The globalisation of reggae continues to engender a wide range of highly poignant re-inscriptions and re-interpretations of reggae's sound and of Rastafarian thought. One of the most compelling of these has been the negotiation of Rastafarian and Christian ideologies within the context of Protestant reggae bands and artists. The application of Rastafarian thought, dress and language to the evangelical concerns of Protestants – at times paradoxical, at others ingenious – signals an important moment of inter-religious contact that opens a window onto the complexities and multiple meanings that attach to music and to religious systems as they travel between the local and the global. This essay considers music by Christafari (United States), Sherwin Gardner (Trinidad and Tobago), and Stitchie (Jamaica), and considers questions related to the parallel globalisation of reggae and Rastafari. It does this by interrogating the extent to which authenticity, positionality, and religious context inform the use of and interpretation of Rastafari symbols within gospel reggae. In so doing, I introduce a concept that I call the negotiation of proximity, and offer some reflections on the ways that the Rastafari elements within gospel reggae might be understood in new, global (and newly localised) contexts.

In this article I shall attempt to demonstrate the application of an ideology-critical framework designed to give a comprehensive and differentiated account of textual ‘contradictions’ and ‘tensions’ in symbolic forms. Based on Johann Visagie's figurative semiotics of ideological discourse, this theoretical schema is demonstrated via an extensive analysis of the gospel rap video wrapped up by the African-American group Dawkins & Dawkins. As a metaphorically mediated enactment of contemporary-religious meaning, this instance of gospel rap is analysed as a forthright yet complex example of structural ambiguity. Allowing for a detailed reading of the semiotic layering surrounding and infiltrating all dimensions of this text, my interpretation problematises its reading as an uncomplicated, commercialised excursion into the pleasures of an embodied, danced religion. In both ‘highlighting’ and ‘hiding’ the layers of cultural meaning built into the metaphor of danced religion, wrapped up celebrates black religious identity without distancing it from underlying ideological formations associated with collective suffering and social injustice.

This paper offers a case history of the BBC's ambivalent engagement with dance music during the Second World War. It examines what ‘dance music’ meant to the BBC, musicians, and the public, and how they contested and performed those meanings in the context of new social dance practices and the growing popularity of what became known as ‘swing’ in Britain. Although broadcasting in effect disembodied music closely associated with the physical, the BBC was a primary way for people to access dance music which supported their bodily acts of leisure and regimentation. The BBC's study and regulation of dance music centred around two goals: pleasing important groups in national service and broadcasting morale-boosting music. The problem of whether these goals were congruent lay at the heart of the issue, for the youth active in national service emerged as the primary audience for the two genres – ‘swing’ and ‘sentimentality’ – about which the BBC felt most dubious.

This paper is a study of prestige and boundaries in Quebec French-language popular music. Based on interviews with artists, producers and critics conducted in the early 1990s, I argue that popular music in Quebec at that time remained divided along a symbolic boundary established in the 1960s between a highly prestigious group of songwriters/rock artists, who wrote and sang their own material, and a less prestigious group of interpreters/artistes populaires, who sang light pop songs or songs written by others. As predicted by Bourdieu, I show that artists in the most prestigious category were associated with privileged social groups and gained material and symbolic advantages from their prestige. They are more likely to receive honorific awards, to be invited to perform at special cultural events, to see their work recognised as ‘important’, and to persist over time. In opposition to Bourdieu, however, I argue that in the context of emerging nationalism, their songs were also perceived as providing collective benefits over and beyond class and gender divisions.

This article looks at audiocassette tapes that are produced and circulated within the Bay Area underground hip hop scene as subcultural artefacts through which an understanding of the key activities, ideologies and sensibilities that mark subcultural identity can be grasped. Using du Gay's circuit of culture (1997) as a template for organising ethnographic data, the article demonstrates the ways in which subcultural meanings are encoded into the activities surrounding the commodification of underground hip hop cassettes. Ultimately, it argues for a reading of audiocassette tapes as unique technologies that simultaneously embrace the progressive politics of subcultural inclusion while defending subcultural boundaries against mainstream co-optation.

The Northern Soul scene is a dance-based music culture that originated in the English North and Midlands in the early 1970s. It still thrives today with a mix of forty-year-olds and new converts, and its celebration of 1960s' soul has an international following. Centred on the detail of the dance techniques, and musical and cultural context, the analysis presented here is developed from an ethnographic study. It uses a concept of competence and the example of a classic record to explore the meanings of dance for the scene's participants. The importance of solidarity, senses of identity through gender, place and ethnicity, and the relationship of the scene with African–American culture are explored. The study draws conclusions about the way that dance can be theorised and analysed, and argues that a full analysis requires an exploration of the relationship of physical movement to space, music and senses of identity.

