub Date : 2023-04-26 Artur Szarecki
The paper introduces the concept of musicking assemblages to account for the agency of non-human actants in a project by contemporary artist, Wolfgang Buttress, that involved creating a musical soundscape together with bees. Collapsing distinctions between popular music, contemporary art and scientific research, the project exhibits musicking not as a result of human action but as emerging from intensive
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Listening to Anohni's variously vibrating voice: studying transfeminine vocality in 21st-century popular music culture through the concept of vocal figurations Popular Music Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Veronika Muchitsch
This article examines the work and reception of singer-songwriter Anohni to investigate sonic and discursive negotiations of transfeminine vocality in 21st-century popular music culture. Developing Haraway's concept of feminist figurations, it introduces the concept of vocal figurations, which articulates a performative, relational and multiply mediated understanding of voice, wherein gendered voice
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Shaping rhythm: timing and sound in five groove-based genres Popular Music Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Anne Danielsen, Mats Johansson, Ragnhild Brøvig, Bjørnar Sandvik, Kjetil Klette Bøhler
Shaping events at the microlevel of rhythm is an important aspect of many groove-based musics. In the present study, we explore the interconnectedness of musical parameters such as timing, attack shape, timbre and relative intensity in creating groove through investigating musicians and producers’ discourse in five genres (jazz, samba, electronic dance music, hip-hop and traditional Scandinavian fiddle
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Under suspicion: library music and the Musicians’ Union in Britain, 1960–1978 Popular Music Pub Date : 2023-03-10 Elodie A. Roy
Drawing primarily from unpublished archival data, this article reconstructs the Musicians’ Union long embargo on library recording in Britain (1965–1978), retracing the immediate as well as long-lasting implications of the ban for the shaping of library music practices and discourses. The article demonstrates how crucial relations with the Union were in shaping the nascent library music industry as
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Expert or advocate? The role(s) of the expert witness when rap is on trial Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Erik Nielson
This paper considers the role of the rap music expert in criminal cases involving the use of rap as evidence. In addition to describing ways that an expert can help the defence challenge the use of rap, both before and during trial, it also offers strategies for intervening beyond the criminal justice system. These strategies may require an expert to balance the roles of objective observer on the one
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Live and direct? Censorship and racialised public morality in grime and drill music Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Alex de Lacey
This article addresses the linguistic policing of grime and UK drill music. Existing studies often focus on the immediacy of the penal system. This article will instead explore the extent to which institutional bodies uphold and maintain a programme of racialised censorship across radio broadcasts, seeking to understand how these value judgements impact upon creative practice. It presents an ethnographic
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The regime of style: cover versions, reality TV, and the aesthetic principles of populism in Israel and beyond Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-11-24 Oded Erez
This article explores the relationship between the meaning of style in Idol-format TV shows, and the political style which many scholars consider central for understanding populism today. Inspired by Jacques Rancière's notion of aesthetic regimes, I theorise what I call ‘the regime of style’ as a set of aesthetic principles shared across these fields. I explore the case study of Miri Regev's term as
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Schoolhouse rap Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Andrea L. Dennis
Rap on Trial, the treatment of rap music as evidence in the American criminal legal process, is well-documented and increasingly scrutinised. Research has shown that – with little restraint – police, prosecutors, probation officers and judges use rap lyrics to investigate, prosecute and punish individuals. Less noticed is that a similar phenomenon is occurring in the American K–12 educational system
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Freestyling in war and peace: rap and transitional justice in Colombia Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-11-04 Rafael Quishpe, Samuel Augusto Escobar, Juan Francisco Soto
Rap, as with other musical genres, can contain narratives about Colombia's armed conflict. Members of armed groups, such as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército del Pueblo (‘Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People's Army’; FARC-EP), and civilians have used rap as a means of expressing war-related issues and their causes and consequences. Following the signing of the peace
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Copping the blame: the role of YouTube videos in the criminalisation of UK drill music Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-11-03 Tilman Schwarze, Lambros Fatsis
