Recent research shows that the English folksong collectors, who were active before the First World War, systematically selected what they took down from rural working-class singers, basing their selection on what they considered to be worth preserving from such singers' repertories. Their work, then, can only give us a biased and highly mediated impression of popular singing traditions (see Harker 1972 and 1982; Gammon 1980). The purpose of this article is to see if it is possible to go beyond the work of the collectors, to try to grasp something of the wholeness of popular nineteenth-century singing traditions, and also to situate those traditions socially.

Music is part of everyday life in late twentieth-century America, due primarily to the technology of recorded sound. We are surrounded by it: we have radios to wake us in the morning and to entertain us while we drive our automobiles, background music on television and in movies, ‘atmosphere’ music in elevators and restaurants, and collections of musical recordings in our homes. Because most of the music heard today is recorded, we assume that the pervasiveness of music in our lives is, indeed, a twentieth-century phenomenon. There is evidence to suggest, however, that music was almost as commonplace for late nineteenth-century urban Americans as it is for us today. The popularity of sheet music and of ubiquitous parlour pianos are obvious manifestations of amateur music making by the generation of our grandparents and great-grandparents. Less well known, however, is the fact that Americans of the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially urban Americans, were in frequent contact with professional performing musicians, who played not only at functions where we would expect to find music but also, as a matter of course, at events with which we do not normally associate music and musicians.

In discussing humanly organised sound in How Musical is Man?, John Blacking points out that musical ability is not only the prerogative of those who make music. Without the capacity of an audience for structured listening, he says, there would be no music and no musical communication (Blacking 1973, p. 9). The construction of a sound-ideal, that is the acceptance or rejection of patterns of sound as music or non-music, is part of the musical process. When Merriam constructed his model for ethnomusicological research in The Anthropology of Music, he recognised that those listening to the sounds produced by musicians played an active role (Merriam 1964, pp. 32ff). He also realised the importance of what he called ‘conceptualisation about music’ to the process. Figure 1 illustrates simply the three analytical stages of his model and the feedback system involving the acceptance or rejection of sound. The weakness of the model lies in the assumption that those listening will react uniformly to the sounds produced. As I shall show, such a consensus on the classifications of sound is not to be found in large differentiated societies.

The contemporary popular music audience in Japan is exposed to a large variety of music, both domestic and imported; tastes are well defined. In particular, such factors as: the singer's ‘image’, what I call maintaining a standard formula, ambiguity and sentimentalism can be pinpointed as important to the music's appeal. In spite of this, the similarities of Japanese popular music to Western musical styles can suggest that a conventional musical analysis will be sufficient for understanding this music. Thus, many critics who evaluate Japanese popular music usually consider it merely a parody of the ‘correct’ styles that they are accustomed to hearing. Concentrating merely on the musical analysis, however, underestimates the cultural factors that give Japanese popular music distinctive characteristics which are highly valued in Japan. To offset the shortcomings of such analysis, this article is an attempt to examine Japanese popular music in terms of those cultural factors most important to popular music genres. The first section is a general review of current trends in popular music in Japan, paying particular attention to the characteristics that make the music uniquely ‘Japanese’.

During the last two or maybe three years, people in the Netherlands have witnessed a big boom in popular songs in their own language: tear-jerkers, evergreens, easy listening and rock songs performed in Dutch have made a conspicuous conquest of the hit charts, usually dominated by Anglo-American songs. Most striking is the breakthrough of Dutch language rock groups, reflected in higher audience figures for specialised radio programmes, an expanding live performance circuit and high record sales (see Table 1).

On a common-sense or proto-sociological level, this phenomenon has been explained by referring to the end of so-called American ‘cultural imperialism’ – the native rock tradition has finally grown mature, as is the case in other countries on the European continent; or by alluding to the crisis of the modern welfare capitalist state – manifested in a range of aspects, from the economic crisis in the record industry to the cultural-ideological problem of modern people longing for a comprehensible world view in an abstract society. In this article I shall not touch upon these matters, but I shall discuss the reception of Dutch rock as such and try to unveil (some aspects of) the social meaning of this type of music.

The significance of the mass media in everyday musical life can scarcely be exaggerated. Music is nowadays, to a large degree, heard in technologically communicated form, i.e. as ‘transmitted music’ (Übertragungsmusik), not live (see especially Silbermann 1954, Eberhard 1962, Jungk 1971, Goslich 1971, Bornoff 1972, Blaukopf, Goslich and Scheib 1973, Schmidt 1975, Rösing 1978a, Brinkmann 1980, Hosokawa 1981). It can be assumed that young people and adults in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) consume, on average, a good three hours' worth of music a day, on radio, cassette recorder, television or records. The fact that music, by means of the technological transmission-chain, is available at all times and can be replayed at will, independent of the here-and-now of live performance, has far-reaching consequences for the listening behaviour, listening expectations, musical preferences and musical understanding of every individual. Two of these aspects, listening behaviour and musical preferences, will be examined in detail in what follows.

