records often include accidents. i suggest this tells us something about the flexibility of musical practices and the limits of theories. musical ‘hooks’ provide useful test-cases because the hook is normally considered the least accidental part of a song. we imagine it emerging fully formed in a moment of inspiration – the catchy phrase that comes into a songwriter's head – or at least of calculation: ‘i’ll see your vibraphone and raise you a mellotron'. but hooks sometimes incorporate accidents or happen accidentally. if hooks are less than completely determinate, then every aspect of the popular record must be subject to contingency. i argue for theories – and views of musical practices – which begin with the recognition that accidents happen.

popular music performance raises important questions about music-making as process. these questions are addressed through dealing with a further issue: the difference between music journalism and academic discourse on music. a dialogic structure is adopted. first, in a short paper, tim quirk examines film of the who playing at the isle of wight in 1970. he shows how pete townshend's performance moves through a cycle, from incompetence to the extraordinary: paradoxically, formulaic performance prompts sincerity (and so an extraordinary performance) on the part of townshend. jason toynbee responds by arguing that quirk's writing is able to open up, as journalism, an approach to performance not available to academics. what is at stake is the foregrounding of subjectivity in the writer (quirk) and, through this, the inter-subjectivity of performer and audience. quirk's own response follows, and there is then a second round of responses which develops these issues.

Recently we have been talking in the Editorial Group of the journal about the term ‘popular’, and wondering in particular about its epithetic role next to ‘music’. Some of us have questioned what the term now means, partly because it has been used less and less in media studies and cultural sociology over the last few years. Others have pointed to the fact that it remains a vital concept, even a rallying point, in certain fields such as musicology and politics.

The literary canonisation of Hamlet means that it is now most frequently encountered as a printed text. This crucially reconfigures its character, since Shakespeare wrote for sound, not print, and for an audience habituated to finely nuanced auditory semiotics. Hamlet generates its own soundscape as the major bearer of meanings. Apart from dialogue, its complex repertoire of auditory effects includes instrumental music and song. If we examine the play as an acoustic experience, we can situate it more ‘soundly’ in its epoch, and perhaps also reinterpret its puzzles, most notably Hamlet's procrastination, an issue that only began to be raised by later critics working in a more print-oriented era. If we reclaim the sonic dimensions of the play, his inexplicable indecisiveness may be seen as the point, not the puzzle, of the play, and a metaphor of the liminal epistemology of Shakespeare's age.

Why do bands keep audiences waiting? This question is one among several by which I aim to delimit the phenomenon of the public performance experience. I want to determine how far a concert is a sequence of rituals – rather than an encounter critically focused on the act of music-making – where it is the observance of each component that decides the success of the occasion. I ask this of all types of concerts, by the way, but – hey – this is a popular music journal.

by focusing on brief examples from four writers – journalists anthony decurtis and lester bangs, academics sheila whiteley and susan mcclary – this piece is designed to inspire and/or shame readers into paying closer attention to how they use language when they describe or analyse music. an effort was made to keep the tone of the critiques informal and conversational, thus approximating the mood of the kind of session the author has found effective in more than thirty years of editing at the village voice, and many years of teaching writing to ambitious undergraduates as well as a class full of journalism grad students. in such sessions, the intention is always to better enable the writer to say what he or she wants to say as convincingly as possible. if ideas are called into question, that is because the editor believes them to be overly familiar, inconsistent, or already discarded by the writer's audience. what is at issue is the writing, not the writer. this is not to deny, unfortunately, that sometimes hurt feelings ensue.

it should be added that the references to magic initially addressed the conference theme ‘this magic moment’. given the essay's nuts-and-bolts attitude, however, they retain a more general relevance.

