During the 2010s a new generation of queer hip hop artists emerged, providing an opportunity to engage with a set of politics defined by art, fashion, lyrics and music. A leading proponent of this movement was Azealia Banks, the controversial rapper, artist and actress from New York. This study instigates a critical investigation of her performance strategies in the track and video, ‘Chasing Time’ (2014), offering up various perspectives that probe into queer agency. It is suggested that techniques of sonic styling necessitate a consideration of subjectivity alongside genre and style. Employing audiovisual methods of analysis, we reflect on the relationship between gendered subjectivity and modalities of queerness as a means for demonstrating how aesthetics are staged and aligned to advanced techniques of production. It is argued that the phenomenon of eroticised agency, through hyperembodied display, is central to understanding body politics. This article opens a space for problematising issues of black female subjectivity in a genre that is traditionally relegated to the male domain.

This article discusses an extraordinary body in popular music, that belonging to the person with anorexia which is also usually a gendered body – female – and that of the singer or frontperson. I explore the relation between the anorexic body and popular music, which is more than simply looking at constructions of anorexia in pop. It involves contextually thinking about the (medical) history and the critical reception and representation, the place of anorexia across the creative industries more widely, and a particular moment when pop played a role in the public awareness of anorexia. Following such context the article looks in more detail at a small number of popular music artists who had experience of anorexia, their stage and media presentations (of it), and how they did or apparently did not explore their experience of it in their own work and public appearances. This close discussion is framed within thinking about the popular music industry's capacity for carelessness, its schedule of pressure and practice of destruction on its own stars, particularly in this instance its female artists. This is an article about a condition and an industry. At its heart is the American singer and drummer Karen Carpenter (1950–1983), a major international pop star in the 1970s, in the Carpenters duo with her brother Richard; the other figures discussed are Scottish child pop star Lena Zavaroni (1963–1999), and the Welsh rock lyricist, stylist and erstwhile guitarist of the Manic Street Preachers, Richey Edwards (1967–1995 missing/2008 officially presumed dead).

This essay examines the work of singer-songwriter William Fitzsimmons as an example of how confessional performance is constructed within indie music. I contend that both audiences and artists participate in a discourse that draws on narratives of personal communication, intimacy and authenticity in order to create a distinctively confessional aesthetic. This aesthetic orientation is then reflected in performances that are framed as autobiographical and truth-telling. After surveying aspects of indie music that contribute to the formation of this aesthetic, I trace the implications of performed confession through an exploration of the sonic, visual and relational characteristics of Fitzsimmons's performances from his 2008 album The Sparrow and the Crow. By examining how artist and audience construct the confessional, I suggest a new perspective on how the confessional trope operates in indie music.

This article explores the case of a musician performing pro-Zapatista revolutionary songs in a restaurant in a city in southern Mexico which has undergone rapid gentrification since the turn of the century. It highlights the particular set of constraints on, and possibilities for, musical creativity that emerged in an urban setting in which space was increasingly ordered around the accumulation of rents. Exploring relationships between commercial strategy and musical detail, it examines tensions arising around the performance of a revolutionary body of song in such a setting. To conclude, and drawing on the recent work of Anna Tsing, it introduces the notion of musical ‘salvage’ to make sense of the relationship between protest and commerce. Recognizing the incompleteness of revolutionary songs’ translation into the rapidly gentrifying context of San Cristóbal, it is argued here, may help to underline performer agency and creativity.

Timbre is a key aspect of musical practice and aesthetics. Artists use instrumentation, vocal technique, and production technology to create precise tone colours; listeners are able to identify genres, artists and connotations through timbre. However, critical assessment of its ephemeral musical agency is scarce. This article develops a theory of timbre. Goth music, which privileges tone colour in production, performance, and aesthetic, is a case in point for the ungraspable agency of this musical parameter. Timbral analyses of two goth tracks, Veil of Light's ‘Cold skin’ and Sopor Aeternus and the Ensemble of Shadows's ‘Dreamland’, will assess tone colour's relation to identity and difference (Walser), signification and corporeality (Barthes, Ihde), and the surplus of meaning and embodiment (Dolar). The article will argue that timbral aesthetics are characterised by the paradox of present absence: it indicates corporeality and meaning but simultaneously exceeds both. Tangible but also disembodied, immersive but also meaningless, it is no wonder that goth exploits timbre's dark agency.

Using Swedish metal band Ghost as a primary case study, this article examines how anonymous bands mediate their identity through the use of masks. The isolation of the band members’ ‘real’ identities from their musical performance complicates traditional modes of ‘knowing’ the performer, but in turn enables the formation of a multitude of connectivities, as audiences utilise masked bodies as sites upon which to project their desires and fantasies. Such projections are integral to the ways in which masking allows performers to mobilise and sustain their connections to audiences, who themselves become complicit in the maintenance of anonymity. This article thus considers how masks might challenge established notions of popular music performance, celebrity and authenticity, particularly within heavy metal contexts, and investigates how masks, rather than de-identifying a performer, can invite intimate connections among musicians and audiences.

