In recent years, pop/rock has ceased being an exclusive Anglo-American phenomenon. Local styles of rock might be found today in many countries, styles which merge local traditions with the rock aesthetic. Some products of these styles are distributed successfully in the USA and Britain under the large title of ‘ethnic pop’ (sometimes ‘world music’). The work on the emergence of these local styles tends to stress their ‘authenticity’ in one way or another: in the way they reflect political resistance, in the way they express cultural change (Szemere 1983; Fiori 1984; Vila 1987; Duran 1989; Siriyuvasak 1990; Bright 1986; Manuel 1988; Frith 1989). In addition, much of the work tends to be descriptive – there are hardly any attempts to theorise the emergence of pop/rock and its becoming ‘local authentic’ music. One salient exception is the work of Wallis and Malm (1984). They describe a two-way flow of musical elements, in which local or national music cultures both contribute to and pick up from an emerging body of music which they call transcultural. Anglo-American pop/rock is the nucleus of transcultural music. The simultaneous convergence of its influence, of access to music industry technologies, of local music culture and of the will to create something different explains, according to Wallis and Malm, the first stage of transculturation in the countries they studied.

The biographies of most stars work on the misconception that a performer's true, private self can be discretely separated from the meaning of their public image. Whether it is a serious study of a major artist or a trashy exposé of a behind-the-scenes scandal, the organisational logic is usually the same: the writer assumes that since a media image is a false representation of an actual person, digging deep into the background and lifestyle of any star can only help to reveal something of what that person is ‘really’ like.

Chuck Berry recorded ‘Johnny B. Goode’ in December 1957 and it has since become one of his best-known songs. The reasons for its lasting popularity are varied, and one of the goals of this article is to elucidate and discuss them. But the main purpose is to raise ‘Johnny B. Goode’ as an example of the choices and problems Berry faced in his career as an African-American musician in the 1950s and 60s and the ways he dealt with them in this tune.

Blues music is relatively well recognised as a cultural phenomenon. In tracing its history, both as a reflection of one people's particular circumstances of oppression and as an ingredient taken into mainstream popular art, we accumulate reasons for thinking of it as important. But these are external reasons. It is possible to know that one's everyday milieu is heavily indebted to blues (in manners as well as in music), even to feel blues quality strongly, and yet not be able to articulate an understanding of the import of blues. In that case one is kept from thinking well about how the meaning of blues in, say, the life of an early twentieth-century black Mississippian relates to the meaning of blues in other sorts of life, including yours and mine today – which is precisely the inside of the cultural phenomenon of blues. To get over this hump we need to pay a kind of attention that blues rarely receives.

Is country music for real? This question haunts country's detractors, critics, fans and analysts, as it haunts all students of popular culture. Country music is only an extreme example of the instability, contradiction and ironic reflexivity characteristic of popular cultural forms in general in postmodern, capitalist society. It seems impossible to locate an ‘authentic’ country music text, performance or context, one which represents the ‘real’ life of a ‘real’ community without alienated nostalgia, false consciousness or kitschy commodification. On the other hand, country remains more overtly loyal to the experience, desires and language of a particular class and culture than almost any other major popular musical genre. A unique, if elusive core of ‘authenticity’ tantalises country's supporters and infuriates its critics, but attempts to separate the true from the false in country music, whether at the level of text, context or performance, are bound to fail. Country resists all such attempts; it incorporates and combines the true and the false into a poetic which is explicitly deconstructive of the ideology which these categories encode.

There are two seemingly self-evident truths concerning the harmonic practices of popular music. The first, which finds clear expression in Adorno, is that such music's harmonic language is both detrimentally limited and static. The harmonic repertoire is considered to consist of a few formulae (Adorno deals with them in terms of standardisation: see Middleton 1990, p. 45ff.), by means of which song-writers string together their songs, uninfluenced by the song's content. For the expert listener, therefore, popular music should be uninteresting: it is only its psycho-economic dimension which makes it worthy of study. This tends also to be the conclusion of established musicology, except that there it is felt such ‘extra-musical’ speculation is best left to the sociologist. The second truth is that the differences between Afro-American-derived styles are material, since our identities are so strongly incorporated in the styles we use:

We mark out the differences between genres and styles partly by reference to contrasts in the way this stock of techniques and sounds is used. (Middleton 1990, p. 88)

Since harmony is not only at the forefront of traditional analytical investigation, but also forms an important initial focus for songwriters, it may well be assumed that it is therefore an important factor in enabling us to distinguish, for example, ‘rock’ from ‘pop’ from ‘soul’. However, the material reality behind these differences of style has rarely been subject to systematic investigation.