When the Brazilian Antônio Carlos (Tom) Jobim died in December 1994, twentieth-century Western music lost one of its greatest popular songwriters. That may be a contentious assertion, and one open to endless debate, if his work is to be judged against that of the other major composers of the age on purely aesthetic grounds. It is indisputable, though, if the criteria are Jobim's role as a founder and leading songwriter of the bossa nova movement, given the influence of that tradition within Brazil and beyond, and as Latin America's most successful musical export (Treece 1992).

In this article I hope to take on some questions of meaning in a rock vocal performance, examining Patti Smith's reworked version of Van Morrison's garage band standard ‘Gloria’. By looking particularly at Smith's textual accretions and timbral manipulation, I will demonstrate some of the ways that her performance can be thought of as an intertextual, critical recasting of Morrison's tale of male sexual conquest. Smith's ‘Gloria’ differs from Morrison's not only in its altered lyric text, but also in a number of musical details which include harmonic structure, melodic range and form. In this article, though, I devote the most attention to Smith's timbral manipulation, especially the ways that she alters her pronunciation of words for expressive ends. In order to examine this in detail, I have developed a system of notation that tracks Smith's sung vowel sounds alongside her use of pitch. Some of the sonic details so revealed will be used to construct a meta-narrative of Smith's ‘Gloria’ performance.

This article focuses on the issue of meanings in ‘world music’ practices. The main questions addressed are how such musical cultures take on meanings, and what meanings are constructed by such cultures. As Deborah Pacini has indicated, the term ‘world music’ in this case does not refer to a musical genre. It is used, rather, ‘[as] a marketing term describing the products of musical cross-fertilisation between the north – the US and Western Europe – and south – primarily Africa and the Caribbean Basin, which began appearing on the popular music landscape in the early 1980s’ (1993, p. 48). From 1985, the expanding ‘world music’ umbrella has come to include practically any musics of cultures of non-European origin.

We all know the foreigner who survives with a tearful face turned towards the lost homeland. Melancholy lover of a vanished space, he cannot, in face, get over his having abandoned a period of time. The lost paradise is a mirage of the past that he will never be able to recover. (Kristeva 1991, p. 9)

Punk's widely accepted status as a watershed in British music-making has produced some fine academic and journalistic studies. Greil Marcus has devoted much of the last twenty years to an assessment of the legacy of punk rock (Marcus 1989, 1993). Dave Laing's One Chord Wonders provides a multi-layered approach which might serve as a model for any analysis of a particular musical–cultural moment (Laing 1985). The most detailed and thorough account is Jon Savage's England's Dreaming (1991), a paean to the mischievous self-consciousness of punk and a sly put-down of its earnest political wing. Yet there are some important gaps in this literature. Only Laing (1985, pp. 14–21) has addressed the institutional and economic effects of punk in any detail, but his account ends, like that of Savage, with the incorporation of punk imagery and sounds into the mainstream of British cultural life at the end of the 1970s. The symbolic death of punk is marked by the election of Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister in May 1979. Marcus traces the underground simmering of punk in 1980s America, and his vision of post-punk as a lasting source of vitality and rebellion in an increasingly conformist culture is a compelling one. But he is drawn primarily to the situationist and dadaist elements of punk politics. As in Savage (1991), lasting institutional repercussions are sidelined in favour of an exploration of punk's cultural impact. What follows, then, is an assessment of punk's significance as a long-term intervention in the British music industry. This means tracing the development and mutation of punk initiatives into the 1980s–long after its supposed incorporation.

Serious students of popular music and song are rightly curious about the workings of the music business; but when we try to find out about how the industry works, even in terms of economics, we find that virtually all the empirical data comes from internal sources, from the International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI), or from affiliates such as the British Phonographic Industries (BPI) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). In other words, we get only those statistics and ‘facts’ which this most secretive of industries wishes us to have; so we will look in vain for detailed production figures, or for sales of individual recordings (unless they are outstandingly successful), or for hard numbers relating to what IFPI calls ‘piracy’ (let alone the information on which the published numbers and projections are based). Similarly, from the individual company accounts of Sony, EMI or BMG, we may find numbers relating to pension and investment funds, but we will never find the real profits or losses of any company, let alone the rate of exploitation of any artist (or manufacturing or distributive worker); and in any case it is well-known that the published ‘bottom-line’ on a balance sheet is, at best, an informed opinion.

The album Diamonds and Pearls had recently been released when I started working on this study of Prince's music. It had not, therefore, obtained the many layers of personal history which enveloped the earlier albums by Prince in my collection. In addition, it seemed to me an absolutely contemporary record: an exemplary sign of the times which would be able to say something in general about our time. But my initial question was simply: what characterises Prince's music?

In recent years, historians have belatedly recognised the growth of the British brass band as one of the most remarkable developments in the sphere of popular music-making in the second half of the nineteenth century. Not only did ‘banding’ provide an absorbing pastime for tens of thousands of amateur musicians, but brass band performances also fulfilled an important cultural and educational role in introducing the standard classics of the bourgeois musical canon to mass audiences who never saw the inside of an opera house or a concert hall. In addition, satisfying the needs of these new-style bands for music, instruments, uniforms and other impedimenta led to the growth of a group of small, specialised and resourceful enterprises which successfully developed a mass market for their wares in Britain and the colonies. By the end of the 1890s, there could have been few towns or villages, whether in the remoter parts of the British Isles or even the most far flung corners of the white dominions, where some kind of brass band did not add its distinctive tones to the annual cycle of formal and informal events which made up their community's social calendar.