This article discusses the development of a live music network in Larnaca, Cyprus. It is the result of a 9 month field research project centred on a specific music venue and it is based on interviews with members of four local prominent rock bands and the venue manager. These interviews were further informed by several discussions with numerous audience members, the result of the author's participatory involvement in this network. The emphasis of the discussion lies in the experiences of the performers and their views concerning the growth of this live music network, which in itself is an indicator of the dynamic relationship between underground musical tastes and the presence of mainstream currents in the city. The purpose of this research is to highlight that the development and preservation of such live music networks depend on various factors and to argue that the study of transformations of a locality's musical life can lead to sociological readings regarding its music-related past and present.

Since the international breakthrough of The Sugarcubes and Björk in the late 1980s, the Anglophone discourse surrounding Icelandic popular music has proven to be the latest instance of a long history of representation in which the North Atlantic island is imagined as an icy periphery on the edge of European civilization. This mode of representation is especially prominent in the discourse surrounding post-rock band Sigur Rós. This article offers a critical reading of the band's reception in the Anglo-American music press during the period of their breakthrough in the UK and USA. Interpretative strategies among listeners and critics are scrutinised using the concept of borealism (Schram 2011) in order to examine attitudes towards the Nordic regions evident in the portrayals of Sigur Rós. Reception issues then form the basis for a musical analysis of a seminal track in the band's history, aiming to demonstrate how specific details in Sigur Rós's style relate to its reception and the discourse surrounding it. The article finds that much of the metaphorical language present in the band's reception can be linked to techniques of musical spatiality, the unusual sound of the bowed electric guitar and non-normative uses of voice and language.

This article contributes to the growing research base in Turkish popular music studies with a focus on indie music from Istanbul. It situates this music within Turkey's contemporary social, cultural and political landscapes, and in relation to the country's historical cultural narrative. Istanbul indie musicians’ responses to the 2013 Gezi protests suggest that indie's counter-hegemonic aesthetics are being explored and engaged with in alignment with ‘Third Republicanism’, an emerging vision for Turkey that holds liberalism and human rights as its core ideals where the ‘First’ and ‘Second’ Republican visions held secularism and Islam respectively.

This article profiles the music of three politically motivated hip hop emcees. It combines textual and musicological analysis with ethnographic data to examine the ways in which these women use music to empower themselves and to contribute to meaningful, positive change in post-industrial, post-bankruptcy Detroit. These narratives are significant because they combat the dominant, hegemonic two-dimensional representations of African American women that are epitomised in commercial hip hop and popular culture at large. Further, in a context where art and activism are connected, their work challenges the current controlling images and sexual scripts that dominate both commercial music industry representations and scholarship on women in hip hop. The artists we profile exemplify a new kind of musical movement where women are agents and creative solutionaries. At times, they are explicitly critical of the narrow range of black womanhood presented in popular culture and in other instances, they focus on issues such as the environment, race relations, racialized bodies, poverty and abuse, all the while challenging the hip hop industry and popular culture norms that communicate who black women are and who they should be.

This article focuses on the role of protest music in the biggest social movement of recent Turkish history. It is the result of three years of fieldwork triangulating musical and cultural analysis with ethnographic methods. Motives of the protest, strategies of the movement, agency of musicians and participatory performances are investigated and contextualised in an analysis of Turkey's cultural changes. The function of music shifted from framing the protest to encouraging political action and fostering a sense of belonging to the collective identity of the Gezi Park movement. Music even became political activism. By underlining different functions played by music in the case of the Gezi Park movement, this article problematises the relevance of music for social movements.

This article throws new light on the troublesome question ‘what is popular music?’ by pursuing a genealogy of discourse in Britain during a crucial period from 1860 to 1920 in which modernity is increasingly characterised by an antagonistic relationship between intellectual elites and consumer entertainment. Focusing on London music halls, social reformism and ragtime, I argue that the term fell into two broad categories of use: first, to identify and/or denigrate mass culture; and second, to establish a pathway for edification and to champion ideals of respectability. Although implicated in the construction of binary oppositions and frequently associated with impropriety, the popular was not always associated with lowness. The idea, however, was shot through with contradictions deriving from a view of ‘the people’ as being simultaneously docile and seditious. Ultimately, I demonstrate that the popular is a floating signifier with the potential to reference mutually opposing ideas.

Social mood in Finland shifted from generally positive in the spring of 2006 to generally negative by the spring of 2009. We identify this change in mood via eight indicators, including the onset of a financial and macroeconomic crisis, a decline in measures of sentiment, a rise in radical politics and the demise of an iconic business unit of one of the country's most successful firms. From the standpoint of Prechter's socionomic theory we hypothesise that this change in social mood is also evident in a greater level of pessimism in the songs on the country's pop chart in 2009 relative to 2006. To test this hypothesis, we introduce and validate a tool to measure optimism and pessimism in popular music. We apply this tool to a random sample of songs from the Finnish pop chart from 2006 and a comparable sample from 2009. Indeed, we find that the sample from 2009 in the aggregate is substantially and significantly more pessimistic than the sample from 2006. The study serves to enrich our understanding of what makes pop songs popular and how popular music is linked psychologically to broader popular culture and other domains of social expression through a shared social mood.