UK drill music frequently features as a prime suspect in newsrooms and courtrooms that charge it with driving the ‘knife crime epidemic’ in Britain's major conurbations. Such prejudicial assumptions about the role of drill in inciting violence are largely unfounded, but nevertheless inform criminal justice policy that leads to unjust and discriminatory outcomes. While drill rappers consciously post
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Prosecuting rap: what does the case law tell us? Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-11-03 Abenaa Owusu-Bempah
This article explores the admissibility and use of rap music as evidence in English criminal trials. It presents findings from an analysis of over 30 appeal cases. As well as unpacking the link between rap, race and gangs that is prevalent in these cases, the article challenges the categorisation of rap as ‘bad character evidence’, and critiques the way in which questions of relevance and prejudicial
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The 0161 rap gap: the marginalisation of Black rap musicians in Manchester's live music scene Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-11-02 Latoya Reisner, Kamila Rymajdo
Focusing on Manchester, the largest city in the north of England, this paper explores why and how Black rap practitioners have been excluded from performing and promoting rap music in its city centre during the last 20 years. Discussing the intersecting factors of policing of venues and racial bias and class stigma among Manchester's venue owners and promoters, while also scrutinising the city's neoliberal
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Introduction to special issue: Prosecuting and Policing Rap Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Eithne Quinn, Joy White, John Street
The state's coercive engagement with Black youth expressive culture, and rap music in particular, is a topic of mounting public and scholarly concern. Rap lyrics and videos made by defendants and codefendants are regularly used as evidence in court cases in ways that incite bias against young people in the dock. At the same time, the performance and circulation of rap music are increasingly monitored
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Anti-populist populism: Musical challenges to Trump's America and Erdoğan's Turkey Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-10-27 Lyndon C.S. Way
Populism is a discursive construct that represents popular interests and values by ‘pretend[ing] to speak’ for the people who are constructed separate and opposed to a powerful elite. Yet populism, in its various forms and accents, ‘can adapt flexibly to a variety of substantive ideological values and principles’. This is manifested in ‘the people’ not being a prefixed natural category, but a signifier
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Populist performance(s) in contemporary Greek rap music Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-10-27 Kostas Savvopoulos, Yannis Stavrakakis
In recent years, rap music has been growing rapidly within the Greek cultural landscape. This paper places emphasis on a particular politicised current within the genre, examining closely two recent examples from the Greek context. Although such performances have already been broadly discussed as ‘populist’ within public debate, this paper aims at rigorously assessing this claim. To do so, it first
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Songs of tractors and submission: on the assembled politicity of popular music and far-right populism in Austria Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-10-24 André Doehring, Kai Ginkel
Our article addresses the connection between popular music and far-right populism, as exemplified by the Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ). We discuss the specific mainstreaming and normalizing potential of popular music for far-right populist politics, by means of songs that do not qualify as political or politicized music in the sense of carrying a clear political message
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The people vs. the power bloc? Popular music and populism Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-10-17 Mario Dunkel, Melanie Schiller
On 12 November 2017, the Philippine celebrity musician Pilita Corrales was singing the popular song ‘Ikaw’ (‘You’) at a gala event in Manila, attended by some of the world's most powerful politicians at the time, US President Donald Trump and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Suddenly, she noticed a male voice singing along with her, its intonation off, its volume increasing. Aware that the event
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The ‘System of National Cooperation’ hit factory: the aesthetic of Hungarian government-commissioned songs between 2010 and 2020 Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-10-17 Emília Barna, Ágnes Patakfalvi-Czirják
This article addresses the relationship between popular music and populism through three government-commissioned songs, produced for occasions of national remembering during the post-2010 Orbán regime in Hungary, namely ‘Barackfa’ (2013), ‘Egy szabad országért’ (2016) and ‘Hazám, hazám’ (2020). All three songs are one-off collaborations of artists representing various music genres. We ask, firstly
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The Identitarian movement and fashwave music: The nostalgia and anger of the new far right in Denmark Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-08-30 Jeppe Fuglsang Larsen
Through perspectives from the sociology of emotions and multimodality as an analytical tool, this article analyses the cultural aspects of the Identitarian movement through the case of the Danish Generation Identitær (GI) and its online videos. The analysis shows that the group shares an understanding of societal problems and emotions of nostalgia and anger connected to this worldview and demonstrates