Music has always been part of street life. Taking it off the streets and bringing it into enclosed spaces is a relatively recent experience but it has profoundly changed the way music is perceived and evaluated. ‘After art music moved indoors, street music has become an object of increasing scorn’ (Schafer 1980, p. 66). However, although discouraged by the new sonorities that appeared with the Industrial Revolution and the new comfort of home-reproducible music, street music has not disappeared: on the contrary, it is tending to reinvade the urban scene, in forms both old and new.

The walkman – a cassette recorder for headphone listening. This gadget, originally invented and marketed by Sony in the spring of 1980 in Japan, and soon exported, has become known throughout the West, however awkward its Japanese-made English may sound. As its use has proliferated, so have the arguments about its effects. One example, a report in Nouvel Observateur, was cited by Philippe Sollers (Sollers 1981, p. 50). The interviewer, apparently, asks young people (eighteen to twenty-two years old) the following: whether men with the walkman are human or not; whether they are losing contact with reality; whether the relations between eyes and ears are changing radically; whether they are psychotic or schizophrenic; whether they are worried about the fate of humanity. One of the interviewees replies: your question is out-of-date. All of these problems of communication and incommunicability, according to him, belong to the sixties and the seventies. The eighties are not the same at all. They are the years of autonomy, of an intersection of singularities in the construction of discourses. Soon, he says, you will have every kind of film on video at home, every kind of classical music on only one tape. This is what gives me pleasure.

The sociologist Simon Frith identifies rock and roll as a hybrid music, which emerged in the American South of the mid-1950s as a grafting of puritanical ‘white’ country and western lyrics on to sexually explicit ‘black’ blues rhythms. While acknowledging cross-fertilisation between black and white music ‘since at least the middle of the nineteenth century’, he states that since the Second World War,

It is as dance music that black music has developed its meanings for white users. The most obvious feature of dancing as an activity is its sexuality.… Whereas Western dance forms control sexuality with formal rhythms… black music celebrates sex with a directly physical beat and an intense, emotional sound. It makes obvious the potential anarchy of sexual feeling.

(Frith 1978, p. 180)

Frith appeals to an age-old metaphor: black nature is seen as fundamentally threatening to white culture. In modern popular music, this conflict is played out in terms of the liberation or the repression of sexuality.*

There appeared in the summer of 1982 a song written and performed by three German structuralists, a song characterised by the simplicity – to the point of banality – of its musical structure and instrumentation. Intended as a critical intervention in the production of ordinariness in popular music, ‘Da Da Da’ reached number one in the British charts, and Trio's appearance on the British TV show, Top of the Pops, was no more threatening than that of Captain Sensible or any other novelty act: welcome to the whacky world of deconstructive minimalism. Clearly the intended meanings of the song were not always the ones it evoked for the listener. Recordings have a way of taking on a life of their own in their meetings with the public; in Voloshinov's phrase, the production of meaning is intersubjective, involving artists, promotional campaigns, disc jockeys and the audience. This article addresses particularly the role of the listening subject in the construction of a song's meanings.

About five years ago, I began to teach courses on the cultural history of rock and roll. My approach was simple: I would try to describe the texts, interpreting the significance produced by the unique synthesis of musical texture and lyrical content. Then I would suggest correspondences to the situation of its audiences which were mediated through the institutional practices of production and consumption. The music obliquely represented and responded to the structure of experience of at least certain portions of its youth audience. As I sought more adequate readings, the correspondences became increasingly refracted; the music had to be located in an overdetermined context: class, race, subcultures, gender, as well as age, exerted unequal pressures on and were represented in rock and roll. Nevertheless, my students – as well as the rock and roll fan in me – were noticeably dissatisfied. While they often assented to my readings, it was clear that my readings failed to capture something important, something which was intimately connected to rock and roll's power as well as to its cultural politics.

One afternoon in September 1982, at Tirrenia, in the province of Pisa, hundreds of Communist party-workers prepared for the opening concert of an Italian tour by the rock band Genesis. The work took place under the red flags of the National Festival of the Communist Party – L'Unità – and to the sound of traditional songs of political struggle coming from the loudspeakers placed all round the area. These were unpaid workers, highly organised, and they had come from all over Italy.

This article falls into three loosely related parts. The first and third of these are derived from addresses given to the Popular Music Research Symposium at Exeter in September 1982, and at the Festival des Politischen Liedes in East Berlin in February 1982 respectively. The second forms a newly written bridge.