For some reason, the working lives of music makers are not often given the attention in popular music studies which might be expected. The launch of the UK Year of the Artist – celebrating the role of artists in society – immediately before the 2000 conference of the UK branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), meant that it was especially timely, then, for the IASPM event to address this state of affairs. The conference, The Popular Musician: Performance, Poetics, Power, was held at the University of Surrey, 7–9 July 2000, and took as its central theme the position of musicians – in the music industry, in relation to fans and audiences and in the media, politics and society.

Common knowledge has it that Elvis Presley stood for sexual liberation – because his gyrations caused the first controversy, he liberated Western culture from the curse of sexual repression. Beyond the female fans that play a role in that image, Elvis has a vast number of male followers. With more than 20,000 members, the Official Elvis Presley Fan Club of Great Britain (OEPFC) is the largest fan club in the world. According to the president, half the members are male (Slaughter 1996, p. 1). This means that thousands of male fans are dedicated enough to stay in one organisation. Over 400 smaller clubs remain active, so Elvis still has thousands of male devotees. What can be said about how these fans relate to their idol? More fundamentally, what are the most suitable research methods, ideas and approaches to use when answering that question?

There’s no doubt about it. A Conference with a single theme is amazingly comforting. If the theme is centred on a group as well known as the Beatles, then it is doubly so. ‘Journalistic texts on popular music are often disposed towards music which they themselves like and would listen to by choice (often thinly veiling race and gender prejudice). This is characterised by their attraction to a certain type of more subversive-seeming, more lyrically and structurally complex music.’ ‘You want a piece of music to encapsulate the period it was written in, and Sgt. Pepper does seem to do that.’ `It was a decisive moment in the history of Western Civilisation.’ Although these somewhat eulogistic reflections were written in the early 1970s, the attraction to the Beatles has continued unabated. Richard Lloyd Perry, writing in The Independent on Sunday, 21 February 1999, observed: ‘Ironically, given their reputation at the time as slurring Scousers, the Beatles are honoured as custodians of linguistic clarity - an observation echoed in many of the papers presented at the Conference.

The most recent of the informal Critical Musicology study days focused on the concept of authenticity in popular music. The day consisted of seven short papers on this subject and was followed by a group discussion of issues raised by these papers.

In his opening paper, ‘ “We stripped it apart like a car and put it back together totally again”: music's authenticity-speak in the age of digital technology, c.1985’, Dai Griffiths (Oxford Brookes University) was keen to draw attention to the way that sampling technology had been interpreted, both in terms of practice and of discursive context, as a marker of identity. His historical framework made reference to earlier practices of cover and intertextual reference from the early 1960s onwards. Referring to A Tribe Called Quest and Beck, even with samples, it looked as though racial authenticity was still at issue. The role of sampling in the rendering of authenticity was also considered by Rupert Till (University College, Bretton Hall) in his paper ‘Club cultures and authenticity’. Making reference to hip-hop and dance music, he suggested that there are different authenticities for different kinds of popular music. Drawing on Sarah Thornton's (1995) study of club culture in which the underground is considered authentic and the commercial, inauthentic, Till gave examples of some of the alternative means by which it is considered possible to be financially successful and yet retain an aura of authenticity.

The sky is the limit

We rising, we rising, we woman rising,

(Easlyn Orr, cited in Ottley 1992, p. 154)

In February 1999, two women of Afro-Caribbean ancestry won their respective societies' highest musical honours. On 14 February, Singing Sandra was crowned Trinidad-Tobago's Calypso Monarch 1999 – the second woman ever to win this coveted title, a full twenty-one years after the country's first woman calypso monarch, Calypso Rose. Two weeks later in the USA, Lauryn Hill received five Grammy awards, the most in any single year for a female performer or a hip-hop artist. This trend continues in Great Britain, where ‘rude girl’ DJ Patra has a growing posse of fans, and in West Africa where the pop music stylings of Benin's Angelique Kidjo and Mali's Oumou Sangaré enjoy mass followings.

Thanks to the generous support of the Municipality of Bogota, the Academia Superior de Artes of Bogota and the Colombian Ministry of Culture, IASPM held its Third Latin American Conference under excellent technical and organisational conditions. Almost seventy papers and plenaries were presented and debated in the Luis Angel Arango Library in Bogota between 23 and 27 August 2000. Scholars took part from Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Canada, the US, the UK, Switzerland and Spain.

This is the place

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

streams black, the merman in his armoured body

We circle silently

about the wreck

we dive into the hold

I am she: I am he ...

(‘Diving into the Wreck’: Rich 1973, p. 24)

Were Adrienne Rich to dive again today into the wreck – of history, of collective memory, of identity – she might be surprised to find Polly Jean Harvey already there, feasting in the depths on plots and symbols, greedily stuffing her storytelling sack. Like Rich, with her dual-sexed narrator (‘I am she: I am he’), Harvey enjoys playing at multiple selves, and in doing so, she tells stories that are fuelled equally by the fires of female and male, hetero- and homosexual desire. In the final stanza of her celebrated poem, Rich creates another memorable conundrum of syntax: ‘We are, I am, you are/by cowardice or courage/the one who find our way/back to this scene’ (Rich 1973, p. 24). With her suggestive pronoun games, Rich calls for a uniting of forces in the excavation of a troubled past. This seems to be Harvey's conviction as well. Hers is a musical dramatic stage upon which multiple characters, in combined voices and disparate musical styles, act out disorienting and sometimes disturbing tales of identity, sexuality and power.

In the intense disciplinary upheavals of the last fifteen years or so within music scholarship, music analysis has been one of the most contentious areas of debate The sense of conflict arises from a confluence of factors: all music scholars who wish to describe the details of musical style must employ some form of music analysis, yet the very strengths of music-analytical practice Ð its ability to describe musical events with precision, its ability to explain details of musical style and demonstrate structural interrelationships Ð are couched in a technical meta-language that seems resistant to socio-cultural analysis, an area of particular interest for those involved in the self-critique of the field. Concurrent with the apearance of what are probably the best-known denouncements of analysis as formalist and tautological by Joseph Kerman in the early to mid-1980s, musicologists who were sympathetic to aspects of KermanÕs critique explored ways to harmonise the description and analysis of musical details with methods of analysis derived from different aspects of cultural theory. Many of the scholars seeking new applications for music analysis also pursued the related project of understanding the socio-historical context for music analysis itself and of unpacking the aesthetic values couched within the apparently neutral practice of analysis.

The aim of this annual Popular Music bibliography is to provide a record of recent books on popular music and to offer brief, sometimes critical guidance to them whenever possible. Coverage is restricted to books and some booklets (with the exception of important yearbooks and some special issues of journals), and includes revised editions as well as notable reissues. Omitted are translations of books previously published in English except those which include some significant additions.

This edition contains entries for books published in 2000, plus a few items published in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999, information on which was not available when the lists for Popular Music 16/3, 17/3, 18/3 and 19/3 were compiled.

To a fundamental list of British, American and Japanese titles that I compiled were incorporated an extensive list of American books by B. Lee Cooper, a comprehensive list of books in German by Bernhard Hefele and a sizable list of books in French by Christophe Pirenne. Dave Laing, the coordinating editor of the journal, contributed another sizable list of mainly British and American books as well as correcting a preliminary list.

Contributions on books in other languages, especially Spanish, are welcome.

The Editors wish to apologise that the review of the Beatles 2000 conference (in Popular Music 20/1) inadvertently appeared without the author's name. The author was Sheila Whiteley of the University of Salford.