The music of Billy Joel is long overdue for prolonged attention from the scholarly field. As Walter Everett has acknowledged (2000), Joel's music is often more in line with common-practice systems than with popular genres, and when combined with his intuitive understanding of numerous popular styles, makes for a rich trove of harmonic interest. One of the common-practice devices Joel utilises effectively is the evaded cadence (also called a deceptive motion). His use of this harmonic motion reveals two tropes in his music: Deceptive Love describes the complicated nature of love in ‘She's Got a Way’ and ‘She's Always a Woman’, while Denied Ending describes the unfinished and unresolved quality at the end of ‘Miami 2017’. Uncovering these tropes in Joel's songs leads to a better understanding of the lyrics and the harmonic progressions that underlie them.

In the 1990s, a vibrant reggae and dancehall scene emerged in several German cities, and in the early 2000s songs of reggae artists such as Gentleman, Seeed or Jan Delay rose to the top of the German pop charts. In this article, the German reggae scene of this time is depicted in respect to its formation, infrastructure, transnational relationships and sub-genres, and is related to general social and cultural developments in reunited Germany, e.g. a new national self-consciousness, tendencies towards a multi-ethnic society and new kinds of youth scenes. These findings are illustrated by a close reading of two songs from the seminal albums Searching for the Jan Soul Rebels by Jan Delay and New Dubby Conquerors by Seeed, both released in 2001. While Jan Delay's lyrics reflect the singer's commitment to the antifascist youth scene, Seeed celebrates a hedonistic lifestyle in the new capital Berlin.

Popular fusion music in Peru's capital Lima has in recent years grown into a representative genre challenging existing segregation of Limeño society through interethnic and interclass interaction. Focusing on three case studies of Peruvian fusionists performing for the white upper classes, this article documents a shift in racialised notions of Andeanness and marginality among the white upper classes from 1960 to 2014, linking the changes in perception to the political and social context of those years. It examines the trajectories of Miki González (an older white fusion star who hires Andean musicians), La Sarita (an intercultural Andean rock band striving to balance the urban and the Andean) and Magaly Solier (a young Andean campesina (‘peasant’) actress and singer who hires white musicians). These case studies demonstrate how fusion music interactions contribute to re-shaping traditional cultural imaginaries, challenge racism, and project images of empowerment onto 21st century Andeans.

Lo-fi music is commonly associated with a recording aesthetic marked by an avoidance of state-of-the-art technologies and an inclusion of technical flaws, such as tape hiss and static. However, I argue that lo-fi music is not defined merely by the presence of such imperfections, but by a discourse which deliberately draws attention to them. Album liner notes play an important role in this discourse, as they can function as curatorial practices, through which lo-fi artists give an appropriate frame of reference to their recordings. By highlighting the ‘honest’ character of the recordings, the intimate recording spaces, the materiality of the equipment and its ambiguous character as machine/instrument/performer, they invite listeners to adopt a genre-adequate mode of listening. Rather than listening past hiss and other recording artefacts as undesirable qualities, listeners are asked to listen for these qualities as an essential element of not just the recordings, but the music itself.

In this article I focus on the genre of ‘vaporwave’, using the artist 18 Carat Affair as a case study, to explore the way the genre works as a project that produces, and takes pleasure in, a kind of ‘memory play’. As a genre, vaporwave is a style of music collaged together from a wide variety of largely background musics such as muzak®, 1980s elevator music and new age ambience. Vaporwave's ‘memory play’ is a project that takes remembering as its audio-visual aesthetic. The pleasure of vaporwave is therefore understood as a pleasure of remembering for the sake of the act of remembering itself. To explore this theme, I examine vaporwave's memory play using the terms of Chris Healy's ‘compensatory nostalgia’, as well as the idea of ‘ersatz nostalgia’ as discussed by Arjun Appadurai and Svetlana Boym.

The field of popular music studies has long been interested in the relationships between record labels and the music they make available to consumers. At the micro level, research on record labels provides insight into the tensions between art and commerce and those between individuals and institutions. At the macro level, this research illuminates changes in socio-economic trends, music industry structures and structural inequalities. A meta-analysis of this literature reveals an ‘indie prejudice’: a preference for (and even a bias in favour of) independent labels coupled with a dismissive approach to the study of major labels and musical mainstreams that impacts our ability, as a scholarly field, to speak with authority about the largest segments of the commercial record industries. What larger implications for our scholarship might confronting this prejudice reveal? What master narratives have structured popular music studies’ preference of independent over major record labels? In this article, I argue that the art/commerce dichotomy has remained influential, although it can have unintended and dangerous side effects if it becomes a guiding assumption.