In this article, I examine the history of a genre that spans several continents and several centuries. I bring together material from Mexico, Cuba, France and the UK to create anew, expand upon and critique the ‘standard’ histories of danzón narrated by Mexico's danzón experts (and others). In these ‘standard’ histories, origins and nationality are key to the constitution of genres which are racialised and moralised for political ends. Danzón, its antecedents and successors are treated as generic equivalents despite being quite different. From the danzón on, these genres are positioned as being the products of individual, male originators (and their nations). ‘Africa’ is treated as a conceptual nation, and ‘Africanness’ as something extra which racialises hegemonic European music-dance forms. Political leanings and strategies determine whether these music-dance forms are interpreted, adopted or co-opted as being ‘black’ or ‘white’.

To a considerable extent, the mythology of rock and roll rebellion is predicated upon a similarly mythologised male sexual potency that Simon Frith and Angeld McRobbie have characterised as ‘aggressive, dominating, and boastful, … [constantly seeking] to remind the audience of [its] prowess, [its] control’ (Frith and McRobbie 1990, p. 319). In this article, I look to Roy Orbison – a musician who was a key figure in the genesis of rock and roll, but who nevertheless subverts this phallocentric meta-narrative. Focusing on the 1987 concert film, Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night, I argue that Orbison's staid performance style, unusual voice and unconventional songwriting as evidenced (and amplified) by that film trouble the purportedly monolithic rock and roll masculinity, and the concomitant mythology of rebellion. At the same time, however, I propose that even as normative masculinity appears to be destabilised, a close reading of the film reveals that the performance situates Orbison within a different masculinist discourse: the 19th-century Romantic discourse of masculine genius that continues to inflect 21st century notions about artists and art music. Thus, in Black and White Night, normative and non-normative masculinities are thoroughly imbricated, each simultaneously destabilising and reaffirming the other.

In post-apartheid popular culture, there is a tension between the persistence of ‘race’ as a structural category of difference, and its transformation in the lives of young South Africans. In this paper, through the examination of case-studies, I explore how popular music may allow for the mediation of this tension. Drawing on Heidegger's notion of an ‘equipmental whole’ to conceptualise ‘race’, I discuss the specific ways in which individuals may come to an awareness of the potential fluidity of racial identities, and the role of music-listening practices in this process. I argue that reflecting on articulations between music and racial categories allowed listeners to critique understandings of ‘race’ underpinning post-apartheid political discourse. Such a critique enabled listeners either instrumentally to affirm a reconfigured understanding of a racial identity, or to reject ‘race’ as a meaningful category of difference altogether.