This article forwards an alternative perspective on how authenticity can be constructed through popular music tribute show performances. It adopts Edward Bruner’s (1994, American Anthropologist, 96, 397–415) categorisation of authenticity in relation to the replication of ‘historical sites’ in museum exhibitions. It argues that rather than focusing on sonic and historical ‘accuracy’, tribute musicians strive to curate their history and personal experiences with the music they play to prove their ‘authority’ as cultural ambassadors. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Perth, Western Australia, and a case study of a UK-based international touring tribute to The Smiths, this article highlights how some tribute musicians may purposely ‘put themselves in the music’ to conjure a sense of legitimacy and connect with audiences.

Academic inquiries into the motivations and experiences of live music audiences have typically focused on the communal and social experience of concerts and festivals, whereas the experience of individual concertgoers has been relatively unexplored, especially in popular music contexts. In this article, qualitative interviews and focus groups were undertaken with self-declared progressive rock fans to understand their often-individualised engagement with the live music experience. The findings demonstrate the importance of live music performance and appreciation, attentive listening, and detailed personal evaluation of the musicians and their performances to these fans. The co-presence of others in the live music setting served to legitimise not only these fans’ tastes in music but also their individualised way of engaging with, experiencing, and enjoying the concert experience: their preference for the ‘text’ over ‘context’.

In recent years, the genre of UK drill has become the target of a range of ‘posh’ musical parodies. These parodies come in various forms, from private school students making TikToks under the hashtag #privateschool that use the genre’s reputation to illustrate their own privilege (Hall 2020; Complex UK 2023), to folky YouTube covers of drill songs that play off the musical differences between the two styles. Some of these parodies juxtapose UK drill’s reputation as a working class and Black British artform with upper class and white stereotypes, providing a sharp reminder of the issues that can arise through unnecessary socio-cultural comparison. In addition, many creators of these parodies appear to hide behind a veil of self-reflexive acknowledgement to mask the various ethical quandaries that arise in their work, often passing harmful content off as self-deprecating fun.

This article offers an ecofeminist interpretation of female pastoral expression in Kate Bush’s song cycle A Sky of Honey (2005). By identifying points of overlap between the re-visionary strategies of female pastoral and the ecofeminist ethics of care, I examine how A Sky of Honey’s sound world interrogates and restructures the primacy of dualist thinking common in pastoral convention. Exploring the creative background of A Sky of Honey, including the accompanying artwork, I first establish points of convergence with and divergence from pastoral tradition. I then analyse musical motifs to trace the development of character voices, before considering how the interactions of human voice and birdsong articulate a pastoral space that dissolves dualist structures in favour of collaboration. Reflecting on how this space demonstrates an ecofeminist ethics of care, I frame A Sky of Honey as an expression of female pastoral that reconfigures pastoral mythologies to envision an alternate vision of empathy and relationality.

This article examines the ways that alternative musicians in Lebanon tactically engage in corporate collaborations as a mode of aspirational cartography. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores three artists’ entanglements with Red Bull, underscoring the imaginative, ethical, and aesthetic manoeuvres musicians undertake in pursuit of alternative futures through strategic corporate affiliation. I build on Appadurai’s theory of aspiration in order to argue that in cases like Lebanon, aspiration is a cartographic undertaking through which musicians sonically map and shape spaces of possibility. In the absence of governmental support or infrastructure for the arts, transnational corporations take on developmental roles, allowing artists to leverage personal relationships, material resources, and aesthetic and creative control in pursuit of possibility.