Music video has become an increasingly integral component of the music recording business over the past three decades. Major US record companies with international divisions have made music clips since the 1970s to promote their acts in the UK and continental Europe where television shows were a more important form of promotion for recording artists. However, record labels did not make a full commitment to music clips until after the premiere of MTV in August 1981 as a 24-hour US cable programme service presenting an endless stream of music videos. As MTV's popularity blossomed in the early 1980s, music video revitalised a troubled record industry suffering a prolonged recession by prompting renewed consumer interest in pop music and successfully developing several new recording acts like Madonna, Cyndi Lauper and Boy George with provocative visual images.

Although much has been written about the changes wrought to art in the age of mechanical reproduction, these same changes as they have impacted on music through the phenomenon of the phonograph have not received equivalent attention or, if they have, then their discussion has been restricted to particular sectors of the music industry. This failure to address an important facet of contemporary music practice derives from a continuing tendency to abstract musical questions from their context and to obscure the material contributions that technology makes to such practice (Shepherd 1977, 1991; Scott 1990). With some musics this is more apparent than others. For instance, while there has been an extensive analysis of the degree to which the recording industry has influenced and been an integral element in the development of popular music, there has not been an equivalent analysis of its influence on classical music. This is because in the case of the former the links between the two have been somewhat more dramatic. The recording industry, particularly through its links with radio and television stations, has in large measure facilitated the spread of popular music across the world as a dominant element of a globalised culture, as one of its master codes.

This morning I unintentionally stumbled across the annual Cherry Blossom Parade in Washington, DC. It was probaly little different than any other American public parade, full of decorated floats and oversized balloons interspersed between uniformed marching bands from high schools all over the country. What caught my attention was the ‘foreign’ element in the parade – three groups that represented Japan, land of the cherry blossom. Two of these groups were local martial arts associations: one representing the Ryuku Islands, the other, Okinawa. The men and women of both contingents, obviously multiethnic, were dressed alike in stereotypical Japanese martial arts costumes (complete with coloured headbands). Participants paused every few steps to demonstrate kicks and poses, then proceeded on to the sound of traditional Japanese music played through loudspeakers. The third group was the official Japanese delegation, flown over especially for the parade. I'm not sure what I expected – perhaps a float of graceful kimono-clad Japanese women waving cherry blossom branches to the ethereal sound of the shakuhachi. Instead, to my surprise our ears were assailed by a familiar John Philip Sousa march played with gusto by a Japanese high school band. The only difference between this band and its American counterparts was that the musicians did not wear unisex military uniforms: all wore fuchsia pink school blazers, with long white pants for the boys and short white skirts for the girls (Sarkissian 1994).

In this article I want to consider the importance of the pub rock scene as a resource for the consumption of popular music. Considering its role as one of the primary sites for the production and consumption of live music, very little has been written about pub rock. Moreover, in those studies that have made reference to pub rock, emphasis has often been placed upon its role as a training ground for musicians and songwriters (see, for example, Laing 1985, p. 8), or as a stepping stone to full-time professional music-making rather than ‘a locally expressed and tangible manifestation of music in its own right’ (Finnegan 1989, p. 235). Indeed, if only a few published works exist on the production of pub rock then there are, to the best of my knowledge, no studies devoted to pub rock audiences. What I want to do here is to begin redressing this imbalance. I will focus upon two specific examples of pub rock audiences and thus hope to demonstrate that the production of pub rock is inextricably linked to the localised patterns of consumption that inform its reception, and that the significance which an audience attaches to a particular pub rock event is an essential, if not the essential, aspect of that event. The first audience study presented here is drawn from my experience of working as a part-time musician in a pub rock band. The second study, which pursues a slightly different line of enquiry to the first, is based upon fieldwork material that I am currently collecting as part of my doctoral studies at Durham University.

For a mid-twentieth century historian of the music hall, blackface minstrelsy was the ‘oddest form of entertainment imaginable’. He found it ‘incomprehensible’ why people during the Victorian period had delighted in the ‘extraordinary spectacle of the apparently sane white man blacking his face and hands with burnt cork, painting his lips and eyes to resemble those of an African nigger, and then, to complete the incongruity, attiring himself in English evening dress while he sang ditties allegedly emanating from the cotton plantations of Ole Virginny!’ (Felstead 1946, p. 55). There are a number of things to be said about this evaluation, the first being that its severe disparagement of one of the most popular cultural forms of the Victorian period in Britain was, during that period, exceptionally rare. Indeed, the lack of criticism attests to its enduring popularity. From their first wave of success in the late 1830s and early 1840s, minstrel acts, troupes and shows figured as a staple item of the popular stage throughout the remaining decades of the century. What began with its early boom in the second quarter of the century continued to prove attractive to successive generations across all social classes, and among men and women of the large urban centres, provincial towns and outlying rural areas alike.

The subject of his article reflects what Robert Crawford has called ‘a growing wariness of notions of an essentialist Scotland’ (1994, p. 57). The article has been written partly as a contribution to the critique of ‘essentialist’ notions of national identity in gerneral and ‘Scottishness’ in particular. I share the concern of Stuart Hall (1990; 1995) and others (Massey 1991; Rose 1995) to challenge ideas which reproduce notions of the ‘boundedness’ or ‘purity’ of territorial and national identities; whilst recognising that such identities are, by definition, only likely to change slowly (Therborn 1995). My approach to the analysis of national identity is to try to follow the ‘social construction of reality’ thinking which informs much current writing on the relationships between ethnicity, place and identity (Jackson and Penrose 1993). From that point of view, regarding Scottish national cultural identity in the late twentieth century,