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)

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.

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.

‘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 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).

I have attempted to contribute to debates about the body and music through a discussion of how the performance of salsa constructs a particular sense of Latin identity through the bodies of musicians. The embodiment of salsa is proposed as a way of theorising about how body and music are articulated to communicate a particular Latin cultural identity. In considering the relationship between body and music, I have stressed the cultural construction of bodies in the sense in which bodies are not neutral biological essences.

Salsa clubs in London have provided a focus for studying the construction of Latin identities as embodied and communicated by performing salsa musicians and how this is informed by specific codes of gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Throughout this essay I have argued that the embodiment of salsa develops through specific practices whereby instruments, performance techniques, vocal sounds, bodily movements and ways of dressing are encoded and experienced as part of a particular Latin identity.

I also explained how the existence of essentialist beliefs about a natural Latin body and musical abilities, although a constraint, were challenged by musicians who are making ‘Latin’ music. First, by the involvement of non-Latin musicians in playing salsa, whose practices challenged assumptions about a ‘natural’ relationship between bodies, places and music. Second, through the participation of Latin American musicians and the new styles developing from the interaction between musicians and from having to adapt to different local circumstances. Finally, I mentioned how technological devices, sometimes used to solve practical economic problems, were contributing to the re-making of a Latin music performance and identity in London. I also indicated how the use of both Spanish and English language and the involvement of women in salsa music making were also contributing to a type of salsa and Latin performance.

However, whilst musicians have been challenging the idea of essential links between ethnicity, bodies and instruments, the practices through which salsa is embodied have continued to present limitations and expectations for women according to their sexed bodies. Particular expectations about the practices of gender and sexuality became an issue for women in relation to body movements, the use of the voice and instrumental performance. In this paper, focusing on the performance and participation of musicians in the micro setting of a club, I have suggested that women's place in salsa clubs has to be negotiated in relation to what is expected from sexed bodies. This leads me to conclude that unequal relations of power are directly experienced and embodied through gender relations and practices of sexuality and in turn operate as a micro politics of the body.

The analysis presented in this paper is one result of my interest in embodiment, and its potential role in the semiotic analysis of popular music. In cultural studies and symbolic anthropology, theorists often read the body as a carrier of codes, a surface for the inscription and negotiation of meaning. In popular music studies, this viewpoint often appears in fairly simple ways, and it also sometimes appears in a more subtle fashion. Richard Middleton, for example, considers the body both as a code-bearing surface, and as the ground for musical feeling, exploring how embodied experiences generate and interact with other levels of code (Middleton 1990, 1993). Similar things are done by Frith (1996), Walser (1993), Brackett 1995), and others.