This paper introduces the subjunctive as a modality of engaging in musical life, in this instance the contemporary white folk music scene of boeremusiek in South Africa. The genre has repeatedly been portrayed as forever vanishing – a discourse that still characterises contemporary events put up by the largest boeremusiek organisation in South Africa, the Boeremusiekgilde (Boeremusiek Guild). The aim of the paper is to analyse the effects of discourses of nostalgia and salvage on participants' experiences of liveness in the present. It is shown how a deep dissatisfaction for live performance developed throughout the genre's 20th-century history. The repeated framing of present enjoyment in terms of past models of nationalist duty cast the actual actions of participants in the mode of subjunctive possibility, it is argued. As rituals of mourning, boeremusiek events bemoan personal histories fundamentally tainted by political transgression: the loss of intimate spaces of white innocence.

Between 1978 and 1984 Buddy Esquire designed over 300 hip hop flyers. His career coincided with the first flourishing of the Bronx scene, when hip hop shifted from a community-based event to a full-blown commercial phenomenon. This paper analyses Buddy Esquire's flyer design style, supported by a discussion with the flyer artist. The analysis demonstrates that Esquire's ‘neo-deco’ style communicates the aspiration of live hip hop to classiness by suppressing overt graffiti elements, by alluding to the nightclub culture of disco and by using the Art Deco stylings of the Jazz Age as a signifier of sophistication. The paper then moves beyond an interpretation of the flyers, searching for reflections of Buddy Esquire's aesthetic in early hip hop culture. Finally, it proposes that Buddy Esquire's flyers challenge assumptions in current hip hop scholarship regarding early hip hop's aesthetic relationship to the past (particularly the early 20th century) and its self-documenting impulse.

Punk is an extreme manifestation of the rock project, meaning that it depends on an association of raw and authentic expression with blackness, musically represented by particular approaches to the blues, combined with processes of white appropriation, transformation and obfuscation of those blues resources. Punk's powerful affect largely derives from the tension between punk's blues foundations and strategies that obscure its roots. Punk treatments and transformations of the blues include: (1) moving from multi-part, three-chord harmonic schemes to riffs and one- and two-chord vamps; (2) taking a new approach to vocal performance styles; and (3) retaining certain melodic approaches, such as the use of pentatonic scales and monophonic textures. Punk's complex relationship to the blues, including the history of negation and erasure, continues to be a central part of the punk aesthetic.

This paper focuses on the use of rhythmic play in the compositional strategies of rock musicians. Such play is seen as both embodying an attitude on the part of the performer-composer in which music as pure structure tests one's skill and imagination in sonic reality, and as an attempt at a special kind of communication with his or her audience. In this latter capacity the musical work becomes an unspoken or hidden challenge to the listener as a kind of in-group or insider knowledge. Listening thus becomes a window into the creative act, bands and their audiences forming an extended community based on trust, respect and a sense of shared ownership.

In this paper, I examine several aspects of pop-rock music that are characterised by the childlike use of language. Relying on the theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – particularly on their concept of ‘becoming-child’ – I locate, describe and analyse three distinct childlike strategies common in pop-rock: the use of gibberish and nonsense that unbinds language from sense, enabling it to release its own expressive intensities; the utilisation of baby talk and other childlike vocal mannerisms, drawing attention to the physical properties of the act of singing as bodily experimentation; and different forms of repetition that ‘shake’ sense out of words, allowing them to draw their own lines of flight. Foregrounding these strategies, I ultimately claim, expands our understanding of pop-rock music while problematising its traditional interpretation as ‘rebellious’ music, offering its positive, productive qualities and ‘minoritarian’ politics as an alternative to the restricting dichotomy between oppression and liberation implied by the concept of rebellion.

This paper examines the genre of tracks centred around the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s which include aural representations of female sexual pleasure. The two most important tracks, and the ones on which this paper focuses, are Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’ and Donna Summer ‘Love To Love You Baby’. The paper argues that this new audibility of female sexual pleasure related to the transformation in the understanding of female orgasm associated with Alfred Kinsey and with William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the American sexologists who radically changed Western understandings of sexual behaviour in the 1950s and 1960s. More broadly, the paper argues for a link between the so-called sexual revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s and the popularity of tracks in which sounds identified as female sexual pleasure were upfront in the musical mix.

Award ceremonies have played a central role in popular music. One aspect of this role is their exemplarity: they place in full view what is to be valued in popular culture and, at the same time, they embody a sample of something larger than themselves, an ensemble. The Félix award, organised by ADISQ (Québec's music trade association), has played this role in Québec since 1979. However, in 1995, members of the underground scene, claiming that this award ceremony was not representative of all of Québec's musical families, created their own gala: the MIMIs (Montreal's International Music Initiative). This paper focuses on the exemplarity of this event for the Québec (Canada) ‘musiques émergentes’. In the first part, I look at one of the most visible faces of the MIMIs – its categories – to give an overview of the ways in which the event highlights its exemplarity of the totality of ‘musiques émergentes’ through their celebration. In the second part, I discuss the totalising processes implemented by the MIMIs to ensure that all artists, records or organisations could be considered in the pool of potential nominees.