This article is inspired by the voices and perceptions of elder music fans and performing musicians, especially those older than 70 years of age. Based upon field interviews and ethnographic observations, it challenges the deleterious influences of social labelling and ageist perspectives (including casual yet damaging attributions of nostalgic yearning) that tend to delegitimise the musical interests or tastes of older citizens. By also emphasising musical performance, the article explores the active forms of music making as a strategy that mitigates notions of elders as non-productive consumers. The analysis further engages the contexts of musical performances within regulated institutional settings of assisted living residences, interrogating the logic and discourses of commercial management or State bureaucracies as they are expressed through organised musical recreation activities.

This article addresses a gap in the historical study of music on television by revisiting North American popular music in conjunction with the broadcast medium's early stage of development. Central to its analysis is the fact that music has always been deemed essential to the character and success of television. Emphasising the circulating discourses of ‘opportunity’, the article isolates the ways in which some musicians and others in various sectors of the music industry regarded the new medium as a positive influence at its inception. Among key considerations at the time were issues of musical performance style and aesthetics, repertoire, promotional capabilities, career enhancement, and additional leisure options for audiences.

We discuss two themes from Chandra cluster observations. First, we describe the interaction of buoyant, radio emitting plasma bubbles with the hot intracluster gas. Second we summarize the Chandra observations of “cold” fronts (sharp discontinuities in gas density and temperature) separating cool, denser gas clouds from the hotter intracluster medium.

As part of the Chandra GTO program we are monitoring and surveying M31 using the HRC and ACIS cameras. These observations have resolved the nuclear X-ray source into five separate sources, one of which is very soft and may (or may not!) be associated with the central super-massive black hole. In addition, the superb spatial resolution and low scattering of the Chandra telescope allows us to unambiguously resolve the diffuse emission from the point sources. This emission is clearly softer than the point sources, and also increases with temperature radially. The monitoring nature of the observations allows detailed study of the variability of the point sources.

Say somethin' positive, well positive ain't where I live

I live around the corner from West Hell

Two blocks from South Shit and once in a jail cell

The sun never shined on my side of the street, see?

(Naughty By Nature, ‘Ghetto Bastard (Everything's Gonna Be Alright)’, 1991, Isba/Tommy Boy Records)

If you're from Compton you know it's the 'hood where it's good

(Compton's Most Wanted, ‘Raised in Compton’, 1991, Epic/Sony)

Introduction

Hip hop's capacity to circumvent the constraints and limiting social conditions of young Afro-American and Latino youths has been examined and celebrated by cultural critics and scholars in various contexts since its inception in the mid-1970s. For instance, the 8 February 1999 issue of US magazine Time featured a cover photo of ex-Fugees and five-time Grammy award winner Lauryn Hill with the accompanying headline ‘Hip-Hop Nation: After 20 Years – how it's changed America’. Over the years, however, there has been little attention granted to the implications of hip hop's spatial logics. Time's coverage is relatively standard in perceiving the hip hop nation as a historical construct rather than a geo-cultural amalgamation of personages and practices that are spatially dispersed.