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The lives and work of Bob Dylan Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-08-30 Simon Frith
According to the website Come writers and critics, which keeps a running list of all ‘documents related to Bob Dylan printed on paper’, by the end of 2021 (Dylan's 80th year), there were 829 books about him in English and 723 in 36 other languages (from 175 in German to one each in Bulgarian and Vietnamese).1 The list is indiscriminate in terms of the various books’ quality, originality or readability
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Online musicking for humanity: the role of imagined listening and the moral economies of music sharing on social media Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-06-17 Raquel Campos Valverde
Music sharing on social media increasingly involves ‘imagined listening’, a form of sociality based on how we think that others listen to music (as well as on our own imagining of sounds) and typically mediated by the exchange of visual prompts, such as the thumbnail images associated with a particular streaming link or recording. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted online and offline with Spanish
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Postcolonial paths of pop: a suburban psychogeography of George Michael and Wham! Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-06-17 Keith Negus, Adrian Sledmere
This article draws on psychogeography to explore suburban Bushey, Hertfordshire (UK), where the popular music duo Wham! formed and created the foundation for the later career of George Michael. It locates this neglected cultural narrative within the context of parental postcolonial and metropolitan journeys, arguing that migrations from the margins of the British Empire and across London form part
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The production of space and the changing character of the recording studio Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-06-17 Lachlan Goold
The propagation of low-cost music production technologies changes the way recording artists experience the spatial environments and technology of the recording studio. Concomitantly dwindling recording budgets have led to large-format studio closures. Many artists are choosing do-it-yourself (DIY) recording practices with the help of a producer, or self-produced, in non-purpose-built and domestic environments
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A place outside the pandemic? An ethnographic study of live music events at St Gallen's cultural venue Palace during the COVID-19 crisis Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-06-10 Jelena Gligorijevic
The multiple impacts of COVID-19 on the music-culture industry have been duly discussed in a variety of public discourses, academic and otherwise. However, there is still a dearth of studies that investigate alternative face-to-face practices of live music performance and organisation during the pandemic's significant constraints on social behaviour. The present work aims to fill this gap by offering
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How concert promoters think: five approaches to concert promotion in Norway Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-05-19 Ola K. Berge, Bård Kleppe
Between artists and the audience, the concert promoter holds an important position within the music industry. This article, based on an empirical study of promoters in Norway, aims to analyse how concert promoters think, what their motivation and attitudes are like, their goals and their perceptions of a good concert and a good promoter. Drawing from both qualitative and quantitative data, we identify
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Playing with medium: Intertextuality and phonomatic transformation Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-04-05 Jeff Wragg
In ‘Intertextuality and hypertextuality in recorded popular music’, S. Lacasse (in M. Talbot (ed.) The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, Liverpool University Press, 2000) proposes a model for understanding intertextuality in recorded popular music. His model provides different ways one text may reference another, while simultaneously transforming the style and/or subject of the original text. Style
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‘What is music? Anything can be music’: Frank Zappa's theory of art Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-03-30 Elliot Marlow-Stevens
This paper presents an analysis of Frank Zappa's aesthetic values, drawing on two examples: his writing and his music. This paper examines Zappa's musical techniques and contextualises them within art criticism; Zappa's discussion of his own music and theories of art in The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989) further help align his work with contemporary aesthetic theories, namely those of Levinson (Music
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Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on music festival attendees Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-03-25 Maarit Kinnunen, Antti Honkanen
As festivals were cancelled or people were afraid of participating in mass gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic, the well-being effects of festival participation were missed. How can these missed hedonic, eudaimonic or social well-being impacts be described, and how has the prolonged absence of live music events and the cancellation of the festival summer influenced attitudes towards festivals?