The electromagnetic recording system came to Brazil in 1927 – just about two years or so after its establishment in Europe and the United States. With its higher technical specificities and capabilities, the electromagnetic system provided an opportunity for high-pitch and low-voice interpreters of song to be recorded. It seems likely that these artists would not have been recorded at that time had the mechanical system still been in vogue. At least in Brazil, this was the ‘revolution’ associated with the electromagnetic recording system: a new artistic generation emerged from the poor and middle-class inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro – then Brazil's capital city – to help produce what most prominent popular music critics and historians dub the ‘Golden Age’ in Brazilian popular music (see, for instance, Vasconcellos 1974; Tinhorão 1981; Cabral 1996). In my view, this Golden Age coincides with and is tantamount to the inception of a field of cultural and artistic production of popular music. Despite an obvious contrast in proportion and impact, there are nevertheless clear sociological similarities between this decisive moment in the history of Brazilian popular music and those moments Bourdieu (1993) describes in nineteenth-century French literature, theatre and impressionist painting.

Some ten years ago, a group of graduate students in South Korea started reading ‘canons’ of popular music studies, such as those by Simon Frith, Iain Chambers, Keith Negus, Tony Mitchell, and Roy Shuker, among others. No formal discipline, be it music, communication, sociology or economics, embraced the group with open arms. Its members did not even know of the existence of IASPM until a few years later. Being ‘local’ without global connection, at the margins of academia in the periphery of Anglo-American cultural/intellectual centres, was an uneasy position to say the least.

If Brazilian and international audiences now have a far broader view of the range of the musical tradition in Brazil, and particularly the heterogeneous richness of the regional tradition of popular music in that country, it is largely due to the pioneering work of Marcus Pereira. Following the example of Cecil Sharp and Alan Lomax, the Brazilian collector of popular music and culture set out in the mid 1970s to independently produce a series of recordings of regional popular music entitled Música Popular do Brasil. This huge project is important for three main reasons. First, in a climate of uncompromising political and artistic censorship, Pereira attempted to bring to the fore elements of a cultural and political debate that had polarised Brazil in the early 1960s: a debate that was abruptly terminated by the military dictatorship that seized power in 1964. Second, Música Popular do Brasil demonstrates the beginning of an awareness of a new, more complex relationship between traditional, largely rural popular culture and the increasingly urbanised Brazilian society of the mid-1970s. Finally, at a time when popular music in Brazil was increasingly orientated towards influences emanating from abroad, Marcus Pereira dramatically bucked the trend and re-introduced the Brazilian public to aspects of the regional, rural tradition of popular music and culture that would have a huge influence in Brazilian popular music over the last three decades of the twentieth century.

Rap and ragga musics have found a place on the musical landscape of Malawi over the last decade, exemplified in a nation-wide scene characterised by competitions. Recordings and associated materials of rap and ragga that inform Malawian youth interpretations tend to emphasise male participation and masculine symbols. Competitions are male-dominated in their organisational structure and participatory roles. Though the articulated focus of these events is the musical component, movement practices are at the core of the scene, comprising part of contestants' performances and the more informal activities of spectators. Female involvement as dancers is much greater than as music-makers, making attention to dance crucial for understanding gender dynamics. Our exploration of intersections between dance, music, gender and class provides insight into the reasons for and implications of male dominance in this popular music/dance scene.

I first met Gerard in 1975 in Örebro (Sweden) at the Nordic Piano Teachers' annual conference and workshops. Both of us were like fish out of water in discussions about the best fingering techniques to use in Beethoven sonatas. I had been asked to talk about popular music education and Gerard was on the lookout for fresh ideas for his art college in Lelystad. ‘I didn’t have a clue what you were actually saying' (in Swedish), he told me, ‘but it seemed to make sense’. What Gerard said he was trying to achieve in his college made perfect sense to me. He was determined to democratise music (and media) education: he wanted to right the wrong that consisted of excluding the music of the popular majority from officially sanctioned institutions of education and research. I had found a good friend and powerful ally. We kept contact from that time until very recently.

For the readers of Popular Music, the name of Toru Mitsui is associated with the ‘Booklist’, a column he was in charge of from 1989 to 2002. For many members of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the meeting he organised in Kanazawa in 1997 is unforgettable. For scholars and students interested in Japanese popular music, his numerous articles in English are the first references to be read. Last March (2005) Professor Mitsui retired from Kanazawa University, where he had taught since 1969. To commemorate his retirement, a Festschrift entitled Popular Music and Academia (2005b) was published in coordination with a symposium held at the University of Tokyo in May 2004. This is a good opportunity to look back over his prolific career in popular music studies.