31 Songs (re-titled Songbook in the United States) is ‘a little book of essays about songs I loved’ written in 2002 by Nick Hornby, author of the 1996 hit novel High Fidelity and latterly pop critic of the New Yorker. Hornby's assumption of the role of music critic echoed the wish of the protagonist of High Fidelity whose No. 1 in a list of ‘my five dream jobs’ was ‘NME (New Musical Express) journalist 1976–1979’.

the critical karaoke project was a specific response to the endless parade of polls, lists and casual questions about ‘the greatest songs of all time’ – particularly to how that measure seems mismatched to pop, which bets everything on transitory pleasures, intensities, its own evanescence. a number of critics, scholars, poets and musicians were invited to the experience music project's annual pop conference in seattle, in the spring of 2004, to talk about any one song of their choosing, without making a case for its lasting worth, or cultural importance, truth, beauty, or any of the other high art values. they just had to take a song they had believed, once, for a minute or a decade, was the greatest song ever … and give an account of why they thought that, or how it felt to believe. one of the dreams was to ask for criticism under the sign of the top 40, not the canon. the other was to hear talented writers tell stories about songs, as they appeared in their daily lives. the trick was that all the participants were asked to tell their story in the span of time it took to listen to the song they had chosen – with the song playing behind them.

Leaders of the Harlem Renaissance – intellectuals such as Jessie Faucet, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. DuBois – hoped to gain respect for African Americans through participation in emblems of high culture such as poetry, novels, serious plays, and the highest of all classical music genres: the symphony.1 They encouraged artists to mine folk themes for use in new, elevating works, transforming ‘indigenous’ materials into uplifting examples of high cultural resonance. Artists themselves, however, were ambivalent about privileging ‘high’ art, and especially so when making and writing about music. Indeed, as Samuel Floyd has argued, the most vibrant music to come out of the Harlem Renaissance took the form of blues, boogie woogie, and hot jazz, found in venues such as clubs, juke joints, rent parties, and stage shows (Floyd 1990, pp. 5–6).

The appearance of On the Road in 1957 signalled the emergence of a new movement in American literature, soon to be called the Beat Generation (Kerouac 1957). Along with Allen Ginsberg's ‘Howl’ of 1956, Kerouac's work brought a new awareness of an intellectual counter-culture bubbling under the conservative surface of 1950s America. The content of these writers' poetry and prose, with its open and honest depiction of hetero-, homo-, and bisexual activity, drug abuse, petty crime, and social deviance was enough to create a sensation, but it is the style that gives the works their permanence and interest today. Kerouac himself used the term ‘bop prose’ to describe his efforts to reform fiction along the lines of avant-garde jazz, where immediacy of expression and technical fluency combine to open new possibilities, supposedly not present in more traditional methods of composition.

as a life-long music lover, i've always been fascinated by ‘cover tunes’ – versions of songs recorded by artists other than the composer. sometimes the original can't be improved; in other instances a cover tune can transcend the original and become the best-known version. one of the better-known ‘cover’ stories involves otis redding and aretha franklin. redding had written the pulsating ‘respect’ and recorded it in 1965. but when redding heard franklin's searing version, recorded two years later, he was said to have remarked: ‘i just lost my song. that girl took it away from me.’

Autobiographies: the contemporary catalogue is huge and bookstore shelves are heavy with the weight of life-stories. Ex-Presidents, actors, cooks, criminals, Nobel prize winners, preachers, poets and CEOs all write them. Rock stars write them, too – ‘marquee names’ like Tina Turner, Melissa Etheridge, Grace Slick, and Meatloaf, but also minor figures such as Dallas Taylor, the former drummer for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. And plenty of others, including – to name just a handful – Chuck Berry, Ronnie Spector, Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, both Ray and Dave Davies, Dee Dee Ramone, Martha Reeves, Eric Burdon, and John Cale.

sometimes i fall asleep right away. even before the orchestra turns the first page of music, i lean my head into my hand, propped up by the armrest, and let my eyelids fall. at first, though, the closing of my eyes comes as something of a shock. i would have just started watching the bows go up and down across the violins and violas and back and forth across the cellos and basses in a grand unison; i would have just started watching the conductor's arms and backside jerk and sway, not precisely with the music but in the slightest anticipation; i would have just started watching the musicians, their eyes fixed onto the papers in front of them, their movements nothing more than those required by the music. upon closing my eyes all this is gone. it is replaced by a dark, reddish-grey curtain, with a large block of faint light in the middle – the ghost image of the stage. my eyes at first search my eyelids with the same focus they used to watch the orchestra, and this large, abstract shape, because of its sudden closeness, makes my eyelids snap back open. upon opening, however, the shock of sudden darkness is replaced by a dull recognition: i immediately see the orchestra, and realise that nothing has changed and nothing is likely to change. the violinists are still sawing away, the conductor still has on his black coat, and the rows of heads in front of me are exactly as i had left them.