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Can't nobody tell me nothin’: ‘Old Town Road’, resisting musical norms, and queer remix reproduction Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-03-25 Mel Stanfill
‘Old Town Road’, a genre-defying song fuelled by proliferating remixes, is a key site to unravel the position of remixes in contemporary popular music and culture. In this article, I examine mainstream press discourse about ‘Old Town Road’, finding that Lil Nas X's use of remixes to boost the song's popularity was generally seen as smart, while the racial politics of genre were contested but still
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Mainstream popular music research: a musical update Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-03-25 Bernhard Steinbrecher
This article reviews studies that examine internationally circulating music which has reached the upper echelon of all-genre single charts in the 21st century. The examinations will be used as examples for the analysis of sonic aesthetics that are embedded in a particular frame of cultural debate, which the article conceptualises as ‘mainstream popular music’. The research field is then mapped and
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Machines and music: instrumental contributions to bluegrass Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-03-25 Neil Newton
In the performance of bluegrass fiddle tunes, each repetition of the tune is generally played on a different instrument. I argue that the degree to which the instrument can influence the motivic material in improvised passages is beyond idiomaticism – where phrases might suit one instrument more than another – to the point where melodic pitch collections are shaped by the instrument itself. By combining
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Locating liveness in holographic performances: technological anxiety and participatory fandom at Vocaloid concerts Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Alyssa Michaud
This article addresses the growing global phenomenon of automated holographic concerts given by virtual pop stars called ‘Vocaloids’. Alternately acclaimed by music journalists as ‘the future of music’ and derided as ‘a robo-show, a concert simulacrum’, Vocaloid concerts across the past 10 years have sparked feelings of anxiety and prompted debate about the loss of human interaction at pre-programmed
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The remembered future: Macedonian pop icon Toše Proeski and musical life after death Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-03-16 Dave Wilson
When an iconic pop star dies, agency regarding that artist's persona and work is distributed in ways that transform the artist's significance and reveal much about the societies in which the artist participated. This article examines Macedonian pop singer Toše Proeski, an iconic star celebrated throughout former Yugoslavia who died in 2007 at age 26. For Macedonians and people throughout former Yugoslavia
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Robert Johnson and spectral timbre: what we hear, what we construct Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-03-04 Julia Simon
The myth of the deal with the devil at the crossroads frames the reception of Robert Johnson's corpus, particularly lyrics that directly or indirectly reference otherworldly forces. Setting aside the myth, I analyse the uncanny sonic qualities in his performances that evoke a spectral presence. A close examination of vocal and guitar timbre that considers harmonic resonance, chimera effect and other
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‘Daddy-callin’ Mamas’ and ‘Jelly Beans’: sex work and ribaldry in the blues archive Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-02-07 Bruce Curtis
I present a thematic overview of sex work and ribaldry in recorded blues songs for the period c.1920–1942. My ambition is primarily documentary, to take up Paul Oliver's insistence that discussion of the blues must ultimately revolve around its ‘libidinous hub’ and to concretise Abbott and Seroff's characterisation of blues as ‘unabashedly licentious a music form as America has ever produced’. Ribald
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In Concert: Performing Musical Persona. By Philip Auslander. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2021. 293 pp. ISBN 9780472054718. Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Pascal Rudolph
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Pop Music, Technology, and the Changing Media Ecosystem: From Cassettes to Stream. Edited by Tamás Tófalvy and Emília Barna. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 2020. 257 pp. ISBN 978-3-030-44658-1 - Made in Hungary: Studies in Popular Music. Edited by Emília Barna and Tamás Tófalvy. London: Routledge. 2017. 192 pp. ISBN 978-1-138-91587 Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Barbara Rose Lange
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The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight. By Peter C. Zimmerman. The University Press of Mississippi, 2021. 324 pp. ISBN: 9781496832221 Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Alexander Gagatsis
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‘Something else is possible’: transcultural collaboration as anti-apartheid activism in the music of Juluka Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-01-21 Caleb Mutch
This article illuminates the musical activism of Juluka, an interracial South African band active in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s. Its analyses of three songs focus on intersections between Western popular music and a Zulu song genre called maskanda. By examining these cross-cultural interactions in the domains of harmonic progressions, formal structures and metric and rhythmic organisation
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‘Viva Malta’: national unity, loyalty and the familiar in a post-independence Maltese song Popular Music Pub Date : 2022-01-12 Philip Ciantar, Renè Mamo
In the years following its independence from Britain in 1964, Malta experienced several changes socially, politically, economically and culturally. In part, these arose from the fact that after independence Malta, as a small Mediterranean island-country, had to take full control of its own destiny, including its economy and politics. At approximately the same time a band called The Malta Bums was set
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