In the 1990s, a protest rock movement developed on the American continent within informational capitalism, the democratisation of information and communication technologies, and the development of transnational social movements that fought against global powers. To complement the interpretations that understand this type of musical practice as a cultural aspect of social movements, or as commodities that obey the imperatives of the market, I use Auslander’s concept of performance to analyse how these protest rock groups deploy political ideologies linked to international leftist struggles, in the space and time of concerts and other types of mediations. Through an interpretive analysis, I identify some spatial, gestural, corporeal, and sound elements used to act out leftist political ideologies.

Making a living from music is an endeavour fraught with challenges associated with building a career in a rapidly changing, digitalised world and a labour market characterised by intermittency and the need for diversification. It is difficult to achieve a sustainable career that provides sufficient income to make music one’s primary occupation. As a result, many musicians explore different opportunities beyond performance to make ends meet. This article focuses on artists working in jazz and other popular genres on Barcelona’s music scene, with the aim of analysing how contemporary musicians in these genres combine artistic and professional activities. Using a qualitative methodology, including semi-structured interviews and participant observation, the study examines musicians who have attained relative stability and recognition. It identifies three key profiles of the professional musician (the ‘musician-teacher’, the ‘musician-composer’, the ‘musician-performer’) and reveals how these roles often overlap and contribute to the complex multiactivity of artistic careers.

This article examines the paradoxical relationship between discourses of sincerity and an aesthetics of imperfection in twenty-first-century pop culture, with special attention to the Russian music scene. We focus on the career of cult musician Sergei Shnurov to address this broader question: What do present-day anxieties around sincerity tell us about pop-cultural production and consumption processes? First, we offer a genealogy of post-Soviet sincerity rhetoric. We then use this genealogy to unpack the approach to sincere expression that Shnurov and his critics and fans adopt. Two recurring artistic strategies stand out. First, Shnurov creates a sincere effect by insisting on insincerity. Second, he amplifies this ‘insincerely sincere’ rhetoric by foregrounding a visual aesthetics of imperfection. We argue that these strategies play an important role not only in Shnurov’s biography but also in a broader story: that of sincere expression as a prime concern of twenty-first-century media and popular culture.