Tanya Tagaq's work is political, often tackling themes of environmentalism and Indigenous rights. The Inuk throat singer uses live performance and audiovisual media to engage themes of climate change and give voice to environmental violence. Her work diversifies the discourse of environmentalism to include the voices and environmental trauma experienced by marginalised peoples, specifically North American Indigenous-centred sounds and perspectives. Songs such as ‘Fracking’ from Animism (2014) and ‘Nacreous’ from Retribution (2016) are simultaneously expressions of ecological protest and healing, as Tagaq listens with urgency and uses embodied musical practice to explore the aurality of pipeline politics and other forms of ecological imbalance and harm. I analyse how Tagaq's work, both her songs and their accompanying music videos and multimedia, gravitates towards the ecological, considering what healthy and unhealthy relationships between humans and the non-human world – plants, animals, water, natural resources – sound like.

This article traces how Tanzanian Bongo Flava hip hop has shifted from a politically conscious genre at the dawn of democratization and liberalization to its contemporary articulations, more commonly aligned with glamorous, geographically abstracted Western pop sensibilities. It argues that ‘swag’, as an intimately embodied and musically performed charisma, has served as a connective thread across political and economic transformations because of its capacity to generate phantasmatic deferrals to common experiences of dispossession. These fetishistic qualities mediate the attachments of artists and consumers within the splintering musical genre, holding open space to reach for a diversity of desired futures.

This article argues that contemporary systems theory explanations are insufficient when accounting for ‘in the moment’ creative musical performance. The system model's focus on a domain-changing contribution from an individual fails to offer a satisfactory account of the construction and assessment of the more everyday distributed and collaborative creativity undertaken by many popular music instrumentalists. A cultural psychology perspective, in contrast, situates distributed creativity inbetween people and objects rather than within them. Glăveanu's ‘Five As framework’ has particular utility in capturing the ordinary creativity that does not seek to change the domain but nevertheless contributes to it. The model is applied here to four case studies of expert instrumentalists that draw upon a combination of primary evidence, lived experience and original research.

This article explores relationships between the significant growth of foreign tourism to Iceland, following the 2008 economic crash, and the popular music festival Iceland Airwaves. I consider the effects of Iceland Airwaves on popular music in Reykjavík during the festival and outside of the festival season. My focus is primarily on how the local population experiences Iceland Airwaves and musical tourism in general. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Iceland between 2010 and 2018, I examine how musicians, politicians, festival management, tourism sector workers, business people, and other music industry workers approach and negotiate the rising role of popular music in Iceland's new tourism economy. This research contributes to broader understandings of how music festivals and musical tourism shape local musical life year-round, and it also offers insight into Iceland's internationally renowned popular music industry.

This article closely examines the song ‘The Rains of Castamere’, from the television series Game of Thrones (2011–19), to draw broader conclusions about how ‘medieval’ music manifests in contemporary popular culture and how music for television has become increasingly important in the last few decades. This article argues for the relevance of ‘The Rains of Castamere’ in popular music from three perspectives: first, as a musical adaptation of the ‘medieval’ world of 'folk’ music popularised in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels (1996–); second, as a song embedded in the rich tradition of modern ‘medieval’ music, which itself is a modern reconstruction influenced by cinematic and literary tropes; and lastly, as a track that exemplifies the influence of fan culture in both shaping and responding to popular medievalist music.

For more than two decades, a trend in popular music scholarship has been the publication every few years of an edited collection of analytical essays (e.g., Covach and Boone 1997; Moore 2003; Everett 2008). These multi-author volumes sometimes have a specific analytical concern, such as intertextuality (Burns and Lacasse 2018), but more typically they simply bring together a variety of essays written by a variety of authors using a variety of methods to analyse music from a variety of styles. Strategically, the editors of these volumes will pitch this lack of any strong unifying theme as an advantage, asserting that the broad range of approaches gives the reader a sense for the diversity of current perspectives (as in, for example, the preface to Spicer and Covach 2010 or the introduction to von Appen et al. 2015). To be fair, the exclusive focus on analysis, particularly close readings of the ‘text’ itself, makes the chapters of these collections hold together more than, say, the articles in any regular issue of Popular Music. However, with typically only a dozen or so contributions in each volume, these multi-author works often seem like scattershot glimpses into the vast universe of possible analytical approaches and musical styles.

Country music has been popular in Ireland since the 1960s, most notably in the work of homegrown performers. Despite the durability of this appeal in the face of huge changes in Ireland and in the Irish music industry over a half-century, it remains curiously underexamined in the literature on Irish popular music. In this paper, I wish to argue the following:

1. (1) Country music did not simply arise ‘naturally’ in Ireland as a reflection of musical or national characteristics: it was promoted as such.

2. (2) Both popular and academic literature on the subject have tended to unreflectively echo the narrative that was introduced alongside the music in order to fix its audience.

3. (3) In so doing, the literature reproduces a set of anxieties about modernity as it arrived in Ireland, about the postcolonial condition and about authenticity, even as it attempts to locate Irish popular music within these concerns.

The process of becoming a rock musician strongly relates to the organisational form of the band (Bennett 1980; Green 2002; Behr 2010). At all levels of ambition and success, membership of a band provides the musician with a natural entry point for performing to an audience and forging a potential career (Smith 2013a). The ‘micro-organisational’ (Bennett 2001) development of a band, therefore, is an important career prerequisite for rock musicians (Behr 2015). However, the social and practical challenges of musicianship seem to be continuously underemphasised within the field of popular music studies (Cohen 1993; Kirschner 1998; Lashua 2017; Weston 2017; Kielich 2018). Therefore, in this article I will focus on an aspiring rock band's informal learning processes in becoming a small business together. The study provides insights into the educational and organisational aspects of band practices and contributes to the fields of popular music, education and organisation studies – fields that are converging in the emerging interdisciplinary research area of ‘organising music-making’ (Beech and Gilmore 2015).

This article draws from a wider research project undertaken in 2018 in Armidale, a small regional city in New South Wales (NSW) Australia, to explore the challenges commercial venues face in presenting and maintaining a regular live music programme. An analysis of the main themes suggests that the issues regional venues encounter are often qualitatively and/or quantitatively different from those facing their urban counterparts. This research found that regulatory issues, such as licensing, planning and noise, were not considered major impediments to regularly hosting live music. Rather, finding and accessing affordable quality bands in the numbers and styles needed to keep audiences coming to gigs, and getting audiences to regularly attend and spend money in the numbers needed to sustain the gigs, were identified as ongoing difficulties. Although venues in larger metropolitan cities are often confronted with similar problems, these are not the sort of issues that stand out in the research in this area. Rather the regulatory environment is emphasised. By drawing attention to the non-regulatory challenges regional venues face, important new avenues of research are opened up that will benefit live music scenes across Australia.